DMD now has colorized syntax highlighting in error messages

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Sunday, May 14, 2017 21:07:57 H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d-announce 
wrote:
> I hate colors, for the reason you stated above: they usually clash with
> my choice of terminal default color settings.  Also, I find colors a big
> distraction to the eye when I'm trying to focus.  I don't even like
> syntax highlighting for that reason. My take on it is that if I can't
> parse the code with a glance, then either (1) my grasp of the language
> is so poor I really shouldn't be coding in that language, or (2) the
> code is so unreadably poorly-formatted it's time to fix the formatting
> before proceeding any further.

LOL. To each their own. I remember a coworker who never used colors with
vim, and I found it really hard to read his screen. Even if it's not
necessary, I find that having syntax highlighting really helps, and in some
cases it pretty much screams at you that you screwed up (e.g. unterminated
string literals). But it also depends on the colors. If the colors aren't
configurable, then it's pretty easy for it to be a big problem. There is no
"one size fits all" for colors, though some color schemes will work better
in general than others.

I haven't gotten the chance to look at the dmd error messages yet to see how
they look, but if the colors are decent, then I'd expect them to help a lot
of people (especially with more complicated error messages). But given that
it's the command line, I don't know how they'd be very configurable
(certainly not like you could do with an IDE), though as long as there's a
way to turn them off, then worst case, you end up with what we had before.

- Jonathan M Davis