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How is a MacOS only editor without extensions going to gain enough traction to be widely adopted?
No kidding. One of the YouTubers I followed was really shilling Zed editor. He didn’t seem to mention that it was Mac only.
Well, I guess it’s back to neovim on kiTTY terminal for me.
Sometimes I swear Mac based developers think the world revolves around them.
You’re already on a superior editor friend. Don’t fall for the propaganda of lesser tools (that of course being anything not neovim)
Eeeehhhh, I was kinda jealous of one of my coworkers Doom Emacs setup. He had automated like 80% of his own job with it. Still haven’t bothered to try to learn it myself. One of these days…
What did they automate? I’m trying to get some ideas for my Neov… uhhhh… Emacs with evil-mode setup.
He did this thing where he unified his shell history across thousands of hosts - it was super handy given our extensive use of Ansible playbooks and database managment commands. He could then use a couple hotkeys to query this history within a new open document. Super handy for writing out shell command steps or wrapping things in a bash script you’re working on. Unfortunately I don’t really have a link to HOW to do this, I just remember thinking “Oh my god, that would save me SO much time”.
Nowadays, I just have this giant document with hundreds of our runbook commands and enable Github Copilot to make it SUPER easy to do the same thing without establishing an SSH session in the backend.
Wow, that’s super useful! I don’t have thousands of hosts, but even with a dozen, it would save me so much time. Why have I never thought of doing this? Thanks for the idea! (now I just need a few lonely evenings configuring the thing)
There’s also Xpipe for that.
I returned to emacs yesterday after using vscode out of laziness. I set up doom emacs and got everything I needed. Now typing is fun again. Actually before that tried neovim for the first time. I can’t do modal. Makes me very uncomfortable.
Hi, what do you mean by modal?
In vi for example you switch between modes. In insert mode you can insert text and in normal mode you can move around and do many other actions to edit. Getting used to this takes time and I don’t have the energy for now.
If you’re a fan of neovim I’d like to take this opportunity to give Neovide a shout. It’s essentially a purpose built terminal emulator that can only run Neovim and has some fun extensions with that in mind, like the ability to configure font, window size, fullscreen, window opacity etc. using Vim commands, implement sub-character scrolling, let Neovim floating windows have transparency, and have fun little animations when the cursor moves. It also has support for all the modern terminal emulation essentials like truecolor, ligatures, and emoji. https://neovide.dev/
I’ve tried it before, it’s fine but had issues running on wayland last I tried. Did they fix the wayland issues? Looking at the issue tracker it seems like there are still a few open Wayland issues.
kiTTY by contrast has had Wayland support for about as long as I’ve used it.
I’ve been using it exclusively with Wayland for about a year now and I’ve yet to have any issues. YMMV however.
Sounds good, I’ll take a look too
Super cool, just installed this, and eager to spend a workday with it now, thanks!
neovim on kiTTY
Hey that’s my combi too!
Wow! My kinfolk are here!
Neovim with kitty gang
The home page doesn’t even mention Apple or Mac at all.
Macheads don’t mention other platforms, because why would you use anything else?
They are tracking support for other OSes, and I took a look at the Linux roadmap, and they’ve made some good headway from the last time I looked. I would use it for its UI performance. I don’t like how everything these days use Electron. It also supports Language Server Protocol, so adding extensions for languages should be fairly simple for the community to do. The multiple collaboration seems cool too, although I think most devs would seldom use it.
When I need performance I just use sublime text. I wish I could have stuck with sublime text, but vs code just had too many extensions I needed.
VSCode has tons of features that save a lot of time. Unless Zed manages to get close to feature parity, I don’t see how it can complete from a productivity point of view. VSCode’s UI performance isn’t stellar but it’s not nearly bad enough to counteract the productivity boost I get from its features.
They’re planning Linux support
Only if they actually port it which is what they claim they will do but until then not at all
And it has no name in this meme 👍
The media coverage for this, half backed suplime clone, is just weird.
With the power of circlejerk
They can implement lsp support, sshfs, and it already has multiple themes which would work for me after it gets ported to linux
Based on their FAQ, they are not shooting for widespread adoption yet. Extension support and multi-platform appears to be on the roadmap.
