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?
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.