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Founder of Atom here. We're building the spiritual successor to Atom over at https://zed.dev https://zed.dev. We learned a lot with Atom and had a great time,

Founder of Atom here. We're building the spiritual successor to Atom over at https://zed.dev https://zed.dev. We learned a lot with Atom and had a great time, but it always fell short of our vision. With Zed we're going to get it right. Written in Rust, custom native UI framework, engineered to be collaborative. Just starting our private alpha this week, so the timing of this announcement feels quite fitting. Here's a talk I gave last month: https://youtu.be/wXT73bBr83s https://youtu.be/wXT73bBr83s

aniforprez 4y ago
IMO the killer thing that VSCode has over all the other editors is the wealth of extensions and a certain degree of simplicity. What are your plans for Zed in terms of extensibility and are you aligning more towards making something beefy and full-featured like the IntelliJ offerings or something more "lightweight" like VSCode or Sublime?
- nathansobo 4y ago
  We plan to make Zed extensible via WebAssembly, but we're taking a different approach than we did with Atom. Our goal is to make Zed fast, stable, and collaborative first, extensible second. We'll be taking a more conservative approach with our APIs to ensure we can preserve our core values even as users add extensions. Our goal is for Zed to have the lightweight and snappy vibe of Sublime with the power of a more full-featured IDE. These objectives are obviously in tension, but I think we can build something that balances them well. A collaborative IDE that feels fast and powerful.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Ooh, this is interesting. It sounds like you learned a lesson here. Could you say more about what prompted the change? I once talked with a Firefox engineer who felt like an initial urge for openness left them with a lot of API surface area that locked them into a lot of design choices. Was it something like that for you as well?
    - nathansobo 4y ago
      Very much so. As the first Electron app we were so excited about people being able to do anything they imagined. It was cool but ended up really constraining us. This time we really want to drive our API based on the most important things people actually need to extend. We need to navigate the trade-offs more intelligently.
      - SaulJLH 4y ago
        This "private alpha", any hints on how we might jump aboard!? ;) EDIT Nvm, I see this is our best option for now: https://zed.dev/waitlist https://zed.dev/waitlist
        iamnbutler 4y ago
        it's less about being exclusive and more about getting feedback on the specific features we are focusing on and building at the moment. For now, people pairing/collaboratively writing Rust is our focus, and we are pulling people in that fit that criteria!
      - manaskarekar 4y ago
        As someone who loved everything about Atom except the sluggishness and bloat, Zed sounds like exactly the thing that I've been wanting. VSCode/Codium is amazing but it feels the same - sluggish but a feature/extensions-packed behemoth. I hope Zed is able to establish a nice extension ecosystem as that is priceless! Thank you!
      - gosukiwi 4y ago
        This is interesting. I wonder how Emacs solves that, given that it's one of, if not THE most, extensible editor out there. I'd think that is a good thing, but never considered the drawbacks, besides performance and plugin interop that is.
        bombcar 4y ago
        Emacs either doesn't have APIs or everything is an API, depending on how you look at it - since it's source is available at runtime plugins and modules can be first-class citizens performance-wise.
  - syrusakbary 4y ago
    This is great. Syrus here, from Wasmer. I think WAPM and Wasmer could help a lot on the extensibility using Wasm plugins. I'd love to chat further, please feel free to reach me at syrus[at]wasmer[dot]io!
  - the_duke 4y ago
    Hey there. I've been thinking about implementing an editor agnostic WASM based plugin framework and started prototyping with some promising results, although there are also a lot of of WASM related constraints to consider. I think cross-platform plugins would be hugely beneficial for the whole ecosystem, and also generally for new editors since they can potentially benefit from a larger plugin developer community. Is that something you can see your team collaborating on?
  - nurettin 4y ago
    If you make Python a first class citizen and give it special support, you won't be disappointed. Man that felt a bit like extortion, but I mean well.
  - Already__Taken 4y ago
    IMO the leap from sublime to vscode was because the extensions made it so welcoming & bultin. I think the next leap from that is by-default sharing of those extensions and config. WASM might be able to do that coupled with security defining execution. We need a trusted mechanism to share what git-hooks promised without thinking about it. Like you said, collaborative. If extensions lock down the files they will touch and the urls that can be visited I think sharing them becomes more palatable.
    - dghlsakjg 4y ago
      VScode offers workspace settings that you can check into git that will get picked up by anyone else using vscode on that repo.
- quaunaut 4y ago
  Atom practically invented the kind of extensions that VSCode had, and even several years into VSCode's life Atom far outstripped it in Extensions. Perf became the biggest problem however, which VSCode took over.
  - Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y ago
    Sublime, TextMate, …
    - sealthedeal 4y ago
      I love Sublime, still my fave
      - yccs27 4y ago
        The instant-opening experience is just soo good, and Electron bloat nowhere in sight... I actually use VS Code as well, but more like an IDE with tons of extensions, and Sublime is my 'basic' text editor.
        distances 4y ago
        I tried to use VS Code but just couldn't stand it. I don't want to say it's sluggish but it definitely isn't snappy, not even with a M1 laptop. It's fine, but it isn't good. I ended up purchasing the upgrade to Sublime 4, definitely worth the price.
        can16358p 4y ago
        Same thoughts. While Vscode is my IDE now, I definitely love the instant-opening of Sublime. Ironically, it's even launching faster than TextEdit.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      BBEdit.
      - 4y ago
- l33t2328 4y ago
  The bloat VSCode has over Atom kills it for me.
  - joaonmatos 4y ago
    Atom was unbelievably slower than VSCode for any comparable set of capabilities. What do you mean bloated?
  - nsonha 4y ago
    anyone can say vscode is bloated except atom. I gave it credit for being highly modular though. I remember being to disable the statusbar component (not just the UI) completely.
- rjh29 4y ago
  IMO the killer thing is performance, VSCode starts fast and is smooth to write with. It blew away the older set of Electron-based editors. They work tirelessly on performance every release and it shows imo. Allowing extensions without destroying perf isn't easy either.
  - gibbitz 4y ago
    This is why I continued to use sublime text all the way up to capitulating to TypeScript. Code was slower because of all the intellisense. I've had Code freeze on me a few times. Something that I don't have happen in Sublime or Vim. If you have a lot of RAM and work on a current mainstream OS it may seem smooth, but it's still using 400mb of RAM. May as well use Eclipse or WebStorm FWIW. That said I'm using VSCode now too, but things can always be better :).
