I get the theme of the site is inspired by retro games, but the font makes it so hard to read the article, I had to give up. Too bad, since I like the concept of a retro game theme.
Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
41–50 of 73 posts
Re: Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
#42> try to remember what color your color theme uses for class names? While I overall agree with the point of this post and the post being cited, I disagree with the premise that you need to be able to actively recall facts like this. The theme I personally use is quite toned down, but it does use different colors for variables, keywords, arguments, type names, and a few other classes of tokens. I don’t consciously thi…
> Just like I can’t remember the code to my apartment building, yet I type it in multiple times every day.
To me it's even less problematic than this. Not being able to remember important codes except via muscle memory is quite unsettling for me because every now and again my muscle memory fails. Like I will get to an ATM and think "wait - what is my PIN?".
With syntax highlighting, even if my muscle memory fails me I still benefit from syntax highlighting (I think). Because I can immediately see the structure of each line. If I am looking through code for a particular thing, I will probably be able to disregard entire lines because they obviously don't have the structure I am looking for. And even within a line, I can just look at the beginning of each "span", immediately know if it's what I'm looking for, and skip to the next span if it's not.
Re: Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
#43> Here’s another test. Close your eyes (not yet! Finish this sentence first) and try to remember what color your color theme uses for class names? Can you?
Yeah. Pink for keywords, orange for arguments, yellow for strings, green for functions, blue for classes and purple for constants.
But it’s not even important if you can. Having different colors helps you quickly / unconsciously filter through different parts of your code. I agree it can be too distracting to have lots of colors (especially with semantic highlighting, which I’m no particular fan of for that reason), but a carefully calibrated theme helps most people I think.
I can also certainly imagine that some brains just work differently. Maybe for some people colors just add more noise?
Re: Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
#44Good 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 t…
If they're not scannable, there's a good chance they're too dense and should be rewritten.
Re: Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
#45Hmm this wasn't quite what I expected.
I thought that this might be some sort of highlight based on complexity/risk/importance. That immediately struck me as a "why didn't I think of that?!" moment when actually turns out they didn't either.
So I can imagine a scenario where you have a LLM agent's diff to review while iterating in an IDE. The diff would highlighted according to importance/complexity for human review. Trivia like getters and setters would be grey. Highly complex or complicated or risky code would be highlighted in some high-contrast bold colour (perhaps with a luminance scale depending on how critical it was). Then when you are reviewing the diff from the agent you can instantly see and focus on the most important bits that need the most attention.
I'd find that really useful.
Re: Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
#46I am convinced everybody gets syntax highlighting wrong and this article backs me up. My pet peeves: - I have no idea how people are supposed to be productive with non-semantic rainbow vomit themes that are so popular in modern editors. I'm too ADHD to want to be overly stimulated by useless information. - I routinely hate encountering Zig code on Github, where the theme they use turns everything brown. Oh it's becau…
> I wish we had serious designers to design themes for usability and comfort, and not people that have no business playing with colours.
It's programmer art!
Re: Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
#47I get the theme of the site is inspired by retro games, but the font makes it so hard to read the article, I had to give up. Too bad, since I like the concept of a retro game theme.
I enjoyed it. The italic pixels feel like some kind of crime though.
Re: Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
#48I am convinced everybody gets syntax highlighting wrong and this article backs me up. My pet peeves: - I have no idea how people are supposed to be productive with non-semantic rainbow vomit themes that are so popular in modern editors. I'm too ADHD to want to be overly stimulated by useless information. - I routinely hate encountering Zig code on Github, where the theme they use turns everything brown. Oh it's becau…
Completely with you. I've played with limited syntax highlighting in the past (class names were blue, to answer the question in TFA), but for the past few years I've been running with plain black-on-white, with only a green highlight for comments, and a subtle yellow for strings. https://i.xkqr.org/lighttheme.png I think the relatively bold highlighting of comments is important – lots of times I'm the only person to…
Agreed 100% on highlighting the comments, that's what I also prefer and many themes still get wrong.
Re: Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
#49Re: Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
#50I am convinced everybody gets syntax highlighting wrong and this article backs me up. My pet peeves: - I have no idea how people are supposed to be productive with non-semantic rainbow vomit themes that are so popular in modern editors. I'm too ADHD to want to be overly stimulated by useless information. - I routinely hate encountering Zig code on Github, where the theme they use turns everything brown. Oh it's becau…
> | have no idea how people are supposed to be productive with non-semantic rainbow vomit themes that are so popular in modern editors. I'm too ADHD to want to be overly stimulated by useless information.
At least personally, I've been living with ADHD long enough to have had to learn to cope with the fact that even if I tried to suppress various stimuli in my environment, I'd still find something distracting. Pretty much all of life is filled with background noise for me, so having some of the syntax look noticeably different is not that much of a net increase to distraction for me. To you my color scheme probably looks like "rainbow vomit", but I like bright colors on a black background, and I'm the one who spends all day looking at it, so why should it matter whether you like it as well?