My concern isn't so much how it looks in my editor, but everywhere else. I doubt the internets are going to change their fonts just for us. Hopefully Perlmonks would, because that's where I was looking when trying to distinguish.

In fact, look at this: ~ <---- without code markup

and this: ~ <---- with code markup

Without increasing my font size, I can just barely tell that the tilde is a tilde without the code markup. With the code markup, it is hopeless.

In the event that it is easily distinguishable for you, here is a screenshot of this entry on OS X; Chrome; View:Actual Size.

My concern isn't so much how it looks in my editor, but everywhere else

Even the moon? :)

See themes for Anonymous Monk or try out themes without changing display settings, or more importantly, see the links it links -- its easy to override fonts anywhere you go

Especially the moon! Also, I understand that pretty much everything (including the moon) can be customized, but why make things more difficult?! It seems like every day this week at YAPC::NA there was talk about making Perl (and the community) more accessible to non-Perl people, bringing in and welcoming new users and new generations of users, and increasing diversity of the userbase and the community. Well, by making it required to customize your browsers, etc. just to tell the difference between ~> and -> automatically selects against people that are just becoming interested in programming. Today, there was a discussion during Larry Wall's Fireside Chat about trying to avoid losing scientists to other programming languages. Well, most scientists I know (and probably a lot of other professions that use programming on occasion) do NOT have the time to figure out what needs to be done to do such tweaks. This will just result in more frustrated beginners taking up our time trying to figure out why their code isn't working.