    - galaxyLogic 4y ago
      Part of it may be just Windows. I use Windows a lot to move files and folders around and the File Explorer is something I constantly need to wait on to respond. The Windows as GUI is not very responsive in my experience.
    - manigandham 4y ago
      > "but it's still using 400mb of RAM" Why does this matter? What is the point of saving RAM instead of using it?
      - Karunamon 4y ago
        It matters because your program is probably not the only one running.
        manigandham 4y ago
        It’s a small amount and if you’re using it then it should take priority. Modern operating systems with SSDs are very good at managing memory anyway.
- bstar77 4y ago
  NeoVim can compete on this front. See LunarVim for a heavily extended experience.
  - theonething 4y ago
    woah, as a long time vim user who's been too lazy to switch, this might push me over the edge.
    - bstar77 4y ago
      I pair it up with Alacritty on Mac and Linux for a nice performance boost. It will work in iTerm or one of the default Linux terminals, but much slower.
      - theonething 4y ago
        Nice! I'm on iTerm but may just go whole hog and switch out that too. Thanks for the tips! I love HN. P.S. Any other plugins, tips/tricks you recommend for a vim user jumping into NeoVim/LunarVim?
- rattray 4y ago
  Interesting. Will you have built-in LSP support for most popular languages then?
- brianzelip 4y ago
  The killer feature for me wrt to Atom -> VSCode was the built in terminal.
rafaelturk 4y ago
Amazing! Sounds like a great foundation! Curious about UI execution in Rust
- nathansobo 4y ago
  We plan to start blogging about this pretty soon.
ilovecaching 4y ago
Please make zed capable of running in a terminal. If I could have a modern editor that can run in the terminal and had a nice GUI, I would definitely pick it up. There's still many instances where I'm working on a remote dev machine, on my iPad, over a serial connection, inside of tmux, where a terminal based text editor is a necessity.
- nathansobo 4y ago
  We have graphics, but I could see a mode where you `scp` a headless moon lander version of Zed up to a remote server to do remote development. VS Code has a feature like this but I hadn't used it much before switching to Zed full-time.
  - Shish2k 4y ago
    > VS Code has a feature like this but I hadn't used it much before switching to Zed full-time. Please check it out — being able to edit / run / debug code on a linux server using a mac desktop over ssh, and having the whole experience be as seamless as edit / run / debug locally, is a huge win — it's pretty much _the_ reason that I’m currently using VSCode 90% of the time despite being a huge JetBrains fan (to the point of paying for their full enterprise pack out of my own pocket) (JetBrains tools do kind-of support remote file editing, but it’s flaky and slow, and remote run / debug are a nightmare — compare to VSCode, where I sometimes mix up local and remote development because they’re identical except for the hostname in the titlebar when running remotely)
    - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
      It also works on Windows through ssh (including desktop win10), which makes working with Windows easier on the nerves.
    - PascLeRasc 4y ago
      Is what VS Code does different from using an SFTP mount plugin like remote-edit on Atom?
- 4y ago
a4isms 4y ago
Nathan, I remember your passion for this project from its very early days. It has already borne fruit that has grown into a garden in the form of Electron, and I'm excited to see you are reimagining Atom in the form of Zed. Best wishes for Zed's success!
- nathansobo 4y ago
  Thanks very much for your kind words and wishes!
  - a4isms 4y ago
    You are very welcome. Although in my haste I mixed my metaphors up! Not sure if Atom was a fruit that grew into an orchard or a seed that grew into a garden. How about both?
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
> custom native UI framework Cool project, but this is clearly a contradiction. wxWidgets? That offers a native UI. Wherever possible it uses the UI controls from the underlying OS/system to render the interface. Looking at the project page it describes "a GPU-powered UI framework that met our needs." That's not a native UI. That's a non-native UI compiled to native code, ala something like Flutter.
- nathansobo 4y ago
  Sure, cross-platform UI that's on the metal is a more accurate description.
  - loic-sharma 4y ago
    Did you consider using Flutter? If yes, what made you choose against it?
    - wpietri 4y ago
      It's been a few years since I used Flutter, but doesn't it still require you to use the related language Dart? I liked the idea of it, and I thought the tight integration between Flutter and Dart allowed them to do some cool things. But I wasn't a huge fan of the language itself. And I think it's a lot to ask prospective extension-writers to learn a new language.
      - gman83 4y ago
        If you know Java or JavaScript, Dart is extremely easy to pick up.
        wtetzner 4y ago
        Sure, but that doesn't help if your project is in Rust.
        4y ago
420official 4y ago
What's the reasoning behind this iteration being closed-source?
- nathansobo 4y ago
  This time we're on our own in the marketplace with no big revenue-generating company supporting us. We'd like to be as open as humanly possible while being able to build a defensible business around the editor.
geodel 4y ago
Well, unless it is paid, I don't know how would you continue to toil for years making great editor. And unless it is free, gain a good market share to continue to support. I hope you would have some solution to this conundrum.
- nathansobo 4y ago
  We plan to monetize collaboration. Zed is a collaborative platform disguised as a world-class code editor.
  - docmechanic 4y ago
    I'm always excited to see new ways to monetize open source. Hope this is another open source success story.
  - dymk 4y ago
    How often do developers want to edit the same file, at the same time, and have those updates occur in real-time? I see this as a compelling feature for something targeting the use cases of, say Google Docs, where multiple people are contributing to an outline document or a business plan at the same time - but for code, I don't quite see the appeal.
    - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
      > How often do developers want to edit the same file, at the same time, and have those updates occur in real-time? That's a very specific example of collaboration. Remote work is exploding. What about, say, integrated, collaborative debugging or code review? Integrations with things like Slack?
      - ctvo 4y ago
        I'm sure the folks at Zed know what they're doing, but this is already possible in multiple editors / IDEs. I'm excited to see how Zed innovates in this space. Examples: - VSCode Live Share https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share - JetBrains IDEs Code With Me https://www.jetbrains.com/code-with-me https://www.jetbrains.com/code-with-me - Standalone https://www.coscreen.co https://www.coscreen.co https://duckly.com https://duckly.com
pvg 4y ago
Should development ever wind down, you already have the advantage of being able to announce it as "Zed's dead, baby" instead of clunky corporate euphemisms.
- nathansobo 4y ago
  Fabulous point. Always good to have solid contingency plans.
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  They should name its engine or one of its components "Chopper".
