It has been on my mind to write an Ask HN about syntax highlighting since I have seen a shift in people the last 15 years from preferring no syntax highlighting

It has been on my mind to write an Ask HN about syntax highlighting since I have seen a shift in people the last 15 years from preferring no syntax highlighting to preferring the Angry Fruit Salad[1] kind of highlighting. Personally, I like limited syntax highlighting: I only highlight strings, comments and sometimes keywords (in Common Lisp). It lets me quickly separate the code in useful chunks and also highlights a common source of errors that I make (made): forgetting to close strings. Here's a screenshot: http://imgur.com/rx053 http://imgur.com/rx053 (My Vim color scheme isn't quite there yet: the colors are too bright.) [1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/angry-fruit-salad.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/angry-fruit-salad.html