331–340 of 880 posts
It's what kickstarted Electron which eventually gave us VSCode, Slack, and lots of HN comments about memory usage. It also had the sweetest default theme of any code editor. RIP.
Electron is both an amazing enabling technology, and also an artifact of the sad state of affairs for computing platforms. One could imagine a world where strong standards have been established which would allow you to easily deploy lean native applications across a wide variety of platforms. Instead we ended up in this bizzare world where if you want to maintain a desktop GUI app, you either need a large team to sup…
I may be wrong in the moment, but I base my arguments on trends. Processing power, storage costs and bandwidth are always improving. So human productivity should always take priority over efficiency as time progresses.
I'd vote for a real Web 3.0 based on first principles like declarative and data-driven programming, idempotence, immutability, one-shot scripting (perhaps even a Turing-INcomplete DSL) for initial render without side effects (like CSS variables but for HTML), dynamic element loading with something like HTMX, secure server-side includes, distributed databases using Paxos/Raft, even distributed computing with a real Docker that provides an actual secure sandbox and repeatable builds of untrusted secure/private code (maybe with something like homomorphic encryption). I can go on and on about what real (not phantom) tech looks like. And it looks nothing like SPAs.
Also I think a lot of people recognize the need for this stuff, so ideas aren't the problem. The problem is, always has been, and always will be funding. In fact, my single greatest disappointment about the modern web is that stuff like advertising and eBay got coopted so there was never a viable way to make enough residual income to live on after the Dot Bomb around 2000/2001. The closest things we have are Uber and donating plasma. So we have a generation of highly-effective programmers spending the most productive years of their lives at a day job making rent, which is why rent increases. Hustling without understanding that the hustle itself is the failure when viewed through this lens.
Blah I dunno why I write this obvious stuff anymore. It just ain't never gonna happen. It may as well be impossible. Or I should say, it may take another 20 years to get here, and I just don't think we have that long anymore.
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Well, unless it is paid, I don't know how would you continue to toil for years making great editor. And unless it is free, gain a good market share to continue to support. I hope you would have some solution to this conundrum.
We plan to monetize collaboration. Zed is a collaborative platform disguised as a world-class code editor.
Founder of Atom here. We're building the spiritual successor to Atom over at https://zed.dev . We learned a lot with Atom and had a great time, but it always fell short of our vision. With Zed we're going to get it right. Written in Rust, custom native UI framework, engineered to be collaborative. Just starting our private alpha this week, so the timing of this announcement feels quite fitting. Here's a talk I gave l…
Please make zed capable of running in a terminal. If I could have a modern editor that can run in the terminal and had a nice GUI, I would definitely pick it up. There's still many instances where I'm working on a remote dev machine, on my iPad, over a serial connection, inside of tmux, where a terminal based text editor is a necessity.
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No it's perfectly reasonable. That open source software forms some part of a commons is not really a thing in practice. Open source software is ran by maintainers, those maintainers own the projects, and they do with the software what they deem fit. And even if it were, VSCode is basically a rewrite of Atom that reuses a big chunk of the original codebase, they're the same sort of project serving the same sort of mar…
> VSCode is basically a rewrite of Atom that reuses a big chunk of the original codebase It isn't true anymore then saying Slack is rewrite of Atom. While it is using electron, editor and IDE aren't from Atom.
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I come from an era where the more fully featured your IDE, the less likely you were to truly understand what was going on under the hood. I strongly recommend everyone spend their first ~5 years coding in vim or some other basic text editor (preferably through the terminal), before leaning on an IDE to solve their problems for them. That said, VSCode is now my go-to IDE, and I haven't opened WebStorm in probably ~6 m…
Would you even do that with C# ? I actually dislike computer science classes which won't let me just use an IDE. No one can memorize the .net 7 API
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IMO the killer thing that VSCode has over all the other editors is the wealth of extensions and a certain degree of simplicity. What are your plans for Zed in terms of extensibility and are you aligning more towards making something beefy and full-featured like the IntelliJ offerings or something more "lightweight" like VSCode or Sublime?
We plan to make Zed extensible via WebAssembly, but we're taking a different approach than we did with Atom. Our goal is to make Zed fast, stable, and collaborative first, extensible second. We'll be taking a more conservative approach with our APIs to ensure we can preserve our core values even as users add extensions. Our goal is for Zed to have the lightweight and snappy vibe of Sublime with the power of a more fu…
Founder of Atom here. We're building the spiritual successor to Atom over at https://zed.dev . We learned a lot with Atom and had a great time, but it always fell short of our vision. With Zed we're going to get it right. Written in Rust, custom native UI framework, engineered to be collaborative. Just starting our private alpha this week, so the timing of this announcement feels quite fitting. Here's a talk I gave l…
Should development ever wind down, you already have the advantage of being able to announce it as "Zed's dead, baby" instead of clunky corporate euphemisms.
I think Electron is an amazing legacy to leave. Like many I would like it to use less resources, but it is still a grest idea.