Coding in color

I spend quite a bit of time writing Python in Sublime Text, navigating documents whose line counts range from ten to five hundred. System variables — “False”, “s”, “Y” — and integers render in purple, strings in yellow, flow control statements — “for”, “while”, “if” — in red, and built-in functions — “open”, “sorted”, “len” — all display with an electric blue tint. These keywords only make up a small portion of my scripts, however; for the rest, I dig through line upon line of white variable names and regular expression operations. So when I saw this article from Evan Brooks on coding in color — essentially, implementing semantic highlighting rather than syntax highlighting — I could immediately realize the practical application of the former over the latter. Unfortunately, given the way semantic versus syntax highlighting works though, few editors support it natively.

Permalink.