The single best thing I like about Zed is how they unironically put up a video on their homepage where they take a perfectly fine function, and butcher it with irrelevant features using CoPilot, and in the process:
- Make the function’s name not match what it is actually doing.
- Hardcode three special cases for no good reason.
- Write no tests at all.
- Update the documentation, but make the short version of it misleading, suggesting it accepts all named colors, rather than just three. (The long description clarifies that, so it’s not completely bad.)
- Show how engineering the prompt to do what they want takes more time than just writing the code in the first place.
And that’s supposed to be a feature. I wonder how they’d feel if someone sent them a pull request done in a similar manner, resulting in similarly bad code.
I think I’ll remain firmly in the “if FPS is an important metric in your editor, you’re doing something wrong” camp, and will also steer clear of anything that hypes up the plagiarism parrots as something that’d be a net win.
If FPS is NOT an important metric in text editing, you are doing something wrong. Otherwise, good points.
Unless FPS means “files per second”, I don’t see why it would, past the point of usability. You can only type so quickly, and 50 frames is as meaningful as 144.
If you get to that point where frames per second does matter, you’re either the fastest typist known to man, or it might be worth finding a more efficient way of doing what you’re doing.
In many modern environments the second I start scrolling my eyes start to bleed. Yes, I want 60 fps min. That was the first part. The second part is about stability. 20 fps may be enough for typing, but it needs to be 20 fps all the time. Not the average between 1 and 60, it is makes IDEs unusable.
No need to update my screen when nothing happens. I use neovim, the pinnacle of editing.
Explain why
How is a MacOS only editor without extensions going to gain enough traction to be widely adopted?
No kidding. One of the YouTubers I followed was really shilling Zed editor. He didn’t seem to mention that it was Mac only.
Well, I guess it’s back to neovim on kiTTY terminal for me.
Sometimes I swear Mac based developers think the world revolves around them.
neovim on kiTTY
Hey that’s my combi too!
Neovim with kitty gang
Wow! My kinfolk are here!
If you’re a fan of neovim I’d like to take this opportunity to give Neovide a shout. It’s essentially a purpose built terminal emulator that can only run Neovim and has some fun extensions with that in mind, like the ability to configure font, window size, fullscreen, window opacity etc. using Vim commands, implement sub-character scrolling, let Neovim floating windows have transparency, and have fun little animations when the cursor moves. It also has support for all the modern terminal emulation essentials like truecolor, ligatures, and emoji. https://neovide.dev/
I’ve tried it before, it’s fine but had issues running on wayland last I tried. Did they fix the wayland issues? Looking at the issue tracker it seems like there are still a few open Wayland issues.
kiTTY by contrast has had Wayland support for about as long as I’ve used it.
I’ve been using it exclusively with Wayland for about a year now and I’ve yet to have any issues. YMMV however.
Sounds good, I’ll take a look too
You’re already on a superior editor friend. Don’t fall for the propaganda of lesser tools (that of course being anything not neovim)
Eeeehhhh, I was kinda jealous of one of my coworkers Doom Emacs setup. He had automated like 80% of his own job with it. Still haven’t bothered to try to learn it myself. One of these days…
What did they automate? I’m trying to get some ideas for my Neov… uhhhh… Emacs with evil-mode setup.
He did this thing where he unified his shell history across thousands of hosts - it was super handy given our extensive use of Ansible playbooks and database managment commands. He could then use a couple hotkeys to query this history within a new open document. Super handy for writing out shell command steps or wrapping things in a bash script you’re working on. Unfortunately I don’t really have a link to HOW to do this, I just remember thinking “Oh my god, that would save me SO much time”.
Nowadays, I just have this giant document with hundreds of our runbook commands and enable Github Copilot to make it SUPER easy to do the same thing without establishing an SSH session in the backend.
atuin might be useful it syncs your shell history
Wow, that’s super useful! I don’t have thousands of hosts, but even with a dozen, it would save me so much time. Why have I never thought of doing this? Thanks for the idea! (now I just need a few lonely evenings configuring the thing)
There’s also Xpipe for that.
I returned to emacs yesterday after using vscode out of laziness. I set up doom emacs and got everything I needed. Now typing is fun again. Actually before that tried neovim for the first time. I can’t do modal. Makes me very uncomfortable.
Hi, what do you mean by modal?
Macheads don’t mention other platforms, because why would you use anything else?
The home page doesn’t even mention Apple or Mac at all.
They are tracking support for other OSes, and I took a look at the Linux roadmap, and they’ve made some good headway from the last time I looked. I would use it for its UI performance. I don’t like how everything these days use Electron. It also supports Language Server Protocol, so adding extensions for languages should be fairly simple for the community to do. The multiple collaboration seems cool too, although I think most devs would seldom use it.
VSCode has tons of features that save a lot of time. Unless Zed manages to get close to feature parity, I don’t see how it can complete from a productivity point of view. VSCode’s UI performance isn’t stellar but it’s not nearly bad enough to counteract the productivity boost I get from its features.
