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…
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.
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.
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 mankind, 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.
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
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?
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.
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
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)
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.
