They pivoted pretty hard into AI, huh. I remember when being multiplayer was their big selling point.
Anybody who takes VC money will always pivot to "the current thing".
Zed – The Editor for What's Next
41–50 of 54 posts
Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next
#42I’ve never got its python LSP to work as well as Pylance in VSCode. Once you start using Pylance for large codebases, even if it is slow and sometimes crashes, you cannot go back to coding without it. Go to Definition, and automatic argument hints are too useful to code without
As far as I know Pylance (unrelated to pypi's pylance) is python LSP with microsoft's proprietary extensions that you can use only with official microsoft products.
btw, go to definition, argument hints can work without it just fine.
Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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) We have had these for decades, they are called IDEs
I've not seen many IDEs with the functionality I just listed. Most of the time it's just debugging support and code completion. The idea that most programmers have edited code in the way I just described for decades is patently absurd.
You mean one that formats code as you type, embeds multi-media within
source, rewrites class variables as getter methods? None of these could
be implemented in a way that even immature developers, those with 3-4
years of experience who go in for whizbangness, wouldn't immediately
deactivate.
Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've not seen many IDEs with the functionality I just listed. Most of the time it's just debugging support and code completion. The idea that most programmers have edited code in the way I just described for decades is patently absurd.
You mean one that formats code as you type, embeds multi-media within source, rewrites class variables as getter methods? None of these could be implemented in a way that even immature developers, those with 3-4 years of experience who go in for whizbangness, wouldn't immediately deactivate.
Yes they totally could. I auto-format all my code and it works mostly without issue even in relatively complicated languages. Why would you turn of images in the source? A comment with a diagram would be useful. Rewriting class variables isn't something you can even turn off. It would just be an option in the right-click menu to refactor code. Everything I suggest is based to some extent on existing features. It is just a more complete implementation of them.
Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next
#45I'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…
Embedding media (the way a lot of markdown editors work) is one of the features I mentioned wanting on a new IDE wishlist. Preserving last seen arguments passed through a local debug session for future replays would also be handy.
Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next
#46I'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…
Embedding media (the way a lot of markdown editors work) is one of the features I mentioned wanting on a new IDE wishlist. Preserving last seen arguments passed through a local debug session for future replays would also be handy. https://mordenstar.com/blog/how-to-build-a-better-ide
The issue such things face is that they are very difficult to justify. If you say "I am going to improve the efficiency of the rendering process by 30%", no one will question what you're doing. The numbers are better than before, so it has clearly improved the software. But if you say "I'm going to implement images in comments", there are suddenly all sorts of questions. Will people use it? What if it degrades experience? What if it contributes to bloat? Etc. If you were to ask which of the features adds more value to the product, the answer is probably the second. But if you look at the feature on its own, it's much harder to justify doing work on the second than doing work on the first because there's no metric you are improving.
Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next
#47I'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
The problem is that while editors are super fast, the plugin/LSP integrations can really slow down the editing experience. While you can write the editor with GPU acceleration in Rust, the language servers will remain unchanged. Dealing with edge cases and concurrency is really difficult, even in Rust.
For example, if you activate auto complete, but there are multiple servers returning results with different response times. Do you wait for all of them to finish? If not, will you have results that jump around?
Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a pretty decent editor to be fair. The AI features are probably there to raise money from investors.
Mmm, AI integration for coding is table stakes for any development tool right now IMHO. Even for things as simple as "I have an idea about how I'd check to see if the time is between midnight and 4:30am, but I don't have the python datetime module locked into memory, how would you do it" is extremely useful.
sad. software quality deteriorating sharply because of all this. To learn an API also helps to keep it small and focused instead of having thousands of methods on it. All software will now go the way of Java.
Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next
#49They pivoted pretty hard into AI, huh. I remember when being multiplayer was their big selling point.
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?
It’s hit or miss for me as a coding assistant.
Sometimes the snippets are helpful and sometimes not.
Re: Zed – The Editor for What's Next
#50I'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…
There were some new ideas a few (10+) years ago around how to visualize and navigate code, basically letting you edit through the program flow rather than by file. I was really keen on the idea but they only worked for Java, if I recall correctly. I'd love to see those ideas play out again with typescript, rust, etc.
Last time I tried zed it didn't have good git integration. I look at diffs and blame a lot and both vim and vscode have really great plugins.