what is the best linux terminal? I have been using alacritty for years and have been doing well. But I don’t think kitty and st. I was wondering if any new projects have come out in recent years.

  • apostrofail@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68

    ALGOL 68, mother of all the C-likes, has ≠. There ace quite a few languages support Unicode such as ≠. What is not equals then? Exclamation mark + equals? Forward slash + equals? Tilde + equals? Less than + greater than? Equals + forward slash + equals. What is more clear than all of those aforementioned options from ‘modern programming languages’? 2260 ≠ Not Equal To. Type what you mean, specifically. Your programming language doesn’t support it? Your language is hurting clarity.

    • snaggen@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      Good to know that every time I feel the need to use ALGOL 68, I must remember to disable ligatures. Still not sure this is going to be a huge problem 😂

      • apostrofail@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        No need to ignore history. Older ALGOL versions used several now-Unicode operators. A lot of language support it. You have most of the APL + its dialects (such as BQN), theorem provers like Agda and LEAN 4, functional languages supporting Unicode Preludes like Haskell and PureScript, MATLAB, Mathematica, RPL, Raku, Julia, AppleScript, and of course the TI BASICs. Not to mention is what is used in general math(s) & handwriting. All this to say, it’s more common than you are leading on.

        • snaggen@programming.dev
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          2 months ago

          Are you saying that it is common that people use utf8 characters that you cannot easily type on a standard keyboard? I’m very skeptical of this claim.

          • apostrofail@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            APL programmers usually use an APL keyboard layers. Some people use Compose. Vim offers digraphs. Some editors can replace with a macro. Input is a solved issue, but the outputs can often either be more clear for reading either for lack of ambiguity such as the ligatures or in information density as seen especially in the APLs (see a 1975 demo) (hence Chinese writing taking up less paper space being more information dense). The ligatures themselves are still taking up the same physical character space since that is how ligatures operate. I believe the goal here is to achieve something similar with ligatures, except taking an opentype hack instead. If you believe ligatures are more readable, then everyone should be seeing these concocted symbols on any device or font, which Unicode offers without the hacks or ambiguity.