I once showed a few base16 text editor colourschemes to someone and they said that they would not use it because they all use the colour “red” a lot and “red” indicates an error to them (which is a reasonable).
Since then I haven’t really been able to get that out my head. BASE_08 is often used as the standard text colour but it’s also used for errors and is often red. Errors don’t stand out because it’s the colour of text and you need to understand the context in which errors are shows to understand it’s an error. Syntax highlighting is meant to convey meaning (it’s nice if it looks good too) and meaning is lost when it comes to errors compared almost any other editor theme I've used before. The base16 styling page mentions:
base08 - Variables, XML Tags, Markup Link Text, Markup Lists, Diff Deleted
I'm guessing it's used for errors due to the Diff Deleted colouring? Here is a side by side example of a sample piece of code from base16-builder-go with vscode using the top theme vscode extension for that specific theme:
Below is an example of side by side typescript with errors in VSCode. I've included Gruvbox which is quite "red" heavy and nord which has basically no "red".
I picked these themes because they're all very popular themes.
Conservatively, Base16 has at least double the amount of "red" in it's themes than the "official" or most popular VSCode equivalents when not displaying errors. I suspect this is a systemic problem, otherwise it wouldn't be so prevalent in basically ever theme (but I could be wrong).
@base16-project/base16-project-team what your thoughts are on this? Is there something we can do about it?
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