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What is the best way of displaying highlighted text in a text editor?

I know of shading, which simulates what a physical highlighter does:

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And 'xor' highlighting:

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Are there any other methods? Which method is preferable?

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    This isn't much of an answer, so I'll put it in a comment. I don't think it really matters as long as it's obviously which parts are selected, both of which do very well. I would opt for the first option as it's more visually pleasing/easier on the eyes, but I consider them one in the same. Just as long as the highlighted colour contrasts enough with the text/background.
    – Anonymous
    Jan 26, 2012 at 16:11
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    Xor is very clear and very ugly. It's always suggest shading and deliberately choosing your colors.
    – Ben Brocka
    Jan 26, 2012 at 17:07
  • Well, the second (XOR) is impossible to read. So that should answer your question. And to give you a lttle background: it exists because it is technically easy to program: it's just a matter of inverting every pixel. The first thing is harder as it requires to keep track of each pixel's original color.
    – User 1
    Jan 27, 2012 at 13:03
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    As someone with mild colour vision deficiency, please don't use XOR for highlighting - so often the result is difficult to see (and remember there's more than just Red-Green colour deficiency too).
    – Bevan
    Jan 27, 2012 at 23:42

3 Answers 3

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If you can, you should leave it up to the user's operating system settings. OS X does a highlight effect by default, while the linux machine I'm on now (as well as Windows, if I remember right) does a bluish XOR.

As a user, it would definitely look strange to me if I was accustomed to my blue XOR effect and some application displayed a highlight effect (or vice versa). It would throw me off a second. Sure, I could figure out what was going on, but it's a visual anomaly with the rest of the system that could easily be avoided by either not overriding the effect, or inheriting from the system (if you must specify in a lower language).

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    If the background and text are OS colors, then the selection (and all other colors) MUST be too. If they are not, then all colors must be non-OS colors, other wise you may end up with background = foreground where one is OS default and the other is a custom color.
    – Danny Varod
    Jan 26, 2012 at 23:43
  • There's no such thing as a "blue XOR effect". XOR is always dependent upon the input color; you can't shade or tint it. The Windows highlight effect just changes the background color. It uses a blue background in the default color scheme. This is not XOR, which is essentially inverting the colors.
    – Cody Gray - on strike
    Mar 11, 2021 at 0:33
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Always just shade the background and allow the text to be rendered over it.

Rendering the text first and then applying a bitwise XOR highlighted area over the top might appear to work ok superficially, but you cannot guarantee that the results are as effective as leaving the anti-aliasing to the font rendering engine. Consider for example what happens if the anti aliasing does not follow a linear drop off at the edges of the text, but a curved drop-off - by XORing it you invert the curve and end up with something slightly different to how the text would be rendered straight on to the background.

Furthermore an XOR operation might turn black text white, but XORing other colours is going to generate something quite horrible.

So, no - it's not better to XOR - just use a standard background shading of suitable colour and contrast. If wish to actually invert the text colour then do that - but not by XORing it.

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    White on black is already pretty ugly in a black on white context...it just doesn't add unintentional, hideous colors into the mix.
    – Ben Brocka
    Jan 26, 2012 at 17:49
  • If you shade the background, make sure to pay attention to foreground colors. A blue background tint is great until it completely obscures, e.g., hyperlink text. Some editors allow you to define both bg and fg colors for highlighted text (e.g., vi) when defining syntaxes.
    – Alex Feinman
    Jun 20, 2013 at 14:06
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Inverting colors can look bad, depending on colors and also the inversion of contrast of B/W <--> W/B can be uneasy to look at.

Changing foreground only makes it hard to tell if color change is due to selection or due to formatting.

Changing background only makes text loose its emphasis relative to its background.

That is why I prefer a different approach...

If the possible foreground and background colors are known in advance change them both slightly, e.g. white on black to yellowish-white on dark grey, black on white to medium blue on light grey.

If they are not known in advance then use a mathematical function e.g. slightly reduce contrast of all three channels of background and slightly reduce contrast of blue channel of foreground. This approach however won't work if the theme is low contrast.

By reduction of contrast of a single color I mean moving its value closer to the middle of the possible range.

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