Zed Code Editor Now Open-Source

[DumbFsck]

Maybe it is just they are both Electron-based.

Correct. IIRC, the fellas who made atom were the ones who brought us electron, hence the naming convention (atom + electron). Atom's plug-ins and extensions also were all in coffeescript, as that was the JS dialect in vogue at the time.

The reason you might be grouping atom and vscode might also be because Atom was made by github. Of course at the time github was not Microsoft's. So VScode is made by MS, Atom by github (who is now also MS) both are electron based, both used a JS superset/dialect. Easy confusion to make.


I will say, though, MS deserves kudos (IMO) for showing how fast and light an electron app may be, as vscode is, probably, the best electron app I've used, in that regard. Still too slow and fat for me, but they really polished that turd really well.

Edit: one day I'll start getting "in", "on", and "at" correctly. Today is not that day.

[DumbFsck]

[...] but these days, I wouldn't switch editors if it didn't have good ai integration.

Do you mind sharing how you fit AI in your workflow? Is it writing boiler plate or actual code? Tests? Asking questions about the code base? I'm assuming you mean AI like co-pilot.

Or are you talking about featuring AI more like a jupyter notebook than like code generation and I misunderstood?

[Alexmitter]

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

Still absolutely no clue why anyone likes this terrible website that brings its own web browser on install. Its not even a good editor in the realm of web app editors.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

while you wait for zed to be rewritten in 100% safe rust. you can has ved today:

https://github.com/vlang/ved

[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.

[Gonk]

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

[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

[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.)

[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!

[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.