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Leaving Neovim for Zed

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Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#191

Post by kstenerud »

> I was already a keyboard maximalist from previous jobs where I learned speed = productivity

I've never understood this. In over 30 years in the industry, I've not once held a job where my keyboard speed had a noticeable effect on my productivity. Even when I had to type one-handed for a month, my productivity was unchanged.

The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day. And even with a raw 10x that amount to account for variance, changes, debugging etc, you'd be at 12 lines PER HOUR. Being generous at a full 80 chars per line, you have a maximum of 1000 keypresses per hour, or an average of one every 3 seconds. Even doubling your typing speed or keyboard response time would have no discernible effect.

90% of software development happens in the mind. The small amount of time spent actually writing it out seems kinda silly to optimize for.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#192

Post by devsda »

LtdJorge wrote: post #127
kvark wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, it’s because they are not open source and not as fast.

Yesterday RustRover became so unresponsive that the UI would freeze for more than 15 seconds (as reported by their exception notifications) and completions would take 5 seconds to appear and be wrong or lacking most times. I was seriously doubting the internal Rust engine (they don’t use rust-analyzer or LSP), so I switched to VSCode with the rust-analyzer extension, and the same happened there too, although no freez…

> Turns out some of my types were 80k characters long,

I know Rust uses name/symbol mangling but what sort of type declaration in Rust ends up with that long names ?

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#193

Post by eviks »

> Whenever I need to edit a configuration file for an app or just edit something really quickly while I’m already navigating in a terminal, nothing beats the convenience of whipping out Neovim. Opening Zed for every single file like that would get exhausting, but for longer term sessions or projects it’s perfect.

Which part exactly would exhaust you? These editors are fast to close/open even is there not already running (also you could just leave it open h, and you get the benefit of not blocking the current terminal session, so that's the convenience that beats neovim. Another one is that you can have editor's window size independent of the terminal size

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#194

Post by meitham »

kstenerud wrote: post #191

> I was already a keyboard maximalist from previous jobs where I learned speed = productivity I've never understood this. In over 30 years in the industry, I've not once held a job where my keyboard speed had a noticeable effect on my productivity. Even when I had to type one-handed for a month, my productivity was unchanged. The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day. And even with a raw 10x th…

I don’t touch type and I’m fully with you on speed doesn’t increase performance, but I have recently started writing c# after two decades of python and man the number of lines that you have to write before you get to the meat of the logic! So I think that 10 lines of code are only to expressive languages not globally

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#195

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

fastasucan wrote: post #149
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…

As opposed to vim it has a gui, as opposed to eclipse and intellij its language agnostic, as opposed to you they obviously dont find it too slow to be a nice editor, having an inferior ui or miss any of the features. Contrary to that they may find the ability to shape the editor using extension pretty nice, and doesn't care for having an IDE for every language they use. Its nice being in the same environment no matte…

Probably a mismatch between what I expect from an IDE and what VSCode offers then, I understand that. Every time I fire it I am always deeply disappointed by the lacklustre debugger and the lack of good refactoring tools.

I never really tried the git integration as I use git purely through the CLI and didn’t try to work on a remote code base so I might have missed the killer features.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#196

Post by mikojan »

kstenerud wrote: post #191

> I was already a keyboard maximalist from previous jobs where I learned speed = productivity I've never understood this. In over 30 years in the industry, I've not once held a job where my keyboard speed had a noticeable effect on my productivity. Even when I had to type one-handed for a month, my productivity was unchanged. The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day. And even with a raw 10x th…

It is important to be sufficiently fast at editing or else you will not revise what you wrote.

I hear people complaining a lot: "This is tedious. That is tedious." They have no control over their development environments. They write code once and whatever was produced in the process will be checked-in as is.

It is aggravating because there is this sentiment that it is fine to be incompetent. It is not.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#197

Post by lenkite »

danielvaughn wrote: post #131
Voklen wrote: post #109

For me this feels similar to why I use Helix[1]. I used to use VSCodium and had tried to switch to Vim or Neovim multiple times but didn't manage because of all the plugin configuration to be able to program. Then I saw an HN post about Helix, started it up and it just worked and so haven't used anything else since. I find the Helix keybindings easier to learn because you see what text will be affected by any operati…

I also heard about Helix and have been curious about it, for the same reason. If I’m going to learn Vim keybindings, it’s because I want to move fast. Tweaking configuration files for an evening is the exact opposite of moving fast.

Just use https://astronvim.com/. I haven't touched my config for more than a month. With astronvim community, other people do the hard work.

I also tried the "pure" config from scratch way but its just way too much work to maintain, esp if you want all the goodies. Also, not an expert in Lua so my config sucked. Simply better to use an existing, well-maintained neovim distro. I tried all of them and liked astronvim the best.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#198

Post by lawn »

kstenerud wrote: post #191

> I was already a keyboard maximalist from previous jobs where I learned speed = productivity I've never understood this. In over 30 years in the industry, I've not once held a job where my keyboard speed had a noticeable effect on my productivity. Even when I had to type one-handed for a month, my productivity was unchanged. The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day. And even with a raw 10x th…

I think typing speed is important during bursts. If you can type out a function name really quickly (autocomplete also helps of course) then you can continue your thought process with less interruption than if you were slower.

> 90% of software development happens in the mind. The small amount of time spent actually writing it out seems kinda silly to optimize for.

So you're saying that 10% is spent typing, which doesn't seem a silly amount to optimize for?

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#199

Post by Zambyte »

kstenerud wrote: post #191

> I was already a keyboard maximalist from previous jobs where I learned speed = productivity I've never understood this. In over 30 years in the industry, I've not once held a job where my keyboard speed had a noticeable effect on my productivity. Even when I had to type one-handed for a month, my productivity was unchanged. The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day. And even with a raw 10x th…

> 90% of software development happens in the mind.

Why? The only reason I can think of for this to be true is when there is high risk in writing wrong code. For example, long compile times leading to a large sunken cost, or a lack of testing processes.

Unless you're doing R&D, only spending 10% of your "coding" time actually writing code seems very low, and you should try to optimize the processes that are lacking.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#200

Post by ulbu »

_7tgr wrote: post #166
jdeaton wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helix has been trying to implement a plugins system for like 2 years that should tell you everything you need to know about its future prospects

And, oddly, they chose to do their own Scheme implementation for it. Not that I'm against Scheme in particular, but a lot of other people justifiably seem to be. It doesn't have the speed or learn-it-in-10-minutes of Lua (nvim) or the historical excuse of Elisp/Vimscript (emacs/vim) or the ecosystem of Typescript (vscode). Strange choice.

scheme is a group of languages, it doesn’t have its speed. some implementations are very quick. and quick-to-learn, too.

helix looks like a passion project, so i thoroughly understand their wish to tend towards what they enjoy doing.

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