Zed Code Editor Now Open-Source

[reba]

Lapce editor (https://lapce.dev/)

Curiosity drove me to try it out and... that editor looks extremely alien on my desktop; fonts, scrolling wheel, menu dialogs, nearly everything.
I suppose this is because of not-yet-nice Rust UI crates but, meh, it's unusable, sadly. Back to Intellij.

[ddriver]

What's the big deal? Isn't GPU accelerated text pretty much the norm nowadays?

[c117152]

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 runs on MacOS and targets Vulkan, Metal, D3D12, and OpenGL natively through wgpu so there's nothing unfair or improper in comparing them now.

[spicfoo]

Assuming they use OpenGL in the first place... Which its probably mantle.

Did you want to say Metal? Regardless of the API they have options to translate that to whatever else they want and they don't have to rewrite it. Games do this all the time.

[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)

[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.

[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

[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.

[RealNC]

Zed's dead.

[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!