How would you highlight code?

Question

While the basic scenarios are white on black and black on white, most programmers find more varied syntax highlighting useful.

What advantages do you find from a general setup? (E.g. "a dark background allows...")

What specific tweaks do you find most helpful? (E.g. "slightly off-white works to...", or "highlighting quote marks and escapes, like \n, differently shows...")

One answer per person, please; list multiple points as part of your one response, if needed.

Answer 1

Either way though, I personally find that a white screen with dark text is too bright and hard on the eyes for long coding sessions. The black is much less intrusive on my eyes.

Answer 2

Lately, I've been getting rid of blue and purple in favor of brown and orange. I find less eyestrain with them, at least for me. I've always toned down the contrast. For quite a while, I used to set all the white backgrounds to a very pale yellow. Now, I'm also focusing using more warmer colors and fewer of the cool colors. In general, I find little difference between dark on light or vice versa... contrast and general color temperature seems to be more important than which way around.

Even if you don't use the tool, the theories behind f.lux are interesting.

Answer 3

I find highlighting escape sequences useful.

In particular for Python, raw strings have different escaping:

Answer 4

I think it totally depends upon your eyes; what's good to one person can be unreadable to the next.

I like white background with dark letters. I also tend to turn down screen brightness to keep the glare down. And I've used f.lux in the past (mentioned by Jim Leonardo) and that helps a lot.

Answer 5

I find white text on black background most pleasing for my eyes as it feels less straining than black text on white background. And any colour on black is usually not a problem unless you're choosing very dark colours. Then again, a bright yellow on white background is absolutely unreadable.

When it comes to colours for syntax highlighting, I think pretty much any colour combination will do as long it distinctly separates things such as keywords, variables, comments, etc. (Even better, keywords could be set in bold to further separate them.)

But, I find it very important to have a very distinct colouring on comments to allow me to quickly separate comments and code. I want to be able to ignore comments when reading code, and ignore code when reading comments.

Answer 6

Dark text (#1d1d1d) on light background (#f5f5f5) all the way.

• High contrast, while not too bright
• Allows to turn the screen luminosity way down in a low light environment
• Readable even on glossy screens with lots of ambient light
• The text somehow just stands out better, it's easier to maintain visual context when scrolling
• More readable at small font sizes
• Makes color adjusting programs pleasant to use rather than annoying