(* n (factorial (- n 1)))))
should mean it takes about 650ms for someone to see there are 5
close parentheses at the end. It takes me about 3 seconds of
concious effort to reach that number. Moving the cursor over them
is one option, but it is slower. I think another might be if I can
find a font and a means of displaying it which slightly disturbs the
spacing, position or shape of successive parentheses, so the pattern is
irregular. Then when the characters appear to "move about" for me I
won't mix them up and come to a wrong count. I'm thinking of the
way text used to be just a bit wobbly with the line printers of the
1980's.
Given my preferred editor is Vim, and I'm using it on Windows, mostly
with PuTTY talking to a Unix box, does anyone know if I can do this?
Maybe there's another solution?
Well, when coming in over a SSH connection, there's not much you
can do to make the font itself change. However, you can colorize
differently. Toying around, I came up with this:
:match Error /)\zs)/
which seems to correctly highlight alternating adjacent parents
(using the "Error" group, which I tend to use, but adjust
according to taste). My original though was to try and do
something of the form "\%1c(\|%3c(\|%5c(\|..." for alternating
screen columns, but I like the compactness of the actual solution
I gave, as well as its ability to work regardless of the number
of columns in your terminal window.
-tim