When I need performance I just use sublime text. I wish I could have stuck with sublime text, but vs code just had too many extensions I needed.
Only if they actually port it which is what they claim they will do but until then not at all
And it has no name in this meme 👍
Based on their FAQ, they are not shooting for widespread adoption yet. Extension support and multi-platform appears to be on the roadmap.
Fwiw, I like a lot of the ideas behind the editor, and long-term I might consider it a viable option for some of my work.
The media coverage for this, half backed suplime clone, is just weird.
With the power of circlejerk
They’re planning Linux support
They can implement lsp support, sshfs, and it already has multiple themes which would work for me after it gets ported to linux
I’m glad to hear Zed uses the GPU to render its UI, much like every other IDE on the planet.
the framework is actually pretty cool, it uses SDFs to render ui (which is definitely not the most efficient solution but it’s really, really cool (it means they can use the same system to render shapes, text, and literally everything else which can be described by a signed distance formula)
wake me up when theres a vim plugin and a linux port
I think it already has vim motions. But I wouldn’t know because there is no Linux build.
You can run it on Linux by building it from source, wouldn’t recommend it though.
Church of Emacs vs. Cult of vi is the only true rivalry. Enlightenment will only be found taking one of these paths.
The religious marriage to rule them all: doom Emacs (or other packages that do similar things). All the excellent text editing of vi/vi/vi/vim, the ecosystem and all the features of emacs.
For anyone who hasn’t heard of doom Emacs, it’s emacs with a lot of customizations baked into it, one of the biggest selling points is that everything uses vim keybinds now (where it makes sense). You get the amazing ecosystem of emacs with the ease of movement and editing of vim, plus a lot of other QOL features. It’s also just vanilla emacs with pre-made (and easy to edit) config files and helper functions so you can move over existing stuff if you want, and you don’t have to worry since all the emacs packages will still work, since it’s still emacs
Doom Emacs is the Emacs users that found their operating system, but are trying to stumble their way into a good text editor :)
As an old coder this is the only religious war worth having. 😂
(Totally church of vi btw)
I’m an old emacs warrior, tired of the war. I’m Church of Emacs, but why? I don’t know what I don’t know about the advantages of vi/vim, I only know that when I see other coders use them, they seem to weave the magic about as well as I do.
I know that I have a ton of built-up configuration code that makes emacs the perfect editor for me. I know that I can’t imagine using git much without magit, or how I would organize anything without org-mode, or how I could tolerate the frustration of editing in a container on a remote server without tramp. I know that I have a huge familiarity bias.
I know that whenever I see anybody with with any of these flashy new-fangled editors, they spend most of their time futzing around with dials and buttons and other gadgets, and thinking about how cool it all is, rather than thinking about the code. They start projects really quickly, they handle some refactoring edge cases slightly faster, but they take forever to do any real work, and are completely unprepared to do anything with a new language or text structure at all.
I say: Vim and Emacs against the world.
I hope that I live long enough to one day master either vim or emacs. Until then Unix is my IDE, and mind you, Sublime my editor. But I could immediately relate to people being distracted by their tools rather than focusing on their code. That’s what I have observed a lot, it’s a distraction from what matters most. Even code itself could be a distraction from more essential code. That’s why I think, programmer should delete code constantly, until there is less code, or preferably no code.
I’m still trying out different editors from time to time. I always feel like they are lacking in some way in comparison to Emacs. Like, when there’s no key binding to focus the list of references, or one cannot navigate to the beginning of a block, or one cannot navigate by subword. Let’s not forget sexp. Cannot live without it. Or marks, for that matter. Or proper clipboard history that is properly searchable. It’s like the developers has not seen the light yet. Most editors are very mouse driven, and maybe does not focus enough on actual code navigation. I’m biased of course. Though, Helix seems cool.
Side note: Even though I use Emacs, I have nothing against Vim. Heck, I even use it every now and then.
I recently learned there are people that think emacs and vi are bloated. They like acme or sam or something. Iceberg is so deep.
Ed users have not found the internet yet, otherwise they’d be in the war too
?
“Ed”, a.k.a. “edline” is a really old line by line editor in Unix.
Oh my god someone finally fell for it! Please don’t edit your comment, you just made my day
I chose to respond to the most likely meaning as it’s also the response with the greatest utility value for the average person coming across this thread.
Responding to it as an “ed” prompt is pretty useless in this context.
Are you a Vulcan? O_o
Either way you have my thanks. Greatest utility value as well as greatest hilarity value!
Lol, wooshed.
?
Even Lynx is bloatware if you’re a member of the Ed Sect.
When you think of a bloated text editor, you would not expect VI to be that. If anything, it’s closer to the opposite.
Check this out. It puts everything I thought that was, you know, more ethical to use to the harmful section and suggests some unknown and probably not very useful today stuff. Can someone explain if they have good points or not?
Unclear. They don’t give their reasoning beyond “complicated = bad”, and very specifically leave it up to the imagination of the reader.
