How to disable ligatures in WezTerm?

"Life is all about sharing. If we are good at something, pass it on." - Mary Berry

How to disable ligatures in WezTerm?

2023-08-01

As you may know, I switched to WezTerm and Helix a few months ago.

What surprised me is when I type != in Helix, it is rendered as ≠. This behaviour also occurs with other character combinations, for example:

<= becomes rendered as ≤
-> becomes rendered as →
=== becomes rendered as ≡

My first guess was that Helix had something to do with the font rendering but I encountered the same issue when typing directly into terminal.

After some research, I found a relevant link which introduced me to the concept of “ligatures”.

It turns out that WezTerm uses JetBrains Mono as the default font, and this font comes with ligatures enabled. I do not like this feature because I want everything I type to be rendered exactly as it appears on my screen.

To disable ligatures, add the following line to the ~/.wezterm.lua:

1config.harfbuzz_features = { 'calt=0' }

Tags: helix wezterm

Edit on GitHub