I used Zed for a while. The biggest performance improvements I noticed, compared to VS Code, were in start-up times and the opening of files. Sure, Zed feels snappy in those areas, but I feel VS Code is simply not that bad speed-wise when it comes to everyday coding. Especially, in the era of M1 Macs. Zed may win the battle in the longer term, but I feel slow performance has to truly annoy the fuck out of the user to convince them to make the switch. Right now, I am sticking with VS Code.
We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
41–50 of 243 posts
Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
#42Had 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 can't think of a nice way to express what I think of vim, but I think your general point is apt.
Some pretty full-featured editors already exist that people are happy with or, perhaps, have at least gotten used to. Where does a new editor fit in?
It's neat that it's "multiplayer" but that's an edge case.
I'm also not convinced by the business model. Do people really want channels, calls and chat integrated with their code editor? Personally, I have an almost visceral negative reaction to the idea but maybe that's just me.
Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
#43I tried Zed, and it felt similar to VSCode. I know there are multiplayer features that are better than live share, but on the surface, I needed convincing to switch. I would be more inclined to use Zed if it could displace XCode. It pains me to use it from deleting derived data or cleaning the build folder to random crashes. Contrasting the DX to Android Studio, it's night and day. I always wanted an Android studio-l…
AppCode was more or less Android Studio for iOS. Both are based on IntelliJ. It’s a shame AppCode was recently discontinued.
Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
#44> But the goal I've always had is a lightweight editor that is minimal that I love using that feels like a text editor, but has the power of an IDE when needed, without all of the slowness in the experience and kind of heaviness in the UI, but still powerful. That was very early on what I wanted. And for it to be extensible.
Sorry for being that guy, but vim. Nvim specifically.
Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
#45For those wanting a text editor/light IDE for Linux, Kate is surprisingly good.
Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Hey! I'm the mentioned Thorsten. Linux is actively being developed. Here's a PR from 2 days ago that shows file-opening in Linux starting to work: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/7852
And so far Linux support has been a big community effort. I think more community member contributed to Linux support than Zed teammates. Very cool to see.
So: Linux is in the works. Windows will probably happen after that, or if someone in the community wants to emulate what the Linux users are doing and start before that.
Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
#47Earlier 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.
it is actually faster and snappier to use on a beefy M2 max, on the same hardware zed starts up in half the time. the difference is very noticeable. of course it is much less configurable and doesn't work with a lot of things VS Code can do easily.
edit: see this comment for a much better explanation than mine of what I originally meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39409763
Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
#48SIMD I wonder if Zed uses SIMD, to read in text from a file or write out text to the display. Mitchell recently wrote about how he got a massive reduction in latency, by implementing SIMD in his terminal app (which is analogist to an editor) https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-devlog-006 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/111919642467789362
despite what the article claims, clang and gcc are acc very good at vectorising code, and intel, arm, etc have entire teams dedicated to improving vectorisation in modern compilers
How do you explain the before/after speed improvement then?
Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
#49Had 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 t…
I feel like these classic editors are good to know just for general education like writing cursive. If you end up on some barebones system you will know how to edit a config file and exit. But for day-to-day it's all IDEs nowadays.
Re: We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
#50I tried out the editor because of this post: it looks very promising. Unfortunately I can't use it because it doesn't have support for remote hosts/devcontiners. That feature of VScode is critical to my workflow, as I don't actually want to program on a Mac host, but rather use my Mac as a portal to the VMs and containers I actually code on. It massively helps with segmentation of my projects and improves my security posture (by not having a development environment or dependencies on my actual host machine).