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Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

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Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#81

Post by eviks »

marssaxman wrote: post #75
ivanjermakov wrote: post #41

> Lua is great, but one JSON file is even better I will never understand how you go back from a very customized editor setup to the one with "reasonable defaults with little to no things to configure". Great talk on this topic by TJ: Personal Development Environment: https://youtu.be/QMVIJhC9Veg

Back in the '90s I would customize my development environment to within an inch of its life, but after going from one machine to the next, one toolchain to the next, one operating system to the next, year after year, culminating in one ridiculous six-month period when I had to pave my dev machine and reinstall everything from scratch every two weeks (yes, this was stupid; yes, I knew it was stupid at the time; no, I…

How is the work of copying an editor config/plugin folder with a script every two weeks for six months worse than using the bad suboptimal defaults every day?

> every step you take away from the mainstream has a cost

Customizing neovim is mainstream

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#82

Post by SnowingXIV »

cbisnett wrote: post #9

I’ve been using Sublime Text for more than a decade and I gave Zed a try recently. I don’t have good reasons like the author, but I kinda wanted to see what the hype was about. I really liked everything about it including the much better LSP support and the base key map for Sublime Text was very close so I felt at home quickly. Then I tried actually writing code in my usual workflow and this is where things started t…

I echo this sentiment. Also, a long time rubyist. I pretty much go between neovim or Sublime everything else has felt off for Ruby development. I use vintage (vim) mode for Sublime and it’s the sweet spot. I get all the motions, but also some -non vim actions that I appreciate. This might feel like uncanny valley, but it works.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#83

Post by theendisney »

marssaxman wrote: post #75
ivanjermakov wrote: post #41

> Lua is great, but one JSON file is even better I will never understand how you go back from a very customized editor setup to the one with "reasonable defaults with little to no things to configure". Great talk on this topic by TJ: Personal Development Environment: https://youtu.be/QMVIJhC9Veg

Back in the '90s I would customize my development environment to within an inch of its life, but after going from one machine to the next, one toolchain to the next, one operating system to the next, year after year, culminating in one ridiculous six-month period when I had to pave my dev machine and reinstall everything from scratch every two weeks (yes, this was stupid; yes, I knew it was stupid at the time; no, I…

If it can open text files and has a cursor im good. Irl i dont grow attached to environments either. Its just to expensive when they vanish. Its just people now :)

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#84

Post by scottyeager »

There's a funny dynamic here I just came to appreciate. A perfect use case for AI is writing config file code (relatively simple stuff with lots of examples in the training data). Zed has replaced VSCode as my GUI editor, but I still use Neovim in the terminal. The "just works" aspect of Zed is nice, but I could see myself maybe opening my Neovim config with it one day to use the AI features to tune something up. Well, maybe I'd actually use Aider, but it's a fun thought anyway.

It makes me wonder if highly configurable software plus AI can be combined for an outcome that "just works" while also being highly personalized. One thing that kind of surprised me about Zed is that the AI assistant isn't very good, in my experience, at answering questions about how to configure Zed. Models have their cutoff date, of course, but this seems like low hanging fruit for some context injection based on keywords. An editor feature that can help me quickly implement my preference choice and get back to work without a visit to the docs would be truly adding value.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#85

Post by pugworthy »

Arch-TK wrote: post #64
st3fan wrote: post #5

> my workflow consists of switching back and forth between a terminal window and an editor window. Same! I run neovim in tmux together with stuff I hack on. I switch beteen tmux windows with shift-arrows and it works so well. I run this full screen in Ghostty. No distractions. I try Zed and VSCode and I always come back to this setup. It works so well for me personally.

I've always just closed vim to use the terminal, and started it up again to go back to editing. I find it difficult to operate any other way. I know people who use ^Z to suspend vim and then foreground it again.

