I don't see any way to monetize a free text editor but I see that they're hiring and also hired talented devs like Thorsten Ball already. What's the business model here?
be cool and gain traction, to later extract profits?
Zed on Linux Is Here
301–310 of 703 posts
Re: Zed on Linux Is Here
#302I 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…
Okay, call me weird, but why our standards have fallen so low?
VSCode may appear fast, but still has massive latency. The Zed website claims 97ms.
I can feel it is laggy.
Why can't we have response time under 1ms? Even 5ms would be a massive improvement.
For me latency is a massive productivity killer as it feels like walking in a swamp and it always puts me off.
Re: Zed on Linux Is Here
#303First impressions: 1. curl | sh, seriously 2. The default theme is so low-contrast that I seriously struggled to read text. I could not find something that was, like, actual white on actual black. 3. I can figure out how to enable Copilot, but not to open a file. (I had to resort to “zed file.cpp” from a terminal.) 4. vim keybindings are not bad, but also not perfect. 5. It feels… laggy? Isn't this supposed to be fas…
I couldn't even get it to run at all. It's in the official repo of my distro, but when I installed that package and tried to execute it, the binary launched another executable with a 'zed-cli://' URI pointing to some socket/named pipe it tried to create under /tmp (but didn't) as an argument, then just sat there doing nothing. Seems like it's doing some sort of local client-server implementation -- not sure why a standalone desktop app would be designed that way.
It never spawned a window, and possibly because the process is itself launching another process, nothing is output to stdout or stderr to indicate what's going on.
Re: Zed on Linux Is Here
#304Just a suggestion. One of the best features of pure text editors (and incredible, not all of them implement it) is autosave keeping the "unsaved" state of the file. For example, if you make some changes in a file (new or not), don't save the changes, close and open the editor, the state of the opened files are kept like I never had closed the editor. The unsaved files are still unsaved. New edited files are still the…
I think Emacs does this too, if you configure it, or even by default, using its backup files, that go by #some_name# or similar.
Emacs definitely does this. I have saved many files from power outages. M-x recover-file, but the user has to recover the file right away when he opens it again or else a new auto-save will overwrite the old one. I think that's the case.
Re: Zed on Linux Is Here
#305First impressions: 1. curl | sh, seriously 2. The default theme is so low-contrast that I seriously struggled to read text. I could not find something that was, like, actual white on actual black. 3. I can figure out how to enable Copilot, but not to open a file. (I had to resort to “zed file.cpp” from a terminal.) 4. vim keybindings are not bad, but also not perfect. 5. It feels… laggy? Isn't this supposed to be fas…
Re: #2, use
"buffer_font_weight": 600
in the settings.json to fix the font rendering.
Re: Zed on Linux Is Here
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. They are on front page of HN with "zed on Linux is here". We got to have some standards, don't you think?
WSL is a pretty niche version of "Linux". I would guess that close to 0% of what makes it to the front page of HN had a QA team that explicitly tested it on WSL.
niche?
WSL (all distros combined) is the 2nd most popular Linux environment. Only behind Ubuntu.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-t...
Re: Zed on Linux Is Here
#307I 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…
Okay, call me weird, but why our standards have fallen so low? VSCode may appear fast, but still has massive latency. The Zed website claims 97ms. I can feel it is laggy. Why can't we have response time under 1ms? Even 5ms would be a massive improvement. For me latency is a massive productivity killer as it feels like walking in a swamp and it always puts me off.
I agree with you -- but aiming for 1ms performance is pretty hard. That is 1/1000th of a second. Your keyboard probably has higher latency than that. Physics cannot be defeated in this regard.
Re: Zed on Linux Is Here
#308I'm never using this editor unless it can install itself and work completely offline, without going for downloads and making web requests , it is crucial, especially after totally not related xz fiasco and the white house praise for rust.
If you want a fast, low-memory-footprint editor with no spurious network connectivity and a conventional desktop UI, check out Geany: https://geany.org/
Re: Zed on Linux Is Here
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that many parts of the ecosystem require that you use the official MS build. You can't connect to the Marketplace and some extensions outright can't be used with a custom build.
You can however down the extension from the website and install it from the terminal. codium --install-extension {path to .vsix}
You are able to do so, but is it allowed by the website's terms of service? It may say that you are granted the license to extensions only with Microsoft builds of vscode.
Microsoft isn't a stranger to distribution restrictions and software usage limitations. I remember uploading Visual C# Express 2010 (freely downloaded from Microsoft's website, without license keys) to a local file sharing website to ease the downloading for my local study group and got a letter from Microsoft's lawyer to take it down.
After that our study group transitioned to Mono with Monodevelop.
Re: Zed on Linux Is Here
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
"reading before you run" eliminates all convenience of the one liner. Their linux docs are way better because it shows you exactly how to do it on a per-distribution basis. when it comes time to update the software I would prefer to know how exactly it is installed so that I can update it correctly.
> when it comes time to update the software I would prefer to know how exactly it is installed so that I can update it correctly Then read the script you complain about.
I do it from time to time, but it's time-consuming (proper install scripts are long), defeating the whole goal of "one-line installer".
With proper installers I never read it's install scripts.