Hard to see highlighted occurrences of marked variable in dark theme

[dcastil]

Thanks for the awesome theme, it immediately became my favourite one! 😍

However, I rely on VS Code highlighting all occurrences of a variable when my text cursor is placed in one. In the dark theme it is really hard to see those as the contrast between highlight and background is too low.

In following screenshot, the variable value occurs in lines 44, 67 and 72.

[dcastil]

Here are some dark themes for comparison:

Dark+ (VS Code default dark theme)

Atom One Dark (theme I used before GitHub Dark)

[rezyaev]

@dcastil can you share font's name? sorry for being off-topic

[dcastil]

@rezyaev It’s JetBrains Mono 😊

[renkun-ken]

Same issue here. It's very hard to find document highlight words provided by lsp:

[simurai]

Yeah, there are quite a few things that interplay with each other. Would be nice to avoid making things look muddy if too many things get layered on top of each other.

Have been playing around a bit and ended up with this:

• use a distinctive background color (blue) for selection that is different from the rest. So that it's always clear what is being "selected" by the user and what is additionally being "highlighted" by the editor.
• use a green border for wordHighlight. So that it doesn't clash with the selection.
• use a green background color for selectionHighlight and BracketMatch.
• There still the a yellow background for findMatch when searching. But maybe doesn't overlap too often.

I'll see how that feels with the dark theme.

[dcastil]

That looks really good! I had issues with selection and wordHighlight being indistinguishable in the Atom One Dark theme, so this would be a very welcome improvement.

[rezyaev]

Yes, that's good!

[simurai]

And the dark version:

Ok, I'll make PR and release it. We can always 🎻 fiddle a bit more with the colors later.

[dcastil]

I'm still having some issues with the occurrences.

The problem is that wordHighlight highlights the actual occurrences of a variable while selectionHighlight highlights everything that matches the selected string like in search and replace. This means that it's still hard to figure out what the occurrences of a variable are.

Here is an example of a wordHighlight. The highlight is not standing out very much and it is easy to miss it, especially when dealing with larger functions with more nesting.

The selectionHighlight is not so useful because it highlights more than just the occurrences. It's even dangerous because it might misleadingly highlight variables with the same name which actually aren't occurrences of this specific variable, here e.g. in line 206.

A suggestion would be to turn the styling around: A border for selectionHighlight and a background color for wordHighlight while keeping the background color for selection. This would make sure to always keep focus on occurrences of a variable while making selection highlights less obtrusive. If more focus on selectionHighlight is needed, one can still use the file search.

[dcastil]

@simurai I can't reopen this issue unfortunately. Could you do it?