I guess it turns out actively depriving yourself of relevant information at a glance isn’t that popular, no.
If I could have some sort of focus follows mind where highlighting automatically happens commensurate to what level of granularity I'm currently thinking about the code at I would be extremely interested, but absent "focus follows mind" it's a trade-off that everybody has to make for themselves.
Some people prefer to highlight almost everything, some almost nothing, some people find it helpful for some languages/tasks but not for others.
It's similar IME to the extent to which preferred debugging styles (printf versus interactive versus hybrid versus situational choices) are also something people have to figure out, and, well, different people are different, and that's neither a bad thing nor an avoidable thing.
It was hard for the first few hours, but then I eventually got used to it, and now I can't use anything else.
I know this is not quite as extreme as working without syntax highlighting :)
I would not at all be surprised if people who started off one way or the other (for generational reasons or indeed any 'whatever environment they were first introduced to' style reasons) are less likely to end up switching, but that probably says more about perceived switching costs as what would be most comfortable for somebody.
e.g. I know people who took a month to be comfortable without synhi but then loved that, and I've spent weeks trying to be more comfortable -with- and given up, and honestly anything that half screws your productivity for over a week is going to be a hard sell even if the end result -would- be better (waves in "also, still can't manage to drive emacs" ;)
It certainly sounds like an experiment that would be interesting to try, though.
Ie, the paragraph (or block of code) your cursor is focused on is visible, the rest of the code is blurred out.
https://github.com/davidleghorn/atom-focus-mode
Edited to add that I found this for VS Code which I might try:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=imagio.v...
Although I can definitely imagine this being a plugin in different editors
I can imagine more useful highlighting than color coding the types of the symbols encountered. Lighting up the active scopes. Giving the same hue to names that look like each other. There are probably highlighters out there that do that. But "simple" syntax highlighting is still the norm.
> most colours are actively adding irrelevant information to the cognitive load of existing. It should be obvious that apples and red and the sky is blue.
That’s silly, because it does add relevant information. Obviously it’s a spectrum - too many colours can hide information, but when used appropriately it’s fine.
Also everyone is different. Perhaps your brain gets distracted by the colours more than the majority of people.
As you had guessed a little later, there are a few different emacs packages that do this. One of them is "rainbow parentheses" that gives every bracket a different colour (remember that emacs supports lisp, so differentiating between lots of different parentheses is arguably more useful in emacs than any other editor). [0].
Another one is highlight parentheses [1] which highlights all parens that enclose the cursor position, and gives a darker colour to those "further away" from the cursor.
Emacs' 'Rainbow Identifiers' does that. I like it.
https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-identifiers