How do I stop PhpStorm from collapsing my characters, as can be seen here:
As can be seen, then the comment-arrows are 'nice and beautiful' (bwwadr!!).
I've read through the entire preferences-sections and Google for about 30-45 minutes. ... But everything about 'collapsing' shows results about 'folding code' or 'collapsing code'. And every time I Googled anything about 'removing space between characters', then I find pages about controlling tabs'n'spaces.
This is driving me up the wall...
It called font ligatures (the only thing I'm aware of that will do such thing) -- you must have it enabled.
Settings/Preferences | Editor | Font --> Enable font ligatures
A bit info on what that is: