I used to use all kinds of color schemes like the author points out, and I agree that over time I found it to be /harder/ to understand what was going on that it being helpful.
I've also used mostly a light theme (that's pretty stripped down too) for the last ~7 years, https://github.com/liamgriffiths/vim-colors-plain - it's a fork of another color scheme that I've adapted a little for the languages I work with more often. It uses bold for keywords, muted/italics for comments, and a color for constants (strings, numbers, "symbols"). It's super simple to maintain. Shout out to the original author (thank you!)
I quite like not having so much noise and it helps me focus on reading and understanding the code instead of getting distracted or mislead by the colors.
The bold is helpful to get the "outline" of structure and easily see the reserved words and it helps to not accidentally use one as a function or variable name. The colored constants are nice to stand out a little more from regular code and track them down. And at least for me the code I work in has so few comments that it's just very obvious when they appear.
Since I tend to work in relatively brightly lit environments using a light theme is just easier for me to read and switching back and forth between websites and other things it's not so jarring since most interfaces are light-themed as well.
Reading through this article made me think a little bit more though about whether there might be some new improvements I could make that would help. I hadn't given my color-scheming much new thought in a long time. I liked the idea of giving some background color to text colored on a background where the contrast would impair legibility. Given so many of us here spend an incredible amount of time reading text on a screen I think it's worth making it something a bit more enjoyable whether that's the typography or colors - it makes a difference!
I've also used mostly a light theme (that's pretty stripped down too) for the last ~7 years, https://github.com/liamgriffiths/vim-colors-plain - it's a fork of another color scheme that I've adapted a little for the languages I work with more often. It uses bold for keywords, muted/italics for comments, and a color for constants (strings, numbers, "symbols"). It's super simple to maintain. Shout out to the original author (thank you!)
I quite like not having so much noise and it helps me focus on reading and understanding the code instead of getting distracted or mislead by the colors.
The bold is helpful to get the "outline" of structure and easily see the reserved words and it helps to not accidentally use one as a function or variable name. The colored constants are nice to stand out a little more from regular code and track them down. And at least for me the code I work in has so few comments that it's just very obvious when they appear.
Since I tend to work in relatively brightly lit environments using a light theme is just easier for me to read and switching back and forth between websites and other things it's not so jarring since most interfaces are light-themed as well.
Reading through this article made me think a little bit more though about whether there might be some new improvements I could make that would help. I hadn't given my color-scheming much new thought in a long time. I liked the idea of giving some background color to text colored on a background where the contrast would impair legibility. Given so many of us here spend an incredible amount of time reading text on a screen I think it's worth making it something a bit more enjoyable whether that's the typography or colors - it makes a difference!