Nicolas P. Rougier
2020 · arXiv
Text editors are written by and for developers. They come with a large set of default and implicit choices in terms of layout, typography, colorization and interaction that hardly change from one editor to the other. It is not clear if these implicit choices derive from the ignorance of alternatives or if they derive from developers' habits, reproducing what they are used to. The goal of this article is to characterize these implicit choices and to illustrate what are some alternatives without prescribing one or the other.
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A more sensible text related to code presentation is Rougier's On the design of text editors. But I found I don't really need a lot of syntax highlighting. My preference is towards those separations: - Code vs comments - builtins vs other symbols - maybe strings. But I like to rely on whitespace (blank lines and indentations) more than colors these days. [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06030
It's not adhd specific but https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06030 After reading this I implemented a code theme based primarily around typographic variation like weight rather than color. It uses only two colors (black and deep purple) in two weights and one italic each. I have pretty severe adhd and it's hard to judge but after using it for a few months I think this is better for me. Previously I had been using solarized light for nearly a decade for probably similar reasons. Nano emacs was created by the author of that paper and its default themes are based on it, if you want to try it without committing to hand-rolling a theme. Personally I found that one too "light" (typographically, not color) but I also have relatively poor vision and like a large and heavy font. https://github.com/rougier/nano-emacs
>I am trying to imagine what a page of code laid out by a professional designer would look like.... You'll probably love this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06030 Nicolas Rougier has also implemented a few of those ideas in a series of packages for Emacs called "NANO Emacs"; the actual implementation goes beyond what's discussed in the paper and is worth checking out.
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