While I respect your choice to make things more 'beautiful' in your editor, I do not think we should ever do this by default.
It might seem nice visually, but suddenly we are not seeing things exactly as the compiler does. And as someone who has spent a lot of time helping folks debug their code, I feel quite strongly that this is just further obfuscating an already challenging field - for superficial gains.
No idea what held in is, but I live in vim, and ... no ligatures, thanks. Same with italics. Ligatures with fixed-width fonts make no sense. I especially hate the combined arrow symbols: why draw attention to something so unimportant?
Do you think the existence of the Linux kernel might've had an effect on how Hurd was prioritized? Also, FreeBSD wasn't too far behind, chronologically.
I'm not saying Linux is unimportant (or even less important), but I think some folks here are pretty clueless about the significance of widespread DVCS adoption.
You're thinking in terms of a single dev using revision control, but the person you responded to was referring to the higher level aspects of software development that git facilitates. In other words, you've completely missed the point.
As for the Linux kernel, if it hadn't come along, we'd likely be living in FreeBSD-dominated world. Or, perhaps Hurd would've received more attention.
Torvalds didn't create git because he was passionate about version control systems, he created it because the existing solutions were not adequate.
Git is a distributed version control system (DVCS) that facilitated a fundamental shift in how people collaborate on software projects in general. So, comparing it to SVN and downplaying the significance of Git suggests you've kind of missed the point.
Edit: with you on the other thing though - fuck Windows.
actually quite enjoyable, ty!