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Comment by swinglock | Hacker News Reader

It looks amazing for e-ink. You'd probably don't want this for video anyway, besides it's not even in color. I'm impressed that it works at all. For a lot of work though it could be amazing, depending on your environment.

Say you'd want to pop outside in the nice weather to do some programming. You quickly find why that wasn't as glamorous as you expected. But if you had a laptop with such a screen I would expect it to work great.

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What about syntax highlighting?

I built a colorscheme for Vim [0] that is close to monochrome when I was worried about blue light (I've since had kids and now this kind of worry doesn't rate at all), and I basically use bold and highlights (I hate underlining, italics, and squiggles, but I think you can do all that too in the GUI version). I found it surprisingly usable.

[0]: https://github.com/camgunz/amber

> in the GUI version

or in the TUI version, in a terminal like Kitty.

I want to try some monochrome UI, but that amber is definitely not my taste. Let me see if there is a "paper-like" theme, or maybe I can make one myself.

I (re)built it w/ a little script I call roygvim [0] -- here's the source [1]

[0]: https://github.com/camgunz/roygvim

[1]: https://pastebin.com/b0LRpjUC

My attempt:

https://images2.imgbox.com/16/79/Tz7rMe2c_o.png

  colorscheme paper
  
  highlight Normal guibg=#f7f5f0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
  
  highlight CursorLine guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE
  highlight CursorColumn guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE
  
  highlight Comment guifg=#777777 gui=italic
  
  highlight Constant       guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight String         guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  highlight Character      guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  highlight Number         guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight Boolean        guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight Float          guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  
  highlight Identifier     guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
  highlight Function       guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  
  highlight Statement      guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  highlight Conditional    guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline
  highlight Repeat         guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  highlight Label          guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  highlight Operator       guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
  highlight Keyword        guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  
  highlight PreProc        guifg=#333333
  highlight Include        guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight Define         guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight Macro          guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  highlight PreCondit      guifg=#333333 gui=underline
  
  highlight Type           guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic
  highlight StorageClass   guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  highlight Structure      guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  highlight Typedef        guifg=#000000 gui=bold
  
  highlight Special        guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  highlight SpecialChar    guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  highlight Tag            guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  highlight Delimiter      guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
  highlight SpecialComment guifg=#777777 gui=italic
  highlight Debug          guifg=#333333 gui=italic
  
  highlight Underlined     guifg=#000000 gui=underline
  highlight Error          guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline
  highlight Todo           guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic
  
  highlight Visual guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
  highlight IncSearch guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE

Thanks for sharing! Would it be alright if I try it out during our livestream this week?

Hi Alex. If you are interested in showing VSCode, here are the theme and additional color settings that I use with my Mira Pro:

https://gist.github.com/RossBencina/f37f51c3f53796f0988c7d96...

Possibly not the best syntax highlighting, but generally makes the UI legible.

Feel free to use.

Yes sure. public domain.

You have the option of a few greyscale levels, bold, pehaps italic, and depending on font maybe extra-bold and light. That should be enough for the essentials, though it will feel like a downgrade if you have got used to a richly colourful environment and rely on it for reasons other than liking it being pretty.

I don't require it myself but that's a concern, it's nice to have. Maybe someone can build an editor that uses different fonts within one file instead of different colors. Could be something out there for color blind folks already, though seeing no colors at all is unusual. But e-ink has grayscales so you could at least make comments a bit lighter, I think I'd be happy with that.

There's plenty of options available. A coworker of mine used to print out code for reviews. You can use italic, bold and underline as alternative to colors. Grayscale might work nicely for eInk too - for laser printers just thin/regular/bold probably works better.

Other fonts... I could see myself being distracted by changing fonts in a document, except maybe for comment blocks. But for those italic/thin seems to work well already.

Tried to find the tool... it's GNU enscript. Syntax highlighting for several languages, outputs to postscript.

I didn’t know about GNU Enscript, going to check it out. Thanks!

I like your idea better.

I'd do 3 greys, from lightest to darkest: comments, syntactical cruft like braces, semicolons, certain keywords, etc., and then 'actual' code, variable names and so on.

Much more variation than that with 256 colours is mostly just making it pretty rather than offering helpful distinction imo.

That indeed would be my issue with it for programming.

this is not the same technology as e-ink, hence why they call it e-paper

It’s an electrophoretic display, in the category of e-paper, informally called e-ink, made by the company E Ink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Electrophoret...

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