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Zed on Linux Is Here

zed.dev

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Re: Zed on Linux Is Here

#111

Post by AndyKelley »

NormenKD wrote: post #70
AndyKelley wrote: post #22

> To install Zed on most Linux distributions, run the shell script below. This is not an acceptable way to install anything on Linux. If you want to target Linux users you can't distribute with a shell script for installation. I get that the idea is to reduce friction to installation and trying it out, but most Linux users - the ones you want filing bug reports anyway - are ones who will do due diligence and inspect…

They aren't happy with this, either: "[...]And of course, the journey isn't over yet－we'd love your help, particularly if you're excited about: - Helping bring Zed to your distro. Either by packaging Zed or by making Zed work the way it should in your environment (we know many people want to manage language servers by themselves).[...]" Give them a hand ;) https://zed.dev/docs/development/linux#notes-for-packaging-z.…

I sympathize with the situation that Zed developers are in. They are thinking of the user experience first and foremost, and when trying to distribute on Linux, faced with an overgrown, chaotic landscape that utterly fails to provide the basic needs of application developers, such as the ability to distribute a binary that has no dependencies on any one particular distribution and can open a window and interact with the graphics driver, or the ability to require permissions from the user to do certain things.

I do think that my work contributes to help with this use case. Looking elsewhere on this thread I see that they are having problems fetching and running a nodejs binary successfully. Fortunately, nodejs is a piece of software that can be built and distributed statically. I have not packaged up this one in such a manner but I have done a proof of concept with CPython: https://github.com/allyourcodebase/cpython

That said, if they want to allow users to install Zed through a system package manager, they will need to cooperate with the system and rely on system nodejs instead of trying to fetch it at runtime. Fetching and running software at runtime is fundamentally incompatible with the core mission of Linux distributions (curation, vetting, and compatibility patching of all software that is to be run on the system).

Re: Zed on Linux Is Here

#112

Post by janalsncm »

fao_ wrote: post #74
porphyra wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just read the script that you're curling rather than pipe it into sh directly. It seems like it just extracts the binary from a tar.gz and puts it into ~/.local.

"reading a script" is actually a worse user experience on Linux than just using repositories or flatpak, though. It's pretty rude of software developers to put the onus on users to verify that they're not doing something outright malicious in terms of the installer.

Instead of pasting it in terminal, I opened a new tab and read it. There’s maybe 200 lines, most of which aren’t relevant to my platform. Didn’t see anything unusual.

I then proceeded to install tens of thousands of lines of code I didn’t read onto my machine.

My point? People really seem to be bike shedding this install script bit. If I was a malicious actor I wouldn’t be hiding the bad parts in the install script.

Re: Zed on Linux Is Here

#113

Post by danielvaughn »

handsaway wrote: post #26

I tried zed for a few weeks because I'm generally sympathetic to the "use a native app" idea vs Electron. I generally liked it and its UX but: 1. VSCode is pretty damn fast to be honest. Very rarely is my slowdown in my work VSCode loading. Maybe I don't open very large files? Probably 5k lines of typescript at most. 2. Integration with the Typescript language server was just not as good as VSCode. I can't pin down e…

Yeah my experience has been that you aren't going to suffer performance problems with VSCode unless you have an incredibly large codebase. Past a certain point I'm sure Vim/NeoVim/Zed are probably much more performant, but the differences in smaller codebases is barely noticeable IME.

Re: Zed on Linux Is Here

#114

Post by nicce »

pkage wrote: post #38
AndyKelley wrote: post #22

> To install Zed on most Linux distributions, run the shell script below. This is not an acceptable way to install anything on Linux. If you want to target Linux users you can't distribute with a shell script for installation. I get that the idea is to reduce friction to installation and trying it out, but most Linux users - the ones you want filing bug reports anyway - are ones who will do due diligence and inspect…

This is a fairly common way to install tools on Linux. Tailscale, Homebrew, Pi-hole and many others offer installations in this way.

While it is fairly common way, it does not mean that it is good way.

Re: Zed on Linux Is Here

#115

Post by shepherdjerred »

fao_ wrote: post #74
porphyra wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just read the script that you're curling rather than pipe it into sh directly. It seems like it just extracts the binary from a tar.gz and puts it into ~/.local.

