Write down syntax highlighting design principles

[jan-warchol]

Hi @dngray, I wrote down some of my thoughts on choosing colors for particular token types. Let me know if you have any comments.

[dngray]

Reading over those points I agree 100%.

warm colors (orange, yellow) are best for tokens associated with action

I did this with the i3wm theme and windows requesting urgency.

comments must be gray, so that they fade into background (unlike many schemes in which comments are green and clutter the view)

It might be worth having a look at this article from a while back, it has quite a different opinion on that Your syntax highlighter is wrong and the thread from HN and repost. I am curious to know what your thoughts on (1: ‘Comments are cruft’) were.

I don't personally agree about the diff remarks neither did this person. I consider red meaning it was shit so it was removed. Green is good, and it is the new stuff that is better. Any more meaning than that is really not inferred.

should boilerplate be blue? or gray? or not colored at all?

At the moment I think it is gray, if say you consider DOCTYPE in HTML to be boiler plate. It's not something that needs a huge amount of attention so I think that's okay. Solarized does the same thing.

Other than that I would agree with the other points. I don't change my color scheme very often at all, and up until now I have been using Solarized. Previously I used Xoria256.

[jan-warchol]

I've just realized that this commit was rebased and merged some time ago (but I forgot to update branch/close PR)...