purple?

I think I'd ideally like to do this:

• Give the function tokens a distinct silhouette (change their shape, give them a heavy outline, animate them, something like that).
• Additionally, give them a consistent background and icon color.
• Give project tokens their project colors.
• Change disabled/closed tokens to grey with strikethrough.

I don't know if we can figure out a silhouette approach that doesn't look junky, though. If we can't and/or you don't like that, a less aggressive approach might be:

• Give function tokens a background and icon color (yellow? yellow = function).
• Give project tokens an icon color, but leave the token itself blue (blue = object)
• Change disabled tokens to grey (maybe no strikethrough) (grey = disabled/closed object).
• Change invalid tokens to red (red = invalid token).

That's a little less crazy than trying to do silhouette changes, and maybe better?

I'm not happy with them right now; I'd like them to be more distinct than they are.

Either of those color approaches would also let us vary the icons freely. I think it might be more natural to give "members(x)" a "users" icon than a "magic wand" icon.

As I think about it I'm less into the silhouette idea. Let's just try the colors first. I'll do that in a followup.

if we are using text, perhaps no icon to be truly distinctive?

I'm looking for "(" because I want this to count as a "function token" as the user types it out:

members(x

Specifically, that's sufficient for the "members" datasource to know that the user is calling the "members" function, and it should query for projects matching "x...".

That said, I can replace that call with PhabricatorTypeaheadDatasource::isFunctionToken().