- behnamoh 4y ago
  yet another buzzword we hear a lot these days: Zed is “lightning fast”… I hear that a lot about Rust projects, like Kitty or Alacritty
  - nathansobo 4y ago
    "Real real fast"
    - pvg 4y ago
      I like smoke and lightnin' Bare metal thunder
  - ossusermivami 4y ago
    kitty is python+c++ fyi! (and as blazing as the other lightning rust software)
  - smolder 4y ago
    Lightning fast must be an upgrade from the blazing[ly??] fast days. Tangential, but I've been wondering, what comes after "web scale" on that axis?
  - alx__ 4y ago
    That because they're usually comparing it to a Electron app, at this point it's punching down ;)
tiffanyh 4y ago
Re: Native UI Is Zed web-based or not? Would it be able to be hosted in the browser like the web-based version of Github Codespace (Visual Studio Code Online)?
- nathansobo 4y ago
  We plan to compile to WebAssembly that writes pixels to a WebGL canvas.
  - shakow 4y ago
    If you will directly write yourself everything to a GL canvas anyway, what do you gain by going through a whole WebGL dependency & context rather than just using a native OpenGL context?
    - nathansobo 4y ago
      This would only be for the web. Right now we're macOS only and target Metal.
polutropos 4y ago
Any screenshots to share?
- nathansobo 4y ago
  Here's a demo from a talk a give not too long ago: https://youtu.be/wXT73bBr83s?list=PL3TSF5whlprXqwYNIM0X8mBzula2McGKd&t=1077 https://youtu.be/wXT73bBr83s?list=PL3TSF5whlprXqwYNIM0X8mBzu...
mwcampbell 4y ago
zed sounds like a great project. What are your thoughts on the existing Rust GUI frameworks? Naturally the core editor widget will need to be custom no matter what, but for the rest of the UI, have you considered using one of the Rust GUI frameworks already being developed?
- nathansobo 4y ago
  When we started on Zed the Rust UI framework space was much younger. In absence of a mature solution that met our exact needs, the simplest path for us was to build it ourselves. We're too far into things now to change at this point.
  - mwcampbell 4y ago
    Fair enough. Hopefully when you're ready to work on accessibility in your UI framework, AccessKit [1] will be ready. I'm hoping to have usable Windows and Mac implementations by the end of this year. [1]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit
    - zamalek 4y ago
      Accessibility is a peeve of mine (for no other reason than sympathy). Thanks for your work on this.
gosukiwi 4y ago
Atom was the first editor I wrote plugins to and contributed to core. I prefer it over VSCode, as it does less, and it's easy to customize for web devs. Sad to see it go, but it's for the best :(
gigatexal 4y ago
Add a really good vim mode and I’m there.
- nathansobo 4y ago
  Earlier this year Keith Simmons, the author of Neovide (https://github.com/neovide/neovide https://github.com/neovide/neovide), joined our team. He's been working on Vim bindings and paying a lot of attention to getting it right. As you probably know there's a lot of surface area, so this will take time.
  - gigatexal 4y ago
    Fantastic. Let us pay you so this sticks around.
  - frizkie 4y ago
    Amazing to hear this, looking forward to hearing more about the project.
  - petepete 4y ago
    Hoping he also adds animations. Neovide is beautiful.
sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
Humble question, I don't mean to sound confrontational, I ask of genuine curiosity: Why not contribute to VS Code instead? For Julia, Atom+Juno was excellent. It was the first time I could select+run on a proper IDE (I was coming from python+notebook). To me this was revolutionary. Then I discovered VS Code, so Atom+Juno stopped making sense. You seem to be a very competent developer, so why not just contribute to VS Code?
- vlunkr 4y ago
  Not the person you're responding to, but it sounds like they're going in a different direction with Zed in terms of the tech stack, where VSCode is pretty similar to Atom.
- nathansobo 4y ago
  Our goal is to build something substantially better than VS Code.
  - gregmac 4y ago
    Can you be more specific about this, and what you're prioritizing? Eg: Speed? Different UI layout? Fundamentally different design/UX philosophy?
  - GordonS 4y ago
    What would you say are planned to be the primary selling points over VSCode?
    - exyi 4y ago
      From the other parts of the thread: Performance, maybe better collaboration?
      - galaxyLogic 4y ago
        I think that's a worthy goal. I find it really bad that in this age of super-mega CPUs apps still feel not much faster than say 20 years ago. The reason I think is because like cities apps are built on top of other apps, like VSCode on top of Electron. Secondly when you re-create from scratch you can keep the best features and drop the ones we've learned are not so useful. Godspeed!
input_sh 4y ago
I just wanted to say I really liked your product and despite multiple attempts to switch to VS Code (in anticipation of this day), I kept returning to Atom. I don't know why, I could never get VS Code to feel right to me, while Atom always felt right despite many of its quirks I've gotten used to over the years. Looking forward to its spiritual successor!
- nathansobo 4y ago
  Thanks very much!
Aeolun 4y ago
Hmm, curious how this will compare to Jetbrains’ fleet editor. Of course, they share the problem that I can’t yet use either :)
- nathansobo 4y ago
  We're pure Rust and hopefully faster. But yeah, plenty of competition in the space!
  - fmntf 4y ago
    I work on the linux kernel using CLion and the IDE is still fast. I would not be interested in a non-Java IDE for the performance.
    - exyi 4y ago
      Are you using 32-core / 100GB RAM monster machine? I do everything on my rather powerful laptop, but Jetbrains IDEs are just too much. I can't have more than one project open at time, which is limiting. I didn't try CLion, only IntelliJ for Scala and Rider for C#/F#, all on smallish projects and it will still take 3-6GB of memory :| I'd be interested in even lighter than VSCode IDE ;)
      - nwatson 4y ago
        I often have several simultaneous PyCharm projects open with separate completely introspected and navigable virtualenv's with lots of installed libraries, and also ongoing DataGrip, and at times CLion or IntelliJ sessions ... all the Jetbrains IDEs are performing quite well. At times running Docker as well. 32GB Macbook Pro M1.
        4dregress 4y ago
        Yeah I'm doing the same on an 2021 intel Mac, I love jet brains stuff!
      - deleted 4y ago
tormeh 4y ago
Any chance of collaboration with https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/ ?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- woojoo666 4y ago
  Wow this does seem to share a lot of features. Rust based, WASI plugins, real time collaboration. And it's open source!
greyhair 4y ago
Just make it keyboard centic. I don't want to touch the mouse.
- nathansobo 4y ago
  Definitely a priority.
artursapek 4y ago
PascLeRasc 4y ago
I think Atom was perfect, for what it's worth. I've always found it to be faster than VS Code.
kobalsky 4y ago
