A few years back, I started a new theme that I call “bland”. I kept it at just pure black on pure white, keywords bold, comments italic for a week. After that, I agreed that some colour was useful, so I made strings red, numbers blue and comments green. All nice and high contrast. Since then I’ve added a little more from time to time, e.g. lifetimes in Rust are italic red, and attributes and macros in Rust code were orange for a few months but are now just italic black (though I still use orange for macro_rules $variables), but I’ve kept it all deliberately minimal and ultra-high contrast. I use the same styling (except for the background colour) on my website. I made a bland-dark somewhere along the way that I very occasionally use, also used on my website.

I should probably try something radically different again in another different direction soon. There are generally somewhat better options available for semantic highlighting now than there were five or ten years ago.

Back in the day™ Think’s Pascal used bold, italics and underlining to do syntax highlighting because the Mac’s screen was black-and-white. It would be a compromise: you can’t encode as much information into the text’s appearance without access to color, but it could be sufficient depending on your requirements.

That’s a good point. I think one or two colours mixed with font weights and italics could get us pretty far.

Response time is a pretty critical metric for me when it comes to coding. I don’t want to have to wait a couple hundred milliseconds to scroll or switch files, so I’m not convinced coding is a great fit for the existing tech. Code isn’t read top to bottom like a novel.

That said, hell yes I want less eye strain when coding. I’m sure we can all relate to that.

I found out that text styling (bold, underline, italic, and different fonts) are more than enough.