1. I appreciate having instant feedback if I've mistyped the number of closing quotes, brackets, or parenthesis. If everything below line 100 is displayed in the color for strings, I know what mistake I made there.
2. The color is visually appealing to me. I stare at my screen for 8+ hours a day, or more if I'm working on a hobby project. I like it to look pretty. It makes reading code more enjoyable for me.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing. There's a spectrum, with darcula on one extreme, and no highlighting at all on the other. You don't have be on either extreme of the spectrum, you can always settle for something in between.
Some of the most enjoyable coding I ever did was 2001-2003, when I wrote C using vim in a black-on-white xterm, with keywords underlined, string literals and comments in gray, number literals in bold ... and nothing else!
Even now, today, I remember more of that code that I wrote then, than anything in the almost 1-million lines since.
Vim can now be configured to use italic for comments, green for string literal, magenta for known format-strings within string literals, red for unknown format-strings within string literals, blue for function calls, etc ad nauseum.
Now I pattern match the colors without even reading the code in detail. I think it's time I tried a mono scheme again.
This is the joy of uniqueness. For me, colour is beyond annoying on text. I loath it, yet would never want your colours removed!
I worked for a guy who thought he was "helping" by barging in and distracting me, whenever he saw me in deep thought. I finally confronted him on it, and he thought this helped the creative process!
OK great! I think through a mega-complex problem, anticipating possible issues with furture use of my code, security issues, or if people use the API wrong, and in barges the guy 70% of the way through a thought process and starts blathering on about something irrelevant.
Sure, I guess ot helps HIM become creative, but it just wastes my time and is highly annoying, and does nothing for me. Except perhaps engender mistakes.
Letting others work as they do best, is pivotal to success.
So please all people who have read this far, colour is great, but also no colour is too.
And yep. I like color. You don't. I'm glad we both have the options we like!
I've come to realize that I like certain programming languages, not entirely because of any objective superiority, but because my brain works a certain way and those languages compliment it. There are languages that I just can't stand that others heartily enjoy. I could make objective arguments with evidence but someone whos brain works entirely different from mine is going to remain unconvinced.
My wife used to do a similar thing.
Since the "deep thought" look is very similar to the "annoyed" look, she thought she'd lighten the mood by sending me funny things to look at and then demand I go look at them, and then she'd get annoyed that I didn't react.
Sorry, honey, I'm juggling a mental model of multiple functions and classes. The Humor module is currently disabled.
Like you, I finally had to set the boundary. When I'm in hyperfocus mode, DO NOT DISTURB unless it's important and can't wait. Don't even ask me if I want something to drink. Your assistance is not needed.
I think I'm personally more likely to quickly suss the difference between black text and yellow text than between regular and italics, so I wouldn't personally use that approach. I appreciate that there are choices, though!
This is a syntax error and ought to be highlighted with a red squiggly line or something.
The only essential syntax highlighting is syntax highlighting for (certain types of) comments because otherwise you might easily run into situations where they are impossible to distinguish from actual code.
That is what I am doing. Highlight comments. All else no highlighting. Looks extremely aesthetically pleasing to me