The Commit Mono font has a feature that it calls “smart kerning”. Monaspace has a similar feature that it calls “texture healing.” Characters are moved around slightly, or swapped out for a slightly larger or smaller character to even out the spacing, for example, when a wide character like an ‘m’ is followed by a narrow character like an ‘l’.
The effect looks nice on their web sites. It worked in VSCode, but not in Emacs. The “smart kerning” / “texture healing” features did not seem to be activated when I tried the fonts in Emacs.
How would I get this to work in Emacs? The Monaspace docs say you have to add “‘calt’” to “editor.ligatures” in the VSCode Settings. Commit Mono just worked without changing the settings.
I might end up hating the moving around, but I’d have to try it for a few hours to see. I’m just not sure how to set that up in Emacs, or if Emacs supports that sort of thing.
(I have no experience with Emacs) but it looks like getting Emacs to support ligatures requires a bit more futzing – the instructions for getting Fira Code ligatures to work looks a bit involved