macOS: Space Between Forward Slash When Moving Cursor Between Them

[0xmachos]

I'm seeing what I think is a bug in the rendering of forward slashes / on macOS. You can see it below:

Screen.Recording.2025-01-05.at.18.35.40.mov

When I put lots of forward slashes it only seems to happen at the start and end, as you can see below:

Screen.Recording.2025-01-08.at.23.18.22.mov

Is this a bug or expected behaviour?

Ghostty: 1.0.1
macOS: 15.2 (24C101)

Ghostty config:

# Update 
auto-update = download
auto-update-channel = stable

# macOS Specific Settings
macos-auto-secure-input = true
macos-secure-input-indication = false

# Appearance
theme = Solarized Dark Higher Contrast

shell-integration = zsh

keybind = super+l=jump_to_prompt:-1

[taylrfnt]

Does still this happen if you add font-features = -calt or font-features = -aalt ?

[rhodes-b]

This will disable ligatures which I assume will make it go away

When you have a ligature and you put the cursor in between said character(s) ghostty will split them back into their individual characters which is why you will see some movement when going between text that contains ligatures you can see this on /**/ notably as well (block comment ligature) to see the splitting very noticeably use something like !=

the second case im just speculating but you separate (2 or 3 slashes both are ligatures) from the rest of the text with your cursor then ghostty combines it into a ligature because it sees it as I have 2 or 3 characters I can combine since the cursor splits up the text (like how I explained in the first reason)

[taylrfnt]

Precisely, thanks for explaining why I was asking the question.

I don’t use JetBrains Mono (or a font with ligatures) so I don’t know the exact ligature type for those characters, but doing font-feature = -liga would probably be the lowest effort nuclear option that should disable all ligatures.

Side note, FontDrop is a really good tool for checking type features, it’s linked in the docs for Ghostty configuration under the font-feature option.

[JakeWharton]

Second case looks the same as one I filed #4714

[0xmachos]

Adding font-feature = -calt to my config stops this. TIL about ligatures. I wasn't aware of this before now. Cheers for your replies.