"reading a script" is actually a worse user experience on Linux than just using repositories or flatpak, though. It's pretty rude of software developers to put the onus on users to verify that they're not doing something outright malicious in terms of the installer.

Are you not concerned with the software developers doing something outright malicious in the software itself?

Re: Zed on Linux Is Here

#116

Post by danielvaughn »

barnabee wrote: post #99
the_duke wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people just have very different tolerances for latency and slowness. I keep trying different editors (including VS Code), and I always end up going back to Neovim because everything else just feels sluggish, to the point where it annoys me so much I'm willing to put up with all the configuration burden of Neovim because of it. I tried out Zed and it actually feels fast enough for me to consider switching.

I use Helix and feel the same way. The pickers/fuzzy finder particularly have no equal for speed in any editor I’ve found. (Zed seems pretty fast but I didn’t get on well enough with it to find out how it performs with more serious use.) fwiw I’ve also found the configuration overhead much lower with Helix than for pretty much any other editor I’ve seriously used.

This makes me want to use Helix, because while I love the idea of a terminal editor, I'm not the kind of person to whittle away a day screwing around with my config files.

Re: Zed on Linux Is Here

#117

Post by whalesalad »

janalsncm wrote: post #112
fao_ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"reading a script" is actually a worse user experience on Linux than just using repositories or flatpak, though. It's pretty rude of software developers to put the onus on users to verify that they're not doing something outright malicious in terms of the installer.

Instead of pasting it in terminal, I opened a new tab and read it. There’s maybe 200 lines, most of which aren’t relevant to my platform. Didn’t see anything unusual. I then proceeded to install tens of thousands of lines of code I didn’t read onto my machine. My point? People really seem to be bike shedding this install script bit. If I was a malicious actor I wouldn’t be hiding the bad parts in the install script.

200 lines versus the actual install steps which is 1. wget the tarball, 2. extract the tarball to .local/bin, 3. done, or a few more steps to add the desktop file.

Re: Zed on Linux Is Here

#118

Post by sensanaty »

handsaway wrote: post #26

I tried zed for a few weeks because I'm generally sympathetic to the "use a native app" idea vs Electron. I generally liked it and its UX but: 1. VSCode is pretty damn fast to be honest. Very rarely is my slowdown in my work VSCode loading. Maybe I don't open very large files? Probably 5k lines of typescript at most. 2. Integration with the Typescript language server was just not as good as VSCode. I can't pin down e…

I don't use it as my main editor (I'm far too used to the Jetbrains editors to make the switch, they're just too smart), but it's the best one for CLI apps that use EDITOR, like git. It boots up basically instantly even when it hasn't been launched in a while and I can make my commit messages and immediately close stuff up at the speed of my thought.

Re: Zed on Linux Is Here

#119

Post by Arch-TK »

I really don't get why this is the modern editor style of choice.

20% (35 chars) of screen space permanently wasted on a always on file browser (meanwhile the animation showcases fuzzy finding)

4% (7 chars) of screen space permanently wasted by line numbers (why are the numbers cut off on the right?)

2.7% (5 chars) of screen space taken up by a gutter

So 27% of screen space effectively dead 99% of the time.

Why do people do this to themselves?

I can't quite figure out how to get the gutter to truly only appear when needed (I can't remember why) but in my vim configuration 2 chars of space are taken up by the gutter and the rest is for the actual code. The current line number is in the bottom right, and if I need to go to a specific line number I have `G` for that. If I need a file explorer, there's the default Netrw one, there's NERD Tree, there's a terminal (I actually rarely need this anyway, but I can understand not everyone can cope, but I can't comprehend why you would need it on 100% of the time).

Why does the "modern text editor" waste so much screen space?

I have a 1200p laptop monitor which gives me 174 chars of horizontal space at a comfortable font size. If I split that in half I get two terminal windows worth of 87 characters each. If I keep my code under 85 characters per line, not only is it easier to read, I can keep a man page or another piece of code on the other half of my screen.

Re: Zed on Linux Is Here

#120

Post by TiredOfLife »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #102
whalesalad wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but vscode is open source: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode and there are third-party builds from the community that disable things like telemetry: https://vscodium.com/

Sorry, I should have been more specific and said FOSS. VSCode is still encumbered by the weight of a mega corp. It's like saying Chrome is open source. Sure it is, but it still exists to serve the corporation that owns it.

It's MIT licensed. So it's more FOSS than FOSS
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