Expand ligature support to enable "Texture Healing"-type font features.

Problem description

GitHub introduced their new font face, Monaspace

I'm not a typography expert, but my understanding is that it uses fancy ligatures and contextual alternatives to achieve a feature called "texture healing", where it alters letter widths to maintain visual consistency while honoring the monospace grid.

Anyhow, the ligatures work fine in Sublime, but not the texture healing. Is this is possibly because Sublime Text only honors ligatures on a subset of characters?

Preferred solution

Monaspace really seems to lean into font features such as ligatures, style sets, and contextual alternatives. I would love to see the configurability of Sublime Text enhanced to match these features.

MVP:

• Support for "texture healing"

Nice to have (and probably much harder)

• Support for using different typefaces in syntax highlighting (this is the vision that they seem to have for this family of typefaces, and I don't think many editors support it. I'm not sure I'd use it either, but if we're talking about Monaspace support, its probably worth considering.)

Alternatives

I am using a config similar to this mastodon thread for my current Monaspace configuration. Ligatures work, but texture healing does not.

	"font_face": "Monaspace Neon",
	"font_options": ["dlig","ss01","ss02","ss03","ss04","ss05","ss06","ss07","ss08"],
	"line_padding_top": 1,

Additional Information

References:

• https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/ligatures.html
• https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/111386894868933130

Monaspace Krypton Var SemiWide Regular is wonderful in iTerm 2. Using it straight in ST is not bad, but I have yet to figure out how to define SemiWide Regular.

Want to point out that the new font 0xProto also has the Textual Healing feature, so its no longer unique to Monaspace. I would also really like to see Sublime be able to render these fonts in that way.