I love the way Perl 6 looks with Unicode, it's really beautiful, but I'm just not very comfortable typing Unicode. It takes me a split second to type ">>*<<", but much longer to type the Unicode equivalent (and I probably have to look it up). The editor could probably do it for me, but I haven't looked too deeply into how.
I think doing it with the font might actually be nicer from a usability perspective. Unicode is fun to play with but slows me way down.
perltidy for Perl 6, perhaps, should offer it as an option. It'd only show up after you saved your code (or checked it in, or built it...I usually run perltidy on my Perl 5 code in my dist.ini, so it only happens during a dzil build).
One of the golang plugin bundles for Atom runs gofmt on every file on save which is actually pretty neat. I've been tempted to do the same for all of the languages I use. It sort of habituates me to do the right thing over time, as I see the changes happen immediately and I'm always working with a file that is mostly in the "right" style.
I think doing it with the font might actually be nicer from a usability perspective. Unicode is fun to play with but slows me way down.