Saluton Charlie :) On Sun, 25 Jan 2009 09:54:31 -0800, Charlie Kester dixit: > When working with text, being able to distinguish individual letters > and punctuation marks is usually more important than being able to > distinguish colors.
Difficult for me with or without syntax highlighting. Some intelligent highlighting (e.g. to spot common errors made by the writer) may help. > I do use syntax coloring. but only sparingly. For example, I like to > make comments a light to medium gray, so uncommented text stands out > more. I also like using green for string literals, as an easy way to > catch a missing close quote. And I like red text for error messages. > But I find most other keyword and type coloring to be nothing more > than visual noise. It's funny you should say that. I've been using one or other kind of syntax highlighting almost all my programming life, and for email too, and I must confess that the best highlighting I've ever had was that of the Aurora editor, back in my DOS times (maybe 15 years ago or more), which I remember it was very minimalist. Today, I tend to tweak color schemes so things like "Identifiers" and "Types" are highlighted equally... because I find too many colors to be visual noise and make me less productive, not more. Until I used Vim I just took whatever highlighting the editor gave me, but with Vim I started to tweak syntax a bit. Instead of searching for more colors, syntax groups et al. I just got rid of some colors. Currently I can live and edit code more proficiently using a color for comments, some dimmed gray, another for reserved words to avoid typos, and another for literals (both strings and numbers) to spot hardcoded values and missing quotes fast. Function names may be useful when colored, but colored identifiers are a pain in the arse IMHO. For email I only need two or three colors, to visually spot the different quoting levels fast. Too many colors and you start doing color recognition (fast but vague) instead of pattern recognition (a bit slower but needed to spot text). Maybe we should start a good ol' flamewar to force everyone to use less colors and simpler highlighting and to dominate the world, of course XD Raúl "DervishD" Núñez de Arenas Coronado -- Linux Registered User 88736 | http://www.dervishd.net It's my PC and I'll cry if I want to... RAmen! We are waiting for 13 Feb 2009 23:31:30 +0000 ... --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
