Comment by adrianmonk
6 years ago
Too much color ends up overwhelming. I can find the red circle super quick because it's the only red thing in a sea of black and white.
But I like the idea of going beyond syntax. Maybe a way to get the best of both worlds would be to have keyboard shortcuts that toggle cycle through different views. Press this shortcut to color-code types, press this other one to color-code error handling, etc.
Also, maybe other visual depictions might be useful. Maybe parentheses could start off very tall and get slightly shorter as you go a layer inward. Or add a 3D/depth shading effect so that code each level of parens literally looks like a level. Or whatever else you can think of, the point being that it doesn't have to be color.
> Too much color ends up overwhelming. I can find the red circle super quick because it's the only red thing in a sea of black and white.
> But I like the idea of going beyond syntax. Maybe a way to get the best of both worlds would be to have keyboard shortcuts that toggle cycle through different views.
I couldn't agree more. When a line has too many different colors I have a really hard time to intuitively organizing the information. It's kind of a visual cacophony to me. So I use a minimalist syntax highlight to avoid that.
I believe we could come up with a more clever and interactive highlighting system.
A simple example could be rainbow parenthesis which is only enabled when many parentheses are found in a chunk of code. (if it already exists, I'd be glad to know about it)