just a little idea: permanently colored indentation guides

[ThomasW]

Hi all,

I just had one of those "wouldn't it be nice...?" thoughts, so here it
is:

In my experience, in longer blocks of code it's hard for the eye to
follow one particular indentation guide because they are all gray.
(This is especially true for narrower indentation widths.) The
indentation guide highlighting feature is a nice thing, but one has to
move the cursor to one of the braces to activate it, then go back to
the position where one is working. Wouldn't it be nice if the
indentation guides were permanently "highlighted" in different colors,
like: Leftmost line is gray, next line is blue, third line is red,
next line is gray again, then blue, red and so on? If the indentation
is correct, one would see at a glance where the block starts and ends
by looking at the color of the line. The eye won't accidentally be
skipping two lines of a different color. Of course this can't replace
the actual highlighting feature that is based on true bracket
matching, which is very useful to have, too, especially if the
indentation is screwed up.

Any opinions?

Thomas W.

[Neil Hodgson]

ThomasW:

> Wouldn't it be nice if the
> indentation guides were permanently "highlighted" in different colors,
> like:  Leftmost line is gray, next line is blue, third line is red,
> next line is gray again, then blue, red and so on?

Sounds distracting to me. You should probably mock this up in a
paint program to see how it looks and if anyone else likes it.

Implementation would be a little bit of work as each coloured
pattern would have to be rendered into a pixmap surface as is
currently done for pixmapIndentGuide and pixmapIndentGuideHighlight
since that is faster than drawing lots of single pixel lines.

Neil