I’ve definitely done the ^Z thing. The catch is to remember you did it if you get distracted in the terminal. Nothing like finding some vim job in the background and you can’t remember what it was.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#86

Post by narnarpapadaddy »

roland35 wrote: post #67
lowboy wrote: post #62

Zed has the least uncanny valley of any vim emulation that I've tried. Switching is not feasible for me until they get mini.surround[0] and Flash.nvim[1], particularly Flash's treesitter mode (see screenshot of [1] to get an idea). They work particularly well together to select semantically meaningful chunks of code and add/remove/change surrounding parens/braces/curlies/etc. 0: https://github.com/echasnovski/mini.su…

Surround is amazing. I agree that all these vim modes are nice, but nothing beats the real thing.

I think I understand the use case for a smart surround plugin like this; I watched the demo video and saw and lot of picking-and-pulling text.

What I don’t understand is the development workflow that includes so much text manipulation. If you’re writing new code, there’s nothing to manipulate. If you’re refactoring existing code, wouldn’t you want the support typical AST-based refactoring tools provide? Where’s the sweet spot where shuffling strings around makes sense?

That’s not sarcasm. I’m genuinely asking.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#87

Post by o11c »

pugworthy wrote: post #85
Arch-TK wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always just closed vim to use the terminal, and started it up again to go back to editing. I find it difficult to operate any other way. I know people who use ^Z to suspend vim and then foreground it again.

I’ve definitely done the ^Z thing. The catch is to remember you did it if you get distracted in the terminal. Nothing like finding some vim job in the background and you can’t remember what it was.

For me it only works because I never reuse a single terminal for unrelated things. Additionally, I have my virtual desktops grid set up so that different types of tasks are always in certain places, so if the switcher shows a terminal somewhere, I know roughly what it's for even without going to look at it. So I can't "lose" a terminal.

So it's fine for X11 terminals, but not for /dev/tty2

Don't forget you can just :!some-shell-command though - not just in vim but in lots of programs even.

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#88

Post by ttyprintk »

airstrike wrote: post #45
st3fan wrote: post #5

> my workflow consists of switching back and forth between a terminal window and an editor window. Same! I run neovim in tmux together with stuff I hack on. I switch beteen tmux windows with shift-arrows and it works so well. I run this full screen in Ghostty. No distractions. I try Zed and VSCode and I always come back to this setup. It works so well for me personally.

> I try Zed and VSCode and I always come back to this setup. I have Ctrl+` set to switch focus between the editor and the terminal panes in VSCode, so I can toggle between them pretty easily as this is also my workflow If anyone's wondering, here's what I have in my keybindings.json { "key": "ctrl+`", "command": "workbench.action.terminal.focus" }, { "key": "ctrl+`", "command": "workbench.action.focusActiveEditorGrou…

I can’t tell if Ctrl-` is portable. Anyone know if it’s representable on terminals?

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#89

Post by theonething »

Arch-TK wrote: post #64
st3fan wrote: post #5

> my workflow consists of switching back and forth between a terminal window and an editor window. Same! I run neovim in tmux together with stuff I hack on. I switch beteen tmux windows with shift-arrows and it works so well. I run this full screen in Ghostty. No distractions. I try Zed and VSCode and I always come back to this setup. It works so well for me personally.

I've always just closed vim to use the terminal, and started it up again to go back to editing. I find it difficult to operate any other way. I know people who use ^Z to suspend vim and then foreground it again.

> I've always just closed vim to use the terminal

You don't mind losing all your editor state? If you don't like working with multiple terminal windows, why not open a term within vim with `:term`?

Re: Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

#90

Post by ttyprintk »

imbnwa wrote: post #78
toisanji wrote: post #10

I use cursor and vim now. I have been on vim for 15+ years. Are there LLM extensions that make vim work like all these new AI editors? I would prefer to stay in 100% vim world, but the productivity benefits from LLMs with composer mode and context is so powerful.

I use Neovim with Copilot assistant plugins all the time for work

I switched from this to TabNine. I was impressed that, with multiple buffers open, it seems to synthesize the right three-way merges.
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