Cool project. Since it's not mentioned on the website, what will be your roadmap regarding security? I feel that all IDEs have security handled as an afterthought, VSCode made some progress but it's far from being there. I just want to be able to use a code formatting / language extension without having to worry about it subverting my whole computer in a future update. vscode is halfway there with containerized development, but apparently they didn't intend that to be security measure and they make it clear to only run trusted extensions. I'm guessing there are ways to access host files through the bridge. It's obvious that we still have to trust extension authors, but an IDE with the correct security sandboxing can limit the blast zone if it gets compromised (leaking a source file vs getting a rootkit installed and ending up releasing compromised updates to production)
- hit8run 4y ago
  Did that happen to you? Sounds scary…
CJefferson 4y ago
What is the accessibility (for example for blind users) of your custom UI framework like?
Communitivity 4y ago
Sounds interesting. I've love to take part in the alpha and provide feedback. I've done software engineering professionally for 25 years in Javascript, C++, Rust, Java, Erlang, Elixir, Clojure and Python (mostly Java and C++). I've used Emacs, VS Code, Visual Studio, and other IDEs.
- Petersipoi 4y ago
  https://zed.dev/waitlist https://zed.dev/waitlist
alephnan 4y ago
All these new generation text editors are cool and all, but I feel they are mostly rehashing the UI of VSCode. VSCode is fast enough, and the perceived speed of text editors / typing only needs to be so fast. Looking forward to innovations in UI. Cause otherwise, VIM is comparable if not better in performance than modern text editors.
thewoolleyman 4y ago
Best of luck with Zed, Nathan! I've always been impressed with your brilliance, vision, hope, and positivity. Hope we can catch up again soon, until then keep changing the world for the better!
omaranto 4y ago
Is it caled Zed because it is inspired by the old Zed text editor? https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/spe.4380100107 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/spe.43801001...
ljm 4y ago
How many times do you have to re-invent the text editor?
- lytedev 4y ago
  For the same reason people have and use many different tools in all sorts of professions.
- bananamerica 4y ago
  I love Emacs and use it every day, but not everyone is up to the time commitment of maintaining it.
eikenberry 4y ago
When will the source repository going to be made public and what license do you plan to use? For the editor and the UI kit. Looking forward to seeing how that all works.
ravedave5 4y ago
Please be aware of the second system effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
- neoneye2 4y ago
  Also implementing undo for a big project is tricky. If the user switches to another file, collapses/expands things, runs a plugin, auto-formats some code, and then undoes things. What will undo be like for a collaborative editor?
jonathankoren 4y ago
Is Zed a company? I wish you luck, but I'm pretty skeptical that a whole company can survive on making a text editor, or even editing tools in general. Wouldn't it be safer for user if you open sourced this? As someone that loved Atom, and have been screwed over by Facebook's Nuclide, and now Github's Atom, I have to think about my options. (No emacs isn't an option.)
- marxplank 4y ago
  why isn't emacs an option? It's the longest continuously maintained open source code editor there ever has been and still outperforms electron editors half a century after it first appeared
hannob 4y ago
I've spend a few minutes on your page, yet I couldn't answer the following questions: * Do you already have a working editor I could test or is this merely an announcement? * Is this an open source project or a proprietary product? Does it cost money? If yes how much?
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  From the webpage, I figure this much: - It's in closed alpha, so yes they have a product, no they don't have a product. - It is a closed project. It probably will cost money, it is not decided how much.
folknor 4y ago
Interesting! I just wanted to let you know my perspective, which is probably quite unique. I started using atom pre-1.0, a long, long time ago. I immediately jumped to vscode when I realised it existed. The reason is a bit weird; it's the find-in-files/project (c-s-F/Ctrl+Shift+F) sidebar search/replace feature. Compared to the Atom (and from what I can see in the youtube talk, zed has the same "problem") which opens c-s-F results in the main window, vscode opens them in the sidebar and doesn't clutter the main view with it. The reason this is powerful to me is that I code mostly in domain-specific, esoteric, private languages that have no API documentation, no stdlib or docs, and no online resources to learn from. So the only way to learn is by example, or talk to someone who knows. Learning by example is usually much faster than talking. So what I do is any new project is just a subfolder in a workspace that contains all known code in the language and the way I find out how to do something is c-s-F. When the results cover the main view, or even parts of it (which is also possible with atom), it's just way too intrusive. The sidebar file list is useless to me at this point - where the result comes from is irrelevant. So why not use that space? Also of course the fact that vscodes cross-file search was blazingly fast was an upside as well (I believe they used ripgrep for that since the start?) Another thing I want to mention is (and you highlight the keyword search in that youtube talk around 18:54) the power of the command palette search method that is available in vscode: first-letter-matching. I don't know what the proper name of it is, but essentially "ps" matches "pub struct" for example. Obviously it matches it with a lower score than something that starts with "ps", but it's very powerful for matching in the command palette. Thanks for listening.
- theteapot 4y ago
  > I code mostly in domain-specific, esoteric, private languages, no stdlib or docs, and no online resources to learn from. Jesus, who are you?
  - denysvitali 4y ago
    A brainfuck developer?
  - tmp_anon_22 4y ago
    Retired? Or in Academia?
jzzskijj 4y ago
I have to assume no-one in the team saw Pulp Fiction (1994) when you ended up picking up the name "Zed"...?
slightwinder 4y ago
> Written in Rust, custom native UI framework Interesting. I think a major reason for VS Code's success is their usage of web-stack, which is stable, powerful and well documented, enabling easy access to higher customizations for anyone. It will be interesting to see how much a custom UI can emulate this without html&css.
lifeplusplus 4y ago
i hate vscode is written in electron, i always noticed the latency, it's good enough but it's annoying. atom was same but worse. what I also disliked about atom and sublimetext, is how you needed to install 20 extensions to get basic functionality and they weren't always compatible, with each other. Vscode approach of having most of basic functionality builtin but behind flags which can be disabled meant most people had good setup from the get go. Vscode to me was like jetbrains but faster and lighter. Although in some cases jetbrains was more robust. If there is vscode that was written natively. I'd be so happy. Even if there is a new branch of vscode that is 6 months behind in features but is built in native it'd be huge for me.
ClawsOnPaws 4y ago
Hey, Please don't forget about accessibility. Getting this right from day 1 will make your life a lot easier in the long run. If I remember correctly, I was never able to use Atom with a screen reader. Hearing custom UI already makes me nervous and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to use Zed with a screen reader either. Blind developers exist. Please don't forget about us. It's one of the few areas where we can actually make a meaningful difference together with our peers on an equal playing field.
