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Zas Editor

zeditor.app

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Re: Zas Editor

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still possible to ship cross-platform native software. People just pretend like it doesn't exist because it's too hard, and so I respond by pretending like their software doesn't exist.

What's the correct way to ship cross platform native software that doesn't require me to write it in C or C++?

I don't think there is a single "correct" way. There are several non-C/C++ ways like Java, Electron, BeeWare, etc., but all of them tend to stand out when compared to native apps, regardless of what operating system you're using.

Re: Zas Editor

#312
post #21

There has been a resurgence of native editors these days (Helix, Nova, …). Every time I rush to check if there are vim keybindings. It's a dealbreaker otherwise!

It's especially interesting because thanks to Neovim, implementing vim mode should be more or less trivial -- Neovim has a server mode where you send it keystrokes and it sends you back buffer edits and/or UI to display. And since it's real vim you get to keep all your vim config, plugins etc in your IDE. I'm surprised I haven't seen it really take off yet.

If the VSCode Neovim extension is anything to go by, this does result in a considerably improved UX versus the usual Vim-key approximation. In addition to your Vim config, it plays surprisingly nicely with all other VSCode editor features, so you can basically work both ways at once.

Re: Zas Editor

#313
post #4

Hi everyone! I'm the lead developer of Zas Editor. I wanted to share some details about the editor you might be interested in. The text-storage data structure, syntax highlighting and search features are written in Rust, and the UI is written in Swift since we wanted to create a native macOS experience. The Swift and Rust code talk to each other using C FFI, and no, that doesn’t take away the safety features of both…

Mentioning that it’s Mac only, and that it’s not free software, would help keep plenty of people from wasting their time.

Thanks for the warning!

Re: Zas Editor

#314
With web development being as prevalent as it is nowadays, is there any plan to support HTML, CSS, JS/TS? Go and Rust are often used for web backends, so it would make sense to support frontend languages as well. Especially since Rust can be compiled to WASM.

Re: Zas Editor

#315
Its really fast, responsive and pretty! Some things are missing imo: - An option to disable font ligatures - CTRL+click to go to definition

Re: Zas Editor

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still possible to ship cross-platform native software. People just pretend like it doesn't exist because it's too hard, and so I respond by pretending like their software doesn't exist.

You're making the assumption that everyone _wants_ to target as many platforms as possible, have the resources to do so, and are just too lazy to do so. In other words, you're assuming that people don't build for your platform because they're "bad." Why so cynical?

It’s a weird attitude. The desktop app community in particular has always had a pretty strong sub-community within it that’s coalesced around the idea of “we’re just going to focus on making the best Mac apps possible”. Which, even if you’re a staunch Windows user, seems fine? If you’re a developer who likes a platform and wants to build software for that platform, to you I’d say: go nuts. There are plenty of alternatives, and that’s particularly true in this space.

I can understand disappointment around great apps that don’t ever cross the platform threshold, totally, but I’ve never thought of that as terrible, or that the developers themselves are bad. This attitude of “you don’t like what I like so you’re just wasting my time” is super strange.

Re: Zas Editor

#317
So many critics here.

"It's paid!"

"It's not multi-platform!"

"It doesn't support my language!"

Dear Zas Editor creator:

Good on you for creating something that solves your problems and challenges you intellectually.

Good on you for putting yourself out there by making it public.

Good on you and for making your efforts sustainable by charging real money for it.

Good on you for taking the first step, and shipping before it's "perfect".

Good on you for taking feedback graciously.

Re: Zas Editor

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's hard, people are not going to spend their attention on it unless deemed worthy. Like it or not, there is a class of IT-professionals who settled on the idea that macOS won the desktop-game, reasoning that Windows is and will remain trash, and that Linux can't deliver a comparable quality in UX. Someone who wants to focus on building a product can't dedicate the same amount of energy opting for cross-platform,…

Its funny that gaming industry has settled on the idea that Windows won the desktop-game, reasoning that Linux is and will remain trash, and that macOS can't deliver comparable performance. This is not meant to show that some opinion is better just highlight that people have narrow tunnel vision on what is in front of them and tend to ignore other options without consideration.

> and that macOS can't deliver comparable performance

That's not the case at all. The problem is that, much like shipping native apps, supporting a second graphics API for Mac/Linux is a pain in the ass, so nobody does it. On MacOS, OpenGL is too slow for most modern titles and Metal is too high-level and doesn't have good language bindings. Same goes for why games run better on Linux than they do on MacOS; translating DirectX to Metal is simply too slow, even for the highest-end GPUs that Apple ships. An M1 Max will struggle to get 1050Ti-tier performance when running games through MoltenVK, and doing the same thing through OpenGL certainly doesn't improve the situation.

Re: Zas Editor

#319
A lot of this is possible in Xcode, but kudos to the team for packaging everything so nicely in this editor, and there are a few standout features I haven’t seen in other editors/IDEs:

- multifind

- find in all enums (declaration/structure-specific search)

- the “minimap”

Like another poster said, just the few niche functions alone would be a cool acquisition target for Apple. I’d love to see the best/unique parts of this make it into Xcode without having to maintain the rest of the wheels that have been reinvented here.

I guess you kinda have to reinvent all those wheels as a foundation upon which to build new unique features for a text editor though…

Re: Zas Editor

#320
post #218

> Zas Editor reparses your code on every keystroke without compromising performance. Having a maintained AST at all times brings many intelligent features to the editor. How does this work in the presence of syntax errors? 95% of the time you're writing code, your code is syntactically invalid, because you've started some new construct but not finished it yet, so you need syntax highlighting, code completion, etc to…

you still have the previously valid tree because the parsing is incremental i suspect it's tree sitter under the hood

Bold of you to assume that the previous state of my code was valid!
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