Fwiw, I like a lot of the ideas behind the editor, and long-term I might consider it a viable option for some of my work.
The single best thing I like about Zed is how they unironically put up a video on their homepage where they take a perfectly fine function, and butcher it with irrelevant features using CoPilot, and in the process:
- Make the function’s name not match what it is actually doing.
- Hardcode three special cases for no good reason.
- Write no tests at all.
- Update the documentation, but make the short version of it misleading, suggesting it accepts all named colors, rather than just three. (The long description clarifies that, so it’s not completely bad.)
- Show how engineering the prompt to do what they want takes more time than just writing the code in the first place.
And that’s supposed to be a feature. I wonder how they’d feel if someone sent them a pull request done in a similar manner, resulting in similarly bad code.
I think I’ll remain firmly in the “if FPS is an important metric in your editor, you’re doing something wrong” camp, and will also steer clear of anything that hypes up the plagiarism parrots as something that’d be a net win.
If FPS is NOT an important metric in text editing, you are doing something wrong. Otherwise, good points.
Unless FPS means “files per second”, I don’t see why it would, past the point of usability. You can only type so quickly, and 50 frames is as meaningful as 144.
If you get to that point where frames per second does matter, you’re either the fastest typist known to mankind, or it might be worth finding a more efficient way of doing what you’re doing.
In many modern environments the second I start scrolling my eyes start to bleed. Yes, I want 60 fps min. That was the first part. The second part is about stability. 20 fps may be enough for typing, but it needs to be 20 fps all the time. Not the average between 1 and 60, it is makes IDEs unusable.
No need to update my screen when nothing happens. I use neovim, the pinnacle of editing.
Explain why
Church of Emacs vs. Cult of vi is the only true rivalry. Enlightenment will only be found taking one of these paths.
I recently learned there are people that think emacs and vi are bloated. They like acme or sam or something. Iceberg is so deep.
Ed users have not found the internet yet, otherwise they’d be in the war too
?
“Ed”, a.k.a. “edline” is a really old line by line editor in Unix.
Oh my god someone finally fell for it! Please don’t edit your comment, you just made my day
I chose to respond to the most likely meaning as it’s also the response with the greatest utility value for the average person coming across this thread.
Responding to it as an “ed” prompt is pretty useless in this context.
Are you a Vulcan? O_o
Either way you have my thanks. Greatest utility value as well as greatest hilarity value!
Lol, wooshed.
?
Even Lynx is bloatware if you’re a member of the Ed Sect.
When you think of a bloated text editor, you would not expect VI to be that. If anything, it’s closer to the opposite.
Check this out. It puts everything I thought that was, you know, more ethical to use to the harmful section and suggests some unknown and probably not very useful today stuff. Can someone explain if they have good points or not?
Unclear. They don’t give their reasoning beyond “complicated = bad”, and very specifically leave it up to the imagination of the reader.
While they make some interesting points with regards to overcomplication and scope creep, there are also good reasons why we’re still not using programs like
edas text editors, such as it being arcane and unintuitive.viwill at least helpfully point out:exit is not an editor command. Instead,edwill not-so-helpfully point out?.
As an old coder this is the only religious war worth having. 😂
(Totally church of vi btw)
I’m an old emacs warrior, tired of the war. I’m Church of Emacs, but why? I don’t know what I don’t know about the advantages of vi/vim, I only know that when I see other coders use them, they seem to weave the magic about as well as I do.
I know that I have a ton of built-up configuration code that makes emacs the perfect editor for me. I know that I can’t imagine using git much without magit, or how I would organize anything without org-mode, or how I could tolerate the frustration of editing in a container on a remote server without tramp. I know that I have a huge familiarity bias.
I know that whenever I see anybody with with any of these flashy new-fangled editors, they spend most of their time futzing around with dials and buttons and other gadgets, and thinking about how cool it all is, rather than thinking about the code. They start projects really quickly, they handle some refactoring edge cases slightly faster, but they take forever to do any real work, and are completely unprepared to do anything with a new language or text structure at all.
I say: Vim and Emacs against the world.
