@krinkle@mastodon.technology I don't know of anyone using difftastic by default, including me! (I use it >50% of the time though.)
I toyed with background colours but I didn't find anything that I really liked. Contrast is hard, and depends on the user's theme.
Background colours look bad with syntax highlighting (e.g. red background with blue comment text).
It also looked silly due to ignoring whitespace between symbols.
It's an interesting space and I'm still experimenting :)
miniblog.
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Futhark's design is deliberately trying to stay simple to keep long term design sustainable.
The author also has an interesting discussion of relative versus absolute paths in import syntax, and how relative paths can make local analysis easier.
Terminad is a really interesting approach to rendering markdown in the CLI. It deliberately doesn't render links, so you can always see both the link text and the URL.
In a browser you have hover to see URLs, but not necessarily in a terminal.
I think you could build an interesting IDE with a tiny embedded LLM in addition to the usual tooling.
Features like 'extract method' would be much nicer if an LLM could provide a name. Choosing a good name is virtually impossible from just a typed AST.