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Leaving Neovim for Zed

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Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#21

Post by jasoneckert »

I explored Zed on macOS when it was posted here previously, and my impression was that it was a fast and fully-featured editor.

However, it's not as ubiquitous on *nix systems as editors such as vi/vim. And for those of us who work with various infrastructures and deployment constraints, it's much easier to focus our efforts on an editor that is also ubiquitous. And vi/vim fits that mould.

In other words, while Zed is a vi-able alternative, I doubt most vi/vim users will switch to it exclusively.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#23

Post by beginnings »

I started using Zed in the last month and I had a feeling it would end up taking a lot of Neovim users. Neovim gets a lot of users who need better performance than VSCode, like me, but the config is such a pain and there was a gap in the market for a blazingly fast GUI editor which Zed looks like filling.

Supermaven still has some issues on Zed, but apart from that its been rock solid and ive fully switched from Neovim.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#24

Post by wis »

agumonkey wrote: post #13
twp wrote: post #11

If you want true Neovim in VSCode check out https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetliakov.vscode-neovim You get a real, actual VIM (no half-assed bindings), and all the bells and whistles that come with VSCode.

they emulate the whole command / move / location layer in js ?

To add to what sibling commenters have said, you can also configure this extension to use a specific Neovim binary on your system, and you can also configure it to use/load the same Neovim config you use when you use Neovim in the terminal. That's what I do.

It's really the better (Neo)?vim extension in my opinion, but it has a lot less installs than the other popular extension, called just "Vim" (6.656M installs vs. 400K installs) that extension AFAIK actually emulates Vim in JavaScript, I used it for about a year in 2018, before the other extension "VSCode Neovim" was released in 2019 and remember not having a good experience using it then (to compare, the extension "Vim" was released in Nov. 2015).

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#25

Post by irusensei »

I tried leaving vim for Helix but turns out it's not curated at my employer's site so I'm back to using vim. Zed would be even worse considering it's a desktop app.

There is the option of using vscode but I'm one of those aliens who absolutely dislike that program.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#26

Post by kristiandupont »

Over the summer I got an interest in Kakoune and Helix and discovered a number of extensions for VSCode that enable modal editing(1), but not VIM-style per default. I got excited about this and ended up writing my own extension instead.

At this point, it supports most of the VIM subset that I care about, and I have added a number of new motions and modes that do clever things based on the AST. I am kicking myself for not doing this sooner and I think I need to write up a blog post about it. It's surprisingly easy.

1. e.g. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DCsunset...

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#27

Post by MrJohz »

squidsoup wrote: post #3

I’m currently using VS Code with the Neovim extension. Has anyone migrated to Zed from Code? Curious what your experience has been.

I've tried it a few times, and each time there's been something missing that was too irritating to live without - stuff like git integration, or extensions that I use a lot. It's nice, but I don't really notice the speed much once the application is open and running, and so I just ended up back at vscode every time.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#28

Post by jchw »

Neovim has felt frustrating. I still sort of manage a Neovim configuration, but have been gradually moving to Zed as well. (Similar reasons overall.)

I think everyone has their own personal list of gripes and wants for a text editor. Here's some issues that I think many people will immediately be struck by:

- Zed does not yet support EditorConfig. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/8534

- Zed does not yet support auto-detecting indentation in the current file. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4681

- Zed does not yet support configuring indentation in the current file. (edit: clarified wording) https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4867

- The core editing experience is still less polished than Monaco. Example: Selecting a block of spaces and striking "delete" may lead to an uneven number of characters being deleted. It seems to interact poorly with indentation.

- No settings UI (yet?).

As a Linux (and specifically NixOS) user, there's also a few other problems that I would love to have solved:

- Zed can't be configured to not auto-update, which can simply never work on immutable distros or e.g. inside of Flatpak. It just tries and fails, wasting bandwidth. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/9224

- Zed can't re-use all already-installed language servers yet, so some language servers can't be used on platforms where the auto-download feature can not work. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4978

- Zed doesn't really integrate well with direnv. VSCode is in the same boat, but Vim is not. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4977

Overall Zed has been very nice. It definitely feels like it's still pre 1.0, but it is a very strong pre 1.0 to me. I am a bit weary on the focus on collaboration and AI features so soon, but I do realize that people actually like these features, so hopefully it's not a sign that the core editing experience is going to be neglected.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#30

Post by oktoberpaard »

AlexErrant wrote: post #8

I die inside whenever I use `\ ` for word boundary regex. Neovim has no plans to change this either. I'll likely switch eventually so I don't have to know two flavors of regex. One is hard enough.

I just add `\v` (very magic) to make it interpret regex more strictly. I’ve just tested it and you don’t need to escape these anymore to match word boundaries.
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