I hope that I live long enough to one day master either vim or emacs. Until then Unix is my IDE, and mind you, Sublime my editor. But I could immediately relate to people being distracted by their tools rather than focusing on their code. That’s what I have observed a lot, it’s a distraction from what matters most. Even code itself could be a distraction from more essential code. That’s why I think, programmer should delete code constantly, until there is less code, or preferably no code.
I’m still trying out different editors from time to time. I always feel like they are lacking in some way in comparison to Emacs. Like, when there’s no key binding to focus the list of references, or one cannot navigate to the beginning of a block, or one cannot navigate by subword. Let’s not forget sexp. Cannot live without it. Or marks, for that matter. Or proper clipboard history that is properly searchable. It’s like the developers has not seen the light yet. Most editors are very mouse driven, and maybe does not focus enough on actual code navigation. I’m biased of course. Though, Helix seems cool.
Side note: Even though I use Emacs, I have nothing against Vim. Heck, I even use it every now and then.
The religious marriage to rule them all: doom Emacs (or other packages that do similar things). All the excellent text editing of vi/vi/vi/vim, the ecosystem and all the features of emacs.
For anyone who hasn’t heard of doom Emacs, it’s emacs with a lot of customizations baked into it, one of the biggest selling points is that everything uses vim keybinds now (where it makes sense). You get the amazing ecosystem of emacs with the ease of movement and editing of vim, plus a lot of other QOL features. It’s also just vanilla emacs with pre-made (and easy to edit) config files and helper functions so you can move over existing stuff if you want, and you don’t have to worry since all the emacs packages will still work, since it’s still emacs
Doom Emacs is the Emacs users that found their operating system, but are trying to stumble their way into a good text editor :)
I’m glad to hear Zed uses the GPU to render its UI, much like every other IDE on the planet.
the framework is actually pretty cool, it uses SDFs to render ui (which is definitely not the most efficient solution but it’s really, really cool (it means they can use the same system to render shapes, text, and literally everything else which can be described by a signed distance formula)
Vscodium gang?
Represent! (It’s vscode with all telemetry and crap removed, all your vscode extensions still work fine)
“all your vscode extensions still work fine” is definitely not true. Sure a vast majority of them probably do, but certainly not all of them.
I still prefer it over full VS Code though.
Well… At least all the ones related to platform IO and other embedded development. Can’t say every extension, since I’ve not tried them all.
Me. I’d like to try zed though.
present… yet until i can toy around with zed in Linux
wake me up when theres a vim plugin and a linux port
I think it already has vim motions. But I wouldn’t know because there is no Linux build.
You can run it on Linux by building it from source, wouldn’t recommend it though.
Lots of discussion here of Zed being macOS-only. Multiplatform support is being tracked in this issue for Linux, Windows, and web:
It’s far from finished usable though. I had to adjust the installation script myself and it disconnected both my monitors when the application started. The application opened and 3 seconds later the screen went black and I got a “No Displayport Output” message. I expected it to fail compiling or crash or something, but I never expected that to happen. I thought it was unrelated at first, but I was able to reproduce the issue 3 times in a row.
It’s funny how many people online use VS Code. But I’ve heard that this might be a US thing. Here, everyone uses the JetBrain products (which are far superior imo).
To be fair, there’s a big difference.
VS Code is a text editor / IDE. Compared to something like Notepad++, it’s super slow to open/load, its UI feels laggy at times, and it’s just overkill for opening a text file. Compared to specialized log viewers, it struggles with large files and is generally super slow.
But compared to “full” IDEs like IntelliJ, it’s marginal in coding features, lacking important analysis and testing support, plus integrations with ~everything.If you find yourself in the middle, like many JS developers do, not actually needing the biggest IDE but also needing more than just a text editor, it’s a fine tool. As a Java Backend Dev, VS Code feels like a joke if applied to that, OTOH.
it’s super slow to open/load, it’s UI feels laggy at times, and it’s just overkill for opening a text file.
Because it’s a webbrowser in disguise. The most complex and inperformant GUI rendering system in existence.
Honestly, vscode opens in a split second for me, faster than I can react and start typing. For all intents and purposes it is instantaneous. Granted my setup is extremely clean and I only have the barest extensions installed for my workflow. The performance is consistent in my Windows, macOS and Linux machines.