- serial_dev 4y ago
  How do other editors/IDEs perform in terms of accessibility? What are your favorites?
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    I've only ever heard good things about Visual Studio in this area, not sure if other IDEs are comparable. I do know Eclipse has a specialized build for this purpose as well. I wonder if XCode is also decent in this regard. I think Notepad++ might be only other one from memory that I know of.
  - dharmab 4y ago
    Visual Studio is quite good: https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc
  - ClawsOnPaws 4y ago
    My favorite is VS Code by far. I use it daily. They recently also added a bunch of sound cues to help figure out if code is folded or a line contains an error. It's pretty great. Auto completion reads well, the parameter hints read, even the built-in terminal works. So overall I'm really happy with it.
    - exysle 4y ago
      Would you mind commenting on XCode? I heard that Apple really cares about accessibility.
scotty79 4y ago
Please, please, please, make it infinitely pluggable from the start. That's the strength of Atom and similar editors. That anybody can create a plugin either for something very niche or just connect some huge amazing tooling directly to the editor. If you can make editor in Rust pluggable or scriptable with JS, Lua, C#, Python and whatever someone knows and is comfortable with you got a winner.
zamalek 4y ago
> Just starting our private alpha this week I'm holding thumbs, I have been massively excited about your elevator pitch since your original announcement. Good luck!
jjtheblunt 4y ago
jeppester 4y ago
In VS Code the collaborative editing (live share) seems like a dirty workaround put on top of an architecture not built with multiple users in mind. I use live share all the time because it's the best thing we have for pair programming, but I often wish for a better solution. We often get disconnected for no reason, editors get out of sync, terminal sharing is near useless. If you can produce something that doesn't feel like a hack, then I'm all in! Features I would love to have: - Terminal sharing should work like tmux with window size "smallest". It's the best solution I've found for having a shared terminal. - Let us join a collaboration session from the terminal: `zed [URL]`. No annoying website that takes ages to open, or having to open the editor before joining the session. - Let me start a server on a port and let others join that server. I can forward that port if I need to. - Let me start a headless server on a shared dev env, and let me and others connect to collaborate
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Have you seen https://tuple.app https://tuple.app?
  - jeppester 4y ago
    Thank you for the suggestion. I have tried tuple, but for me it feels like a step back compared to live share. It has poor linux support, and sharing one screen is not as good as connecting to each other's editors. It just feels worse to watch a video feed compared to something that's getting rendered locally. I do however believe that tuple can work very well if you are in an environment where everyone has mac computers and similar screen setups.
404mm 4y ago
Hi, when can we expect to see some first preview?
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
"Mission-critical tools should be hyper-responsive." Did not seem to be important with the worlds slowest dev-tool ever, Atom. ;) "Real-time collaboration produces better software." At design level, ok. Programming is in most cases not a co-op operation. If it is, then you are probably creating solutions while writing code which is the best guarantee for bad solutions. “Conversations should happen close to code.” Agree to some degree, this is a big flaw with GIT. It is also a flaw with many programming langs and tools. Even if I use collaboration features in VS and VSC many langs are simply not designed for presenting code to people not highly familiar with the specific code base. So, an editor may not solve the problem here. “Your editor should disappear.” I mainly code in VS and what I can do in VS in 10 mins takes me a couple of hours in VSC. A tool should aim to be the default of a problem. The amount of time I have seen wasted over the years with people trying to master VIM or git from a prompt is just ridiculous.
- ghshephard 4y ago
  I don't use Visual Studio, so I'm intrigued as to what VS can do in 10 minutes that takes 2+ hours in VSC?
  - LocalPCGuy 4y ago
    One example could be scaffolding out a CRUD app and DB fairly quickly. Even excluding scaffolding, VS can eliminate a lot of the boilerplate that takes time if you need to type it out yourself. Not saying you can't setup VSC to do those kinds of things also, but VS is a tools included solution out of the box. (I say this as someone who hasn't touched VS in a few years now, but used it daily for a few years before that, and who generally enjoys using good/fast text editors.)
    - merlinran 4y ago
      I would argue that boilerplates should be minimized in the first place. Regardless how fast it is to generate them, reading them over and over again together with the code human write is a huge waste of energy.
infogulch 4y ago
"collaborative" "Rust" "code editor" "CRDTs" is very reminiscent of Xi Editor by @raphlinus which shared all of these traits. Xi was abandoned with the conclusion that CRDTs aren't suitable as a basis for text editing interactions, or at least that implementation wasn't. Is Zed related to Xi in history or as inspiration? Why are you confident that Zed will be able to overcome the issues that blocked Xi's advancement?
- raphlinus 4y ago
  I've been talking to Nathan and think he has a good handle on the issues. One of the biggest mistakes in xi was an over-reliance on async and a loose coupling between the main logic and the UI surface. Zed isn't making those mistakes. I'm eager to see what the come up with and look forward to friendly competition in the open source Rust UI space when they release their toolkit.
diziet 4y ago
Will it be native Sublime Text fast? Not on electron? I tried using VScode and Atom. Both were noticeably slow compared to sublime text. I can do silly, bad practice things like open a 50 meg log file in sublime and search for simple regex in the editor. Electron based editors stall and potentially crash.
- iamnbutler 4y ago
  I may be biased, but at least sublime fast, hopefully much faster! Moving to Zed felt like going from a 30fps to 144fps. You should be able to open stupidly big files and shouldn't experience much to any lag. Nathan has a demo he likes to give opening one one of those huge json files and searching, using multiple cursors, etc. It is pretty cool to watch.
- ghshephard 4y ago
  50 Megabytes? That's tiny I would hope in 2022 that any text editor can handle a 50 megabyte file. I routinely (like every day) open 500 megabyte files in SublimeText, and just checked to make sure that it can handle 1.5 Gigabyte files without much difficulty (it can). Admittedly - once we get into the 5+ Gigabyte file size, startup times become annoying enough that I usually switch over to vim. So, thank you for bringing this up as an important requirement for modern text editors - they should be able to open up multi-gigabyte text files without even breathing hard.
  - diziet 4y ago
    I hear you, but atom and vscode are noticeably slower at interacting and searching even at those small file sizes. So we're in violent agreement here!
