On Fri, Nov 5, 2021 at 10:24 PM Lars Ingebrigtsen <
larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
[...] A typical user won't be loading more than a handful of fonts,
so the number of ligatures at any point won't be more than a few
hundred.
I don't know if you're familiar with this or not, but there's a popular bit of "eye candy" for emacs called all-the-icons:
This package (and it's helpers) adds a bunch of icons to emacs in various contexts (mode-line, dired, completions, etc.). It gets those icons from several fonts (currently: the file icons from the Atom editor, the FontAwesome icons, the GitHub "Octicons", Google's Material Design icons, and a set of weather icons maintained by a group on github). Most of these fonts are created and maintained with an eye towards use on the web, but all-the-icons packages them up for easy-ish use by emacs. Aside: I recall that some people dislike this approach to bringing icons into Emacs as a hack, which it undoubtedly is. Until something like Stefan Kangas' icons.el project bears fruit, it's difficult to imagine an alternative that will provide a reasonable number of easily-scalable icons of the sizes desired by most of the users of all-the-icons.
I bring this up because most of these fonts have ligatures, and they seem to be using them for various "special effects" that I could imagine wanting to use inside Emacs, and also because when I use this package inside emacs, I don't see those fonts listed in list-fontsets, so it's possible that they might also be "hiding" when you check to see how many fonts might be scanned by harfbuzz.
~Chad