For example: keywords, specifically, are actually very useful to highlight. This post complains that misspelling "return" didn't make easily-scannable color changes (it changed the color from purple to red, which still looks like a special color)... But then, proposes to not highlight keywords at all, so misspelling "return" would still be impossible to quickly scan for visually! In both cases with the proposed color scheme, "return" and "retunr" would have identical coloring: white.
Generally speaking I think a lot of the visual noise of syntax highlighting comes from having too many colors. For example, you don't need the "class" keyword to have a different color than the "const" keyword — and many syntax highlighting themes are guilty of doing exactly that. But it's useful to be able to immediately, visually see if you made a typo: if you expected to write a keyword, and it's colored like normal text, you know you messed up. Similarly, it's useful when reviewing code to quickly be able to tell whether there's a typo somewhere.
I have a pretty custom syntax highlighting theme for Neovim. I have a few categories that are highlighted differently:
- Keywords
- Function calls and method calls (highlighted identically)
- Property accesses (to highlight mistakes when you're simply accessing a property instead of calling it — it's a different color than a method call)
- Non-string built-in primitive types like numbers, booleans, etc
- Strings
- Comments
- Types
Ultimately I think syntax highlighting is a tool to let you see mistakes. If you go too wild with the colors, it's true that since everything is a unique color, it's hard to tell when something is the wrong unique color. But you can use a relatively restrained palette and get a lot of value, and I think this post goes a bit too far in terms of reducing color usage.