deleted 4y ago
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beliu 4y ago
In case folks are interested, I had a delightful interview about a year back with Max Brunsfeld, one of the original Atom devs who is now working on Zed: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/max-brunsfeld https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/max-brunsfeld. (YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jf8AqaZ7IU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jf8AqaZ7IU) Very excited about where this new collaborative editor goes!
LoveMortuus 4y ago
Does 'lightning-fast' mean that the application will be light on the system or does it mean that it's well optimised but still demanding enough that you require a modern computer? I'm asking because I like to use my laptop Acer Aspire One most because of the size and because it the incredibly good feeling keyboard. BUT the system is 32-bit and running Intel Atom which means that before VSCode moved away from 32-bit I could use it, but it would take some time to open and I wouldn't really call it writing in real time, if you know what I mean~ :D But I love the keyboard shortcuts and the multiple cursor functionality, which is why I stuck with it for as long as I could!
smcleod 4y ago
Great to see you've dropped Electron!
giancarlostoro 4y ago
I'm a huge fan of Text Editors, I've made a few basic ones myself. Thank you for creating Atom! For ages before Atom was a thing I grew fascination with using web servers for front-end UI and thereby using HTML / CSS for a local applications UI, I had seen this in SlickBeard and a few other usenet applications that used a web interface instead of a standard GUI interface to render a UI. I also remember a Google program that did this, though I can't recall the name. It might sound crazy to some to do it this way, but because the web server is localized to your system and your browser is usually responsive once open, every app I used that worked this way was always highly responsive and just worked. I was dreaming of taking Vibe.d and CodeMirror and making something you could install as a daemon on any machine and code from anywhere. When Atom came out I was obsessed with it for a while, it was a whole other approach from what I was thinking of! Did you ever do a write up on how you came to the thought of just taking a browser engine and turning it into your own sandbox and what that entailed in the earlier days? That seems like a fun story. Because of Atom we got great innovations that followed, for example Slack, Discord, VS Code, and the list goes on... and on... Heck POSTMAN! Which is probably used or has been used by every developer under the sun.
shuntress 4y ago
This actually looks really promising despite fitting snugly into the "Show HN: Hey check out my cool unique new project" mold. I know it's not the main point of the DevXConf presentation but I really like the look of that multi-buffer feature.
derelicto 4y ago
Thank you for everything! Atom paved the way for the next gen of editors. Curious to see what comes out of zed! Live collab seems amazing. As a wishlist item, can we get a native vim mode with .vim.rc support? :D
ksec 4y ago
>Mission-critical tools should be hyper-responsive. >When you move the cursor or type a character, you should see pixels on the next refresh of your display—every time. Even sub-perceptual pauses add up over the course of a day to create unnecessary stress. I remember there were lots of research for this in Next-Generation Atom during the Atom era, before VSCode came along. Having a UI and text responsiveness within 16ms on a 60Hz Monitor is a tall order which I believe even Sublime is incapable of. Considering 95% if not 99% of developers on HN thinks VSCode is very fast or fast enough, I am not sure this point is worth pursuing. Personally I really want to see it happen. As I hate latency.
still_grokking 4y ago
How does it do in comparison to the other upcoming "better VSC"s? Like for example: https://v2.onivim.io/ https://v2.onivim.io/ https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/
xwolfi 4y ago
You're not going to get it right. At worst you ll make the same mistakes and at best you ll do the opposite mistakes. No migration, sunsetting, "this is legacy, let s redo it all" will ever fix anything. Fix what doesnt work.
rattray 4y ago
Funny, this doesn't sound like a spiritual successor to Atom at all. What made people excited about Atom (compared to Sublime Text, which people switched from and was ~always faster) was the extensibility. Sounds like this won't have that. It's only a successor in the sense that it's built by the same people and tackles some of its challenges.
rattray 4y ago
I'm not sure if this feedback is useful, but I have to say that a collaborative text editor doesn't feel like that big of a sell. Pairing in VS Code over Zoom has gotten a lot better over the last year or two, to the point that I choose it for simplicity over more purpose-specific tools like VS Code Live Share (which is a bit slow/glitchy but fine, and overall "neat") or Tuple (which is great). Would I pay money for "VSCode, but faster"? Absolutely. I'm waiting multiple seconds for keystrokes to apply sometimes and don't know why. But the extensions are what make it VS Code – if I just wanted "a faster text editor" I'd uninstall all my extensions and just keep using VS Code (it'd blaze), or switch to Sublime. I'm excited to see more people working in this space, so I certainly wish you luck!
ThinkBeat 4y ago
This will be interesting. For me Sublime seems to hit all the same spots without the web assembly plug in feature.
sgtnoodle 4y ago
Good luck! A clean slate code editor with Rust's memory safety guarantees sounds great. Just don't fall for the 2nd system fallacy. Keep things simple and pragmatic. I tried Atom for a while, but it didn't cope well with other IDEs renaming files before overwriting them. I tried to fix it, but the response I got from the community was rather dismissive. It was quite irritating to present obviously wrong behavior and be told that it was correct. My attempts to dive into the code myself lead me down a rabbit hole of dependencies of dependencies of dependencies, to the point that I just gave up. I switched to vscode and it has mostly stayed out of my way.
lenkite 4y ago
first class VIM keybindings also please!
niutech 4y ago
Why not collaborate with developers of existing code editors such as Xi Editor (https://xi-editor.io https://xi-editor.io) or Lapce (https://lapce.dev https://lapce.dev) instead of making yet another one? As for lightweight alternatives to Atom, there is also Lite-XL (https://lite-xl.com https://lite-xl.com).
- PoignardAzur 4y ago
  Speaking as someone involved in the Xi community, there's not that much to collaborate with. Work on Xi has completely stopped, and work on the Druid GUI framework is still in early stages. I think it could be interesting to compare notes re GUI frameworks (especially since the Druid community is about to see some overhauls there) but I don't think it would have saved them that much work if they'd done that from the start.
wvh 4y ago
A new approach with native speed and incorporating LSP and easy extensibility at its core instead of bold-on – as in older editors – sounds interesting. LSP and across-file editing doesn't always fit nicely into the old tab-per-file or view-per-file paradigm. Is there going to be an open-source version with free license available for Zed, or will this be a commercially licensed project?

