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Leaving Neovim for Zed

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Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#231

Post by hydroteur »

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 depends on what you work with. If you debug a complex issue you need to check many different setups to see whether your suspicions are right. Then, having a nice workflow where you sticky edit and run your code is quite important.

It's not always the case. Quite often the only way to investigate the issue is to run a cloud workload that takes several minutes to start. Still, if you write good code, you can try to isolate the issue for local debugging at some point.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#232

Post by thomascountz »

My dealbreaker with Zed is that it takes away my autonomy and agency.

1. Zed downloads binaries without user input as soon as you open a file; think LSPs and linters. This is a hot topic and has been for a while.[0]

I would rather my editor break (or even better, fail gracefully and helpfully), than obscure what amounts to being a significant action that I believe warrants user involvement.

2. I can't tell what gets sent to Zed's servers.

I don't have time to audit all the code, but as an example, this PR, [Allow Al interactions to be proxied through Zed's server so you don't need an API key][1], has +3,628 -8,918 changes and even just by the title seems to suggest that using the Assistant feature may result in requests being sent to Zed's servers.

This is a dealbreaker for me because, not only is this not documented anywhere, it seems in contradiction to the EULA.

"User Content is transmitted from Your environment only if You collaborate with other Zed users by electing to share a project in the Editor. Once You share a project, Zed may transmit User Content consisting of file paths, file contents, and metadata regarding the code returned by language servers."[2] It doesn't mention if using the Assistant feature is part of the network based solution or that it's the same as "sharing a project," but I'm not an Editor-EULA lawyer.

Arguably, this is true is any open source project, though my stance is generally to be more alert to privacy concerns with software from newly-backed pre-profitable startups. I don't want to spend my rare editor-tweaking time on nonconfigurable privacy and security control workarounds.

Edit: As if on cue, another PR to seemingly default to sending data to zed.dev: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/16454

[0]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589

[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/7367

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240718140959/https://zed.dev/e...

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#233

Post by svlasov »

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…

If you know what you want to build, typing becomes a real bottleneck.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#234

Post by kombine »

p4bl0 wrote: post #229

A lot of editors are being discussed here but I see nobody has mentioned Kate (KDE's Advanced Text Editor) [1] in the conversation yet, so I'm doing it. Kate is a very mature and capable editor, and even if I only use it on Linux I'm glad to know that it is also available on macOS and Windows. It natively supports LSP and has much, much more to offer in terms of project management, support for build system, support f…

After Kate was ported to Qt4, I was very impressed that it could handle extremely large files with no sweat. I don't use it, because I need a remote development capabilities and when compared to Neovim it simply lacks the plugin ecosystem and a large community driving it forward.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#235

Post by rd07 »

p4bl0 wrote: post #229

A lot of editors are being discussed here but I see nobody has mentioned Kate (KDE's Advanced Text Editor) [1] in the conversation yet, so I'm doing it. Kate is a very mature and capable editor, and even if I only use it on Linux I'm glad to know that it is also available on macOS and Windows. It natively supports LSP and has much, much more to offer in terms of project management, support for build system, support f…

I agree that Kate is a good code editor. I have tried more than a year ago when I still use KDE Plasma (now switched to Gnome). Honestly, I am happy that there is at least one GUI Code Editor from a big community that actually on par with some popular code editor (VS Code, Sublime, etc). Because I see that most code editors made by the Linux community are always lacking in features when compared to other popular code editors. However, there are some things that make me not use Kate as my daily editor. One of them is the file browser feature which I find more complicated than its alternatives in Sublime Text or VSCode for example. In addition, the small number of plugins for Kate is also one of the reasons I do not use it.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#236

Post by kombine »

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…

This is partly true, but there is a caveat: it's 10 lines of finished. In order to get there you would write and edit this piece of code many times over until it reaches the desired quality. And VIM is meant for "editing" code.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#237

Post by kstenerud »

Jare wrote: post #222
owenpalmer wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day This is a ridiculous statement. Citation needed.

Hopefully it's clear that: - code is not the only output produced by a developer. Communication, design, documentation, testing and tests, diagnosing and debugging, etc. - I can and do write hundreds of lines of working code in a given day (and I'm not an IC). But "finished" was meant to describe something that doesn't get touched again unless new work requires it. A lot of code today is written more iteratively, wit…

Hmm... This might be where my process differs, I guess?

In my normal process (not exploratory work), I don't write a single character until I'm sure of how the thing I'm making will fit into the overall design (such as the API it will have, how it will interact with other components, its placement in the overall architecture, what its responsibilities are and how to structure it so as to minimize potential confusion and make what it is doing clear to a reader, mentally walking through code paths to make sure other components can use it as intended, etc). All of that happens in my head, not in an editor (although I might have a few notes jotted down if it's a big change or a whole new feature).

Then, once I know exactly what I intend to write, I just dump it all down into the source files. 80% of it is already "finished code" in that I won't be changing it again unless I've made a serious design error.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#238

Post by 8fingerlouie »

toastercat wrote: post #35

Echoing similar sentiments that I'm optimistic for Zed to become more polished and stable. Till then, Sublime Text 4 is still the best non-terminal text editor I've ever used and I continue to daily drive it. Sure its paid and non-FOSS, but its incredibly performant on Linux and Windows and its LSP extension + Sublime Merge fill the gap left by VSCode for me. Well worth the price tag IMO.

My only gripe with Sublime Text is that they've changed to a "semi subscription" license model, where licenses expire after 2-3 years, and you essentially need to buy it again after that time.

It's essentially the same model used by other editors like the Jetbrains suite, but unlike Jetbrains, updates to Sublime Text (and Merge) are few and usually don't contain much other than bugfixes.

I've faithfully purchased Sublime Text licenses since the initial versions (switched over from Textmate), but as my ST4 license recently expired, it has forced me to review just what i get for the money i pay.

ST was excellent when it first arrived, and it's still one of the fastest loading editors out there, but pretty much every other editor has more or less caught up, including free ones like Zed and VSCode, making a recurring cost harder to justify.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#239

Post by thomascountz »

replete wrote: post #69

I tried out Zed and really like it, but its still lacking things like EditorConfig support, so project switching sucks. Has strong potential to replace vscode entirely if they don't get carried away with fancy features

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/16349

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#240

Post by __alias »

Has anyone made the transition from VS Code to NeoVim or Zed and succeeded / recommend it?

Years ago I saw a colleague operate as an absolute beast using VS Code with vim bindings and it was impressive to watch.

But I've never watched anyone code in vim/emacs etc and felt it's a more effective editor than vs code.

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