Comment by JohnBooty

I'd like to see a truly flexible code display system that treats things as a matrix.

As the author describes, you have a number of possible concepts we might like to visually denote:

- Language constructs (ie, traditional syntax highlighting) - Parentheses/bracket pairs - Context highlighting - etc etc etc.

The author considers a single "information channel", text color.

There are other possible, largely orthogonal, information channels.

- Text background color - Font weight (light/bold/regular) - Font face - Font italic / upright - Font underlines (single, double, dashed, bold, squiggle, etc) - Font underline color? - Perhaps font effects (shadow, blur, etc) - The editor gutter (Sublime and others expose this) - Hover state (ie, tooltips)

I'd like a text display system that lets me mix and match inputs and outputs, matrix style. Perhaps I'd like to use font weights to denote one concept, and underlines for another.

Perhaps I'd like to use standard text-color choice for language constructs ala traditional syntax highlighting, and text background color for "context" or "semantic" highlighting (where each variable gets a unique color within its scope)

It would most certainly be able to create some real visual nightmares with this level of control, but applied judiciously, it could be very valuable.