Zed Code Editor Now Open-Source

[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.

[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

[mdedetrich]

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

[alphabitserial]

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

[ehansin]

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!

[RealNC]

Zed's dead.

[iruoy]

On HN an employee said this:

Hey! Engineer at Zed here. Linux port is on our roadmap. Hopefully we'll get it done this year!

They made a whole UI crate and then did a V2 of that. They must've had other rendering engines in mind for at least GPUI 2.

[Quackdoc]

Only MacOS for now, but it seems promising. Curiously, the dev team didn't add Lapce editor (https://lapce.dev/) to the performance comparison. Let's wait for the Linux version and, then, do a proper comparison.

lapce is in the barely usable category, IMO its understandable why they didnt

[Eberhardt]

Regarding the speculations here about the graphics API used, they actually use only Metal so far: https://github.com/zed-industries/ze...Cargo.toml#L86

They specifically say that their GUI framework only runs on MacOS as of now. I'm not sure why they went that route, especially since there are already nice graphics layer abstractions for Rust, but I guess the devs are mostly Mac users. And given it's open-source now, it's not unlikely that some Linux users will accelerate the addition of other graphics APIs.

[fluke]

*sigh*

Everybody throwing armchair analysis everywhere like monkeys flinging poop without bothering to look at anything. It uses metal + cocoa in their custon UI lib gpui https://github.com/zed-industries/ze...pui/Cargo.toml

Macos is properly feature-gated, so adding other backends shouldn't be too much of a hassle (likely to be wgpu, unless someone prefers a more direct approach)