I program without syntax highlighting
hakon.gylterud.net
I program without syntax highlighting
1–10 of 70 posts
Re: I program without syntax highlighting
#2I personally find syntax highlighting unhelpful and very distracting, so I always turn it off. Sometimes it feels that I'm the only one. I'm pleased to read that I'm not.
Re: I program without syntax highlighting
#3I believe Rob Pike also doesn't use syntax highlighting [1]
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...
Re: I program without syntax highlighting
#4On my personal devices, I turned off syntax highlighting a few years ago to see how hard it would be to live without, but I ended up liking it and I have not turned it back on since. I am mostly working on small (However, at work I am working on a much larger code base, and the extra help given by syntax highlighting (for example, having a quick visual feedback on whether a method exists or not) is valuable to me.
I think this also depends on the language used: at home I mostly program in C, but if I were doing more e.g. C++, I would probably enjoy some syntax highlighting.
Re: I program without syntax highlighting
#5Most syntax highlighting adds too many color variations.
In light modes, I find that variations gray and bolding certain symbols, variable names, function names in definitions and method calls to be enough.
Just enough hint so the brain can skim for the matching information. My editor highlights the opening and closing brackets of my current block,but indent level indicators are usually enough for me to visually validate.
Dark modes make contrast more difficult to discern though.
Re: I program without syntax highlighting
#6I believe Rob Pike also doesn't use syntax highlighting [1] [1] https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...
I think Torvalds also goes on that list as another ACME user. He mentioned as much in the extended video interview he did with Microsoft recently.
For myself, I've had to spend a lot of time without colorful syntax recently as I was working on building my own IDE and my own syntaxes and even my own system of syntax highlighting. It would have been a distraction to be constantly fighting with someone else's system of syntax highlighting while building my own! But also even having learned that I can live without it I'm hardly ready to say that I never want it back. I just want it back better. I want dynamic, contextual highlighting and I want interactive access to the underlying tree model. I want it to feel really easy to tinker with too.
Re: I program without syntax highlighting
#7More generally the tools used to write the code show through in the code itself. In the way code is distributed across files, in the length and style of names, in the organization of modules. Using an editor without syntax highlighting like Acme, and also because it's Acme will encourage a different style of organizing a project and the code within a file.
Re: I program without syntax highlighting
#8> Supporting all languages equally future-proves the editor, because who knows which language we will use in ten years?
I remember which editors I used in 1990: emacs for most of my code and vi (vim now) for light editing mostly on remote machines. They are the same editors I'm using today. I went through some IDEs (Eclipse, NetBeans) because Java would have been nearly impossible otherwise but I never left those two editors for everything else.
They did not have syntax coloring in the 90s, they do now. It's not life changing but proper syntax coloring can make me spot an undefined variable or an unterminated string. I'm working only with interpreted and dynamic typed languages now so that's almost all it can be done without a compiler that runs in the background and checks the code for errors.
I don't use anymore any of the languages I programmed with 35 years ago.
Re: I program without syntax highlighting
#9I believe Rob Pike also doesn't use syntax highlighting [1] [1] https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...
I think Torvalds also goes on that list as another ACME user. He mentioned as much in the extended video interview he did with Microsoft recently. For myself, I've had to spend a lot of time without colorful syntax recently as I was working on building my own IDE and my own syntaxes and even my own system of syntax highlighting. It would have been a distraction to be constantly fighting with someone else's system of…
Is the Torvalds interview available somewhere?
I thought he used his own hacked-up micro Emacs thing, but maybe he dropped it.
Re: I program without syntax highlighting
#10> In Acme I double click on the outmost marker [...]
I'll represent the insufferable Emacs/Vim pricks by saying: Once I read you're using a mouse during development, my willingness to entertain your contrarian dx ideas dropped to near 0.