Live data from Hacker News

We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

zed.dev

221–230 of 243 posts

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

I did consider temporary disabilities, and don't see how it changes anything I said (which is, again, not much).

The amount of time one is willing to set aside to learn new tools & workflows isn't worth it if they are to be used for a limited period. It's much better to use the old tools one is familiar with in those cases.

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

#223

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…

Do you have links to good guides on getting started with such a work flow?

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did consider temporary disabilities, and don't see how it changes anything I said (which is, again, not much).

The amount of time one is willing to set aside to learn new tools & workflows isn't worth it if they are to be used for a limited period. It's much better to use the old tools one is familiar with in those cases.

You're still assuming that learning the old tool in a new way is faster. That's specifically what I'm questioning.

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

#226
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I only half-conveyed what I was aiming to; I'm able to do what you're describing by editing the search-results scratch-file then saving it. The changes propagate to the target files with the save.

I've had a look though, and you were right: it's due to an extension that I can save from the scratch file:

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

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

#227
post #8

SIMD 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

memcpy, strchr, etc. use SIMD. The rust HashMap uses SIMD. LLVM can and will auto-vectorize. So yes - of course Zed - "uses SIMD", but it's not a tool you can throw at everything to make it faster.

And auto vectorization isn't all that common. In many cases you need to structure your code in a certain way, in which case you're better off doing it yourself if you want the vectorization benefit.

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

#228
post #193

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…

Huh, is Office not just Win32?

I always assumed it was since the accessibility is there, but these are all Microsoft APIs after all, so they might just have implemented them on their own.

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

#229

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…

Whether or not a large number of people use vim has no bearing on whether or not Zed will reach feature parity with it.

Parent seemed to believe that it's a waste to write another editor/IDE because vim already exists. Prevalence of other more popular editors disagrees with that.

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

#230
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Someone might even know some unencrypted platform called as GitHub.
Post reply on HN