I’m finally posting this after years of enduring this.
Does anyone know how to disable Sublime from replacing “</” with a small arrow? I absolutely hate this feature. I want it to autocomplete, but I just don’t want it to literally replace my closing tag with an arrow. I know it’s only visual, but it’s very odd.
Without a screen shot or more information it is hard to know exactly what you mean.
I presume this is a ligature in the font you are using. If so, pick a different font or use the font_options setting to turn off the open type ligature features.
Without seeing it is a bit hard to understand, but I suppose this has nothing to do with sublime itself and more with the font you are using. Basically speaking it’s more likely a ligature in your font.
Which font are you using in sublime?
I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this, I’m a typographer! This all made sense really quickly. It was a ligature in “Space Mono”. It’s too bad since it’s one of my favorite fonts for code.
Case closed!
I immediately thought this would be the case here when reading the question’s title. FiraCode is taking this even further. My first encounter to these ligatures where with a software that had this font as default installation.
Definitely not my [font] type! 
If you want to keep your favorite font, but turn off ligatures, use the font_options setting in Preferences. The relevant options are no_liga, no_clig and no_calt:
{
"font_size": 14,
"font_options": ["no_liga", "no_clig", "no_calt"],
}
Well, at least FiraCode is built to provide coding ligas so they are kinda “semantic”, like opening/closing html operators like ++ && eqeqeq etc… SpaceMono has “arbitrary” ligatures where the closing tag “</” is rendered as a bottom-left diagonal arrow… that simply does not make sense 
Maybe it just doesn’t work out for my programming language, I’ve never used ligatures.
It might make some typos more visible but can also hide them pretty good. Just have a look at their issues labeled “conflict”.
I find it a really amazing project and have a lot of respect to their work. When I look at code I already see an arrow as arrow even without ligature. This kind of brain power comes at no cost at all.
