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Turning off syntax highlighting

dudzik.co

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Re: Turning off syntax highlighting

#161

Post by fmueller »

eikenberry wrote: post #35

I predict that in a few months the author will turn a toned down version of syntax highlighting back on. All the advantages he stated were the result of disrupting his previous practices. Doing that forces you to reconsider how you do things and end up improving your skills. But they are learned lessons, not some mysterious side affect of less color.

I turned off syntax highlighting several months ago and never wanted to turn it back on. Scanning the code is now as good as it was before. And understanding und structuring the code got better because I'm no longer distracted by unimportant parts of the code.

Re: Turning off syntax highlighting

#162

Post by fmueller »

stevebmark wrote: post #10

Not this again "We should remove all color from traffic lights and make people remember which position is what"

The difference here is that on a traffic light the colors are important and inherent to the traffic light's functionality.

This is not true in source code. Syntax highlighting "helps" you to spot strings, numbers, keyword arguments etc. faster. But normally this is not what programming is about.

Re: Turning off syntax highlighting

#163

Post by btschaegg »

duerrp wrote: post #140
craigds wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, every time I've tried a git GUI (I've tried lots), I end up bashing my head against it within a few minutes. They usually make very basic things easy and anything even slightly outside the box basically impossible. I'm much more productive using a couple of git commands that I can type in a few seconds, rather than hunting for things in menus and dialogs for ages. > committing individual lines or c…

did you try magit? Maybe it is of limited use for non-emacs users, but imho it's a fantastic way to use git with a perfect balance between making simple things very easy to do and allowing (almost) anything you can do with the CLI while providing excellent visual feedback.

I also found the git plugin [1] in the Sublime Text Package Control repository to be rather useful. The basic idea is similar to magit, with the (subjective) upside of avoiding the crazy Emacs hotkeys.

That said, since I discovered Spacemacs, I'm also enjoying using Magit - the "evil" control scheme for it is great, too.

[1]: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Git

Re: Turning off syntax highlighting

#165

Post by pYQAJ6Zm »

qznc wrote: post #61
jakub_g wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the other extreme: I always use `git add -A` (but I read the diff before) and avoid doing more than one thing in the first place (which would make me want to use `git add -p`). IMO it is an antipattern to do bazillion changes at once, and then do several commits out of it (unless you really know what you're doing) - because you commit a state of the repo that (probably) never existed. I prefer to do change, c…

Don't you always have commits chains like "add debug printfs" "fix bug" "remove debug printfs"?

I have these in my WIP branches. When I’m ready to merge, I squash out some of the smaller commits, and then merge without fast-forward. Reduces noise and keeps a clear history of groups of work, at the expense of very cheap branching and local rebasing operations.

Re: Turning off syntax highlighting

#166

Post by pYQAJ6Zm »

duerrp wrote: post #140
craigds wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, every time I've tried a git GUI (I've tried lots), I end up bashing my head against it within a few minutes. They usually make very basic things easy and anything even slightly outside the box basically impossible. I'm much more productive using a couple of git commands that I can type in a few seconds, rather than hunting for things in menus and dialogs for ages. > committing individual lines or c…

did you try magit? Maybe it is of limited use for non-emacs users, but imho it's a fantastic way to use git with a perfect balance between making simple things very easy to do and allowing (almost) anything you can do with the CLI while providing excellent visual feedback.

magit is a marvelous piece of work indeed, and the thing that keeps me going back to Emacs every time I get curious about some other editor.

But yeah, I picked it up after quite some time working in Emacs, and the keybindings feel natural. Perhaps it would be very different for somebody new to Emacs.

Re: Turning off syntax highlighting

#167

Post by Blaque »

jmhain wrote: post #30
jowiar wrote: post #25

I think a large part of the issue with syntax highlighting is that our "standard" for syntax highlighting is rather dumb. A few thoughts: - Who the hell would write prose by making all the verbs blue, the nouns red, and the adverbs green (or something to that effect). That's what we do for code. Something togglable a-la iA Writer might make sense, though. At the same time, I can sort of understand, though, because we…

> Who the hell would write prose by making all the verbs blue, the nouns red, and the adverbs green (or something to that effect). Slightly off topic, but I think doing this could actually be useful for learning languages, especially highly inflected ones (if you extend the color coding to account for gender, case, etc.).

That's what I remember doing in primary school when we were learning french grammar, and later with ESL. Is this not a common teaching tool in other languages/school systems ?

Re: Turning off syntax highlighting

#168

Post by yitchelle »

Coming from an age before syntax highlighting was a thing, I would hate for us to go back to it. I first saw it in Turbo C and it was amazing. This is another tool that we can use to give us better code quality.

However, some folks is pushing the syntax highlighting into realms of an art piece. I had a coworker that would using bold, italics, different font sizes, as well as colours.

Re: Turning off syntax highlighting

#169

Post by pYQAJ6Zm »

abecedarius wrote: post #128
jowiar wrote: post #25

I think a large part of the issue with syntax highlighting is that our "standard" for syntax highlighting is rather dumb. A few thoughts: - Who the hell would write prose by making all the verbs blue, the nouns red, and the adverbs green (or something to that effect). That's what we do for code. Something togglable a-la iA Writer might make sense, though. At the same time, I can sort of understand, though, because we…

> Given 100% control over typography, how would you format [code] to maximize readability There was a book on this, whose title I'm blanking on. Anyone remember? Color wasn't an element, since it was an older book focusing on printing on paper.

Kinda rings a bell for me, although not from a book, but some LaTeX manual. Maybe this helps: http://tug.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/algorithm2e/doc/alg...

Re: Turning off syntax highlighting

#170

Post by pYQAJ6Zm »

chrismorgan wrote: post #153
fatbird wrote: post #110

I have 2.5 major distinctions made in my syntax highlighting, and it's common to almost all languages for me: Comments are a shade that's near the background: I can read them if I focus on them, but otherwise they're not present when I'm reading code Strings are a colourful colour, because the next visual distinction I want is between what's an operation or name, and what's data or literal. Numbers don't get this tre…

If making comments invisible is at all helpful, they’re being seriously misused. Comments are supposed to explain what’s going on, and thus make things easier . Hiding them should be very counter-productive.

I do the same thing. It’s not as much hiding the comments as making them less attention-grabbing when they are not needed.
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