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Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

zed.dev

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Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

#411

I'm generally a big fan of zed and have been using it for 60%ish of my dev time for 6 months or so. A couple of nice things to note: - It really is remarkably responsive,and makes one really notice how UNresponsive everything else is. I have reasonably fast machines, so we're not talking about the difference between 5ms typing lag and 500ms, but it's still pretty surprising. VSCode never felt slow on my macs until I…

> older editors that are doing syntax highlighting via regex. I mean, Emacs, which can probably be considered the oldest code editor at this point, got built-in tree-sitter (which is what Zed uses under the hood) support in the last release. So it's not really related to editors being new or old

As I understand, tree-sitter implementation in Emacs is currently more like a foundation for development / adoption by plugins, it's not really usable as-is today.

Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

#413
post #398

I was excited, but then I saw it was Mac only. Weird choice, most programmers will never even look at this editor.

I don't think that's quite fair. The stackoverflow survey shows a large number of developers have made the move to Mac. Certainly not the majority, but a very healthy share. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-t... Anecdotally, Mac has become very popular at my workplace, with a growing number of developers choosing Mac for their primary device. We mostly target Linux, so regardless of workstat…

I don't really consider the SO survey useful anymore. It seems to be hyper-selected to just Silicon Valley techbros, instead of either the more general US tech industry, or the worldwide tech industry.

If the Silicon Valley is just a bubble, then the two bubbles I live in (life-long FOSS/Linux guy, but also deep into the hosting/transit/non-eyeball end of the Internet), every single Mac owner I know does not run OSX, but only wanted it for the physical build itself; they either run Windows because of job reasons, or they run Linux because they like to get shit done.

Everyone else I know is slowly joining #TeamFramework. Having made what seems to be the best Ryzen laptop on the market is certainly turning heads, and congrats for pulling it off.

Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

#414

I like a lot of what I see of this but 1. Whenever I open a new window it fills the full height and width of my screen. 2. I just have no faith in a product which hand waves how it's going to make money.

Why would you need to have "faith" in an open source product? You can always get an older copy or build it yourself, or it could be forked by the community if it's popular enough and the original gets completely abandoned. For that matter, why does an open source product need to make money in the first place?

> Why would you need to have "faith" in an open source product?

Well, even ignoring the central servers which are required for all of Zed’s collaboration features, I’m not personally interested in maintaining my own persona fork of Zed

So that means I need to “have faith” that someone, whether a paid team of developers or an unpaid group of volunteers, will continue developing, or at least maintaining the project.

Or that it gets abandoned in a state that I can keep using it indefinitely, I guess.

> For that matter, why does an open source product need to make money in the first place?

That’s a fine question in general, but in the announcement they pretty clearly say that they are hoping to make money with unspecified future subscription services, not that they don’t need to make money

Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

#415

I opened a random python project on my machine in Zed and it automatically loaded up an LSP for python. It looks like it's using the same one as my emacs uses (pyright), but it presents completion choices in a not particularly useful order. Typing `os.p` gives me for instance as completion choices: pwritev pwrite putenv popen pipe path P_ALL P_PID pread pardir P_PGID P_WAIT ... but then I type 'a' and then backspace…

Interesting. I sometimes have the same issue with pyright (via pylance) in VS Code on Win.

Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

#416
just downloaded it.

pros:

* god damn this is fast... vscode feels so bloated by comparison. * lsp integration works great. loaded up a rust project I have and it has good support for autocompletion

bad: what keeps me from using it as my daily driver for now

* no support for integrated debugger. I use rustrover for rust dev sepcifically because its so easy to set debugger stuff. * daily workflow inolves entering a docker container or sshing into a remote server to edit code. I don't see anywhere in zed where I can do this.

bottom line: I see a lot of potential here. I'd love to use this when I'm just editing some rust code and I need zero distractions but the lack of ssh remote makes this a no-go for all of my paid work at the moment.

Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Engineer at Zed here. Linux port is on our roadmap. Hopefully we'll get it done this year!

Will you be using GNUstep for the port?

Nobody wants to use GNUStep in 2024.

Their UI framework is also rendering via the GPU, so it's more likely they'd wrap it in a GTK/Qt/whatever window and then just render accordingly. You don't need GNUStep for it since there's little "mac"-isms you need to cover.

Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

#418

I'm generally a big fan of zed and have been using it for 60%ish of my dev time for 6 months or so. A couple of nice things to note: - It really is remarkably responsive,and makes one really notice how UNresponsive everything else is. I have reasonably fast machines, so we're not talking about the difference between 5ms typing lag and 500ms, but it's still pretty surprising. VSCode never felt slow on my macs until I…

I’m really picky about my tools in general and latency in particular, and I give Zed a spin from time to time, it’s sweet. Clean, minimal design aesthetic, tree-sitter, tight code, it’s a nice bit of work and I dig it a lot. But emacs 29 with the right flags and a tuned GC (no one does this! it’s got a heap-size from the 80s!) is just as snappy and has more amazing packages than VSCode. There’s a market for people wh…

People are asking what settings would be useful to tweak. Check out the following:

- gcmh -package and gcmh-mode and/or gc-cons-threshold variable (former should take over the latter)

- read-process-output-max

- jit-lock-defer-time

- package-native-compile

Doom Emacs sets gcmh in its initialization so tweaking that might not be needed there. You may still want to touch gcmh-high-cons-threshold and gcmh-idle-delay-factor. Here are mine currently:

    (setq gc-cons-threshold (* 1024 1024 1024))
    (setq gcmh-high-cons-threshold (* 1024 1024 1024))
    (setq gcmh-idle-delay-factor 20)
    (setq jit-lock-defer-time 0.05)
    (setq read-process-output-max (* 1024 1024))
    (setq package-native-compile t)
I've done nothing scientific to check out if these help at all, though, so take them with salt. With and without these, emacs seems quite sluggish at least on a Macbook, in certain modes. On Linux things seem to be a bit better.

Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> older editors that are doing syntax highlighting via regex. I mean, Emacs, which can probably be considered the oldest code editor at this point, got built-in tree-sitter (which is what Zed uses under the hood) support in the last release. So it's not really related to editors being new or old

As I understand, tree-sitter implementation in Emacs is currently more like a foundation for development / adoption by plugins, it's not really usable as-is today.

Emacs already had tree-sitter before 29, just not built in. You can do syntax highlighting[1] and structured editing with it.[2] What is missing for it to be usable in your view?

[1] https://emacs-tree-sitter.github.io/syntax-highlighting/

[2] https://github.com/meain/evil-textobj-tree-sitter

Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

#420
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> older editors that are doing syntax highlighting via regex. I mean, Emacs, which can probably be considered the oldest code editor at this point, got built-in tree-sitter (which is what Zed uses under the hood) support in the last release. So it's not really related to editors being new or old

It's not just tree-sitter that makes zed feel snappy. If you're using a reasonably fast language-server, which rust-analyzer apparently is (I didn't know this using vscode), the autocomplete & intentions feel instantaneous. I think the team has learned a lot from previous editor implementations (they were the core team of atom that was notoriously slow), and so they've had an opportunity to do a lot of stuff right. F…

I've been impressed with the C++ clangd language server snappiness in Zed compared to both CLion (my old favorite) and Emacs (apple of my eye for 2.5 yrs).

I always thought the major slowness was coming from clangd itself, so I'm surprised and impressed to see that Zed appears to be quicker on this front. I might be using Zed as a 'second opinion' editor because of this.

However, now I'm used to the infinite customizability and coziness of Emacs, it's going to be hard for me to move across to Zed permanently.

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