Naming colors after the city

Early builds of the scheme named colors the way most themes do: blue1, magenta, comment-gray. The values were fine, but every tuning session started with a lookup. Which blue was blue1 again? Was magenta the keyword color or the diff-delete color? A name that only restates the hue tells you nothing when you are deciding what the color should do.

So the palette was renamed after the places the values were sampled from, and every name doubles as a job description. The function color is hangang, the river, because call chains are supposed to flow downstream. The keyword color is neon, from the sign tubes of Euljiro, because keywords are the words that stay lit whatever else changes. Strings are namsan pine green, the one organic thing visible from most office windows. Numbers are eunhaeng, ginkgo, after the yellow that buries Jongno every November. Types wear dancheong vermilion, the pigment painted under palace eaves, structural and a little ceremonial, which is exactly what a type annotation is.

The quiet one matters most. Comments are angae, fog. Fog sits behind the city without hiding it, and that is the entire design brief for a comment color in one word. Since the rename, no tuning note in this log has needed a lookup table to stay readable, which is its own small proof that the naming was worth a full note.