Disable the 0x ligature?

[yurikhan]

The first demo image calls this “Hexadecimal Ex”. The examples are 0xFF and 1920x1080. The letter x is displayed similar to the character × U+00D7 Multiplication Sign.

I think this ligature is harmful for three reasons:

• It makes it hard to spot typographic mistakes in two+-dimensional sizes.
• The x in hexadecimal literals has no historical relationship to the diagonal cross; actually I believe it comes from the shortening of “hexadecimal” to “hex” then “ex”.
• It is inconsistent with other hexadecimal forms such as HTML/XML ༀ and string literal \xF00.

Therefore I’d like to disable it at least for my own use. Do I have to do my own builds?

[tonsky]

I’m afraid yes. I hear your arguments, but I think it makes a cool feature nevertheless, so I would like to keep it

[itshawk]

Is it possible to make it a variant? I'm personally finding it fairly unreadable in my code.

[billgan1024]

For anyone wondering how to do this:

• Download fontforge
• open fira code
• at the top, press View > Goto, then type in "x.multiply"
• select the glyph to highlight it in blue
• press Encoding > Detach & Remove Glyphs.

If you did this step properly, you can view the result by going to Metrics > New Metrics window and typing "0x"...

Finally, generate a new version of firacode using File > Generate Fonts.

PS: You can also use this to remove other ligatures by repeating this process.