If your IDE didn't use color to indicate syntax, would you want different information conveyed through color-coding? Using color to indicate syntax, which is already directly visible in the code you're reading, does seem like sort of a waste if it could be used to convey more useful information.
Using different colors for sync vs async calls could be helpful. Or pure vs. impure. Or how many times a function or variable definition is used elsewhere in the code base, exercised in tests, referenced in the documentation, etc. I think I would find this sort of non-local information more useful than syntax highlighting.
There was a blog post linked here a couple weeks ago that used color shading to distinguish levels of nested parentheses, with color shift on mouseover, which was interesting.
The article suggests marking "=" and "==" in different colors, which doesn't seem very useful unless the font shows adjacent = characters with no space between them.
There is a mode for Emacs that picks a different color for different identifiers and uses the same color for a given identifier throughout the code to better aid picking out how a given item is used.
Using different colors for sync vs async calls could be helpful. Or pure vs. impure. Or how many times a function or variable definition is used elsewhere in the code base, exercised in tests, referenced in the documentation, etc. I think I would find this sort of non-local information more useful than syntax highlighting.
There was a blog post linked here a couple weeks ago that used color shading to distinguish levels of nested parentheses, with color shift on mouseover, which was interesting.
The article suggests marking "=" and "==" in different colors, which doesn't seem very useful unless the font shows adjacent = characters with no space between them.