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We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

zed.dev

171–180 of 243 posts

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

#171

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??

I'll take this seriously since lots of people probably wonder this even if they don't bother to ask it.

Disability isn't a permanent state that you start with. It's something that can happen to you 5 years into your career, or 15. It can also be temporary - you break your leg and now you need crutches, a cane or a wheelchair until you heal, for example.

Accessibility also helps people who you wouldn't traditionally classify as disabled: Designing UI to be usable one-handed is obviously good for people who have one hand, but some people may be temporarily or situationally one-handed. Not just because they broke an arm and it's in the cast, but perhaps they have to hold a baby in one arm, or their other hand is holding a grocery bag, or they're lying in bed on their side.

Closed captions in multimedia software or content are obviously helpful for the deaf, but people who are in a loud nightclub or on a loud construction site could also benefit from captions, even if their ears work fine.

So, ultimately: Why should someone who's used to using a given editor have to switch any time their circumstances change? The developers of the editor could just put the effort in to begin with.

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

#172

I 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…

Lapce supports this, if you're keen on trying new editors.

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

#173

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…

That is neat. It would avoid the need to craft regex in many case.

One of my favourite tricks is multi cursor, edit and use end of line or next word shortcuts to make bulk edits.

Doing that across files would be cool!

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

#174

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??

I'm guessing this was downvoted for being rude, but I think there is a valid question here. It looks like Zed is putting a lot of work into minimizing the latency between a key being typed and feedback being displayed on a visual interface which is easily parsed by a sighted user.

If a programmer is using audio for feedback, then there is probably be some impedance mismatch by translating a visual interface into an audio description. Shouldn't there be much better audio encoding of the document? There would also be many more wasted cycles pushing around pixels, which the programmer will never see. An editor made specifically for visually impaired programmers, unencumbered by the constraints of a visual representation, would be able to explore the solution space much better than Zed.

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

#175

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…

Jetbrains ides already do this.

It's absurd but one of the primary reasons I use Jetbrains over vscode is because i can search for a directory and open it in the navigation pane.

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Assuming you mean GNU ed (which is the one that has had a recent release): https://fossies.org/linux/ed/ChangeLog (seems to be a web version of the file `ed-1.20.1/ChangeLog` within the ed release itself).

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

#177
post #82

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…

I would like some commentary from you, sounds very reasonable to me, I don't understand what the problem is. Of course if you choose to share your project with others for collaboration, the content of that project is transmitted from your machine, what else would you expect? How would it work otherwise?

It'd be more appealing if user content was e2e encrypted during sessions.

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

#178
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 t…

I use vim to edit git commit messages and other git related tasks as I'm most comfortable/used to working with the git cli (muscle memory, etc.).

I also use either vim or nano when viewing/editing files on the command line (either msys2 wsl, or headless linux).

Re: IDEs, I mainly use IntelliJ, with VSCode being used for a few things.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

VSCode came out of nowhere and took the market share previously held by Atom and Sublime Text 2 The folks I know who use Emacs or vim (including me) are by and large still using those tools since before Atom and Sublime got popular. We just have LSP, now, like VSCode does.

I moved from vim to vscode. The main driver was an easier time writing extensions.

I've tried to switch to neovim twice since and gave up. Lua is nice and I did get into that the first time. Crashing and errors were rife though. The second time, which was very recently, it seemed like everything had changed again, all completely new plugins etc. And I struggled to do some basic stuff, I guess I've just forgotten the more in-depth file/window management. So it goes.

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