I love this, they are doing things in the best way from my perspective. They've used the best copyleft licenses (GPL3 + AGPL3) and they are clear that free/open source software does not mean you cannot still make money. As they say, commoditize your compliment. I wish them success, and this move makes me want to look into this tool a lot more now.
Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
521–530 of 642 posts
Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
#522Zed developers, if you read this, please get inspired by Cursors "Fix it" button that you can click on any error. It simply starts a new chat with the code context and error message, suggesting possible fixes. I'm currently learning Rust and this is such a powerup that I honestly wouldn't know how to learn anything without.
Zed developers, please don't. I don't want my core editor potentially sending out my code to who knows where or wasting cycles analyzing it. If people want this just let it be a plugin.
It seems inevitable we’ll also be able to run LLMs locally, which would make this type of feature more appealing.
Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
#523AI helpers, Chats and Calls??? Microsoft log-in, Commercial plans, Telemetry? Seems like an overload of everything for an editor - more distractions not a new way to code. Def sticking with good old nvim for some longer time, no better editing experience engineered yet
yeah i noticed that too, whats so hard to just get a simple editor that gets the job done without so much wasted energy and code.
Why is another one of those needed? Personally I'm excited about the idea of a feature-rich editor that is still blazing fast.
Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
#524This looks really nice, but I am confused why the install is over 350mb, including a 300mb binary. I thought Electron-based stuff was big but this is even somehow more!?
The core app itself is 100% Rust, but it supports integration via Microsoft's Language Server Protocol[0][1]. In practice, this means you will be running daemons locally for each language, which may be written in any language. Often these daemons are written in NodeJS since the reference implementation[2] is in NodeJS. [0] https://zed.dev/docs/adding-new-languages#lsp [1] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-p…
It doesn’t follow that a language server written with JavaScript and run via node will bloat the binary by hundreds of MB. Are they bundling a node runtime too?
Maybe if they are embedding dozens of language servers and runtimes it could bloat the binary, but I assumed the extensions and language servers would be downloaded on demand.
But a rust binary by itself shouldn’t be that large. LSP is just a simple json protocol, so parsing it doesn’t require hundreds of MB.
Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
#525I just tried Zed and it is definitely really pleasant to use. I'd need at least a Java LSP to use it for real (and preferably general LSP support so I can code in my own programming languages with it) but I can see a lot of promise. If they ship a Linux release so I could use it on my desktop too they could win me over from Sublime Text/IntelliJ.
> and preferably general LSP support so I can code in my own programming languages with it
I’m curious, do you really use your own languages for day to day development?
Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
#526I had an interesting thought reading their post - is there a brand new open-source monetization strategy in “operate the AI assistant for your tool”? Users can always plug in a local LLM but the fine-tuning and inference optimization is potentially much better from a paid team focusing on the problem.
Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> But emacs 29 with the right flags and a tuned GC (no one does this! Please share how.
i got annoyed by emacs gc pauses and just disabled the gc completely (i think). haven't noticed any downsides so far. i'm in emacs all day...
;; don't garbage collect based on cons count
(setq gc-cons-threshold 10000000000)
(defun garbage-collect (&rest args)
(message "trying to garbage collect. probably you want to quit emacs."))
playing briefly with Zed it seemed like the terminal was a totally different "thing" than a normal file; i couldn't run the same text selection operations, couldn't split the window vertically or horizontally, etc. to me that loses a ton of the benefit of having a terminal in the editor in the first place.
still, it's a very interesting project. i have a very love/hate relationship with emacs, so i'm always interested in alternatives...
Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
#528I'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 have reasonably fast machines, so we're not talking about the difference between 5ms typing lag and 500ms, but it's still pretty surprising.
I really envy people who can sense passage of time between intervals of 5 milliseconds and 500 milliseconds.
My sensibility begins over a second. And to be honest even that is least of my issues. Same with start up time, I restart the IDE only once in a few days. I thinking spending a second or two extra for it is any where in the ball park of what I would call wasting time.
Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
#529I'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…
>>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.
That explains my whole experience with Emacs. More time is spent in making Emacs awesome than actually doing my work.
Re: Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
> VSCode never felt slow on my macs until I started using Zed. I guess you haven't used Sublime Text before?
or BBEdit.
That’s where I landed after v14 with LSP support came out. It’s so nimble! And extensions with shell scripts and CLI programs is right in my wheelhouse.