I wish we had more understanding of how effective different presentation styles really are when working with code. For example, personally I much prefer quite

I wish we had more understanding of how effective different presentation styles really are when working with code. For example, personally I much prefer quite mild syntax highlighting — depending on the language I might distinguish things like comments, literals, and maybe some routine keywords and punctuation that could be de-emphasized. I’d also choose colours that didn’t jump out, but were distinctive enough not to confuse, say, a literal string with an identifier. I don’t see the attraction of colouring 67 different classes of code fragment in 67 barely distinct colours myself. On the other hand, many popular editors and colour schemes do this, so it would be interesting to know whether I’m missing out on something that might be helpful. What I do find very useful is the kinds of context-sensitive highlighting that some editors will do, for example showing matching delimiters and maybe the region between the innermost ones, or showing all references to and any visible definition of the identifier under the cursor. Subtle highlighting is still preferable to in-your-face bold colours, at least for my taste, but I find these kinds of tools do help me to navigate and understand code more efficiently.