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We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

zed.dev

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Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

#31

Post by madeofpalk »

torlok wrote: post #10

Had a look at the About page, and the live coding feature does sound useful. I'm sure the guys are excited; it's a fun project. You get to write algorithms, optimise performance, and do GPU programming. But who needs another text editor that will probably never reach feature parity with Vim and a terminal multiplexer.

I would guess most developers do not use vim. Pretending that vim is the universally loved editor that every developer has agreed upon using seems pretty disconnected from the real world.

VS Code came up out of nowhere pretty recently, and is used by a lot of people, so that shows that there is (or was, but still post-vim) opportunity for a new editor. Whether Zed is able to gain momentum to cater for the long-tail that other developers do remains to be seen, but I'm pretty keen to see more products trying to compete for users.

Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

#32

Post by madeofpalk »

smarkov wrote: post #29
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zed is actually very fast though

This might be one of those things like monitor refresh rate where you can only really tell the difference if you've experienced the better version for a while, but I haven't ever felt slowed down by the speed of VS Code.

Every now and then I switch back to Apple's Terminal app, and I'm blown away at how much faster it is at just typing than iTerm it is, and how much nicer that is.

Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

#34

Post by sofixa »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #18
egze wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually prefer Mac only apps. It usually means the experience is way more polished.

Unless you don’t own a Mac.

Or even worse, you own a Mac (say, through work), but aren't entirely in the Apple ecosystem and don't want to relearn everything and fight muscle memory every time you switch devices.

Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

#35

Post by josh-sematic »

diggan wrote: post #21
2809 wrote: post #11

[flagged]

Yeah, who needs more editors after ed already solved this problem? Good thing problems usually get solved once and then you can never improve on top of that, then I'd have to switch editor like once every decade or something.

Hard agree. Ed is the standard text editor for a reason. https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

#36

Post by mananaysiempre »

sapiogram wrote: post #17
practicalrs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked Thorsten about Windows support today, he said "Zed, you mean? After Linux, I'd say.". So there is some plan :)

> So there is some plan :) How does that follow from the rest of your comment?

Logically it doesn’t, but in actual good-faith communication people usually follow Grice’s relevance maxim[1]: the points they mention are relevant to the conversation and the point they’re making. Thus, if neither Linux nor Windows support are planned, and the question is about Windows support, saying that Windows will come after Linux would be (vacuously) true, but the mention of Linux would be irrelevant.

(Notably, communication coming out or through legal counsel cannot be assumed to be good-faith, the premise of the court system being that the best we can achieve is two bad-faith adversaries and a neutral arbiter. But that’s not what we are dealing with here.)

Pedantry aside, I think I remember one of the developers saying they do plan on Linux support at some point in one of the previous Zed threads here. There were also some “small team” and “laser-focused” and “best possible experience” in that comment, but they did say outright they were planning on it. Though plans change, I think that’s the best we could hope for at this point, as I doubt even they themselves know more about their future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle

Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

#37

Post by paxys »

I wish developers would break out of the silicon valley bubble and realize that the majority of their potential userbase – including technical users – are on Windows and Linux. Heck that's the entire reason Atom (and them VS Code) got popular. No one cares about the nanoseconds of performance you are able to optimize. Working across all my devices and development environments (including the web) is table stakes for all software today.

Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

#39

Post by snet0 »

smarkov wrote: post #29
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zed is actually very fast though

This might be one of those things like monitor refresh rate where you can only really tell the difference if you've experienced the better version for a while, but I haven't ever felt slowed down by the speed of VS Code.

I do think it's something like that. Things can quickly get to the speed that feels "fast enough" that they don't feel subjectively slow, but can still be sped up by a couple orders of magnitude. If you Ctrl-F something and it takes a few hundred ms, you probably don't feel like it was slow, but in reality the "speed-of-light" for this operation was probably orders of magnitude faster than it happened on your device. Once you experience something close to the theoretical speed, it's really hard to go back to something you thought was perfectly fine before. And you start noticing that everything feels slower than it "should"..

I think of something like grep, where if I tried to grep a large hierarchy it'd be really slow and I'd sorta reason to myself "well yeah it's a lot of files in a large tree, of course it'll be slow!". Then I installed ripgrep and suddenly what I thought was a reasonable speed was shown to be unreasonably slow!

Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

#40

Post by digdigdag »

Before anyone jumps on a new text editor band wagon, just a note on the license they have you agree to in using it:

"Customer Data consisting of User content created while using the Solution is classified as "User Content". User Content is transmitted from Your environment only if You collaborate with other Zed users by electing to share a project in the Editor.

[...]Zed's access to such User Content is limited to debugging and making improvements to the Solution."

No commentary from me. Come to your own conclusions.

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