alt Hacker News> I have no idea how people are supposed to be productive with non-semantic rainbow vomit themes that are so popular in modern editors.
That depends on what your use for syntax highlighting is. If you use it to find specific types of code, than yeah, it's probably unhelpful. But for me, the point of syntax highlighting is to just make reading easier by separating different parts of the code with different colors. I have absolutely no idea what each color means in my editor, it just matters that they're different.
I’ve been using vi (nvi) and mg and both doesn’t have syntax highlighting. I’ve copied a monochrome theme of github for my vim setup and my emacs config is using modus operandis which is somewhat minimal and muted.
While I can use rainbow color, but this day syntax highlighting kinda fades into the background as I don’t care that much. I like it for something like React and html for the tags part but indentation is much better than highlighting in my opinion.