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

sgoel.dev

21–30 of 154 posts

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

#21
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.

Yeah the tmux / vim combo is so hard for me to beat with other editors still. I used Zed exclusively last month thinking the LLM integrations would be a compelling enough reason to finally switch. Like the post author, I'm a little fatigued with config / plugin churn since I switch languages frequently and it always takes some customizing to make vim work well when I do that.

As the author describes though, I found myself copy-pasting a lot between LLM chat and editing buffers. In tmux, I have a really simple function that copies select panes (using tmux capture-pane) into my prompt, or I can give it full files for context. Most of the time though, I can do something like `llm -t 0 -t 1 'what is this libSSL error indicating? here's my code', where -t 0 gives it my vim pane and -t 1 gives it the terminal I'm running things in. I've been surprised that this somewhat rudimentary approach has felt far more effective than the more sophisticated editors I've been trying.

Is this just me? Does it seem to others that the LLM-enabled editors coming out these days still require a lot of copy-pasting of context that can be easily provided with just a dump of tmux output?

Everything-is-just-text might be crude but dang does it make quick and dirty LLM integrations a snap!

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

#24
post #22

No syntax highlighting for LISP or Scheme, so... It's fun, but not something I can use right now.

They don't have syntax highlighting, Zed uses LSP server for each language. I'm sure lisps have them, the question is just to add support in Zed for a particular one.

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

#25

I use cursor and vim now. I have been on vim for 15+ years. Are there LLM extensions that make vim work like all these new AI editors? I would prefer to stay in 100% vim world, but the productivity benefits from LLMs with composer mode and context is so powerful.

Avante is much more active and polished at this point, but there's alternatives:

https://github.com/baketnk/l.nvim (self-shill, docs overhaul needed)

which was inspired by the original:

https://github.com/yacineMTB/dingllm.nvim

Also brand new from ggerganov: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vim

dingllm is very straightforward, you submit your entire selection/buffer and it streams out to the current position. mine is a bit more complex with configurations, context management and so on.

The thing I always tell people is just roll your own. The docs are there, the LLM is there, use them. At the end of the day it's just an http call against text from your buffer to put text in a buffer.

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

#27

Zed doesn't run in terminal, sadly. That's the one reason I actually did end up using vim, even if Gui editors are theoretically highly superior. It's always there in the terminal with me. So you know how it goes, you set up $awesome_ide on a separate screen or what have you; start messing in the terminal, and then for quick edits you grab vim anyway. And once you have the whole edit/test/edit/test loop going, well,…

Check out micro: https://micro-editor.github.io/

It's a terminal editor with mouse support and sane key bindings.

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

#28

I use cursor and vim now. I have been on vim for 15+ years. Are there LLM extensions that make vim work like all these new AI editors? I would prefer to stay in 100% vim world, but the productivity benefits from LLMs with composer mode and context is so powerful.

If you want something like composer but want to stay fully FOSS/CLI oriented, check out https://github.com/ai-christianson/RA.Aid

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

#29
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.

Yeah the tmux / vim combo is so hard for me to beat with other editors still. I used Zed exclusively last month thinking the LLM integrations would be a compelling enough reason to finally switch. Like the post author, I'm a little fatigued with config / plugin churn since I switch languages frequently and it always takes some customizing to make vim work well when I do that. As the author describes though, I found m…

codecompanion.nvim has some pretty nice ways to get context into the llm chat without copying and pasting.

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

#30

I use cursor and vim now. I have been on vim for 15+ years. Are there LLM extensions that make vim work like all these new AI editors? I would prefer to stay in 100% vim world, but the productivity benefits from LLMs with composer mode and context is so powerful.

codecompanion.nvim is pretty cool.
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