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We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

zed.dev

201–210 of 243 posts

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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion I wish more editors would become a face to Neovim which can run in a headless mode, allowing you to not have to emulate VIM at all, but take full advantage of it and all its plugins. It still kills me JetBrians chooses to maintain what VIM users call an awful plugin that simulates VIM, when they could just implement a Neovim front-end natively into their IDE, giving them the edge of "we fully support Ne…

I did not know this. My google/brace/ddg foo is failing me. Do you have a link to the full reference on how one would use headless neovim to provide a full headless vim with a GUI wrapped around it? I'm thinking it would be nice if my Lazarus IDE supported Vim commands.

For some reason they're just called GUIs, but its not just some wrapper, it actually uses RPC iirc.

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects#gui

There's also the GitHub topic:

https://github.com/topics/neovim-guis

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

#202

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> 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…

I think it could be sexy! I honestly think a graphical user interface designed from first principles to be accessible would also be kind of incredible for everyone else to use too, much in the way many accessibility improvements (in the US at least) like curb ramps and subtitles make things better for everyone as a side effect. Honestly, I think an ideally a11y interface might end up working like a modern easier on the eyes version of Symbolics Genera — think about it: every UI element on the screen actually retrievably connected to its underlying data representation, and imbued with a ton of semantic metadata that's designed to be used to actively facilitate further interactions with the UI (maybe for instance a generalized way to attach metadata about related UI elements to each UI element, so the UI itself essentially forms a sort of semantic hypertext web you can navigate behind the scenes), as well as composability, rearrangeability, and scriptability! That would probably be a massive boon for disabled people and also amazing for us nerds. Perhaps it would even have a focus on representing the interface in terms of that metadata, with the visual elements being sort of abbreviations/overlays on top of that metadata, sort of like how Emacs does graphics and GUI elements?

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

#203
post #115

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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…

Windows support is happening locally on individuals machines. We’ll start upstreaming things up.

Where can we track this work so as to not duplicate it?

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it could be sexy! I honestly think a graphical user interface designed from first principles to be accessible would also be kind of incredible for everyone else to use too, much in the way many accessibility improvements (in the US at least) like curb ramps and subtitles make things better for everyone as a side effect. Honestly, I think an ideally a11y interface might end up working like a modern easier on t…

Yes I think you and I are on the same wavelength.

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

#205

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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.

I don’t most consider these things anymore. How many signed up for copilot without a second thought?

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This question of who gets to see your company data is I think a lot more thorny these days than ever before.

You're joking about email, but that's of course the reason why companies will pay a lot to host email on premise instead of relying on cheaper offsite solutions. I think Exchange Server is Microsoft's biggest foot in the door to access conpanies tbat otherwise wouldn't care much about the other Microsoft services.

Having a third party look at every email you're sending around is just a non starter for many businesses.

Getting the same setting in an editor where your code is shared with the editor company everytime you want to show it to a colleague is not trivial at all.

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

#207
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Oh, is that what they mean? I set "Search Mode" to "newEditor" immediately whenever I configure VSCode on a new computer, since the default behavior of opening in the side panel is such hot garbage. I entirely forgot that some people don't have that and took for granted in my post that everyone knew about opening the results in an "editor".

But the point is that "editor" is non-functional. It's nice for browsing the results and has syntax highlighting and surrounding context, but you can't actualy edit from there. You can only use it to open the source file and then edit the source file.

In Zed, the search results "editor" is actually functional. You can make changes to the text that you see from the surrounding context, right in the search results, and then hit save, and have those changes propagated to all the touched files.

So, say you update a function to take another argument, and you want to update your codebase appropriately. Well then you do a global search for that function name, and then scan down the results list. The irrelevant search results (maybe you mention the function in a comment, but aren't actually invoking it) you can skip. The complicated updates you can open the source file like you do in VSCode. But the trivial ones where you can see what you need to pass as the new argument, you can just update right then and there.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. If all you needed to move off vim were keybindings, then I submit that you weren’t really using vim at all.

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

#209

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Honest question out of curiosity- Are there possibly AI-based solutions possible that can add assistance at a more generic level that doesn't require software that has "deep" knowledge of the window architecture (and the actual text in it etc.)? My understanding is that this is how tech like VoiceOver works- it knows the actual window definition and all the elements of it at a programmatic level and can take advantag…

iOS already has such a feature, but it's obviously not 100% accurate, not real time, and not great for battery life. It's good enough if you have to click a broken "I accept your terms and conditions" checkbox, but nowhere near good enough to daily drive your phone with. In other words, a band-aid solution for when everything else fails, mostly for situations where the app you're trying to use is mostly usable, but h…

Adding control type recognition seems like THE most trivial add-on feature to implement with an AI-powered solution. I mean, at that point it's just about training data... "Here are 100 different button looks. Here are 100 different radio button looks. Here are 100 different checkboxes. Here are 100 different dropdown menus." etc.

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can take an instant to become disabled: there is no permanent and distinct set of "disabled and "not-disabled" people.

Not to defend GP, but if I suddenly went blind, I really don't know if it would take longer to learn how to use my existing tools with a screen reader or to learn new tools better designed for it. It would be a completely new and foreign workflow either way.

Have you considered that disability is not always permanent? What if you were temporarily blind? Or could only see magnified or high-contrast UIs? Or you broke both arms, but your feet are fine for using your USB driving Sim pedals as an input device for 10 weeks while your arms heal? Would you still want to learn new workflows to be used over a few months only?

A11y isn't about helping one set of users (those who have completely lost their sight), it's about helping a whole spectrum of accessibility challenges - not by prescribing boxed solutions, but giving the user options customizable to their specific needs.

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