Does syntax highlighting help in some way or is it purely cosmetic?
Posted by birdsintheskies@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 36 comments
I get it, people have preferences. Most people have always written code with syntax highlight, so not using it sounds strange. I often find myself switching from between one of three color schemes, but every once in a while I just switch it off.
I'm wondering, unless there is a syntax error on the current line where I'm working, is there even a point of syntax highlighting or is it just there to prettify and distract? What is the threshold of the number of colors where useful starts becoming annoying?
Curious to hear from other folks -- how many unique colors do you have in your color scheme, and whether there are any people here who don't use syntax highlighting at all.
IndependentProject26@reddit
Semantic highlighting is quite helpful at times, and I’m not sure most people even know it exists.
ninseicowboy@reddit
“Purely cosmetic” unnecessarily assumes lack of usefulness due to cosmetic improvement
janyk@reddit
Perfect 1-line summary.
HolidayEmphasis4345@reddit
This.research says it helps. Experiment was for short programs. This confirms my experience of cringing when looking at monochrome code and seeing new programmers smile when they open code in an IDE for the first time.
TangerineSorry8463@reddit
When you are driving a car, does a stop sign being bright red and having a distinct shape make it communicate better or worse than a black and white plaque with the word stop on it?
teerre@reddit
I don't understand this question. Having function being blue and generic parameters be yellow is in itself helpful. A color can only be cosmetic, but it doesn't mean a cosmetic change isn't helpful. As the same suggests the point of syntax highlighting it to highlight the syntax
creaturefeature16@reddit
It absolutely is helpful. I love when my JSX component is a different color from everything else, or when my operators are a distinct color. Do I need it? No, but it breaks up the code so my eyes don't glaze over at a monochrome mess of characters. I also love customizing my desktop/IDE, so there's certainly a fun factor involved, too.
Kerry_Pellerin@reddit
It’s a huge help for readability and debugging. I wouldn’t go without it. That said, overly colorful themes can be overwhelming — I stick to 4–6 distinct colors max.
ratttertintattertins@reddit
Well, not those of us who are older. I can distinctly remember syntax highlighting becoming a thing around 2000. Even after that, many of us were coding in emacs/vi in a monochrome terminal.
Anyway, yeh, it does help because it often shows the presence of a syntax error very clearly and it helps your brain differentiate between different logical components.
vzq@reddit
Even Turbo Pascal had rudimentary syntax highlighting, al least since version 7.0 from 1992.
ratttertintattertins@reddit
I mean.. I knew someone would say something like this because there was bound to be an outlier way earlier.
However, it wasn’t the norm in the 90s more generally.
vzq@reddit
The borland compilers were hugely popular in the nineties. Not some obscure little backwater.
ratttertintattertins@reddit
Yeh, I guess it steadily became a thing during the 90s, but there was still plenty of monochrome editors and IDEs back then.
inputwtf@reddit
I think it's helpful because it helps break up things visually which allows you to find what you're looking for quicker.
I will also say that as I get older, my eyesight isn't as sharp as it used to be so every little bit of visual differentiation helps. 👴
link23@reddit
Douglass Crockford once said that he didn't use syntax highlighting because he isn't a child. I've always found that to be a great example of how not to convince someone of your opinion.
On to your question: yes and yes. Squiggles under malformed code (provided by LSPs) are also purely cosmetic, but no one is arguing that they don't save time trying in the edit/compile/test loop.
high_throughput@reddit
One of the most immediately useful cases is when there's NO syntax error, but the syntax isn't what you intended.
As a dumb example,
is perfectly syntactically valid bash, but the second
echois purple when it should be yellow, letting me know that the quoting is not doing what I wanted.PicklesAndCoorslight@reddit
Yes, it does help. I don't chose unque colors, I take whatever is default in IDE. I use C++, it helps with seeing all sorts of stuff other than a bunch of text.
PoMoAnachro@reddit
I know for myself error detection is the main reason I like it.
If the color is wrong, I'll pick up way faster I made a silly little typo or something.
Other than that, it mostly serves the same role as white space - break things up, make it easier to see the structure of your code before you even read anything.
Doesn't really bother me to work without it though if I'm sshing into something and it just has the most basic install of vi or whatever.
zogrodea@reddit
I would say it's personal preference. Most people quite like it and they find it useful.
For me personally, I started coding without syntax highlighting and with a lighter colour scheme (black text on a light-grey background), like paper.
