> Conditional syntax highlighting I think that's the right approach. Different situations afford different tools. In normal usage, reading only in a single col

> Conditional syntax highlighting I think that's the right approach. Different situations afford different tools. In normal usage, reading only in a single color is a real relief to me; but of course it's typically easier to find missing delimiters and such with syntax highlighting. I've had this shortcut in my vim configuration for a very long time and I use it frequently: nmap <F11> :if exists("syntax_on") \| syntax off \| else \| syntax enable \| endif \|<newline><C-g> Similarly, there should be actual different flavours of highlighting for different tasks. I have configured a very light highlighting which highlights mostly control flow words (if, while, for, return etc) and maybe strings. It's much better than the colorful default or syntax off for many situations. On other occasions it might be useful to highlight all variable declarations, etc. I have come to think that it's the same with programming languages: Different languages require you to type different things explicitly. Sometimes that's beneficial but often it hurts. For example, typing a function signature is much more convenient in python (just variable names), but when debugging the explicitness of a more rigid type system often helps finding bugs. Similarly typing "const" or the precise type of integer is really annoying in many situations. It's visually distracting and shifts the focus on alignment or ordering of statements, instead of the problem to be solved. On the other hand, sometimes these things are just important. It would be very nice to have a programming environment where these details can be hidden most of the time and only turned on when really needed.