Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaving Neovim for Zed

stevedylan.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 331 posts

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#71

Post by linsomniac »

sph wrote: post #55
alberth wrote: post #12

I 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.

Except, as I understand it, the collaboration features were one of the primary things they wanted to do with Zed. So this isn't a case of bloat. The first blog post on the site is "How CRDTs make multiplayer text editing part of Zed's DNA".

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#72

Post by beginnings »

jchw wrote: post #60
beginnings wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They probably should have the option to change the tab size on an open file, but my point is, why wouldn't you have autoformatting on for YAML and JSON? You have a preference for indent size, and you want the same for every file, barring an edge case.

"languages": { "JSON": { "tab_size": 4 }, "JSONC": { "tab_size": 4 }, "YAML": { "tab_size": 4 } }

Edit: Yeah I see your point when you are not in control of the project and have to stick to someone elses style, I guess that only seems like an edge case to me, but could be normal for other people. In that case you would want a convenient way to override your formatting settings, like an auto detect indent button that only applies to the current open file.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#73

Post by Zarel »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #40

I’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…

Heh, I saw this thread just recently:

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1euwht3/webstorm_is...

Most discussions I've seen, including that one, say that VS Code is slower than most lightweight text editors but faster than most IDEs (including WebStorm which is IntelliJ). I don't personally have experience with IntelliJ, but in my experience VS Code is very noticeably faster than Eclipse.

That linked thread also mentions that compared to IntelliJ, VS Code has better remote development, a less cluttered UI, better support for multiple languages in one project. And _many_ people mention the better performance.

Personally, running an open-source project with a lot of contributors who are young or from third-world countries, it also matters a lot that VS Code is free.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#74

Post by ninkendo »

User23 wrote: post #67
sph wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Emacs[1] has been bloated with collaboration (gnus, etc) and AI features (doctor, lisp in general) for decades! [1] Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping

    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root          24 Oct 29  1929 /bin/ed
    -rwxr-xr-t  4 root     1310720 Jan  1  1970 /usr/ucb/vi
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  5.89824e37 Oct 22  1990 /usr/bin/emacs

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#75

Post by linsomniac »

poetril wrote: post #48

I’m actually in the opposite camp, I had left VSCode for Zed about 6 months ago and used it exclusively at work/personal projects. I’ve customized it extensively, and loved its approach to Vim integration. But in the last two weeks I’ve made the switch to Neovim (using a customized LazyVim [0] setup). I really like Zed but as others have pointed out they are not prioritizing features around REPL’s, AI, and collaborat…

A couple years ago I got really tired of maintaining my own vim configs, like the author of this piece mentions (plugins and updates causing problems). I just wanted to get out of the business of maintaining my own configs, so I decided to try a bundle, and eventually ended up on LunarVim, with a small handful of "dealbreaker" config changes. As opposed to a basic vim and then a bunch of plugins and custom configs.

I've been pretty happy with it, but other options are worth checking out (SpaceVim, NvChad, LazyVim, AstroVim).

LunarVim has finally deivered a working LSP/TreeSitter which I always only got half working or would break once I had it working, in my self-managed configs.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#76

Post by linsomniac »

riz_ wrote: post #7

I'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

The article specifically mentions following chris@machine, so I would assume that LunarVim was on their radar. But I agree, it seems odd that it wasn't mentioned in the article.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#77

Post by dalmo3 »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #46
paradite wrote: post #44

Earlier 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…

> I’m sorry but having used both. VSCode is not faster

When you project your own experience over everyone else's it doesn't seem like you genuinely want to understand.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#78

Post by chbint »

jgb1984 wrote: post #41

Most 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.

I was about to make a very similar comment. I won't say I'll never switch to neovim, for a lot depends on future vim/neovim development, and unexpected things happen.

But I do agree that vim's stability is priceless. It's been years without any need for major changes in my vimrc, and without any trouble with the plugins I use.

I'm sympathetic with the author, though. Whenever you need to change, finding an alternative that "just works" always makes things easier and you can quickly get back to being productive. I'm not so sure that I wouldn't go down a similar path if the vim ecosystem collapsed.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#79

Post by metaltyphoon »

jack_pp wrote: post #36
jph00 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I feel the same way. The fact that Zed uses the system clipboard as the default register in vim mode, for instance, made it impossible to use in practice for me -- having every yank replace my clipboard was a bit of a nightmare!

And then there's me that configs vim to use the system clipboard by default

Same. I can’t stand not having A clipboard for the entire OS
Post reply on HN