I did it back in the olden days, on everything from Wyse and Wang terminals to a Commodore 64 and an IBM XT with MDA display.
I haven’t done it that way in years, but this article makes me want to try it again. I wonder if all that highlighting is actually making me less focused. I guess I’ll find out later this week.
Using this kind of rational-choice-based theory assumes complete control of the way your brain processes information and the channels it chooses to focus on, which simply isn't accurate.
For a reductio ad absurdum, if you had a book in which each word was in bold purple iff its Scrabble score was divisible by 5, I don't think it would be controversial that removing that channel of information would make you more productive.
Very true, and completely irrelevant. We're talking about a counterexample to a universal claim, not a universal claim that runs counter to the original claim. The comment I responded to said (paraphrased) "I don't see how you could be more efficient by removing a channel of information", and this is what I disputed, providing a theoretical explanation and a simple example. The fact that examples in the contrary direction exist (as you point out) is not disputed by anyone.
FWIW, as far as the specific upthread topic goes: despite generally preferring a pretty barebones development environment, I prefer syntax highlighting.
The idea is that if everything is highlighted then your brain adapts and stops paying as much attention to highlighted elements. Many colorschemes use too much colors. It is not uncommon to have one line be highlighted with red because of an asynchronous linter warning, and many other words with purple because they are keywords like 'class', 'def', 'do', 'end', and so on. And there are a bunch of other colors everywhere else. Some people ask themselves "Do I really want to highlight syntax elements? If there is a syntax mistake, my editor will immediately tell me anyway, and it will be much more prominent if I have a clean uniform sheet of code."
I've been using minimalist colorscheme for more than a year now. To me it highlights only what matters: mistakes are red, code is dark and uniform, comments are faded, current line is highlighted, search matches have their own color. That's it for the most part. There are some subtleties that are also handled.
Minimal highlighting is beautiful and clean. Too much color is ugly and messy. Just become clean! Remove your wallpaper, remove those tiny ugly icons from your toolbar, find minimal colorscheme, install tiling window manager, take a bath.
I haven’t done it that way in years, but this article makes me want to try it again. I wonder if all that highlighting is actually making me less focused. I guess I’ll find out later this week.