Zed Code Editor Now Open-Source

[alphabitserial]

Very excited to see the open-sourcing of the UI crate in particular!

[mdedetrich]

I think that Visual Studio Code pretty much killed any possibility of Zed editor having any chance of success

[Quackdoc]

I just installed Zed 0.119.18 on macOS (use an Air laptop for work) via Homebrew. When I read this article earlier, Homebrew was telling version on 0.118.x and the new GPUI 2 stuff appears to have been added to the 0.119.x series so decided I'd wait to install. But alas, updated Homebrew and it is here! Initial (very initial) impressions are good ascetics. Might be a good fit for me, time will tell. I have been using VS Code on this things so far.

Fun, I also downloaded Lapce on my Linux installation earlier. Remembered this one after launching it. Looks like a dud to me, not something I would want to work in just on ascetics alone.

If this turns on a winner for me on macOS, would be cool to see available on Linux as well!

lapce doesn't look great oob, but it has some really nice themes availible for it that more then make up for it IMO

[ehansin]

I think that Visual Studio Code pretty much killed any possibility of Zed editor having any chance of success

We will see. There seems to be a simple elegance to it, at least was my first impressions, that might lead to something. And not an Electron app, that is a plus. We will see...

I will add, if these guys where the Atom people, isn't that where VS Code started off from ? (I maybe be wrong on this based on what I. just looked up.) I assume they know their stuff. I'm looking forward to seeing what they can do. I get that MS is a big company with lots of resources and their own background in code editors and IDEs. But very interested in this.

* And wait, there is more. I may be wrong on the Atom and VS Code relationship. Maybe it is just they are both Electron-based.

[ehansin]

lapce doesn't look great oob, but it has some really nice themes available for it that more then make up for it IMO

Thanks for the input. I will keep tabs on it.

[ehansin]

One more thing. Some years ago someone started this GUI editor in a functional language (no, not Emacs!), and I remember thinking it looked so cool at the time. But died out, nothing became of it. I ran it on Windows, cannot remember the name. I think it had "light" in the name though, about all I can remember!

[curfew]

I think that Visual Studio Code pretty much killed any possibility of Zed editor having any chance of success

I moved from Atom to VS Code, somewhat reluctantly, but I would switch away from it swiftly if anything capable should emerge. Relevant features for programmers are actually becoming somewhat IDE-independent thanks to Microsoft's Language Server Protocol. (At least in theory.)

[caligula]

"Zed is a high performance -- multi-threaded and GPU accelerated"

Still probably slower than this https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=L41oIvre9K0

[Gonk]

I am old. Why does a code editor need to have GPU acceleration and a server component?

[caligula]

I am old. Why does a code editor need to have GPU acceleration and a server component?

Text rendering is super challenging. Have you ever seen a computer manufactured before 1990 that can render a screenful of text? Since Windows 12 there has been a new challenge - vector fonts. Before Ryzen 9 7950X3D and RTX 4090 Ti Super it wasn't realistic to render anything other than B&W monochrome bitmap fonts without any transparency. The fill rate just wasn't there and line wrapping was impossible before AVX512.