d33p.js
Niki TonskyAbout syntax highlighting https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/
Peeked into comments. Without live cursors or google-style presence avatars, people went back to discuss background color. Well
Ronflaix@nikitonsky at this point, I feel like the day you'll change, if it ever comes, it will be a loss for everyone.
Jörg Volbers@nikitonsky that's the way!
Matt Lacey@nikitonsky Nice work! I'm complained many times about how so many colour schemes use the lowest constrast they can get away with for comments.
𐌌𐌉𐌊𐌄
europlus 
Dimitri
@eugensson yep. People are so used to it they never questioned the premise
amoeba@nikitonsky Alabaster is a gift, thank you for caring about this stuff
Francesco Marini@nikitonsky not sure I agree with regards to bold and italics (though I kinda understand your reasoning), but great read nonetheless 👍🏻
Daniel Jonsson@nikitonsky Great article! Will try out that theme in Rider. Seems like there's a version for Visual Studio too https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=NicolaiVerbaarschot.alabaster-variant-theme
Oriel Jutty 
Next, let’s tone down punctuation
And now you've lost me. "Toning down" means lowering contrast means making it harder to read. Why would I want any part of the code to be hard to read?
@barubary for me, it puts text and punctuation almost on different planes. Helps me read names easier, stuff like parentheses and commas don’t stick to them. Easier to see where words start and end
@nikitonsky Easier to confuse
( and {, or , and ., or ; and :, or >= and =>. If you find it hard to visually separate letters/words and punctuation, may I suggest giving them different colors? 😈@barubary there’s not a lot of cases in practice where someone puts `,` in place of `.`
@nikitonsky Unwarranted generalization, I think. Just the other day I found a line were someone had typed
, instead of ; in Real Code™. And I have definitely seen () vs {} mixups.
Daniel Neuman@nikitonsky I really enjoyed using the Alabaster theme! This concept is something that you don’t realize until someone puts the finger on it. ☝️
I had some bugs with the JetBrains version, but haven’t gotten around to debug it, so I run some regular ”christmas lights” theme at the moment. 😅
I had some bugs with the JetBrains version, but haven’t gotten around to debug it, so I run some regular ”christmas lights” theme at the moment. 😅
zefu@nikitonsky u so damn right!
Panicz Maciej Godek
Kiloku - Secretário do Caos@nikitonsky The black on very bright yellow is pretty hard to read...
@nikitonsky Wait, there's something odd going on! The yellow is much more subdued when I open your blog on Chrome, instead of Firefox. I don't think I've seen that before
Curtis Wilcox@Kiloku
If you're looking at both browsers on the same display, I think Firefox adjusts itself based on the color profile of the display.
@nikitonsky
If you're looking at both browsers on the same display, I think Firefox adjusts itself based on the color profile of the display.
@nikitonsky
aerique@nikitonsky I've also been using my own restrained theme for ages now: https://codeberg.org/aerique/emacs-theme-aerique#emacs-theme-aerique
Another important aspect of what restrained themes do is partitioning the code into easily scannable pieces.
Haelwenn /элвэн/ 
@nikitonsky Also reminds me that I sometimes wish assignment and comparison operators would at least not be highlighted in the same way, could make the change to my editor but usually too lazy for that as I tend to use a bunch of different languages.
🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑@nikitonsky
Back in the ancient days of monochrome displays, programming in Ada (or Pascal), I kinda liked keywords in bold, which IIRC was how they were shown in the Ada Language Reference Manual. But even though I was used to that, I don't really think it was very helpful.
Back in the ancient days of monochrome displays, programming in Ada (or Pascal), I kinda liked keywords in bold, which IIRC was how they were shown in the Ada Language Reference Manual. But even though I was used to that, I don't really think it was very helpful.
Anders Hovmöller@nikitonsky To me it's always been key to *stick to it*. That is: I started in Turbo C++ 3.0 on DOS, and I have never switched color scheme and only switched font once (and to something very similar).
Investing in training your brain on a theme for decades is key to making it work imo.
Adam Lett@nikitonsky I’ve had many of the same thoughts, and created this Textmate theme: https://github.com/KaptajnKold/Minimal
big awoo notationPer statistics, 70% of developers prefer dark themes. Being in the other 30%, that question always puzzled me. Why?I'm not convinced this is related to colour contrast; for me the reason is a much more basic "my eyes can't handle staring into a searchlight eight hours a day"...