I can’t imagine it running slow at all (perhaps someone with hundreds or thousands of extensions would). The last two editors I could recall that took the whole of eternity in the time space continuum to load were Eclipse and Atom. And those were slowass right out of the gate with zero extensions or plugins.
its* UI feels laggy
Oops. TY, corrected!
People should use with whatever they feel comfortable with, but I personally don’t see the advantage. I used VSCode once for simple edits of something and it worked, but I couldn’t imagine really using it for a project due to the lack of… everything. The whole support of the JetBrains products from the smart autocompletion, pointing out errors in advance, to improving your code, is insane, and with VSCode, you don’t have that.
I also once had a small project with two people using PyCharm and one VSCode and the differences in the code style were insane. Of course that depends on the person, but it’s just much easier to obey all the style guidelines and write cleaner code with the former one.
I’m in Europe and VS Code is very popular, JetBrains stuff is around too tho. Both are bloated but VS Code is still way lighter.
VSCodium is less bloated
Oh yeah Codium all the way.
I have a full JetBrains sub paid out for five years. I have dropped JetBrains for VS Code because I got tired of switching editors for everything and dealing with a Java-centric setup when I tried to streamline. Their decision to drop community Rust support in favor of only paid more recently also doesn’t sit well with me, especially given the PyCharm setup.
I swore up and down I would never leave Sublime for JetBrains.
For jvm stuff definitley yes. For other things I often prefer VS Code.
Man I use IntelliJ for:
- python
- Jupyter notebooks
- node, typescript
- html
- YAML/TOML
- sql
- testing
- ReST
- Docker
- bash
- cloud formation
- terraform
- lua
- groovy, kotlin, and also java
- maven, gradle, spock
- linting, code formatting, dependency management, db connectors & browsing, live templates, refactoring, code analysis, fantastic git operations, local history, testing, etc
Support for most of this stuff is just built in, and a few plugs for the rest. In-line embedded sql execution, best git merge tools, everything has customizable key commands… it goes on and on. The amount of config and plugs this requires in other tools is insane.
Its just the swiss army knife of the editor world.
My hopes for a vscode replacement are on lapce.
But I mean… this also looks like a swiss army knife…
The right tool for the right job. I use both, depending on what task I have.
This goes for most things in tech - there’s no one best language, there’s only really a best language for any given job.
Latin American. When VSCode was first released, immediately jumped from Atom. Never locked back.
I for a long time thought VS Code was an Atom fork because of how simmilar they were
Everyone I know in Europe uses either Visual Studio or vscode.
Me, a European, using Xcode and Eclipse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, used to do a lot of the latter for server-side stuff and Android and of the former for iOS, but in the last couple of years been doing game programming so that’s VSCode because it’s C# with Unity.
Way back when I started doing it professionally it was Emacs, vi and even notepad depending on what I was doing.
They’re just tools and only worth it to hyperspecialize in them if you only do one thing your whole career.
It massivelly depends on whether it’s for programming or something else (such as sys admin work) and which language (and even for which framework) if the former.
If you’re doing, say, Java programming for server side or Android, VS and VSCode are far from good choices, but they’re perfect if you’re doing C# .Net stuff.
However if you’re doing sys admin work (including the programming part of it) you’re probably better of mastering vim or Emacs (if only because at times in some systems it’s all you have).
Depends heavily on the market segment. I also work in Europe and in my 15 years as a software developer (the first 6-7 as C/C++ developer) I’ve never seen anyone use Visual Studio.
Fuck vs code, jetbrains all the way!
I’ve seen their page and while it seems great, I don’t think they’ll match Jetbrains in term of out of the box ergonomics. Could be a good VScodium replacement once it gets a bit fleshed out and available on Linux.
I must be the only one that actively dislikes Jetbrains products.
Well I can understand. Not open source, kinda heavy in ressources, pricey…
Any other reason why? Just curious
All of the above, and I ran into some bugs in Datagrip that when I reported them I was blown off and gaslit in the response. The response to the bug report was something like “No one does things like this, and even if they did it isn’t important” MF, I DO IT, and it was important enough for me to report the bug! That was enough for me to not renew our licenses for our team when it was time to re-up.