While they make some interesting points with regards to overcomplication and scope creep, there are also good reasons why we’re still not using programs like
edas text editors, such as it being arcane and unintuitive.viwill at least helpfully point out:exit is not an editor command. Instead,edwill not-so-helpfully point out?.
I don’t understand the hate for zed here. Because they are MacOs only? Well, platform support is being worked and looking at their business model it seems MacOs users will the cohort that actually pays for these kinds of things. It will be fun to try out once it comes on linux buy my fealty is with nvim.
They wana be vscode, but barly have the features of suplime text. The marketing is dumm.
Well it’s just starting out. + They’re at least open source.
Thats wy we dont hype and wait. I wish them luck, but they aint killed nothing yet and there not even close.
Vscodium gang?
Represent! (It’s vscode with all telemetry and crap removed, all your vscode extensions still work fine)
“all your vscode extensions still work fine” is definitely not true. Sure a vast majority of them probably do, but certainly not all of them.
I still prefer it over full VS Code though.
present… yet until i can toy around with zed in Linux
Me. I’d like to try zed though.
I’ve seen their page and while it seems great, I don’t think they’ll match Jetbrains in term of out of the box ergonomics. Could be a good VScodium replacement once it gets a bit fledged out and available on Linux.
I must be the only one that actively dislikes Jetbrains products.
Well I can understand. Not open source, kinda heavy in ressources, pricey…
Any other reason why? Just curious
Bulky. It has so many features and many times, it’s missing just one or two more things from being good enough. Its like Excel, where it tries to predict/outsmart the dev but all that does is annoy them.
I use jetbrain at work.
All of the above, and I ran into some bugs in Datagrip that when I reported them I was blown off and gaslit in the response. The response to the bug report was something like “No one does things like this, and even if they did it isn’t important” MF, I DO IT, and it was important enough for me to report the bug! That was enough for me to not renew our licenses for our team when it was time to re-up.
I’m not a fan of Rider, it’s just that OmniSharp outright breaks on large/real-world projects and Visual Studio doesn’t work on Linux. I don’t use their products out of choice.
You’re not. Jetbrains users are just a lot more vocal. It’s like vegans or people who vape. They will let you know 😉
Fleshed*
lol fleshed out is definitely correct here. Down votes are confusing.
Flushed out?
Absolutely agree. JB 4 lyfe
John fucking Carmack codes in Microsoft Visual Studio, and that’s the guy who wrote Doom, the single most important piece of software in history of Man and I’m not even exaggerating.
That’s cool but for some reason VS Code is just super distracting for me. I really can’t focus well when I’m using it, Zed feels a lot more focused for me
He doesn’t develop text editors, so he uses what’s popular. That’s what most people do.
So what would you use if you developed text editors?
And as a side note, would would you use for html and php?
I’d probably use my own niche text editor
Doom, the single most important piece of software in history of Man and I’m not even exaggerating.
First of all, that’s your opinion, second of all, appeal to authority, third of all, what’s that have to do with what he does right now?
It’s not opinion though, but a scientific fact.
Don’t you try to argue with the experts
Getting revenge on Microsoft by tightly integrating Microsoft’s LLM stuff 😎
From the Atom team? The same Atom that takes forever to load? Gonna be a hard pass from me, even if it does make it to PCs.
Ain’t Atom dead?
I think this editor is supposed to be super fast because of their GPU or whatever libraries. It’s also supposed to be written in Rust.
So far there’s no extensions and just on Mac. Maybe when those open up I’ll take a closer look.
The technology is nothing alike though. Atom is Electron and Javascript where Zed is Rust with its own custom UI toolkit.
And on the current version of Pulsar (the only real community fork of Atom seeing active development), startup time to point of the editor being usable is actually slightly faster than VSCode.
Lots of discussion here of Zed being macOS-only. Multiplatform support is being tracked in this issue for Linux, Windows, and web:
It’s far from finished usable though. I had to adjust the installation script myself and it disconnected both my monitors when the application started. The application opened and 3 seconds later the screen went black and I got a “No Displayport Output” message. I expected it to fail compiling or crash or something, but I never expected that to happen. I thought it was unrelated at first, but I was able to reproduce the issue 3 times in a row.
Could someone let me in the joke and tell me what editor this guy’s comparing VScode too?Oh Zed. I think it’s got promise but cross platform is gonna be necessary for mass adoption.
Sucks for consumers but that is poetic justice for the zed team. They now atone for their sin of creating electron.
Out of the loop here, what sucks for the zed team?
Probably the reason Vs Code has so many extensions, is that they can easily (low barrier of entry) be created in JavaScript. This is mainly due to the fact that VS Code is an electron application, itself written in JavaScript.
It sucks for zed, because these extensions allow users to customize their workflows to their needs which decreases their liklihood to switch to a different editer. I think the message of the post is that VS Code’s large and mature extension ecosystem will somewhat impede users migrating to zed.
The irony in this is that the people behind zed and atom were the ones who initially created electron for atom.
Idk man. I’m still waiting for Fleet.
