rainbow-delimiters VS sublime-scheme-alabaster

I'm a big fan of rainbow-delimiters, available on Melpa.

rainbow-delimiters ( https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-delimiters/ ) does this for parenthesis/braces etc but is somewhat bound to the syntax tree of whatever major mode is currently in use, it also scans on a per-character basis, where I'd need to scan for regex.

> Lighting up the active scopes

As you had guessed a little later, there are a few different emacs packages that do this. One of them is "rainbow parentheses" that gives every bracket a different colour (remember that emacs supports lisp, so differentiating between lots of different parentheses is arguably more useful in emacs than any other editor). [0].

Another one is highlight parentheses [1] which highlights all parens that enclose the cursor position, and gives a darker colour to those "further away" from the cursor.

[0] https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-delimiters

[1] https://sr.ht/~tsdh/highlight-parentheses.el/

This article is especially interesting to me, as it shows how VS Code still doesn't have the "Emacs nature". Even though I'm a 30-year Emacs user, I do hesitate to recommend it to younger programmers because it's so alien, and VS Code has one of the essential characteristics of Emacs: the extension language and the implementation language are the same. But this article is a great example of how it doesn't — extensions are limited to using an extension API, rather than having full access to the application's internals. Maybe a good thing, if you're a mass-market product worried about malicious extensions. But I'll note that [rainbow-delimiters-mode](https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-delimiters/) dates back to 2010, and has never noticeably slowed down loading or display of source files, even in languages with lots of delimiters like Lisp.

Using highlight-parentheses-mode, which is an additional package, helps. There are also show-paren-mode (build in) and rainbow-delimiters (additional package), whose could help there.

I use Alabaster[1]. Contrary to most themes, it is quite minimalistic and it emphasises comments instead of de-emphasising them. I like the minimalism, because it lets me focus, instead of marking every single thing on the screen as a different colour of “important” making my head spin.

[1]: <https://github.com/tonsky/sublime-scheme-alabaster>

I have been tinkering away at my personal take on what a modern, monochrome-esque Emacs might look for some years now and it is finally in a place where I think other might find it useful. The approached draws wisdom from the realization that "highlighting everything is the same as highlighting nothing" and tries to remedy the de-facto practice of theme by way of fruit-salad with more considerate approach. Inspired by alabaster's use of backgrounds for subtle syntax highlighting, typographic ideals and my endlessly sore eyes, it leaves text a comfortable black/white while drawing attention to constants, comments, declarations, and strings. A customizeable highlight color (by default a golden beige) provides a bit of life to the otherwise monochrome palette.

While I don't fully disable syntax highlighting, I use a minimal theme [0,1] that only has highlighting for comments, strings and globals. It reduces eye strain, and I never find myself relying on highlighting to navigate through code. LSPs provide an "outline" which can be very useful to navigate through code. I find "jump to symbol" function in my text editor to be faster than scanning all of the code to find the line.

Also most themes dim the comments, but IMO if something in the code needed an explanation, it should be brighter, not dimmer.

[0]: https://github.com/tonsky/sublime-scheme-alabaster

[1]: https://github.com/gargakshit/vscode-theme-alabaster-dark