> Syntax highlighting had, for me, been somewhat of a crutch. I was relying on it to immediately highlight code errors One man's crutch is another man's perfec

> Syntax highlighting had, for me, been somewhat of a crutch. I was relying on it to immediately highlight code errors One man's crutch is another man's perfectly reasonable tool. Is a carpenter's level a crutch? > When I read a book, I don't want parts of speech highlighted in different colours I have trouble discerning colours and I still use syntax highlighting. I don't think that there are people that are programmers but unable to read code unless all of the floats are purple. The highlighting mostly just tells me "this parsed correctly" and helps my eye track where e.g. string literals begin and end. I don't really see a reason to give either of those things up. If it's distracting, you could easily turn down the theme to just bold one or two keywords and string literals, which solves both of those two problems at least. Maybe go crazy and reverse the background on obvious syntax errors like unexpected symbols. I rarely want to focus on the code itself and more just want to focus on the problem. Immediately highlighting code errors seems like a perfectly nice thing to do to that end. If I could just write a bunch of code quickly, riddled with syntax errors, and click some magic "okay editor, fix away!" button I'd be fine with that too. To each their own I suppose.