Why

Save Space

Ampersands can look squeezed in monospaced fonts and even more so when written next to itself — “&&” is used as “logical and operator” in many programming languages.

Creating an amp-ampersand frees up room to the other characters around it.

Admitted: Drawing an amp-ampersand ligature is plain fun but it serves a purpose.

Ease Understanding

≥ and ≠ shown above are more intuitively understood than >= and != but aren’t normally used in coding since they’re harder to type. Ligatures combine ease of type with ease of reading.

Group Things

Ligatures can be used to subtlety stress the fact that a combination of characters denote a single function.

It is tempting to reduce the width of “…” by one monospace width, but this would result in exessive jumping in the GIF found further down in this piece.

All Hail Mrs. Minimal

Ligatures look cleaner and thus lets you focus on the actual code. Operators in code are often a combination of characters mimicking a symbol — why not just display the actual symbol everyone already knows?

Icons

Modern languages like Swift and social coding like GitHub have made emojis more ubiquitous in coding but a lot of languages don’t support those. I often write “somethingIcon” in code when making a reference to said icon. Actually displaying the icon in the code not only makes it easier to find when skimming — it also makes the code more compact.

I’ve only added 4 icons just to test it and it’s important to note that:

Icons should only be used alone when they leave no room for (mis)interpretation