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.
Explain why
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.
How is a MacOS only editor without extensions going to gain enough traction to be widely adopted?
And it has no name in this meme 👍
With the power of circlejerk
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.
They’re planning Linux support
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.
The home page doesn’t even mention Apple or Mac at all.
neovim on kiTTY
Hey that’s my combi too!
Wow! My kinfolk are here!
Neovim with kitty gang
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/
Super cool, just installed this, and eager to spend a workday with it now, thanks!
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.
Macheads don’t mention other platforms, because why would you use anything else?
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…
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?
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.
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.
atuin might be useful it syncs your shell history
The media coverage for this, half backed suplime clone, is just weird.
They can implement lsp support, sshfs, and it already has multiple themes which would work for me after it gets ported to linux
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.
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
It’s funny how many people online use VS Code. But I’ve heard that this might be a US thing. Here, everyone uses the JetBrain products (which are far superior imo).
For jvm stuff definitley yes. For other things I often prefer VS Code.
Man I use IntelliJ for:
- python
- Jupyter notebooks
- node, typescript
- html
- YAML/TOML
- sql
- testing
- ReST
- Docker
- bash
- cloud formation
- terraform
- lua
- groovy, kotlin, and also java
- maven, gradle, spock
- linting, code formatting, dependency management, db connectors & browsing, live templates, refactoring, code analysis, fantastic git operations, local history, testing, etc
Support for most of this stuff is just built in, and a few plugs for the rest. In-line embedded sql execution, best git merge tools, everything has customizable key commands… it goes on and on. The amount of config and plugs this requires in other tools is insane.
I have a full JetBrains sub paid out for five years. I have dropped JetBrains for VS Code because I got tired of switching editors for everything and dealing with a Java-centric setup when I tried to streamline. Their decision to drop community Rust support in favor of only paid more recently also doesn’t sit well with me, especially given the PyCharm setup.
I swore up and down I would never leave Sublime for JetBrains.
Latin American. When VSCode was first released, immediately jumped from Atom. Never locked back.
I for a long time thought VS Code was an Atom fork because of how simmilar they were
Its just the swiss army knife of the editor world.
My hopes for a vscode replacement are on lapce.
To be fair, there’s a big difference.
VS Code is a text editor / IDE. Compared to something like Notepad++, it’s super slow to open/load, it’s UI feels laggy at times, and it’s just overkill for opening a text file. Compared to specialized log viewers, it struggles with large files and is generally super slow.
But compared to “full” IDEs like IntelliJ, it’s marginal in coding features, lacking important analysis and testing support, plus integrations with ~everything.If you find yourself in the middle, like many JS developers do, not actually needing the biggest IDE but also needing more than just a text editor, it’s a fine tool. As a Java Backend Dev, VS Code feels like a joke if applied to that, OTOH.
People should use with whatever they feel comfortable with, but I personally don’t see the advantage. I used VSCode once for simple edits of something and it worked, but I couldn’t imagine really using it for a project due to the lack of… everything. The whole support of the JetBrains products from the smart autocompletion, pointing out errors in advance, to improving your code, is insane, and with VSCode, you don’t have that.
I also once had a small project with two people using PyCharm and one VSCode and the differences in the code style were insane. Of course that depends on the person, but it’s just much easier to obey all the style guidelines and write cleaner code with the former one.Honestly, vscode opens in a split second for me, faster than I can react and start typing. For all intents and purposes it is instantaneous. Granted my setup is extremely clean and I only have the barest extensions installed for my workflow. The performance is consistent in my Windows, macOS and Linux machines.
I can’t imagine it running slow at all (perhaps someone with hundreds or thousands of extensions would). The last two editors I could recall that took the whole of eternity in the time space continuum to load were Eclipse and Atom. And those were slowass right out of the gate with zero extensions or plugins.
its* UI feels laggy
Oops. TY, corrected!
it’s super slow to open/load, it’s UI feels laggy at times, and it’s just overkill for opening a text file.
Because it’s a webbrowser in disguise. The most complex and inperformant GUI rendering system in existence.
Everyone I know in Europe uses either Visual Studio or vscode.
Me, a European, using Xcode and Eclipse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fuck vs code, jetbrains all the way!
I’m in Europe and VS Code is very popular, JetBrains stuff is around too tho. Both are bloated but VS Code is still way lighter.
VSCodium is less bloated
The right tool for the right job. I use both, depending on what task I have.
This goes for most things in tech - there’s no one best language, there’s only really a best language for any given job.
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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.
Ain’t Atom dead?
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.
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.
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.
Getting revenge on Microsoft by tightly integrating Microsoft’s LLM stuff 😎
For the most part it’s a business for them, and that’s what matters, they target Mac users because they are more likely to pay. If you need speed and customization there is neovim and Helix (Rust based). From users to users, no business interests here. Or VSCode just works for almost everyone.
I mean, it was DOA at “From the Atom team”.
Fuck bulky ass vs code fucking horrendous
It does just work though, which is what other code editors need to get that kind of adoption, I’d love to be able to say I use vim or Emacs but get frustrated when I’m trying to get work done and things keep breaking, I finally feel I have everything configured and then realise I’m missing something else that took me 3.5 minutes to set up in VScode, half of that is due to the large community.
Zed works pretty well out of the box but is missing a lot of features that will make it a viable replacement for me. I am excited about Zed and the way it works, it’s super interesting and creative and id love to drive it daily someday, so much so that it’s the first project I’ve really considered contributing to myself.
I don’t like that VSCode is bloated, but I love that it takes five minutes to set up and contains nearly every feature I can think of.
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.
meanwhile me who’s never left editplus
Church of Emacs vs. Cult of vi is the only true rivalry. Enlightenment will only be found taking one of these paths.
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
Even Lynx is bloatware if you’re a member of the Ed Sect.
?
“Ed”, a.k.a. “edline” is a really old line by line editor in Unix.
Lol, wooshed.
?
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!
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?.
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 :)
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.
I don’t get why some people argue over text editors… Just use whatever works. I like VSCode, not because its the best or the fastest or the lightest.
It works and it does all I need it to do , which is all that I need from a text editor.
not because it’s* the best
It’s worth finding the best text editor if you’re using it all day long imo
If it does everything it needs to do without major drawbacks, then it is the best editor.
Pretty much. But some people end up wanting to configure and tweak the thing just so they “can work”, when in reality they never actually use any of those tweaked things
Sometimes, it feels like people that spend too much time glorifying text editors are just trying to justify why they’re using a bad one.
Yeah… and these criteria depend on the editor + use case combo. Hence, the discussion and excitement around text editors
VSCode is the best for me, simple, good UI, extensions, 0 setup required, can run on practically anything created after the dinosaur age (early 2000s).
