Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care

Good article, enjoyed it. I might give this idea a shot!

> Comments: these contain high level descriptions (faster than reading the code) and external context (the “why” that reading code can’t answer). This is the most scannable thing in any big code file.

Not sure about that one, depending on comment culture. Comments are prose and not structured, so to understand their meaning is a lot more cognitive load for me than (most) code. I certainly wouldn't have thought to call them "scannable".

What about comments? Do you prefer comments to stand out or stand back?

Maybe a decade ago, I decided to start a theme from scratch, named bland. Initially, it was just black on white, with keywords bold, comments, macro invocations and lifetime tokens (this was all focusing on Rust) italic, and escape sequences bold italic. I decided to wait a week before deciding if I would add any colours at all. As expected, after that week I made strings red, comments green and numbers blue. Since then, I’ve made number type suffixes light blue, macro-related things orange, and delimiters grey (I should try dropping that one again). But things like making type, async, function*, for, const, of, &c. different? No, they’re all just bold black, no need to try distinguishing between them.

I also subsequently made a dark variant of it for my website’s dark mode and for occasions I want to use an editor in a dark place.

The colours involved are all high-contrast, using the RGB channels provided rather than trying to be silly with low contrast: #fff, #000, #c00, #090, #00c to begin with.

But I have no particular interest in publishing this in a form others can consume in whatever editors they use. Plenty of small tweaks that I develop over time, half for my own Vim syntax files. I think the approach itself, of experimenting deliberately yourself, is worthwhile.

I found this site very difficult to read and I had to give up as it was hurting – the font is unreadable.

As for syntax highlighting – I don't like it either.

I use themes that change colour according to their nesting level.

The article touches upon this:

> Unlike prose, where you usually read it linearly, with code you bounce around based on what connected elements you are exploring.

The moment you are jumping around a lot while reading, being able to understand the structure quickly becomes a major help. For example, dictionaries will have the words in a bold font while italicizing things like the plural etc.