Zed Code Editor Now Open-Source

[Quackdoc]

Nice things on an ugly UI with almost no functionality. Notepad++ running on wine is a better choice.

what do you mean no functionality? it has support for common LSP servers, right click view info about function, type auto complete etc, It has initial debugger support, remote coding support, etc.

[paulocoghi]

What performance comparison?

This one:

[paulocoghi]

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.

You are right

[yump]

This one:

I see. Interesting that they write this:

respond to your keystrokes on the next display refresh.

next to a chart that very clearly shows the response only comes on the 4th refresh.

TBH I doubt any GPU-accelerated text editor will be able to match vim+xterm on this test. Even knowing about display refreshes allows frame-clocked latency to creep in.

[szymon_g]

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

not in the Linux world

[alphabitserial]

Naive question, but what are these really good native text editors you speak of (seriously)?
I've heard of various VIM variants I know not of.
I'm guessing there's not an emacs-lisp-to-WASM or lisp-in-OpenCL thing.
The gedit / joe / whatever stuff never seemed special at first glance to me.
Eclipse / VSCode etc. didn't seem really high tech.
I guess there's "runs using web technologies" stuff like IIRC Theia so that may inherit cool stuff like WASM, WebGPU, who knows.
What am I missing?

I've been using Helix for most of my editing needs for a while now. It's a modal editor like vim, but where it differs is that selections happen first, before verbs and it has first-class support for multiple selection. The built-in LSP support is great and it works really nicely out of the box. My whole Helix config is only 7 lines and 5 of those are color theme and setting the cursor shape for various contexts. I'd be unable to accomplish selection-verb in vim and getting the various programming languages I use and the other nice things Helix includes working in neovim would surely need hundreds (thousands?) of lines of Lua.

[mazumoto]

we're never going to ... and if we do ...

don't think they understood what "never" means. and this doesn't sound like I should trust them

[Palu Macil]

Seems a little weird that is already has 1000 stars. The website has zero screenshots, it doesn't mention which languages are supported out of box or if there are plugins to add them or something, and it seems like Mac only for now means an awful small userbase. I am mildly interested in trying it, but the team really needs to do a better job selling it. The performance metrics and design considerations are mildly interesting, but they should be quite secondary to the UI and UX.

[skierpage]

The website has zero screenshots, it doesn't mention which languages are supported out of box or if there are plugins to add them or something, ... the team really needs to do a better job selling it.

From GitHub you need to follow the tiny unmtivated link to zed.dev, which has plenty of screenshots and says Zed speaks the Language Server Protocol so presumably it can support any language that has an implementation (about 40 are listed at https://langserver.org).

I'm not sure how Zed's LSP implementation relates to its support for the team's other project tree-sitter, "an open-source parsing framework ... Tree-sitter uses an incremental version of generalized LR parsing, enabling language-aware features for a general-purpose editor that were once only possible in language-specific IDEs."

Besides speed Zed's main feature is "multiple developers can navigate and edit within a shared workspace." Rust's fearless concurrency surely helps to implement complex concurrent editing over network.

It all sounds like a very cool editor, as does that crazy ved project someone mentioned earlier, a tiny editor written in the tiny V language with its own UI. So many editors to try, and I'm still adding the muscle memory for vim's advanced capabilities!

[skierpage]

the team really needs to do a better job selling it.

It does, at the site zed.org.

(I wrote an excellent comment explaining this and the Language Server Protocol and mentioning other Zed and ved features, but for some reason Phoronix marked it "Unapproved".)