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   Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 03:49:21 JST Niki Tonsky

   About syntax highlighting https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/

   • Embed this notice
     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 04:12:44 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Lobo

     @lt nice!

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     Lobo (lt@meemu.org)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 04:12:45 JST Lobo

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky I've felt like this for a while, so much that I've been using my Emacs theme of choice (https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes) customized to be fully monochrome, but your theme inspired me to do add some color back with the backgrounds

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     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 05:21:00 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     @barubary for me, it puts text and punctuation almost on different planes. Helps me read names easier, stuff like parentheses and commas don’t stick to them. Easier to see where words start and end

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     Oriel Jutty :hhHHHAAAH: (barubary@infosec.exchange)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 05:21:04 JST Oriel Jutty :hhHHHAAAH:

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky

     Next, let’s tone down punctuation

     And now you've lost me. "Toning down" means lowering contrast means making it harder to read. Why would I want any part of the code to be hard to read?

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     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 05:21:55 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     Hell yeah, we have beaten Apple _and_ AI!

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     Sergei Smagin (smagin@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 17:29:28 JST Sergei Smagin

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky hey, good post, agree on most of the things.

     So one case of using bold and italic instead of background colors would be to use background color for search highlighting, e.g.

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     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 17:55:13 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Andrej

     @alberand yeah, I’m thinking what to replace them with. They were too distracting

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     Andrej (alberand@mas.to)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 17:55:14 JST Andrej

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky Did the animals have to go? And cursors too :(

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     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 17:57:16 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Dimitri

     @eugensson yep. People are so used to it they never questioned the premise

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     Dimitri (eugensson@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 17:57:17 JST Dimitri

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky this is literally my last rant on twitter

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     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 18:09:54 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • aerique

     @aerique nice!

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     aerique (aerique@genart.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 18:09:55 JST aerique

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky I've also been using my own restrained theme for ages now: https://codeberg.org/aerique/emacs-theme-aerique#emacs-theme-aerique

     Another important aspect of what restrained themes do is partitioning the code into easily scannable pieces.

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     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 18:10:47 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Oriel Jutty :hhHHHAAAH:

     @barubary there’s not a lot of cases in practice where someone puts `,` in place of `.`

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     Oriel Jutty :hhHHHAAAH: (barubary@infosec.exchange)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 18:10:48 JST Oriel Jutty :hhHHHAAAH:

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky Easier to confuse ( and {, or , and ., or ; and :, or >= and =>. If you find it hard to visually separate letters/words and punctuation, may I suggest giving them different colors? 😈

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     (λ. borkdude) (borkdude@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 21:06:55 JST (λ. borkdude)

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky Has anyone made alabaster for emacs?

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     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 16-Oct-2025 21:06:55 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • (λ. borkdude)

     @borkdude I don’t know! Shouldn’t be hard though

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     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Friday, 17-Oct-2025 02:03:18 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     Peeked into comments. Without live cursors or google-style presence avatars, people went back to discuss background color. Well

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     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Friday, 17-Oct-2025 02:13:47 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • netop://ウィビ

     @netopwibby ❤️

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     netop://ウィビ (netopwibby@social.coop)'s status on Friday, 17-Oct-2025 02:13:48 JST netop://ウィビ

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky Ever since I discovered Alabaster, I can't go back.

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     Jon Clayden (jonclayden@mastodon.online)'s status on Saturday, 18-Oct-2025 08:32:53 JST Jon Clayden

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky Really interesting post. I've created an Alabaster port for the Nova editor, since there didn't seem to be one yet

     https://github.com/jonclayden/Alabaster_Nova

   • Embed this notice
     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 20-Oct-2025 01:18:22 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Simon Lhoir

     @Dark_Chyper I mean, I don’t spend my whole day in my blog. I hope you don’t, either

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     Simon Lhoir (dark_chyper@pouet.chapril.org)'s status on Monday, 20-Oct-2025 01:18:25 JST Simon Lhoir

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky Very interesting article, I am in the process of adapting the dark theme for PhPStorm to my needs. I note all the same the irony of the article which advocates parsimony in the use of syntax highlighting, on a web page with such a bright background 🌞😎

   • Embed this notice
     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 20-Oct-2025 08:06:00 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Tamir Bahar

     @tmr232 what’s the opposite of thank you for showing me this?

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     Tamir Bahar (tmr232@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Oct-2025 08:06:01 JST Tamir Bahar

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky This was a fantastic read, thank you. And I'm definitely going to try this out.

     Also, have you ever seen Source Insight?
     Their highlighting and typography are _wild_!

   • Embed this notice
     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 20-Oct-2025 18:27:42 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Tamir Bahar

     @tmr232 that is better, thank you!

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     Tamir Bahar (tmr232@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 20-Oct-2025 18:27:43 JST Tamir Bahar

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky can I make amends by sharing some good highlighting?

     These are from x64dbg (replicating OllyDbg themes)