aniforprez 4y ago

IMO the killer thing that VSCode has over all the other editors is the wealth of extensions and a certain degree of simplicity. What are your plans for Zed in terms of extensibility and are you aligning more towards making something beefy and full-featured like the IntelliJ offerings or something more "lightweight" like VSCode or Sublime?

nathansobo 4y ago
We plan to make Zed extensible via WebAssembly, but we're taking a different approach than we did with Atom. Our goal is to make Zed fast, stable, and collaborative first, extensible second. We'll be taking a more conservative approach with our APIs to ensure we can preserve our core values even as users add extensions. Our goal is for Zed to have the lightweight and snappy vibe of Sublime with the power of a more full-featured IDE. These objectives are obviously in tension, but I think we can build something that balances them well. A collaborative IDE that feels fast and powerful.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Ooh, this is interesting. It sounds like you learned a lesson here. Could you say more about what prompted the change? I once talked with a Firefox engineer who felt like an initial urge for openness left them with a lot of API surface area that locked them into a lot of design choices. Was it something like that for you as well?
  - nathansobo 4y ago
    Very much so. As the first Electron app we were so excited about people being able to do anything they imagined. It was cool but ended up really constraining us. This time we really want to drive our API based on the most important things people actually need to extend. We need to navigate the trade-offs more intelligently.
    - SaulJLH 4y ago
      This "private alpha", any hints on how we might jump aboard!? ;) EDIT Nvm, I see this is our best option for now: https://zed.dev/waitlist https://zed.dev/waitlist
      - iamnbutler 4y ago
        it's less about being exclusive and more about getting feedback on the specific features we are focusing on and building at the moment. For now, people pairing/collaboratively writing Rust is our focus, and we are pulling people in that fit that criteria!
    - manaskarekar 4y ago
      As someone who loved everything about Atom except the sluggishness and bloat, Zed sounds like exactly the thing that I've been wanting. VSCode/Codium is amazing but it feels the same - sluggish but a feature/extensions-packed behemoth. I hope Zed is able to establish a nice extension ecosystem as that is priceless! Thank you!
    - gosukiwi 4y ago
      This is interesting. I wonder how Emacs solves that, given that it's one of, if not THE most, extensible editor out there. I'd think that is a good thing, but never considered the drawbacks, besides performance and plugin interop that is.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Emacs either doesn't have APIs or everything is an API, depending on how you look at it - since it's source is available at runtime plugins and modules can be first-class citizens performance-wise.
- syrusakbary 4y ago
  This is great. Syrus here, from Wasmer. I think WAPM and Wasmer could help a lot on the extensibility using Wasm plugins. I'd love to chat further, please feel free to reach me at syrus[at]wasmer[dot]io!
- the_duke 4y ago
  Hey there. I've been thinking about implementing an editor agnostic WASM based plugin framework and started prototyping with some promising results, although there are also a lot of of WASM related constraints to consider. I think cross-platform plugins would be hugely beneficial for the whole ecosystem, and also generally for new editors since they can potentially benefit from a larger plugin developer community. Is that something you can see your team collaborating on?
- nurettin 4y ago
  If you make Python a first class citizen and give it special support, you won't be disappointed. Man that felt a bit like extortion, but I mean well.
- Already__Taken 4y ago
  IMO the leap from sublime to vscode was because the extensions made it so welcoming & bultin. I think the next leap from that is by-default sharing of those extensions and config. WASM might be able to do that coupled with security defining execution. We need a trusted mechanism to share what git-hooks promised without thinking about it. Like you said, collaborative. If extensions lock down the files they will touch and the urls that can be visited I think sharing them becomes more palatable.
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    VScode offers workspace settings that you can check into git that will get picked up by anyone else using vscode on that repo.
quaunaut 4y ago
Atom practically invented the kind of extensions that VSCode had, and even several years into VSCode's life Atom far outstripped it in Extensions. Perf became the biggest problem however, which VSCode took over.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y ago
  Sublime, TextMate, …
  - sealthedeal 4y ago
    I love Sublime, still my fave
    - yccs27 4y ago
      The instant-opening experience is just soo good, and Electron bloat nowhere in sight... I actually use VS Code as well, but more like an IDE with tons of extensions, and Sublime is my 'basic' text editor.
      - distances 4y ago
        I tried to use VS Code but just couldn't stand it. I don't want to say it's sluggish but it definitely isn't snappy, not even with a M1 laptop. It's fine, but it isn't good. I ended up purchasing the upgrade to Sublime 4, definitely worth the price.
      - can16358p 4y ago
        Same thoughts. While Vscode is my IDE now, I definitely love the instant-opening of Sublime. Ironically, it's even launching faster than TextEdit.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    BBEdit.
    - 4y ago
l33t2328 4y ago
The bloat VSCode has over Atom kills it for me.
- joaonmatos 4y ago
  Atom was unbelievably slower than VSCode for any comparable set of capabilities. What do you mean bloated?
- nsonha 4y ago
  anyone can say vscode is bloated except atom. I gave it credit for being highly modular though. I remember being to disable the statusbar component (not just the UI) completely.
rjh29 4y ago
IMO the killer thing is performance, VSCode starts fast and is smooth to write with. It blew away the older set of Electron-based editors. They work tirelessly on performance every release and it shows imo. Allowing extensions without destroying perf isn't easy either.
- gibbitz 4y ago
  This is why I continued to use sublime text all the way up to capitulating to TypeScript. Code was slower because of all the intellisense. I've had Code freeze on me a few times. Something that I don't have happen in Sublime or Vim. If you have a lot of RAM and work on a current mainstream OS it may seem smooth, but it's still using 400mb of RAM. May as well use Eclipse or WebStorm FWIW. That said I'm using VSCode now too, but things can always be better :).
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    Part of it may be just Windows. I use Windows a lot to move files and folders around and the File Explorer is something I constantly need to wait on to respond. The Windows as GUI is not very responsive in my experience.
  - manigandham 4y ago
    > "but it's still using 400mb of RAM" Why does this matter? What is the point of saving RAM instead of using it?
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      It matters because your program is probably not the only one running.
      - manigandham 4y ago
        It’s a small amount and if you’re using it then it should take priority. Modern operating systems with SSDs are very good at managing memory anyway.
bstar77 4y ago
NeoVim can compete on this front. See LunarVim for a heavily extended experience.
- theonething 4y ago
  woah, as a long time vim user who's been too lazy to switch, this might push me over the edge.
  - bstar77 4y ago
    I pair it up with Alacritty on Mac and Linux for a nice performance boost. It will work in iTerm or one of the default Linux terminals, but much slower.
    - theonething 4y ago
      Nice! I'm on iTerm but may just go whole hog and switch out that too. Thanks for the tips! I love HN. P.S. Any other plugins, tips/tricks you recommend for a vim user jumping into NeoVim/LunarVim?
rattray 4y ago
Interesting. Will you have built-in LSP support for most popular languages then?
brianzelip 4y ago
The killer feature for me wrt to Atom -> VSCode was the built in terminal.

rafaelturk 4y ago

Amazing! Sounds like a great foundation! Curious about UI execution in Rust

nathansobo 4y ago
We plan to start blogging about this pretty soon.

ilovecaching 4y ago

Please make zed capable of running in a terminal. If I could have a modern editor that can run in the terminal and had a nice GUI, I would definitely pick it up. There's still many instances where I'm working on a remote dev machine, on my iPad, over a serial connection, inside of tmux, where a terminal based text editor is a necessity.

