it's fine to prefer less colors, but man, that (2025) blog post is all over the place...
Sometimes it gets so bad one can’t see the base text color: everything is highlighted. What’s the base text color here?
why does the base color matter at all? What is "base" anyway when every word has a syntactic meaning?
Here’s a quick test. Try to find the function definition here:
It's funny to see how this test backfired depending on the person in hacker news, lobster, and lemmy threads. Clearly a personal preference phrased as absolute truth.
But the crux of why the post doesn't make sense is assuming this would matter at all:
Here’s another test. Close your eyes (not yet! Finish this sentence first) and try to remember what color your color theme uses for class names?
Can you?
If the answer for both questions is “no”, then your color theme is not functional.
No, it doesn't. And it boggles my mind why someone would think that failing to recall colors-to-syntax pairs would mean the theme has failed you. Visualizing colors, more often than not, is not even a conscious effort. Colors are a subtle aid to guide your attention to the parts that matter.
Can you see it? I misspelled return for retunr and its color switched from red to purple.
This would/should be better caught by a static checker anyway.
But the best part is that the post contradicts itself: the suggested minimal theme doesn't even address that typo use case mentioned above, because it doesn't feature a distinct color for special keywords. So if one were to follow the post's advice, return and retunr would look exactly the same, making it worse than the colorful theme it criticizes.