Is Syntax Highlighting Bad?

I've never written software outside of an editor without syntax highlighting. Always found it useful, even a necessity when I just started learning. Lately though I'm questioning if it's holding me back, maybe preventing me from seeing the forest for the trees...
Any devs among Jow Forums who've tried working with syntax highlighting on and off? Has it been better or worse?

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Why would a tool aimed at helping you to visualize correct syntax hold you back? Explain your reasoning to me, please.

I feel that colorizing syntax adds noise to a degree makes me "jump around" and parse colors instead of the actual meaning of what I write. Also maybe I'm depending too much on "seeing the right colors" instead of seeing the correct syntax and semantics.

It's just a hunch and personal doubt, questioning whether or not my habits are really helping me. I don't have a real concrete hypothesis. I don't use syntax highlighting when I do math or writing, so maybe I shouldn't when coding. Or perhaps vice versa? IDK.

>I don't use syntax highlighting when I do [...] writing
Well, I do and it's of great assistance. By syntax highlighting I of course mean highlighting misspelled words, grammatical errors, turning on the paragraph feature if I'm using Word or something similar or actual highlighting of syntax if I'm writing LaTeX or Markdown.

minimal highlighting I want is to distinguish comments and strings

Over time auto correct has degraded my spelling and grammar abilities because I've become too comfortable having them around. (Just a personal feeling, again.) There's other allusions to this as well.

When I started writing software, I habitually Googled every little thing. While Google has the answer to just about goddamn everything, I eventually sensed I was too dependent on it. I was at the point I forsook thinking through issues and properly learning.

Same goes for driving. I habitually use Google Maps/Waze to drive places and while they work, they crutch me from developing a better sense of navigation.

I'm not espousing living without these niceties, but I think training without might make us all the better with.

Skilled programmers don't use syntax highlighting.

There's certainly such a thing as "too much color" or "too many colors".
Done properly it helps you focus on the right things faster. Skimming the code is what you will do most of the time.
Clearly seeing function definitions, return statements, loops, etc. is very well worth it.
It also helps to avoid a lot of typos: this "whlie" is not in the right color? Sure enough, I mistyped it.
Of course you can have errors and warnings shown without highlighting but that's not a replacement.

Anyway, if you find yourself being distracted by the colors, try different color schemes, possibly other editors. Without colors you might end up looking for bugs in comments or string literals which is not a good use of your time.

while we're all here, which editor does scope highlightning? ie no differentiation of literals/strings/keywords etc but just of number of paranthesis/curlyboy/tags etc depending on language

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1-800 come on now.

use proper indentation

You could probably make your own with Sublime Text and compatible editors, they have pretty robust engines for it

This makes sense. I feel the same way with traffic lights, signs and road markings.

Why yes I do avoid syntax highlighting, what gave it away?

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fail but nice digits

Log much?

the autism gave it away

based

Better debugging in the long run

My eyes are already fucked, so I need all the help I can get. I feel as though I can acquire a focus target much easier with highlights, in a way similar to indentation and spacing.

The glyphs and their absorption are irrelevant to programming imo, only the logic matters.
Likewise, If someone were to explain a program to you in English, what matters is your comprehension of it, not the input vessel.
More importantly, programming isn't a contest, even if you consider it a crutch, an unfair advantage, whatever, who cares. I program to ends, not for vanity, recognition, etc. If you think it benefits you personally, I suggest you keep doing it. If not, then don't.

The better you get, the less shit you need on the screen.
When I first started I was a retard and used VScode spyware because I wanted shit like graphical indentation marks and pretty line numbers.

Eventually moved to Emacs because its much better to look at a clean buffer and just the code

you can just disable those, you dont need a whole OS for that

Tried both, went back to syntax highlighting after a few years.
The main reason was that Python started gaining popularity at work, and therefore FOIC and all of it's delimiterless glory became a pain.

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syntax highlighting is good, but there is a point at which it is too much. No syntax highlighting will hold you back. It depends on the language, too. Lisp needs minimal syntax highlighting because there isn't much complex syntactical stuff. The only things that Emacs highlights in lisps by default are comments, strings, and special forms (basically control flow operators in C-like languages) and variable/function declarations. In C that stays pretty much the same except types and preprocessor macros are also highlighted. Emacs also provides syntax highlighting within regexps too and its immensely helpful because regexps are otherwise just jumbled together unformatted text.


Syntax highlighting is both about communicating info (as in special forms in lisp being highlighted to indicate that they are special) and helping your eyes quickly find stuff (as in highlighting variable names in declarations and highlighting preprocessor macros and highlighting in regexps).

I used to make Minecraft mods using notepad.

leave color off by default, keybinds to quickly toggle them on if you need help looking for a missing token

If everything is highlighted then nothing is.

Your displayed code - should put as little as possible of a strain on your brain for decoding it.. it should not create negative feelings - like stress etc.

the important bits to highlight are
>comments
>keywords
>literals
which helps with eye-scanning and lets you catch simple errors easily

like, there's way, way, way too many colors in that pic