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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

Ha, I thought I was the only person in the world who disliked syntax highlighting. I only use :syntax on when I can't find a parse error!

My only real exposure to an IDE like development experience is the Google Apps Script editor and I really dislike it. Auto completion, auto indenting, it's all such a pain.

I use ChatGPT-4 all the time for coding, but I just copy and paste between 2 interfaces. I might just be an old man yelling at a cloud but having things pop up and code jump around on the screen while I'm typing just annoys the shit out of me.

Also since I code in a relatively basic vim environment I'm able to work from any SSH terminal without having to worry about setting things up in a particular way which seems like a bonus to me (except in cases where vim comes with all sorts of auto-junk enabled in which case I find myself looking for how to disable everything which I guess is the same as setting things up in a particular way ... )

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Hardly alone. I use no color except for comments and errors.

Rob Pike has no color - he thinks it is juvenile.

https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...

I just don’t see the utility in having a bunch of colors.

> he thinks it is juvenile

Bet. No true adult likes colors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

to each his own.

i switched from VSCode to CLion (for Rust) the other night and only lasted 5 minutes because i missed how alternating braces change color.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10080-rainbow-brackets

And for me colorful braces are the most diatracting thing in the world. It is the first thing I disable on a fresh VSCode install.

Yeah, I just looked at the link in a sibling comment, and yikes that is awful. To me, that goes totally counter to what I want syntax highlighting for...

Similarly I don't use the feature. There are features I feel incredibly strongly about so I do understand the sentiment a bit.

For me it's searchable local history and searchable recent locations- both jetbrains features that vscode falls flat on.

Native stack-based clipboard is up there, but there is a vscode plugin.

With those three features I can do what I think of as "fearless development" where I can just delete / change things without a second thought, easily able to undo/find old changes without needing to micro manage.

this feels like the _weirdest_ thing to call someone a child over. it’s akin to saying “real men don’t use umbrellas”.

totally and absolutely bonkers.

colour is insanely helpful as a _sense_ that can aid our brains in parsing. we aren’t compilers; it’s fine to like colour and not like colour but to say there can be no benefit or, worse, that it’s juvenile is even more childish of a statement.

eh, one thing i’ve learned is smart people in one field are not universally smart, and that’s ok.

Real men don't write Pascal either, we write all our programs in Fortran.

In all seriousness, it's a valid opinion. All the best programmers I know had relatively bare bones setups. I've found when I get in the habit of using IDEs are things like ChatGPT, I start to get sloppy. If the language server or whatever is tracking the logic of the code to tell you whether it will parse correctly, then you aren't using your brain as much to do it.

If being able to efficiently spot typos, visually parse code, and see the types of literals makes me juvenile, well, I prefer to think of it as young at heart.

Hahaha juvenile... Some people are so arrogant.

Syntax highlighting adds more visual information to the code to help your brain navigating it. Some people probably don't need it, but personally it helps me tremendously and I would have to have to program without it. It's like eye shortcuts.

Yeah, it seems pretty arrogant. If anything I want more cues, not fewer.

While color for syntax highlighting is relatively new, it does date to the 1980's, , and so if it was a person it'd be middle aged by now...

Even long before that the syntactic conventions of many languages were designed to achieve much the same (e.g. different casing patterns), some of which have survived into modern languages, along with a long string of "pretty printing" tools that to format things with bold, underline, italics etc.

The only reason I didn't rely on color for highlighting much in the early 90's was that e.g. at university I often still worked on monochrome terminals.

This reminds me of -- I think -- Arthur Whitney, who prefers to program in C in four windows of notepad.exe. If it works for them, why not?

I use very very little, some keywords are bolded and strings are in blue but that is it. I absolutely hate more than that and I suspect I could do without it altogether.

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