Impeccable Syntax theme

Impeccable syntax is an attempt at a less ornate syntax highlighting theme that has fewer colors than what’s conventional and occasionally has typographic features to differentiate pieces of code.

Screenshot of the Impeccable Syntax theme

I recommended that a variant of the Iosevka font is used with this theme as it’s the only font I’ve tested in conjunction with the theme. If you’d rather use a different font, choose one that has regular (often equivalent to a font-weight value of 400 in CSS), medium (often 500) and bold (often 700) weights and an italic style.

Design

Heavier weighted text seems to stand out better than lighter weighted text. With this being the case, a bold weight was chosen for aspects such as keywords because these often begin and end sections of code. Hopefully this will enable more effective scanning.

Italics were chosen for constants and basic literals because in contrast to heavier weights, italics seem to attract less attention while still providing emphasis over roman type. Color is still used as I found that using only italics to didn’t provide enough contrast to regular text.

Characters within a string that are not literally part of the string are in roman style, a bold weight and gray.

Brackets, comments and some other things are in a bold weight and gray.

Bugs

Incomplete styling

I still have work to do in regards to making sure all aspects of syntax highlighting are styled how I want them. I’m not sure what all of the selectors effect. Consequently some things are styled with default styles or have inherited styles I don’t intend for them to have.

Inconsistent styling

Atom wraps pieces of text in tags based of rules in the grammar defined for the current file’s type. I’m not sure if certain characters or sequences of characters can be styled without modifying or replacing the grammar files Atom includes as these are slightly inconsistent in how certain textual aspects are defined.

As an example, by default Atom treats double quotation marks (for string literals) in a CSS file as punctuation whereas in a Ruby file (again for string literals) these characters are part of the string. It’s possible to style double quotation marks separately from a string for CSS files but for Ruby this doesn’t seem possible.

Incorrect styling under certain conditions

If one creates a new HTML file and selects the default HTML grammar, the styling of text between quotes and the quotes themselves are not styled correctly unless the file is saved and reopened.

Copyright and license

See the LICENSE.md file for more information.

impeccable-syntax