Eskild Hustvedt@nikitonsky This was really interesting to read, thanks! It makes a lot of sense.
My brain works against me, so don't think I could make the switch, though. Way too used to my christmas lighting by now. Even considering a font change is too much 😆🤷♂️
Janek Bevendorff@nikitonsky I disagree with the premise: Highlighting is not for making things stand out. It's for distinguishing different lexemes. I don't need function names or "retunr" misspellings to stand out. That's what other highlighting layers are for, such as fold markers and linter error squiggly lines. I need to see whether something is a type name, a variable name, a function name, or a keyword, especially in syntactically complex languages such as Rust or C++.
Marcos Dione@nikitonsky "Comments should be highlighted, not hidden away". THIS.
Sergei Smagin@nikitonsky hey, good post, agree on most of the things.
So one case of using bold and italic instead of background colors would be to use background color for search highlighting, e.g.
Andrej@nikitonsky Did the animals have to go? And cursors too :(
@alberand yeah, I’m thinking what to replace them with. They were too distracting
@nikitonsky I dunno for me they gave connection with others, like on old forums "Users online:"
KewlCat
Lasse Beyer@nikitonsky good one 👍!
For my AVR ASM stuff I prefer only two colours highlighted: labels and comments. On a white background.
For my AVR ASM stuff I prefer only two colours highlighted: labels and comments. On a white background.
(λ. borkdude)@nikitonsky Has anyone made alabaster for emacs?
@borkdude I don’t know! Shouldn’t be hard though
Andrey Subbotin@borkdude @nikitonsky There seems to be one here: https://github.com/uzhne/alabaster-emacs/tree/master
Kevin Karhan 
@nikitonsky except you ain't sorry at all... ^
spectrum@nikitonsky yep yep. Some years ago I watched a talk by Douglas Crockford where, among other things, he discussed syntax highlighting, and conjured https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=darthspectrum.darkdoug for personal use.
It took some time to get used to but reading code became so comfortable.
I find the actual book analogy helpful here: we do not need different colors for verbs and nouns and so on to be able to read the text
The Long Tail@spectrum @nikitonsky The original talk was turned at some later point into a blog post. https://www.crockford.com/contextcoloring.html
The original was in the early 2000s, it may have been part of his 'good parts' book.
The original was in the early 2000s, it may have been part of his 'good parts' book.
@sleepyfox @nikitonsky I remember it being grayscale in the talk. Thanks a lot though!
Gregatron5@nikitonsky @siracusa Nice. I did similar changes with Solarized back in the day. One thing I do differently (and would like to offer as a suggestion) is to make numbers red so magic numbers stand out in a mildly alarming color.
Labbrigercorny
netop://ウィビ@nikitonsky Ever since I discovered Alabaster, I can't go back.
@nikitonsky Highlighting keywords might be a habit picked up from Algol 60, which used a bold typeface to distinguish keywords (yes, compiler technology was that primitive - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stropping_(syntax) ). As LISP shows, there's no need to distinguish keywords.
Janne Moren@nikitonsky
Bold works really well in light themes, to make any lighter colors stand out better.
Bold works really well in light themes, to make any lighter colors stand out better.
Aleksandar Vacić@nikitonsky you really got me to properly look at the default theme in Xcode. **Great** post.
Tris@nikitonsky @catppuccin would like to have a word with you lol
I'm using https://felipec.github.io/vim-felipec/ since quite sometime and I like it. Reason why I switched from fancy themes to this was because of the poor contrast in popular themes
Magnus Ahltorp@tris @nikitonsky ”All variable identifiers we assign to twice”
About 15 years ago, I actually wrote a plugin for an IDE that did exactly that, because I needed to clean up code that was abusing variable reuse a lot.
Starr Horne@nikitonsky I don’t use dark mode because it looks better. I use it because I am a vampire and the light mode sears my eyes.
Jon Clayden@nikitonsky Really interesting post. I've created an Alabaster port for the Nova editor, since there didn't seem to be one yet
Simon Lhoir@nikitonsky Very interesting article, I am in the process of adapting the dark theme for PhPStorm to my needs. I note all the same the irony of the article which advocates parsimony in the use of syntax highlighting, on a web page with such a bright background 🌞😎
@Dark_Chyper I mean, I don’t spend my whole day in my blog. I hope you don’t, either