Procrastin8 wrote:
I know this post is pretty ancient....
If it's any comfort, I feel it's correct to "necro" an old thread on the same topic rather than start a new one; why toss aside all the experience that's been built up in the old thread, especially one with as many good points as this one?
Quote:
....so I thought I'd share my solution (though my stylistic choices might bother some or all of you)
I have to say, I like several of your choices of what elements you've chosen to distinguish from others; it seems to help make the important things jump out a bit more. (I'm not a big fan of colourising things, but I do often find that using around three different ways of marking syntax can be helpful without being intrusive or annoying.) The one major thing that's missing in your example, though, is what labels look like when used as instruction operands.
That said, what is the point of different colours for label definitions, instructions, and operands in general? It seems to me that the separate columns already do a good job of distinguishing them.
I mention this because the more colours you use, the less power you have with contrast. While BDD's colour-blindness may not be the common case, you should note that the
presbyopya that commonly comes along with ageing eyes is not just about focus but also about brightness and contrast. More light reflected from the subject (or generated from it, in the case of computer screens) contracts the pupil, thus improving focus. Thus, light backgrounds with dark text tend to be easier to read, and things like dark red or dark blue on black, being both dark and low-contrast, are seriously suboptimal.
As others have pointed out in this thread, often better syntax or better use of existing syntax is a better solution to readability problems than colourisation. My attitude is that if something is hard to read without colourisation, look first at the syntax, rather than using colourisation as a crutch for bad syntax. Often better formatting or a macro will do a much better job of fixing the problem.
BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
Color is fine and all that, but obviously is not going to help when displayed on a monochrome terminal, which device until relatively recently, dominated computer displays.
This is where, again, stepping back and looking at
readability as the problem, rather than lack of colour, can help. Monochrome terminals do have distinguishing modes even without colour; the old IBM MDA offered both bright text and underlined text, and these days you can also usually get italics in a monochrome terminal display. Just two or three distinguishing modes can usually do 80% of the work that eight modes would do. And using fewer modes allows for more contrast (in the generic sense) between them, which is good for a wide range of issues, including presbyopia and colour blindness.
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