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.
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.
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)
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/
neovim on kiTTY
Hey that's my combi too!
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.
They're planning Linux support
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:
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.
Church of Emacs vs. Cult of vi is the only true rivalry. Enlightenment will only be found taking one of these paths.
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
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'm glad to hear Zed uses the GPU to render its UI, much like every other IDE on the planet.
Vscodium gang?
Represent! (It's vscode with all telemetry and crap removed, all your vscode extensions still work fine)
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.
Lots of discussion here of Zed being macOS-only. Multiplatform support is being tracked in this issue for Linux, Windows, and web:
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).
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, its 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.
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.
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
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.
For jvm stuff definitley yes. For other things I often prefer VS Code.
Man I use IntelliJ for:
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'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 fleshed 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
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.
He doesn't develop text editors, so he uses what's popular. That's what most people do.
I don't get why some people argue over text editors... Just use whatever works. I like VSCode, not because it's 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Sucks for consumers but that is poetic justice for the zed team. They now atone for their sin of creating electron.
Helix superiority.
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