The reason is that I dislike visual noise and my eyes being confronted with all these different colours unnecessarily. Maybe I was experiencing a bit of a "sensory overload" but it looked and felt "cleaner" to have a more homogeneous-looking editor. No random dirt/colours anywhere.
smontesi@reddit
It’s essential for reading code fast
It works on normal text too
mxdx-@reddit
It's not something I have time to think about if I'm being honest. I just use one from the default choices available in the IDE.
08148694@reddit
It reduces cognitive burden of reading and lets you read code more subconsciously with pattern recognition
Exnixon@reddit
Hi, OP. I've got a couple of pictures to show you. Here's picture number one. As you can see, it's a picture of an apple tree. The apples are bright red, and the leaves are green.
Here's the second picture. It's the same picture as the first, but its been desaturated and m rendered in black and white.
I want you to count the apples in the tree as quickly as you can. Do you think you can more quickly spot the red apples in the green leaves, or the gray apples in the gray leaves?
So if you're quickly glancing at a screen of code and you want to see its structure....don't you want its syntax highlighted?
nio_rad@reddit
I don't like colored syntax-highlighting (too busy), but I still like to have some distinction.
Grayscale-colors and font-weights/styles are perfect for me, on VSCode there is the Verdandi Theme which I have used for years.
Unfortunately, most other editors don't have good grayscale themes, I would love one for Sublime Text.
daraeje7@reddit
I find it absolutely necessary for code longer than the height of my screen. Only in the smallest of scripts is it not necessary for me.
internetgarb@reddit
I turned syntax highlighting off for about a decade. It was fine.
Syntax highlighting is useful for highlighting structure. That can be useful. It can also, though IME pretty rarely, be misleading (i.e. the structure looks fine but there is some semantic issue or non-obvious typo).
Turning it off means (ostensibly) you're trading that information for something else, e.g. some people think it means you will read the actual code, and cannot (or are less likely to be) be tricked by the structure.
It is also fine to just like the way code looks displayed in your editor, with or without highlighting.
Personally I find a lot of color information to be visually distracting, so I still try to keep it pretty minimal. I prefer comments to stand out. I know people who prefer comments to be almost hidden. They're only preferences. In other words:
> What is the threshold of the number of colors where useful starts becoming annoying?
Is when you are annoyed.
horserino@reddit
My subjective experience:
I don't care too much about it though. I picked one theme years ago and never really switched to anything else. I don't even know what its name is anymore.
TheRealGucciGang@reddit
I work with CTEs and subqueries in SQL files quite a bit.
Syntax highlighting the parentheses has saved me while debugging a countless number of times.
noonemustknowmysecre@reddit
Yes.
Yes.
Empanatacion@reddit
I'm one of the not-cool devs that find vim and emacs needlessly cryptic and that very rarely ever change the defaults in an IDE beyond choosing dark mode.
I think we're more common than it seems because we don't tend to talk much about a thing we don't feel very strongly about.
That being said, I think syntax error highlighting would be my only requirement and that I'm not much distracted or helped by the rest.
SureConsiderMyDick@reddit
You can see from the color pattern (and length) of that line, what the line can and cannot do.
donniedarko5555@reddit
I don't wanna be rude but the development tools and settings your most comfortable with is something most of us have very strong opinions and sort out within our first year.
To answer the question - yes it's helpful for some peoples work flow and not for other peoples.
StillEngineering1945@reddit
You don't think it is usefull until you loose it.
HelenDeservedBetter@reddit
Syntax highlighting makes it easier and faster for me (and, I'd guess, almost everyone) to read code. Just like monospace fonts and consistent naming standards.
It's like capitalization and punctuation in writing. Just a subconscious visual cue to lighten the mental burden.
spoonraker@reddit
Of all the things editors do to make code easier to work with, syntax highlighting is pretty low on the list if I were forced to rank a modern code editor's many capabilities, but I still believe that it's absolutely a net positive and there's no reason not to use it if it's available to you.
I'm actually curious what your experience is with syntax highlighting that seems to make you skeptical of it. I've been using it for literally my entire career and never once questioned its value, but yet, whenever I look at code in a context where syntax highlighting isn't available I immediately wish I had it.
I think syntax highlighting makes the reality that code has structure and patterns more visually self-evident, and I can't imagine how that wouldn't be a good thing.
jhartikainen@reddit
I never really thought about it, so I dunno if the syntax highlight helps me that much - but if I gotta stare at text 8+ hours a day at least I want it to look pleasant.