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Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

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Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#121

Post by rmgk »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #97
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #73

Just last week some hero claimed to be adding helix keybindings to zed ( https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4642#issuecomme... ). Golly I hope they succeed.

What I find strange about an open source product funded by VC money is that all of the people are helping make it a better editor and yet when they eventually exit none of the money will go to them. Compare that to vim where it's truly an open source product.

I think you are not very accurate about “open source product” vs something like “community led project”.

People being able to adapt their software to their own needs by making changes to the code is exactly what open source is about. This is good.

What is a problem though, is to have the code merged in the main repository requires you to gift them the rights to your code (not just license it). They are also not very clear about this in the summary of their CLA: “You're giving Zed permission to use and share your contributions (like original works or modifications).” which could be misunderstood to just be a usual open source licensing agreement, but seems to be complete handover of copyright: https://zed.dev/cla

This is not good, and something people should be more aware of when contributing.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#122

Post by wruza »

marssaxman wrote: post #75
ivanjermakov wrote: post #41

> Lua is great, but one JSON file is even better I will never understand how you go back from a very customized editor setup to the one with "reasonable defaults with little to no things to configure". Great talk on this topic by TJ: Personal Development Environment: https://youtu.be/QMVIJhC9Veg

Back in the '90s I would customize my development environment to within an inch of its life, but after going from one machine to the next, one toolchain to the next, one operating system to the next, year after year, culminating in one ridiculous six-month period when I had to pave my dev machine and reinstall everything from scratch every two weeks (yes, this was stupid; yes, I knew it was stupid at the time; no, I…

Or you just had to structure your knowledge bases and settings properly. I can restore dev-part of my pc anytime by installing git and making a few clones. Going to another machine is literally a matter of pasting gitlab credentials and init scripts into a terminal. I can even replay things if they have to repeat in a project because I save all the steps I take into a project/job-wise obtf.txt. Working in a non-automated non-repeatable way is so self-inflicted. It’s akin to not having a car because it has a cost.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#124

Post by jdxcode »

ramon156 wrote: post #123

I've tried both VSC's and JetBrains's (god don't remind me), and they were all a bit mediocre. Especially Jetbrain's felt like a gross overlap that no one tested out. I'll give Zed's vim-mode a try, great post!

do you happen to have any examples of what didn't work well? I'm just curious as I switched to vscode and later jetbrains after a decade with vim and I find all of them to be great, though I usually have to modify an option or 2 to get it how I like

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#125

Post by dxuh »

I think Zed is very close to being amazing, but it might be premature. Just recently I think they fixed a bug where undo broke somehow when you pasted something? I could never quite reproduce it, but I ran into it a couple times a week. You still can't specify indentation settings per-file, which I consider essential. For some reason the GPU acceleration is very fast on computers with good hardware, but very slow on bad hardware. I get that it's current year, but a text editor should run well on a T480 imho. Frequently Zed just starts up and shows some of the other windows. I.e. it just renders like another existing Firefox window and I can't do anything to fix it, but restart. Yesterday multiple Zed windows all just showed my login screen (when I was already logged in). And a very recent problem is that Zed will just not format certain files. I think they switched to formatting via the language server by default? It will just format some files like it's supposed to and other (seemingly randomly chosen) files will just result in an error that tells me it could not format the file.

I have been using Zed for a few months now and I think it's better than anything else, but not good (yet). I feel like it's still young enough that the number of problems is not just decreasing, but there seem to be new problems regularly.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#126

Post by jorams »

rmgk wrote: post #121
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find strange about an open source product funded by VC money is that all of the people are helping make it a better editor and yet when they eventually exit none of the money will go to them. Compare that to vim where it's truly an open source product.

I think you are not very accurate about “open source product” vs something like “community led project”. People being able to adapt their software to their own needs by making changes to the code is exactly what open source is about. This is good. What is a problem though, is to have the code merged in the main repository requires you to gift them the rights to your code (not just license it). They are also not very…

> requires you to gift them the rights to your code (not just license it).

The legally binding section only talks about giving them an infinite free license to it. It does not say you hand over your copyright, so the summary seems correct.

I still don't think you should sign it. The editor code seems to be variously under GPL, AGPL and Apache 2.0, all of which would be fine without one.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#127

Post by siddhant »

eviks wrote: post #79

> all the configuration that goes into it before I can use it to start writing code. Yes, this is awful and something the default should've changed years ago instead of continuing this massive collective time waste. But presumably after 15 years you've configured almost everything you need? At least to the point of matching a static config file? > Lua is great, but one JSON file is even better. No way, it's a strict…

I think I'm actively trying to not do anything dynamic/complicated. :)

If Zed breaks things too much in the future (to the point that its JSON config doesn't let me do something I need to get my work done) I'll probably go back to using Neovim. We'll see how it plays out over time. For now I'm enjoying having less configuration knobs.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#128

Post by aldanor »

carb wrote: post #100
theonething wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always just closed vim to use the terminal You don't mind losing all your editor state? If you don't like working with multiple terminal windows, why not open a term within vim with `:term`?

What editor state are you losing when you leave vim? I run a pretty light vanilla vimrc (60 lines maybe) and with two lines you can enable vim undofiles and returning the cursor to the last location upom reopening a file. For me, quitting vim is functionally equivalent to ^Z?

You may lose LSP state like rust-analyzer's which takes a while to restore. You may lose opened buffers and positions within them (unless you have some session restore logic which may also take time), window layout, copy buffers, edit history and lots of other state.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#129

Post by generalenvelope »

I haven't seen anybody mention NvChad, which is a popular pre-configured neovim setup with lots of documentation (and a community of support). You're still free to customize, but it saves a TON of time in terms of getting to the foundational editor features.

https://github.com/NvChad/NvChad

The author mentions switching from editor to terminal often - NvChad has built in terminal integration so you can toggle floating/vertical/horizontal terminals (whose contents persist when closed) with a simple keybind.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#130

Post by artemave »

st3fan wrote: post #5

> my workflow consists of switching back and forth between a terminal window and an editor window. Same! I run neovim in tmux together with stuff I hack on. I switch beteen tmux windows with shift-arrows and it works so well. I run this full screen in Ghostty. No distractions. I try Zed and VSCode and I always come back to this setup. It works so well for me personally.

Another (neo)vim+tmuxer chiming in. One major missing feature (compared to vscode) is opening file links from the terminal back in vim. It was such a major pain to me, so I ended up writing a tmux plugin to solve it. I thought you might find it useful - https://github.com/artemave/tmux_super_fingers
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