Live data from Hacker News

Sequoia backs Zed

zed.dev

181–190 of 346 posts

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#181
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plugins were kind of it's selling point, yet it was pretty easy to mess it up with Plugins to the point of it being unusable - and not knowing what plug-in caused that.

The same curse emacs suffers from. What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date? I remember the extremes of the utter unconstrained chaos of Emacs and the rigid ultra-high-boilerplate approach of the Eclipse IDE. Emacs was fun to hack on, but impractical to use as an IDE, because if you installed enough plugins to make it useful as an IDE, it was broken half the time (my experience, many years ago.)…

> What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date?

Unironically, maybe VS Code.

Everything simple you can do with it, either comes built-in, or within Github/Microsoft ecosystem, or has an official plugin that gets recommended and featured by the editor itself. Plugins from individual hobbyist developers I have, I can almost count in one hand. (VSCodeVim being the most important one)

Now I compare this to my Neovim setup, and that one is basically running on charity from OSS developers.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#182
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human. Hate cancel culture as much as the next techbro, but since y'all point out they're "a delightful human", it'd be interesting to see how Nathan then responds to concerns raised in some quarters: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604

[flagged]

Can I replace "islamophobic" in your comment with "antisemitic" and not have my comment deleted or my profile banned on this site?

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#183
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Especially not having been familiar with who Sequoia is. Altman, Huang, Musk, etc.

What do you mean by that list? They pretty much have every single big tech company in their portfolio.

They have some house cleaning to do in their leadership before I am willing to use a product they back.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#184
Exciting ideas! I'll take a look at this again in several years when they aren't trying to rebuild everything from the ground up from first principles.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#185
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plugins were kind of it's selling point, yet it was pretty easy to mess it up with Plugins to the point of it being unusable - and not knowing what plug-in caused that.

The same curse emacs suffers from. What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date? I remember the extremes of the utter unconstrained chaos of Emacs and the rigid ultra-high-boilerplate approach of the Eclipse IDE. Emacs was fun to hack on, but impractical to use as an IDE, because if you installed enough plugins to make it useful as an IDE, it was broken half the time (my experience, many years ago.)…

Emacs has eglot built in these days and it works quite well as an IDE

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#186

Whether this is good or bad for Zed remains to be seen. I wonder though what the play is here for Sequoia - like all VCs they’re looking for the possibility of a huge return. I don’t see how “just” an editor (even with paying users) can generate a 10x return. So what is the larger vision here?

JetBrains would be a good case study. They also arguably have a lot more IP.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#187
post #108
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code. The modern Sublime Text…

Slower than VS Code?? I guess it's just poorly optimized for Linux. On MacOS, I find it to be significantly faster than VS Code, and the only alternative I've found that's in the ballpark of Sublime (from the performance aspect).

I'm on Linux and performance is the reason I switched from VSCode to Zed. It works great for me.

Perhaps the same issue that had Zed fail to recognize their GPU also tanked their performance.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#188
post #20

I love the spirit of Zed. From the principles to the low-level implementation details, it all screams "good taste". It's immensely interesting as an object of study (the code is great, from GPUI all the way up). Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.

Sublime Text solved this 17 years ago with the 40-year-old shareware model. It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.

Zed works on Linux/Win/MacOS. I'm also frankly skeptical that ST feels that much faster, Zed is pretty darn fast, far faster than any Electron app.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#189
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sublime Text solved this 17 years ago with the 40-year-old shareware model. It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.

Zed works on Linux/Win/MacOS. I'm also frankly skeptical that ST feels that much faster, Zed is pretty darn fast, far faster than any Electron app.

ST is not electron..

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#190
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same curse emacs suffers from. What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date? I remember the extremes of the utter unconstrained chaos of Emacs and the rigid ultra-high-boilerplate approach of the Eclipse IDE. Emacs was fun to hack on, but impractical to use as an IDE, because if you installed enough plugins to make it useful as an IDE, it was broken half the time (my experience, many years ago.)…

> What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date? Unironically, maybe VS Code. Everything simple you can do with it, either comes built-in, or within Github/Microsoft ecosystem, or has an official plugin that gets recommended and featured by the editor itself. Plugins from individual hobbyist developers I have, I can almost count in one hand. (VSCodeVim being the most important one) Now I compare this…

What about writing a quick ad-hoc command? Something I would have found useful today, which I would have done in emacs fifteen years ago, was writing a command to parse a file in a log, generate a curl command from it, and copy the command to the clipboard. Could I do that in VSCode without creating an entire project?
Post reply on HN