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We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

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

#191

Post by cmrdporcupine »

sangnoir wrote: post #162
Jtsummers wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's their only blurb on accessibility: > Currently, many of Zed's themes are largely inaccessible. We are working on a new accessible theme system, which will launch with Zed 1.0 > A11y (accessibility) in Zed will be a long project. Likely lasting far beyond 1.0. Due to GPUI being written from the ground up we don't have access to the same a11y features that Swift, Web-based apps or [insert other language] does. >…

> So they've thought about it, but they haven't actually done it yet. In my experience, a11y shouldn't be an afterthought but baked-in from the beginning. Doing the latter results in hacky, harder-to-maintain code.

100% this.

If you think about it, doing accessibility right -- in particular screen reader work -- requires thinking very carefully about the data model behind the presentation. What you need to declare and when. And doing that thinking actually could force engineers into building UI frameworks that not only are accessible for the visually or auditory impaired, but for broader systems as a whole.

It's hard work that has to get done, but it's not particularly sexy.

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

#192

Post by jtsiskin »

wrasee wrote: post #110
makeitdouble wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get it at first, but as I read it the last "Zed" is not the editor but the company. Basically the Zed company also gets access to the code you're sharing with other users.

Exactly. So two people at work share a private session, then all user content of that session is directly accessible to Zed Industries. Is that right? If I understand that correctly I think that’s going to be an instant no for a lot of people.

A lot of people use hosted git solutions. And even hosted databases!

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

#193

Post by zokier »

CharlesW wrote: post #167
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 wish developers finally learned this lesson. From a product perspective, re-inventing the wheel for something that — at best, many years from now — will be at parity with native presentation layers in terms of performance, a11y support, user experience, etc. is normally considered a risky move. Many startups have failed in part from pouring resources into shiny non-differentiators. The only examples of successful…

> The only examples of successful products that use non-native UIs either (1) leverage web technologies or mature frameworks like Qt, or (2) are Blender (age 30). Apple did this with iTunes, but iTunes felt unpleasant on Windows, and people used iTunes for Windows in spite of this

Successful non-native UIs? Microsoft Office. Every single Adobe product, including the ones they got from Macromedia. I feel most professional software fall in this category. Spotify originally launched with completely custom UI. On Windows it is more difficult to name successful products that used native UI than those that did not.

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

#194

Post by zokier »

losvedir wrote: post #181
fatboy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In VSCode if you do super-shift-f for find-in-project, at the top of the results pane, just right of where it's marked "x results in y files" there's a link button titled "Open in editor" which I believe does what you're describing. I'd actually forgotten about it until I read your comment so I'll start using it again now.

I don't seem to have that. There's nothing to the right of my "x results in y files" summary. Maybe you have an extension installed?

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/codebasics#_search...

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

#195

Post by alpaca128 »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #91
jeffhuys wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remap the keys.

Most people who say “all editors have vim keybindings just use that” miss the fact that bindings or not, a lot of vim’s functionality is just not available on other editors.

And that Vim is more than its keybindings, despite the often repeated jokes. Tabs, window splits, search and countless other details may work very differently, and usually not completely with the keyboard.

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

#196

Post by tiffanyh »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #155
shp0ngle wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually looks very reasonable...?

It’s not unreasonable. The thing is every time you load company proprietary code and/or sensitive data you better make sure you don’t hit the share button as well. Not the end of the world but also something we didn’t have to think about until recently. That pushing a button (other than delete) could potentially get you fired.

> make sure you don’t hit the share button

Are you concerned using email in general?

Because every-time you hit “send” sounds scary as well.

Joking aside, it seems fairly obvious that the risk is on you if your “share” your company’s sensitive code.

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

#197

Post by CharlesW »

zokier wrote: post #193
CharlesW wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish developers finally learned this lesson. From a product perspective, re-inventing the wheel for something that — at best, many years from now — will be at parity with native presentation layers in terms of performance, a11y support, user experience, etc. is normally considered a risky move. Many startups have failed in part from pouring resources into shiny non-differentiators. The only examples of successful…

> The only examples of successful products that use non-native UIs either (1) leverage web technologies or mature frameworks like Qt, or (2) are Blender (age 30). Apple did this with iTunes, but iTunes felt unpleasant on Windows, and people used iTunes for Windows in spite of this Successful non-native UIs? Microsoft Office. Every single Adobe product, including the ones they got from Macromedia. I feel most professi…

Yes, but I think those examples fall under (1), no?

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

#198

Post by skydhash »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #163
skydhash wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic model of computation is the turing maching, and it’s a symbol manipulating one. So editing text is at the core of what computing is. You could go a step higher to edit tokens and that’s what VIM does, albeit imperfectly due to tokens not being a finite set.

I'm not sure what you mean by "tokens not being a finite set". I suppose there's the theoretical issue of token length being potentially unbounded, but whatever problems your editor has with that, your lexer will likely also have. For any finite length file, there is a finite number of tokens, and once you parse it, you've got a much smaller list of symbols plus a convenient address for each one. I don't think it's a…

> you're working on vim's presumed tokenization and not a tokenization that's native to whatever the underlying language is.

LSP can be the foundation to a paradigm of code editing instead of text editing. I want the kind of integration we have with Smalltalk IDE like Pharo and the SLIME plugin for Common Lisp and Emacs.

> It's the AST that matters to the code author, and the AST is a tree, not a string.

I'd take variable inspection (not sure it's the real term) before AST manipulation. More often than not, I'm more worried about the result of data processing than the processing itself. Such capability exists in live programming, such as the system itself. And I believe this kind of rapid feedback is a much better experience.

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

#199

Post by nojvek »

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…

Don’t want to downplay the concern. With modern machine learning is there an opportunity to build a better accessibility tool?

Something that works on any set of pixels and sees like a human does?

I.e parses text with OCR.

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

#200

Post by perryizgr8 »

Zed feels good to use, even though it lacks a lot of features I regularly use in vs code. But the biggest hurdle for me is that windows is not supported. I switch between my laptop (mac os) and desktop (win11) depending on where I'm working from for the day. And its too much stress for me to remember a completely different set of workflows and shortcuts. So, for now I wish zed the best, but vs code remains my editor of choice.
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