To this point, I wonder if we can go even further in the direction "it's fine to have a 'zoo' of colors on the screen... as long as we're able to rapidly scan for patterns based on the shapes of code and relative positions of those colors."
Many games (especially gacha games where one may be tracking multiple orthogonal "levels" on any given piece of inventory) compress tremendous amounts of data into a character or gear item portrait; ticks on the top, dots on the side, colored frames, etc. - all so we can pick things out in a crowd without needing to set a custom sort order.
And yet our IDEs, citing silly things like "render optimizations" and "consistency with ANSI escape codes," allow each character to have just a single foreground color, a single background color, and maybe a squiggly underline. Why stop there?
Give me the freedom to add arbitrary overlays and decorations on any given token. Give me <ruby>-style elements [0] that will let me put a little colored dot or emoji at the top right of any token that meets a certain requirement... say, a utility function, or a reference from the file that's open at the top right of my screen.
Let us swim in rainbows with sparkles flying past our eyes. We're strong swimmers.
Many games (especially gacha games where one may be tracking multiple orthogonal "levels" on any given piece of inventory) compress tremendous amounts of data into a character or gear item portrait; ticks on the top, dots on the side, colored frames, etc. - all so we can pick things out in a crowd without needing to set a custom sort order.
And yet our IDEs, citing silly things like "render optimizations" and "consistency with ANSI escape codes," allow each character to have just a single foreground color, a single background color, and maybe a squiggly underline. Why stop there?
Give me the freedom to add arbitrary overlays and decorations on any given token. Give me <ruby>-style elements [0] that will let me put a little colored dot or emoji at the top right of any token that meets a certain requirement... say, a utility function, or a reference from the file that's open at the top right of my screen.
Let us swim in rainbows with sparkles flying past our eyes. We're strong swimmers.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...