Is the new #zed editor mostly hype rn?
I can believe it’s good and cool ( built in graphics and collab seem to me like good ideas).
But as someone who happily stayed with sublime (with LSPs a likely game changer) …
takes like “it’s fast!”, “LSP!”, “it now has snippets!” … along with people telling me it has a plug-in system, but doesn’t (cf python/lua runtimes of sublime/nvim) give me massive hype vibes and honestly just feels very “2020s-tech”.
@maegul @programming I think there is no general answer, as every developer has different priorities.
Zed looks and feels much better than VSCode to me. Also a lot is working out of the box, where you need to install Plugins in VSCode.
But in both Zed and VSCode I miss the good git support of IntelliJ and the overall intelligence of the Jetbrains IDEs. It feels like IntelliJ knows what I’m doing there at 90%, Zed knows like 60% and VSCode like 50%.
I get that peeps are coming from VSCode and I support competition with MS’s EEE of software dev.
But, like, bloat and corporate capture were always the trade offs with VSCode … you all knew that right?
I’m a fellow Sublime user and recently got excited about trying Zed. it’s a good editor and fairly similar to Sublime, but lacked some language support and the plugins are still very few compared to other mature editors. also, it’s not quite as configurable as Sublime, for example choosing the LSP or linters. but it’s still in early development with frequent updates so I keep it installed and watch the releases
> he plugins are still very few compared to other mature editors. also, it’s not quite as configurable as Sublime
AFAIU, it doesn’t have a plugin runtime, which is fairly glaring to me (but maybe not for devs these days).
This is what triggered my “is it hype” thought, as I’ve seen people say it does but it’s in rust or something.
And I feel like many fail to realise how hard it is to build a new editor with everything we take for granted these days.
Fediverse & typst similarly.
I tried it briefly. I like the idea of an alternative to VS code, that’s not some inefficient javascript electron app. But the focus of zed seems to be on collaboration in cloud and also pushing LLM tools. That’s not what I’m looking for. I disliked that it was impossible to hide the “log in to github” button (I don’t want to log into an editor). Irked me the wrong way.
It drives me nuts that there’s no way to close a folder once you opened it. There’s no way to just edit a file without making it a “project”. In my mind that’s a weird design decision (which is probably rooted in weird fundamental ideas) and gives me no warm & fuzzy feeling about what direction it will take in the future.
That’s not too weird, until IntelliJ added its lite editor, it was the same way for many years.
I kinda alternate between vscode and vim. Just depending on how I feel. Never really thought of branching out as other things feel too much. Like I tried pycharm and was not sure where the community stuff ended and where the professional started (free in uni). Netbeans was alright for a class. Sublime was cool, but I didn’t do anything special.
i have no reason to switch from vim to anything else.
Neovim maybe? 😉
Helix for a better default config. But you’ve probably already set up vim the way you like it.
My device doesn’t have a graphics card and only has two threads, so I guess it’s just for higher end devices?
Unfortunately it requires vulkan (it says 1.3, but because vulkan is based on extensions so it probably doesn’t require the full 1.3). So if you have the Intel GMA 950 that’s in the motherboard for your Pentium 4 HT is not supported. But I’m confident that an AMD HD 6000 from 2010 with the Mesa driver “terakan” is enough to run it. And theoretically one could implement vulkan even for an HD 2000 from 2007, but it’s an unreasonable effort.
If they made an opengl backend, you would be golden, as the Mesa driver i915 implements opengl 2.1 for the GMA 950, and it’s definitely enough to run an editor
P.s.: and I sure did not spend the last 30 minutes looking up vulkan hardware
Well, yes, it currently lacks several basic things. But remote development is a killer feature to me and they seem to be prioritizing it.
However it should be noted that the remote development connection is via their servers, which makes it somewhat less useful