Bulky. It has so many features and many times, it’s missing just one or two more things from being good enough. Its like Excel, where it tries to predict/outsmart the dev but all that does is annoy them.
I use jetbrain at work.
I’m not a fan of Rider, it’s just that OmniSharp outright breaks on large/real-world projects and Visual Studio doesn’t work on Linux. I don’t use their products out of choice.
Man I wish OmniSharp didn’t suck. I built an extension with VSCode and got excited about what I could build, looked into OmniSharp again and gave up when it was crashing without me even throwing a big project at it.
You’re not. Jetbrains users are just a lot more vocal. It’s like vegans or people who vape. They will let you know 😉
Fleshed*
lol fleshed out is definitely correct here. Down votes are confusing.
Oh right. Thanks
Flushed out?
Absolutely agree. JB 4 lyfe
John fucking Carmack codes in Microsoft Visual Studio, and that’s the guy who wrote Doom, the single most important piece of software in history of Man and I’m not even exaggerating.
He doesn’t develop text editors, so he uses what’s popular. That’s what most people do.
So what would you use if you developed text editors?
And as a side note, would would you use for html and php?
I’d probably use my own niche text editor
IntelliJ suite for web development. Its a little resource heavy, but has all the features baked in.
Doom, the single most important piece of software in history of Man and I’m not even exaggerating.
First of all, that’s your opinion, second of all, appeal to authority, third of all, what’s that have to do with what he does right now?
It’s not opinion though, but a scientific fact.
Don’t you try to argue with the experts
That’s cool but for some reason VS Code is just super distracting for me. I really can’t focus well when I’m using it, Zed feels a lot more focused for me
I don’t get why some people argue over text editors… Just use whatever works. I like VSCode, not because it’s the best or the fastest or the lightest.
It works and it does all I need it to do, which is all that I need from a text editor.
It’s worth finding the best text editor if you’re using it all day long imo
VSCode is the best for me, simple, good UI, extensions, 0 setup required, can run on practically anything created after the dinosaur age (early 2000s).
If it does everything it needs to do without major drawbacks, then it is the best editor.
Yeah… and these criteria depend on the editor + use case combo. Hence, the discussion and excitement around text editors
Pretty much. But some people end up wanting to configure and tweak the thing just so they “can work”, when in reality they never actually use any of those tweaked things
Sometimes, it feels like people that spend too much time glorifying text editors are just trying to justify why they’re using a bad one.
not because it’s* the best
oops
From the Atom team? The same Atom that takes forever to load? Gonna be a hard pass from me, even if it does make it to PCs.
The technology is nothing alike though. Atom is Electron and Javascript where Zed is Rust with its own custom UI toolkit.
And on the current version of Pulsar (the only real community fork of Atom seeing active development), startup time to point of the editor being usable is actually slightly faster than VSCode.
I think this editor is supposed to be super fast because of their GPU or whatever libraries. It’s also supposed to be written in Rust.
So far there’s no extensions and just on Mac. Maybe when those open up I’ll take a closer look.
Ain’t Atom dead?
Sucks for consumers but that is poetic justice for the zed team. They now atone for their sin of creating electron.
Out of the loop here, what sucks for the zed team?
Probably the reason Vs Code has so many extensions, is that they can easily (low barrier of entry) be created in JavaScript. This is mainly due to the fact that VS Code is an electron application, itself written in JavaScript.
It sucks for zed, because these extensions allow users to customize their workflows to their needs which decreases their liklihood to switch to a different editer. I think the message of the post is that VS Code’s large and mature extension ecosystem will somewhat impede users migrating to zed.
The irony in this is that the people behind zed and atom were the ones who initially created electron for atom.
Helix superiority.
Helix looks promising. It’s kind of learning curvish because I have to unlearn vim. Trying to do more things in it though, bit by bit (no pun intended)
Could someone let me in the joke and tell me what editor this guy’s comparing VScode too?Oh Zed. I think it’s got promise but cross platform is gonna be necessary for mass adoption.
