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Leaving Neovim for Zed

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Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#211

Post by lelanthran »

Aeolun wrote: post #146
jph00 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I feel the same way. The fact that Zed uses the system clipboard as the default register in vim mode, for instance, made it impossible to use in practice for me -- having every yank replace my clipboard was a bit of a nightmare!

I don’t know. That feels perfectly reasonable for what I imagine is 99% of all developers, so while sad, I can imagine why that use case is not very high on their list of priorities.

> That feels perfectly reasonable for what I imagine is 99% of all developers, so while sad, I can imagine why that use case is not very high on their list of priorities.

I think you might be under the impression that what the GP is complaining about is having the default copy and paste go to the system clipboard.

This is not what is happening; in Vim all modifications are saved to the default register. Making the default register the system clipboard is annoying, because the following happens:

Insert a newline? Newline replaces whatever is in the clipboard.

Switch around two letters in a typo with `xp`? That text replaces the contents of the system clipboard.

Remove a word? Change a word? Add a new word? All replace the contents of the system clipboard.

Run a macro that changes things around? Nukes the system clipboard.

I don't think that 99% of developers want this behaviour. What they want is that when they explicitly copy something, it must be reflected in the system clipboard.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#212

Post by kamaal »

kstenerud wrote: post #191

> I was already a keyboard maximalist from previous jobs where I learned speed = productivity I've never understood this. In over 30 years in the industry, I've not once held a job where my keyboard speed had a noticeable effect on my productivity. Even when I had to type one-handed for a month, my productivity was unchanged. The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day. And even with a raw 10x th…

>>I've not once held a job where my keyboard speed had a noticeable effect on my productivity.

Features like vim/emacs macros do way than increasing the speed of accomplishing a task. They are a way of converting O(n^k) manual tasks to a O(1) task. These are ways of doing lots of work in fewer steps.

This is if your work involves lots of text heavy lifting tasks.

Speed many times is just a unintended but a welcome side effect. Real value is in not doing manual drudgery.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#213

Post by ReleaseCandidat »

lelanthran wrote: post #206
kstenerud wrote: post #191

> I was already a keyboard maximalist from previous jobs where I learned speed = productivity I've never understood this. In over 30 years in the industry, I've not once held a job where my keyboard speed had a noticeable effect on my productivity. Even when I had to type one-handed for a month, my productivity was unchanged. The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day. And even with a raw 10x th…

> The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day. And even with a raw 10x that amount to account for variance, changes, debugging etc, you'd be at 12 lines PER HOUR. Being generous at a full 80 chars per line, you have a maximum of 1000 keypresses per hour, or an average of one every 3 seconds. Even doubling your typing speed or keyboard response time would have no discernible effect. Just my person…

> Emacs `M-x sql-connect` is much easier for me to do than to look up, in VS Code, what shortcut has been assigned to the extension I use that does the same thing [...]

> removes the whole command interface

`C-shift-P` works the same in VS Code (and other editors) as `M-x` in Emacs. VS Code (and many other Editors, like Sublime Text) has the same "keyboard only" usage possibility as Emacs.

I've switched from Emacs (after more than 20 years) to VS Code to Sublime Text and did not need to change my habits. And to be honest, Sublime Merge is what Magit always wanted to be, a useful combination of GUI (for the "easy stuff") and a textual interface for git.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#214

Post by petre »

alberth wrote: post #12

I initially loved Zed. But as their focus has shifted to building Collaboration & AI features, and still haven’t yet nailed just being a good/great base editor, its become less useful to me. I still have a lot of hope for Zed. But for the time being, I’ve switched back to my old editor & IDE … and I’ll try Zed again at a much later date.

Doesn't highlight Perl so I'll pass until it does. Looks snappy otherwise. Back to VSCodium, I guess.

Collaboration, AI, chat, couldn't care less. Hopefully they can be disabled. I used Atom for a few years before they discontinued it. Yes, it was quite sluggish but otherwise it was usable, it had multiline editing and other sublime-isms, so I didn't have learn how to use an entirely new editor. If Zed can replace Sublime, Atom or VSCode for me that's great, otherwise I'll pass. I'm only using the basic code editor features, no git, no collaboration, no integrated terminal, no nonsense. Multiple cursors, PCRE matching and dark theme (preferably molokay) are a must.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#215

Post by Asraelite »

owenpalmer wrote: post #208
kstenerud wrote: post #191

> I was already a keyboard maximalist from previous jobs where I learned speed = productivity I've never understood this. In over 30 years in the industry, I've not once held a job where my keyboard speed had a noticeable effect on my productivity. Even when I had to type one-handed for a month, my productivity was unchanged. The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day. And even with a raw 10x th…

> The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day This is a ridiculous statement. Citation needed.

