Zed Code Editor Now Open-Source

[mangeek]

[Pulp Fiction, but with nerds]

"What Notepad is this?"
"It's a Code Editor, baby."
"What Code Editor is this?"
"It's Zed."
"What's Zed?"
"Zed's accelerated, baby. Zed's accelerated."

[fitzie]

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?

right now it's just mostly boilerplate, but it does pick up on things so sometimes it's more. it feels like pair programming with a simple programmer, like programming is less lonely. and using chat interface is sometimes useful instead of going directly to stackoverflow .

[dgw_]

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!

Light Table? https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable

I think I have a t-shirt somewhere from their Kickstarter. It did look cool, but development died out before it reached a point where one of the languages I actually use was supported.

[DumbFsck]

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

Matter of phrasing.

Would you be happier if they said "if we ever WERE TO" instead of "if we do"?

What they are saying is that they will stay true to their word, but they want us to "trust but verify", in this case verify being "fork them off if they try anything funny".

[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".)

[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!

[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.

[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

[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.

[szymon_g]

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

not in the Linux world