Do you like org-level-1, org-level-2, etc. all different colors, or everything the same color (like black on white, etc.), or something between?

By "something between", I mean something minimal, but a little bit of color, like just two or three font colors for levels. And this entire question could be broadened out to any other distinguishing font differences between levels. I'm asking this because I'm new and I'm wondering if I'm fooling myself that font colored levels does anything good. When I "discovered" themes and faces, I got pretty excited at the eye candy. At first, it looked really nice and seemed like a good idea. But now, idk. I'm curious, how many org mode level-colors (or other font attributes for levels) do you have? What does your different font attributes for levels mean?

I'm very color oriented, so I use defined colors for all the levels. It's the same with writing code for me. Without syntax highlight I feel like my "visibility" is greatly decreased.

Well, syntax highlighting is different, of course, because in that case, color has syntactic meaning. I'm just curious, how many org mode level-colors do you have? What does your level colors mean? If you see a level that's orange or blue or something, do you have a descriptive meaning for each of those levels/color? I'm new to emacs, but what I'm finding is that as I'm doing some kind of research on the web, I might get a few points in an outline, and then I need to expand on one of those points with additional sublevels, and it could go on like that several levels deep. So in that case, the levels don't have any meaning other than "this level is a sub-heading of the level above".

I use both different colors and sizes, It makes it easier to read for me. I have 5 sublevels, I don't find myselft using more than that without it being a mess.

Thanks! I have a theme that has 8 colors, and I think thats too many.

I used to use colors but ended up switching to font sizes *and* using a sans-serif font. Color is a pretty powerful attention grabber. If I use too much color then none of it stands out. I decided to use color to draw my attention to TODO/DONE, checkboxes, blocks, tags, and a few other things. Headings having TODO/DONE *and* tags, I feel like I'm already using quite a bit of color for those, so font size was a different way to distinguish headings. Of course, everyone's org mode usage differs! I currently have sizes for org-level-1 through org-level-4. I rarely use 5 through 8. You might also find inspiration from Nicolas Rougier's org mode setup: https://github.com/rougier/notebook-mode and https://github.com/rougier/org-bib-mode have screenshots which show very little color put on headlines.

Wow, this really helped me out, thanks! I'm also gravitating towards using color or other font-face attributes for attention to org-mode's syntactic elements. That approach makes the most sense for me. For example, I'm using a box around TODO items with black text on a gray background.

I use the same text format for all headings and text in between -- I would love to have headings with larger, maybe even variable-pitched fonts, but then I can't add a TODO level 1 heading to a file real quick without it also becoming huge. So I stick to a uniform but boring look to give me the flexibility to do whatever I want wherever I want in my docs.

Yes, that's where I'm gravitating towards. I do stylize true syntactic elements, just not levels. I think I might do a simple color scheme, like L1=black, L2=dark red, L3=dark blue, L4=black, etc. The color does help a little bit in distinguishing indentation level, much like a ledger or report has alternating colors. In fact, I might try just two. Black and dark-color.