This is a relatively widely known claim, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/966800/mythical-man-mont...

It's debatable how accurate it is, but I think the ultimate productivity of developers is actually surprisingly lower than you would think.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#216

Post by lelanthran »

ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #213
lelanthran wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day. And even with a raw 10x that amount to account for variance, changes, debugging etc, you'd be at 12 lines PER HOUR. Being generous at a full 80 chars per line, you have a maximum of 1000 keypresses per hour, or an average of one every 3 seconds. Even doubling your typing speed or keyboard response time would have no discernible effect. Just my person…

> Emacs `M-x sql-connect` is much easier for me to do than to look up, in VS Code, what shortcut has been assigned to the extension I use that does the same thing [...] > removes the whole command interface `C-shift-P` works the same in VS Code (and other editors) as `M-x` in Emacs. VS Code (and many other Editors, like Sublime Text) has the same "keyboard only" usage possibility as Emacs. I've switched from Emacs (a…

> `C-shift-P` works the same in VS Code (and other editors) as `M-x` in Emacs.

I slightly disagree with this assertion. I upvoted you anyway because I think it's mostly correct for those who aren't full into Emacs :-)

My reason for disagreement: `M-x` in Emacs gives you access to every single thing that the editor can do (like the function to move the point forward with `forward-char`). The `C-s-p` in VSCode doesn't give you the same.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#217

Post by brabel »

imjonse wrote: post #202
_7tgr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, oddly, they chose to do their own Scheme implementation for it. Not that I'm against Scheme in particular, but a lot of other people justifiably seem to be. It doesn't have the speed or learn-it-in-10-minutes of Lua (nvim) or the historical excuse of Elisp/Vimscript (emacs/vim) or the ecosystem of Typescript (vscode). Strange choice.

They already have Scheme based config files and I'd say it is simpler that Lua.

It can't really be simpler than Lua, come'on. Maybe if you already know Lisp, but for people who know C-like languages (Java, Javascript, C++) Lua should be much more "obvious".

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#218

Post by skitter »

owenpalmer wrote: post #208
kstenerud wrote: post #191

> I was already a keyboard maximalist from previous jobs where I learned speed = productivity I've never understood this. In over 30 years in the industry, I've not once held a job where my keyboard speed had a noticeable effect on my productivity. Even when I had to type one-handed for a month, my productivity was unchanged. The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day. And even with a raw 10x th…

> The average developer averages 10 lines of finished code per day This is a ridiculous statement. Citation needed.

According to Stroustrup & co, it's less: They see a good dev optimistically writing 2k lines of finished non-test code a year, and that's when rewriting code ¹, so that checks out! (To be clear, I'm joking and agree with your sentiment, but they really did say that in an official reply to the US gov)

¹: https://downloads.regulations.gov/ONCD-2023-0002-0020/attach...

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#219

Post by dragonelite »

linsomniac wrote: post #71
sph wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paraphrase an old quote, "every new text editor grows until it is bloated with collaboration and AI features." Thank god we still have vim and Emacs.

Except, as I understand it, the collaboration features were one of the primary things they wanted to do with Zed. So this isn't a case of bloat. The first blog post on the site is "How CRDTs make multiplayer text editing part of Zed's DNA".

I always wondered are people really doing this collaboration stuff. I tried it at the start of the lock downs era. But i quickly found it annoying, but maybe its because the implementation was just bad back then.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#220

Post by dominicrose »

There was a time when I was learning how to use Vim and I saw my boss use the mouse to do a simple copy and paste and there was kind of a disconnect between these two ways of using the computer. From my experience a good mouse is better than a power tool like Vim, not for copy/paste, but just because it can reach the whole screen very fast and it works with all software although limited in text terminals. Learning Vi(m) was still helpful because it's installed even on most docker images but that's not the "default" way of typing text. Most software accepts mouse double clicks or triple clicks and standard ways of using the keyboard (including use shift+ctrl+left and things like that), so that's how I like my IDE to work as well. Multi-cursor is great and it's good that I don't miss it outside of the IDE because it wouldn't be useful outside of it anyway.
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