>>12
Fuck you kindly. Syntax highlighting is good if it's easy to write language grammars and themes for, and works well for many different languages. A few good editors do it right, so most people don't think about it. You're obviously one of them.
Most IDEs force you to change hundreds of color groups individually because they don't allow you to link one color group to another. This gets exponentially worse in an editor that supports a lot of languages. Emacs sort of has this problem, but the color editing is programmable so it can pretend it has themes.
A lot of editors don't provide
enough color groups because they're only designed for editing C. This can be downright infuriating if you're working on a Perl source file or a stylesheet. A lot of editors also don't allow you to define themes, so if your lighting conditions change for some reason you might as well switch editors.
TextMate is actually only a little better than Vim, because of how linked color groups work. (In Vim, you have to manually declare linked groups in any new language grammar.) And that doesn't make up for all its horrible other flaws, but still, that's some pretty good highlighting.