Also, it seems most syntax highlighters assume the opposite of the color scheme that I'm using (black text on clear background, or white text on dark background). I guess that would also be derived from Murphy's Law...
Try any one of these a run; you may be pleasantly surprised to know that highlighters "assume" nothing... http://vimcolorschemetest.googlecode.com/svn/html/index-c.ht...
This doesn't stop me from having syntax highlighting on, however.
http://github.com/wincent/Command-T
It also uses a small C extension to Ruby for speed, because for this particular scenario Ruby is a bit too slow to be comfortable.
Since Lua is so lightweight and fast, I think it should be an alternative worth considering in situations like this one, since it offers a reasonable compromise between the speed of C and the comfort of a high-level language like Ruby or Python.
Or am I assuming the wrong meaning?