It’s an interesting idea to use colours for more information in a text editor. A lot of the suggestions here are things VS Code has been incrementally adding a

It’s an interesting idea to use colours for more information in a text editor. A lot of the suggestions here are things VS Code has been incrementally adding as visual guides over time though. For example the way VS Code highlights other instances of the same symbol (variable/function name) under the cursor goes a long way to address the specific Import, Argument, Type, and Exception cases listed in the article. Combined with heat maps for test coverage and git commit recency in the gutter, I am skeptical that switching out syntax highlighting on demand (I.e keyboard shortcuts I’m assuming) would be ergonomic and viable. That said, I love that there’s thinking in this space on how to improve the visual comprehension of code. There still are plenty of crutches I use, such as expanding the selection along the syntax tree (⌃⇧⌘→ on Mac) just to trace all the parenthesis and braces in JS/TS – I don’t find the rainbow braces very useful at all.