It is great to see new editors gaining traction after VSCode took most of the market.
Leaving Neovim for Zed
51–60 of 331 posts
Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed
#52I'm wondering if the author ever tried one of the many neovim distributions, which solve a lot of the problem they're describing. All of the plugins and integrations necessary are already set up to create a nice fully featured IDE-style environment. E.g. LazyVim, AstroVim or NvChad
After years of using Vim as a keyboard assassin, then Neovim (with a custom config initially based on kickstart.nvim), about a month ago I started using LazyVim. After test-driving the default config for just a few hours, I found myself nodding my head and saying to myself, "Yes, this is the way."
I had seen some of the other "Neovim as IDE" projects but after looking at them carefully, I decided that LazyVim is generally the most polished one out there. Folke deserves a lot of credit.
The breakthrough for me was realising that it's a totally acceptable tradeoff to let other developers who know what they're doing, keep up with the bleeding edge plugin scene, and have generally good opinions make decisions about configuration so I can get real work done and not spend time getting bogged down in ricing and config files.
Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed
#53Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.
Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason is simple: You write Java. People using VS Code are writing JavaScript/TypeScript/Python that doesn't need full IDE features. And VS Code is much faster than Eclipse / IDEA kinds.
I have written Ocaml, Java, C, C++, Ada and Python professionally in my career. I either used an editor or an IDE. I had a plugin for eMacs when doing Ocaml but the experience was really subpar (that was before Merlin - yes, I’m that old). I’m sorry but having used both. VSCode is not faster than Eclipse. It’s far less good at writing Java however. You are not really answering my question by the way. So people are in…
> You are not really answering my question by the way. So people are indeed using VsCode because there are no proper IDE for JS and TypeScript?
Yes, that's it. There are plugins for everything and mostly works. Not the biggest fan of it anymore tho so looking for my next IDE or develop one for my liking using AI.
Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed
#55I initially loved Zed. But as their focus has shifted to building Collaboration & AI features, and still haven’t yet nailed just being a good/great base editor, its become less useful to me. I still have a lot of hope for Zed. But for the time being, I’ve switched back to my old editor & IDE … and I’ll try Zed again at a much later date.
To paraphrase an old quote, "every new text editor grows until it is bloated with collaboration and AI features."
Thank god we still have vim and Emacs.
Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed
#56Most of the negatives mentioned (fragility, bugs, plugins breaking often) are specific to neovim. It's one of the reasons why I am and will always keep using vim instead of neovim. Vim is a much more mature ecosystem, less chasing the newest "plugin du jour", my vimrc is stable, based on a few dozen plugins which are feature complete and rock solid stable.
Do you mind sharing that list of plugins you use? I have never used plugins with vim/neovim and only used them vanilla up to this point but interested in checking out the plugin ecosystem.
This is a copy paste from the relevant part of my vimrc. Keep in mind I mainly develop in python.
Plug 'alvan/vim-closetag' Plug 'ap/vim-buftabline' Plug 'davidhalter/jedi-vim' Plug 'dense-analysis/ale' Plug 'dstein64/vim-startuptime' Plug 'itchyny/lightline.vim' Plug 'junegunn/fzf', { 'dir': '~/.fzf', 'do': { -> fzf#install() } } Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim' Plug 'junegunn/vim-peekaboo' Plug 'machakann/vim-swap' Plug 'markonm/traces.vim' Plug 'mhinz/vim-signify' Plug 'preservim/nerdtree' Plug 'preservim/tagbar' Plug 'romainl/vim-cool' Plug 'simnalamburt/vim-mundo' Plug 'tpope/vim-characterize' Plug 'tpope/vim-commentary' Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive' Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat' Plug 'tpope/vim-rhubarb' Plug 'tpope/vim-sensible' Plug 'tpope/vim-speeddating' Plug 'tpope/vim-surround' Plug 'vimwiki/vimwiki'
Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed
#57I’m going to somehow misuse this discussion to ask for the readership help about something: I don’t understand the appeal of VSCode or more exactly I don’t understand the appeal of the text editor propped with plugins to be a semi-IDE so I guess that would also include Neovim with plugins. In my career, I have used text editors including vim which I still very much enjoy and both Eclipse and IntelliJ when I used to c…
I love IntelliJ, but VS Code has much better support for frontend technologies and TypeScript.
Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed
#58I’m going to somehow misuse this discussion to ask for the readership help about something: I don’t understand the appeal of VSCode or more exactly I don’t understand the appeal of the text editor propped with plugins to be a semi-IDE so I guess that would also include Neovim with plugins. In my career, I have used text editors including vim which I still very much enjoy and both Eclipse and IntelliJ when I used to c…
It's a fair question, my guess is that it's a great beginners IDE for multiple languages. You can quickly get up and running with all major languages, and it was one of the first products Microsoft made multiplatform and free. I'm neutral about it, it works fine for getting the job done. I'm a bit disappointed that it's ssh plugin craps out over 200MB of detritus on each remote machine it connects to. But the ability to edit remotely is a neat feature.
Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed
#59Does Zed support remote/containers development now? It was the major blocker for me when i tried it, so i had to retreat back to VSCode. I’m not sure if programming is a social activity so their focus on collaboration is a little odd to me.
The remote editing features are in preview: https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development
Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed
#60Neovim 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 s…
On indentation, most files are going to be autoformatted by the LSP, and there are tab_size settings in the languages section, needing specific file settings seems like an edge case. As for collaboration and AI features, I have no use for them personally, but I think that's their avenue for future monetization, so I can't really complain that they are focussing on that when I get an amazing piece of software for free…
> On indentation, most files are going to be autoformatted by the LSP, and there are tab_size settings in the languages section, needing specific file settings seems like an edge case.
Wow, absolutely not!
Just so we're clear, when I say "per-file" settings, I don't mean in the configuration. I mean at runtime overriding the indentation settings for an open file.
This is needed for many, many cases that I definitely don't consider edge cases.
- Configuration files: Loose configuration files might be in a bespoke format with no language server to begin with. JSON and YAML files can have pretty much any indentation style, and in many cases when editing configuration files there will be no "project-specific" configuration files to read from. I use my editor of choice to edit configuration files in various places including just in my home directory.
- You are not necessarily allowed to fully reformat files in a given project, even if the project has inconsistently-formatted files. Some LSPs are cooperative with this and won't change the indentation, since not all languages have a canonical format. Auto-detection is very important here.
- Even when an LSP is being used, that doesn't mean Zed is synced up with it. The Nix LSP will use whatever nixfmt binary you are using. I'm using nixfmt-rfc-style, which uses 2-space indentation, but the default in Zed seems to be 4-space indentation for Nix files, which means that without configuration it will be out-of-sync. (Generally this would be better to just configure globally but I'm just trying to say that having an LSP in and of itself doing formatting is not a panacea.)
In almost any editor I can think of, from Vim, to Visual Studio Code, to IntelliJ, to Notepad++, to kwrite, to gedit... I can at least override the indentation style if it is wrong for some reason. In Neovim I use vim-sleuth, and my indentation settings in Vim are very rarely incorrect no matter what file I'm editing where.
Modern text editors can and should do better than this, and almost always do; being able to change the current indentation settings is something most editors support before supporting most other basic functions. It's not a weird edge case, it's just flat-out a missing basic feature.