We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by qwertox » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 6:26 PM UTC

jazzyjackson wrote: post #137

As a lowly web developer I must not know what i'm missing, can anyone explain what the issue is with an array being a list of references? Why is there a chase going on, is someone trying to get away? > JavaScript is... You think you have an array of objects, but you really have an array of pointers to objects. So every single time you're walking over that, you're chasing it down.

I think it refers to the fact that you can't just compute an offset from element 0 to get to an element N, like you could if you'd have an array of structs or classes. Assume a struct uses up 128 bytes, then you can get to element N by using a pointer of N * 128 and you'd be positioned directly at the memory location of that struct. - Edit: cache locality like sibling comment mentions sounds more convincing.

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

#142

Post by euroderf » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 6:32 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #60

MR4D wrote: post #23

Fantastic interview where you really get into the mind and mindset of the developers for how they approach development from many different angles. Highly recommended. I only have one disagreement with them. . . > the perfect name for a text editor in Zig is already taken: Zed No, it’s “Zag”. ;)

> I only have one disagreement with them. . . > > the perfect name for a text editor in Zig is already taken: Zed > No, it’s “Zag”. ;) Except that `zed` contains `ed`, precursor to `ex`, `vi`, and `edlin` yet still around: `ed` is a line editor for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It was one of the first parts of the Unix operating system that was developed, in August 1969. It remains part of the POSIX and Open…

ed just had a release and nowhere can I find release notes.

This is depressing, considering that ed is the linchpin of the contemporary I.T. environment.

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

#143

Post by yoyohello13 » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 6:37 PM UTC

Szpadel wrote: post #138

miki123211 wrote: post #104

Their custom UI framework might be all fun and games for now, but that will probably change once they realize they need to implement accessibility. Doing this in a custom framework without sacrificing performance won't be easy and is going to require lots of messy, per-platform work. It's not like it's optional for them either. It would be for a simple editor that you can just decide not to use, but they're positioni…

I'm not surprised that most of rust guis are not a11y friendly, there is no established gui library yet, none of them I would call mature yet Not long ago there weren't any gui libraries that wouldn't be just binding to existing C framework or was in proof of concept state of lifecycle I'm sure this situation will improve in the future and I understand frustration of someone that rely on a11y features, but you need t…

System76 is making headway getting a11y accessibility for Cosmic Desktop. They are doing a lot of good work in the Rust gui space.

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

#144

Post by Jtsummers » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 6:41 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #112

kstrauser wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe there’s a useful distinction, at least for more advanced editors. For instance, I’m not aware of anything you can do in, say, PyCharm that you can’t do in Emacs or Vim. I don’t mean that in a curmudgeonly way like “nothing I care about, because we don’t need those fancy features to write a pageful of Fortran on my 1997 laptop”. I mean, I don’t know of a single feature of any kind that doesn’t exist on…

> I mean, I don’t know of a single feature of any kind that doesn’t exist on essentially all modern editors. All composed commands. Like Repeat. As in `repeat the following command 5 times`. Like `d5` in Vim (delete 5lines). Or y30 (Copy 30 lines). Or `V?^func` (select text from current cursor position to the beginning of the function). None of those are memorised commands. They're simply one command composed with an…

In emacs your repeat commands are C-u . Your selection would be C-space C-s func M-b.

M-b causes it to go back to the beginning of the word and search ends, you can still adjust the selection with other movements. It's not as tight as V? but it's still composable.

Or you use evil mode and get those vi-style bindings in the editor.

EDIT: Actually, playing around with your `V?` command doesn't it select that entire line rather than to that pattern? So the emacs equivalent would actually be: C-space C-M-s ^func C-e

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

#145

Post by mplewis » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 6:41 PM UTC

notso411 wrote: post #130

miki123211 wrote: post #104

Their custom UI framework might be all fun and games for now, but that will probably change once they realize they need to implement accessibility. Doing this in a custom framework without sacrificing performance won't be easy and is going to require lots of messy, per-platform work. It's not like it's optional for them either. It would be for a simple editor that you can just decide not to use, but they're positioni…

Why bother with accessibility. If a disabled wants to use an IDE, use a different one??

Accessibility helps all users, not just disabled users.

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

#146

Post by losvedir » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 6:46 PM UTC

I don't use Zed, but I noticed José Valim using it when he was live streaming a coding session. I mostly use VSCode, but one feature he used in Zed was really compelling: he did a "Find All", which was similar to VSCode in that it opened a results pane with snippets from all the files that matched, but then he was able to edit the snippets directly from there, and was able to use multi-cursor editing and all the other usual niceties. That was pretty neat and impressive to me, since in VSCode you have to actually click the search result to open the file, and then edit it there. It wasn't quite enough to make me switch, but I've been thinking about it from time to time whenever VSCode annoys me.

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

#147

Post by shp0ngle » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 6:49 PM UTC

digdigdag wrote: post #40

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 de…

This actually looks very reasonable...?

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

#148

Post by smoldesu » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 6:54 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #37

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 a…

You're right, and it's weird to hear them dunk on Atom when it had so many de-facto features Zed still lacks. They're very proud of their technical stack and their performance, but it feels more like they're defending the cathedral to discredit the bazaar.

It's their call, but I feel like I've seen this story play out the same way you describe hundreds of times. I'll never forget when the warp.dev people came to HN looking for feedback and got torn to tatters by the community. A single-platform POC editor is cool, but not really a functional replacement (or even comparison) to what Atom did and the community it garnered. I'm glad they're making what they want, but they're absolutely trapped in bubble-vision afaict.

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

#149

Post by czottmann » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 7:06 PM UTC

losvedir wrote: post #146

I don't use Zed, but I noticed José Valim using it when he was live streaming a coding session. I mostly use VSCode, but one feature he used in Zed was really compelling: he did a "Find All", which was similar to VSCode in that it opened a results pane with snippets from all the files that matched, but then he was able to edit the snippets directly from there, and was able to use multi-cursor editing and all the othe…

This sounds like it could be very useful. Does it work like this VSCode extension, "Search Editor: Apply Changes"?

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jakearl....

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

#150

Post by kstrauser » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 7:06 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #112

kstrauser wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe there’s a useful distinction, at least for more advanced editors. For instance, I’m not aware of anything you can do in, say, PyCharm that you can’t do in Emacs or Vim. I don’t mean that in a curmudgeonly way like “nothing I care about, because we don’t need those fancy features to write a pageful of Fortran on my 1997 laptop”. I mean, I don’t know of a single feature of any kind that doesn’t exist on…

> I mean, I don’t know of a single feature of any kind that doesn’t exist on essentially all modern editors. All composed commands. Like Repeat. As in `repeat the following command 5 times`. Like `d5` in Vim (delete 5lines). Or y30 (Copy 30 lines). Or `V?^func` (select text from current cursor position to the beginning of the function). None of those are memorised commands. They're simply one command composed with an…

Well, ok. I’m specifically talking about what might count as an IDE feature. Vim and Emacs can run in a terminal, but that’s not a defining characteristic of an IDR. More like, everything can do interactive debugging, and syntax highlighting, and code completion, edit-time error flagging, etc. etc.