Make it look more like this

[BioTurboNick]

With that tongue-in-cheek title out of the way, I'm not sure at the moment how to break this down into parts, so posting this just to keep the issue from getting lost.

Should make it look more like this (longer stretches of same/similar color and use same/similar color for same/similar things)

rather than this:

See #2 (comment) and after for more discussion

[BioTurboNick]

Python just added REPL syntax highlighting in 3.14. Personally, I think the use of color strikes a good balance, even more so than my reconfiguration above. Food for thought.

python/cpython#131507

[tecosaur]

Thanks for sharing. At a glance, I see:

• Blue keywords
• Green strings
• Yellow numbers
• Cyan types
• Cyan function calls
• Blue bools
• Red comments

This seems could be a solid uncontroversial expansion to the current minimalist default? 🤔

I think this should do the trick for taking this style on a test run:

# faces.toml
[julia]
keyword.fg = "blue"
string.fg = "green"
number.fg = "yellow"
type.fg = "cyan"
funcall.fg = "cyan"
bool.fg = "blue"
comment.fg = "red"

[KristofferC]

A bit scared of entering the 🚲🏠 but some comments:

• The difference between blue and cyan is quite small (even in the python screenshot)?

• Comments in red just feels kind of wrong...

[tecosaur]

For Julia, as something similar but tweaked, I'd be inclined to try:

[julia]
keyword.fg = "red"
string.fg = "green"
number.fg = "yellow"
type.fg = "blue"
funcall.fg = "cyan"
bool.fg = "yellow"
comment.fg = "grey"

• Keep red for keywords
• Use blue for types, it's good to distinguish from function names
• Make comments grey
• Make bools yellow, because of how number-y they are in Julia

[IanButterworth]

@KristofferC pointed out https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/ which I think arrives at a really nice balance

[BioTurboNick]

I agree with most of that, thanks for the link Ian! I do think there's value in highlighting keywords in Julia though - they provide a lot of the structure that would otherwise be provided by braces in a C-like syntax.

[KristofferC]

Having punctuation like parens be gray is a bit excessive imo. I would keep those white in that case.

[ghyatzo]

If there is still space in the shed, I'd like to come in with my two cents:

• red on dark backgrounds is a nightmare
• A thousand times yes to a minimal color scheme. (big plus for alabaster, actually used that as inspiration for my own color scheme)
• It should be a color scheme that works at least decently on both light and dark backgrounds
• Is it really beneficial to also highlight function calls?

[danielwe]

I'll also let myself in

My preference would be to stick to the terminal's ANSI palette by default. Those colors should work well against the terminal background, unless the user has chosen a badly designed color scheme, but that's not Julia's problem---they'd have the same problem in the shell and most other terminal apps.

If Julia provides one or more predefined themes of its own (whether as the default or selectable via user config) those should include a background color. You simply can't assume that any given foreground palette will work with the user's terminal background. (It should be possible to opt out of setting the background, but the default should be opt-in.) Violating this principle, especially for the default theme, is in my opinion one of the worst UX decisions you can make in a terminal app.

As long as these principles are upheld (at least the second, but ideally also the first), I'm less opinionated about which color is used for each syntax element. Though I will say that I think the tonsky blogpost is riddled with unsubstantiated assertions and absurd conclusions. I think keywords are among the most important elements to color, and I think color differentiation is of great value even if you don't know your colormap by heart. But of course there are themes that overdo it.

[tecosaur]

My preference would be to stick to the terminal's ANSI palette by default.

We're already doing that. All of the examples of things looking bad that I've seen so far are related to terminals that ship poor-contrast default ANSI colours.

There are two ways of taking this:

1. Saying that having good colours isn't our problem, and that people should set their terminal to have better colours
2. Adjusting what colours we use by default to limit how bad the OOTB experience (unconfigured Julia in an unconfigured terminal) might be

I think there's some value in pursuing (2), but to do that well (instead of just basing it on what one particular terminal does OOTB) we'd really want a bit of a survey of what common terminals look like unconfigured on Linux/Mac/Windows.

I've got enough things to work on that I wont get around to that for a while, but if somebody else were to do that (that = get the hex codes for fg/bg + ansi colours) it would be very helpful for (2).

[tecosaur]

I've just found somebody that's done some of the work that I thought was needed to be able to make better choices: https://blog.xoria.org/terminal-colors/