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Zed – The Editor for What's Next

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Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next

#21

Post by linsomniac »

mattnewton wrote: post #10
unshavedyak wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been curious on when AI was going to feel compelling for me to try. I might give this a try. I've had a subscription to some LLM service for ages, but overall i just haven't found it useful at all for programming. Maybe with this Context workflow it'll be nice. Though from the video it sounds like it might be difficult to get access to it?

You definitely should try a workflow with modern LLMs, but if you have trouble with Zed give cursor a try. No relation to the company, just was surprised at how good the product was for me for your bog-standard python and typescript work, but also surprisingly good in some side projects in embedded C++ and C. A lot of it is polish over how good Claude sonnet 3.5 has gotten at code with enough context.

Zed's AI integration is good, Cursor's is great! I'm mostly using Zed and Aider right now, because I'm not doing a lot of coding currently and cancelled my Cursor subscription because I wasn't getting $20 of value out of it the last few months, but I plan to renew it when I'm doing more coding.

Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next

#22

Post by linsomniac »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #14

I’ve been spending the weekend getting setup in NeoVim and have enjoyed the process so far. It’s definitely not for people who want a plug-and-play IDE, but if you want to see all the programming details that are involved in a text editor (and learn some Lua along the way), then I highly recommend it. Fair warning, it is HIGHLY recommended you come in with a working knowledge of Vim first.

I'd recommend using one of the editor bundles like LazyVim or SpaceVim. I was using Lunarvim and very happy with it, but he's discontinued development on it so I'm planning on moving to LazyVim. After 30+ years of messing around with vi configuration, I'm glad to have someone else doing the bulk of the work.

Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next

#24

Post by milch »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #14

I’ve been spending the weekend getting setup in NeoVim and have enjoyed the process so far. It’s definitely not for people who want a plug-and-play IDE, but if you want to see all the programming details that are involved in a text editor (and learn some Lua along the way), then I highly recommend it. Fair warning, it is HIGHLY recommended you come in with a working knowledge of Vim first.

Setting it up from scratch isn't, but if you just want something that works you can always go with one of the pre-made distributions, which is about as plug and play as you can get. I've had colleagues that were up and running after 10min with all the bells and whistles you expect from a modern IDE by just setting up LazyVim. Really the hardest part is the modal editing workflow, which is just inherent in how vim and nvim work - and I would recommend to set up regardless of which editor you use (e.g. by using the VSCode Neovim plugin)

Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next

#25

Post by entrox »

I very much applaud the effort in trying to push the boundaries, especially on the front of responsiveness and performance. We are typing on machines with mind-boggling resources and yet editors don't feel snappier(tm) at all, so I appreciate optimizing on that dimension.

However, I can't see myself moving away from Emacs. I've been using it for almost a quarter of a century and have seen many editors come and go in that timeframe: BBEdit, Textmate, Sublime Text, Atom and so on. The current hotness is VS Code, but I personally believe that will be abandoned at some point as well.

It would be great if some of the learnings of Zed can be backported to Emacs, however unlikely that is due to the amount of old cruft there.

Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next

#26

Post by James_K »

I've seen a million and one text editors, and almost all of them offer the feature of being "fast " or "gpu driven" or "cleanly implemented" (now "AI integrated"; LOL). Never features that users actually care about. Perhaps this is just my ego taking, but I think I would struggle to develop such an app. What is the point in programming if you aren't presenting the user with anything new? I suppose the collaborative features in this are almost novel, but they seem misguided. It relies on other people using the same text editor as you, which is going to be quite difficult to organise.

How about a text editor which represents code as a syntax tree that is formatted as you type? Or one that has support for embedding multi-media content within source files? Or one with advanced program rewriting capabilities (in-lining functions, replacing struct members into getter methods, etc)? These things would all change the a user's experience much more than replacing the CPU rendering with GPU rendering. A text editor is the window through which we interact with code. It is an immensely rich domain for experimentation, yet the best most come up with is "what if there was a 10ms smaller latency on keyboard input?"

I think the issue here is one of perspective. As programmers, we see the code. We tend to put more focus on the features that took us the longest to implement. But often, these are not visible or relevant to the user. We like to show off the 80% of the effort that gets 20% of the outcome rather than the 20% that yields 80%. I think there's also a measurability bias at play. It's easy to make the case that a faster thing is better than a slower thing, but harder to make the case for an interesting feature. One is measurable but the other is not.

Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next

#27

Post by vunderba »

Zed has been on my shortlist as a natively fast text editor to replace Sublime, but I have very little interest in all the AI integration. I'm also not a fan of the prominent "sign in" button at the top right that's completely unhideable - it just serves to remind me that an off-line editor isn't necessarily the goal.

These are pretty minor criticisms, and for the most part I really like using it. Additionally, the fact that it's open source means that it's just a fork away from ripping out the sign in button manually.

Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next

#28

Post by slowmovintarget »

joe_the_user wrote: post #23

I'd like an editor that uses an open LLM like Lama locally and runs on the Linux desktop. Is this it? Does that exist?

Emacs can do that (there are a couple of add-ons that layer in inference). I believe Neovim can also.

On the commercial side IntelliJ and other JetBrains IDEs now have local-inference single-line completion model included. It won't build a project for you (incorrectly... that doesn't compile...), but will help you code faster.

Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next

#30

Post by ozgrakkurt »

James_K wrote: post #26

I've seen a million and one text editors, and almost all of them offer the feature of being "fast " or "gpu driven" or "cleanly implemented" (now "AI integrated"; LOL). Never features that users actually care about. Perhaps this is just my ego taking, but I think I would struggle to develop such an app. What is the point in programming if you aren't presenting the user with anything new? I suppose the collaborative f…

Performance is extremely important in an editor imo, it changes the whole feel of it. But I don’t even use LSPs now so I may be in the minority
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