I'm not sure why this has to be done in the font. Vim has support for conceal characters, which can "conceal" syntactic constructs into other characters, i.e., any Unicode code point. This works out pretty well in LaTeX documents for example, because you can see the mathematical symbols. [1]
One gripe I have though is that columns become misaligned when you have concealed characters or ligatures. In the source, \alpha is 6 columns and \beta is 5. Displayed, α and β are both 1 column. This messes up things like visual block insert mode, because the location of that column in the source and what's being displayed might differ. Should you line up the displayed version and make it look nice for you and those with the same plugin, or don't you?
Comments
I'm not sure why this has to be done in the font. Vim has support for conceal characters, which can "conceal" syntactic constructs into other characters, i.e., any Unicode code point. This works out pretty well in LaTeX documents for example, because you can see the mathematical symbols. [1]
One gripe I have though is that columns become misaligned when you have concealed characters or ligatures. In the source, \alpha is 6 columns and \beta is 5. Displayed, α and β are both 1 column. This messes up things like visual block insert mode, because the location of that column in the source and what's being displayed might differ. Should you line up the displayed version and make it look nice for you and those with the same plugin, or don't you?
[1]: https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc