Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

zed.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 642 posts

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

#51

Post by Octoth0rpe »

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 started using Zed.

- They seem reasonably responsive to feedback. There was some contention around how search/replace was initially implemented, and the current builds have something much more usable IMO. I'm not sure how much that was driven by community feedback, but the changes were great.

- The debug syntax tree mode is a really neat feature that I think demonstrates how much more advanced zed is under the hood than older editors that are doing syntax highlighting via regex.

There are a few downsides that I'm hoping get addressed soon:

- The collaboration workflow/security isn't very clear to me. You sign in via github (no other option???), there are 'contacts' (I guess these are github usernames?), and 'channels' (where do these live? on zed's servers?). I would really like to know if I can self-host the chat server and use a company oauth provider rather than github. If the diffs being passed around are going through zed's servers, that may be a showstopper for the company I work for as well. If they're p2p and encrypted, maybe not.

- I would love to see ollama integration. This + continue is the only reason why I spend any amount of time in vscode now. There's an issue for it here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4424

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

#52

Post by porsager »

AlexAndScripts wrote: post #5

How many people find real time sharing helpful? I've never found it to be beneficial. I'm curious.

It is such a game changer for me. Pair programming or multi pair programming if you will, suddenly has 0 barriers. Including others in your session with no overhead changes things completely. Before I would rarely include others in my processes because it cost too much. Now I'll do it whenever... Switched from sublime and got my coworkers macs just to be able to use zed and work in this way.

It is extremely important it works fast and fluid, and zed is the only one I've tried that nails it. There are still a few things that needs tweaking wrt. undo history, but I'm sure they'll get that to feel intuitive in the end.

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

#53

Post by toastercat »

This is really exciting. I currently use Sublime Text 4, and coupled with SublimeLSP, it does almost everything I need. What's missing is good debugger support and UI integration. What's the story like for Zed on that front? I briefly scanned the homepage and did not see mention of a debugger.

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

#55

Post by misternugget »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #34
misternugget wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What about Windows?

I think that is on the roadmap too, but possibly further down.

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

#56

Post by dave_universetf »

ushakov wrote: post #4

Also take a look at their freshly open-sourced Rust UI Framework (GPUI): https://www.gpui.rs

Worth noting that, like many immediate mode UIs, it seems to not integrate with OS accessibility infrastructure at all. That means any UI built with it will be a black box to anyone who needs accessibility tools like VoiceOver, text magnification, or semantic navigation.

Hopefully that's fixable :/

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

#57

Post by DistractionRect »

zozbot234 wrote: post #37
DistractionRect wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real time document editing and sync is actually a tall order. To make it editor/tool agnostic you'd need some kind of overlay fs + first/third party support in the various editors (as most editors don't hot reload file changes; they expect the files they have open not to be changing underfoot).

Apache Wave (née Google Wave) is a thing.

Was a thing.

After almost a decade it never got off the ground. And while it might address the core problem (collaborative editing), that still leaves the ecosystem problem: fuse mounts, first/third party adoption in the editor or via extensions/plugins. Arguably that's drawing the rest of the f*** owl.

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

#58

Post by AlexAndScripts »

brimstedt wrote: post #44
pjmlp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, for me it is a gimmick without much value over a screen sharing session.

I disagree. For example, in vscode if the sharer start a http-service the port can be port forwarded through the session so anyone in the session can interact with the service. Pretty neat and useful!

That is pretty cool, I didn't know about that. I could see it being useful in some niche circumstances.

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

#59

Post by kvark »

misternugget wrote: post #15
packetlost wrote: post #3

I hope this leads to Zed being ported to other platforms (Linux, please!)

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

How are you planning to tackle the GPU API differences?

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

#60

Post by drewdevault »

Consider discarding the CLA if you anticipate third-party contributions. If you need to verify provenance, the Developer Certificate of Origin is a better approach. Otherwise, this (correctly) reads as a project which intends to take advantage of FOSS contributors for a while before pulling the rug and making it non-free again.
Post reply on HN