Option to disable font ligatures in certain syntactical constructs like strings

[svilenmarkov]

Sometimes you have to list a bunch of characters in a string containing a regular expression and you don't want the characters to merge in order to more easily read the expression.

[octref]

Have you tried "editor.fontLigatures": false?

[svilenmarkov]

The idea is that I don't want to disable them entirely - only in strings with something like "editor.fontLigatures.inStrings": false.

The example below is in PHP, however it should work the same way in other languages too.

[tsmanner]

I just ran across something similar while writing an extension, realizing that I don't want ligatures for certain language types (i.e. a machine generated output file). The ability to enable or disable ligatures by file type or by TextMate token type in a .color-theme.json or language-configuration.json file would be really nice!

I ran into a similar need, i think it would be awesome to be able to selectively enable certain sequences in a font ligature (maybe make it configurable by language?) I don't like that I have to accept every possible sequence a font editor can dream up just because I checked the box to enable them. For example (F#): ->, >>=, |> and <| would all be handy to have, but I don't like how >= and <= render and would like to keep them as they are without ligatures.

Maybe this feature could be a more general "ligature control" option.