I hope this can somehow improve the font situation. Even on a 1440p monitor, the fonts in Zed are much blurrier than any other editor I've used. I Can't even use bitmap fonts like VSCode.
Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
41–50 of 321 posts
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#42Zed also stopped GPUI (their GPU accelerated Rust UI framework) development for now, sadly.
> Hey y'all, GPUI develoment is getting some major brakes put on it. We gotta focus on some business relevant work in 2026, and so I'm going to be pushing off anything that isn't directly related to Zed's use case from now on. However, Nate, former employee #1 at Zed, has started a little side repo that people can keep iterating on if they're interested: https://github.com/gpui-ce/gpui-ce. I'm also a maintainer on that one, and would like to try to help maintain it off of work hours. But I'm not sure how much I'll be able to commit to this
https://discord.com/channels/869392257814519848/144044062864...
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#43Rust GUI is in a tough spot right now with critical dependencies under-staffed and lots of projects half implemented. I think the advent of LLMs has been timed perfectly to set the ecosystem back for a few more years. I wrote about it, and how it affected our development yesterday: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop
This is why I'm using LLMs to help me hand code the GUI for my Rust app in SDL2. I'm hoping that minimizing the low-level, drawing-specific code and maximizing the abstractions in Rust will allow me to easily switch to a better GUI library if one arises. Meanwhile, SDL is not half bad.
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#44Will this make Zed slower, since Wgpu is just a compatibility layer, adding more code?
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#45Rust GUI is in a tough spot right now with critical dependencies under-staffed and lots of projects half implemented. I think the advent of LLMs has been timed perfectly to set the ecosystem back for a few more years. I wrote about it, and how it affected our development yesterday: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop
I'd love to read a writeup of the state of Rust GUI and the ecosystem if you could point me at one.
https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...
I started writing a program that needed to have a table with 1 million rows. This means it needs to be virtualised. Pretty common in GUI libraries. The only Rust GUI library I found that could do this easily was gpui-component (https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component). It also renders text crisply (rules out egui), looks nice with the default style (rules out GTK, FLTK, etc.), isn't web-based (rules out Dioxus), was pretty easy to use and the developers were very responsive.
Definitely the best option today (I would say it's probably the first option that I haven't hated in some way). The only other reasonable choices I would say are:
* egui - doesn't render very nicely and some of the APIs are amateurish, but it's quick and it works. Good option for simple tools.
* Iced - looks nice and seemed to work fairly well. No virtualised lists though.
* Slint (though in some ways it is weird and it requires quite a lot of boilerplate setup).
All the others will cause you pain in some way. I think the "ones to watch" are:
* Makepad - from the demos I've seen this looks really cool, especially for arty GUI projects like synthesizers and car UIs. However it has basically no documentation so don't bother yet.
* Xilem - this is an attempt to make an 100% perfect Rust GUI library, which is cool and all but I imagine it also will never be finished.
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#46Rust GUI is in a tough spot right now with critical dependencies under-staffed and lots of projects half implemented. I think the advent of LLMs has been timed perfectly to set the ecosystem back for a few more years. I wrote about it, and how it affected our development yesterday: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop
Can I humbly ask how are LLMs and Rust GUIs related?
They're just straining already-strained resources on the "contributions" side and pushing interest in other directions (e.g. Electron).
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#47Rust GUI is in a tough spot right now with critical dependencies under-staffed and lots of projects half implemented. I think the advent of LLMs has been timed perfectly to set the ecosystem back for a few more years. I wrote about it, and how it affected our development yesterday: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop
> Rust GUI is in a tough spot right now with critical dependencies under-staffed and lots of projects half implemented.
Down the stack, low-level 3D acceleration is in a rough spot too unfortunately. The canonical Rust Vulkan wrapper (Ash) hasn't cut a release for nearly two years, and even git main is far behind the latest spec updates.
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that Zed has understandably and transparently abandoned supporting GPUI as an open source endeavour except to the extent contributions align with its business mission.
I remember when that came out, but I'm not sure I understand the concern. They use GPUI, so therefore they MUST keep it working and supportable, even if updating it isn't their current priority. Or are you saying they have a closed source fork now? Actually, this story is literally them changing their renderer on linux, so they are maintaining it. > except to the extent contributions align with its business mission I…
I don't know what the message means exactly, but I can't plan to build on GPUI with it out there, especially when crates that don't carry that caveat are suffering from being under-resourced.
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, fair enough, but [at least] wikipedia agrees with that take. > Graphical user interfaces traditionally use retained mode-style API design,[2][5] but immediate mode GUIs instead use an immediate mode-style API design, in which user code directly specifies the GUI elements to draw in the user input loop. For example, rather than having a CreateButton() function that a user would call once to instantiate a butto…
Wikipedia clearly has never been shown to have faults regarding accuracy.
{{cn}}
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#50The Zed editor seems kind of silly to me. I would rather my editor works in many possible environments maybe even one that only has a tty interface.
What advantages are people finding with this editor other then high fidelity scrolling.