nathansobo 4y ago
We have graphics, but I could see a mode where you `scp` a headless moon lander version of Zed up to a remote server to do remote development. VS Code has a feature like this but I hadn't used it much before switching to Zed full-time.
- Shish2k 4y ago
  > VS Code has a feature like this but I hadn't used it much before switching to Zed full-time. Please check it out — being able to edit / run / debug code on a linux server using a mac desktop over ssh, and having the whole experience be as seamless as edit / run / debug locally, is a huge win — it's pretty much _the_ reason that I’m currently using VSCode 90% of the time despite being a huge JetBrains fan (to the point of paying for their full enterprise pack out of my own pocket) (JetBrains tools do kind-of support remote file editing, but it’s flaky and slow, and remote run / debug are a nightmare — compare to VSCode, where I sometimes mix up local and remote development because they’re identical except for the hostname in the titlebar when running remotely)
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    It also works on Windows through ssh (including desktop win10), which makes working with Windows easier on the nerves.
  - PascLeRasc 4y ago
    Is what VS Code does different from using an SFTP mount plugin like remote-edit on Atom?
4y ago

a4isms 4y ago

Nathan, I remember your passion for this project from its very early days. It has already borne fruit that has grown into a garden in the form of Electron, and I'm excited to see you are reimagining Atom in the form of Zed. Best wishes for Zed's success!

nathansobo 4y ago
Thanks very much for your kind words and wishes!
- a4isms 4y ago
  You are very welcome. Although in my haste I mixed my metaphors up! Not sure if Atom was a fruit that grew into an orchard or a seed that grew into a garden. How about both?

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

> custom native UI framework Cool project, but this is clearly a contradiction. wxWidgets? That offers a native UI. Wherever possible it uses the UI controls from the underlying OS/system to render the interface. Looking at the project page it describes "a GPU-powered UI framework that met our needs." That's not a native UI. That's a non-native UI compiled to native code, ala something like Flutter.

nathansobo 4y ago
Sure, cross-platform UI that's on the metal is a more accurate description.
- loic-sharma 4y ago
  Did you consider using Flutter? If yes, what made you choose against it?
  - wpietri 4y ago
    It's been a few years since I used Flutter, but doesn't it still require you to use the related language Dart? I liked the idea of it, and I thought the tight integration between Flutter and Dart allowed them to do some cool things. But I wasn't a huge fan of the language itself. And I think it's a lot to ask prospective extension-writers to learn a new language.
    - gman83 4y ago
      If you know Java or JavaScript, Dart is extremely easy to pick up.
      - wtetzner 4y ago
        Sure, but that doesn't help if your project is in Rust.
        4y ago

420official 4y ago

What's the reasoning behind this iteration being closed-source?

nathansobo 4y ago
This time we're on our own in the marketplace with no big revenue-generating company supporting us. We'd like to be as open as humanly possible while being able to build a defensible business around the editor.

geodel 4y ago

Well, unless it is paid, I don't know how would you continue to toil for years making great editor. And unless it is free, gain a good market share to continue to support. I hope you would have some solution to this conundrum.

nathansobo 4y ago
We plan to monetize collaboration. Zed is a collaborative platform disguised as a world-class code editor.
- docmechanic 4y ago
  I'm always excited to see new ways to monetize open source. Hope this is another open source success story.
- dymk 4y ago
  How often do developers want to edit the same file, at the same time, and have those updates occur in real-time? I see this as a compelling feature for something targeting the use cases of, say Google Docs, where multiple people are contributing to an outline document or a business plan at the same time - but for code, I don't quite see the appeal.
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    > How often do developers want to edit the same file, at the same time, and have those updates occur in real-time? That's a very specific example of collaboration. Remote work is exploding. What about, say, integrated, collaborative debugging or code review? Integrations with things like Slack?
    - ctvo 4y ago
      I'm sure the folks at Zed know what they're doing, but this is already possible in multiple editors / IDEs. I'm excited to see how Zed innovates in this space. Examples: - VSCode Live Share https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share - JetBrains IDEs Code With Me https://www.jetbrains.com/code-with-me https://www.jetbrains.com/code-with-me - Standalone https://www.coscreen.co https://www.coscreen.co https://duckly.com https://duckly.com

pvg 4y ago

Should development ever wind down, you already have the advantage of being able to announce it as "Zed's dead, baby" instead of clunky corporate euphemisms.

nathansobo 4y ago
Fabulous point. Always good to have solid contingency plans.
nsxwolf 4y ago
They should name its engine or one of its components "Chopper".
behnamoh 4y ago
yet another buzzword we hear a lot these days: Zed is “lightning fast”… I hear that a lot about Rust projects, like Kitty or Alacritty
- nathansobo 4y ago
  "Real real fast"
  - pvg 4y ago
    I like smoke and lightnin' Bare metal thunder
- ossusermivami 4y ago
  kitty is python+c++ fyi! (and as blazing as the other lightning rust software)
- smolder 4y ago
  Lightning fast must be an upgrade from the blazing[ly??] fast days. Tangential, but I've been wondering, what comes after "web scale" on that axis?
- alx__ 4y ago
  That because they're usually comparing it to a Electron app, at this point it's punching down ;)

tiffanyh 4y ago

Re: Native UI Is Zed web-based or not? Would it be able to be hosted in the browser like the web-based version of Github Codespace (Visual Studio Code Online)?

nathansobo 4y ago
We plan to compile to WebAssembly that writes pixels to a WebGL canvas.
- shakow 4y ago
  If you will directly write yourself everything to a GL canvas anyway, what do you gain by going through a whole WebGL dependency & context rather than just using a native OpenGL context?
  - nathansobo 4y ago
    This would only be for the web. Right now we're macOS only and target Metal.

polutropos 4y ago

Any screenshots to share?

nathansobo 4y ago
Here's a demo from a talk a give not too long ago: https://youtu.be/wXT73bBr83s?list=PL3TSF5whlprXqwYNIM0X8mBzula2McGKd&t=1077 https://youtu.be/wXT73bBr83s?list=PL3TSF5whlprXqwYNIM0X8mBzu...

mwcampbell 4y ago

zed sounds like a great project. What are your thoughts on the existing Rust GUI frameworks? Naturally the core editor widget will need to be custom no matter what, but for the rest of the UI, have you considered using one of the Rust GUI frameworks already being developed?

nathansobo 4y ago
When we started on Zed the Rust UI framework space was much younger. In absence of a mature solution that met our exact needs, the simplest path for us was to build it ourselves. We're too far into things now to change at this point.
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  Fair enough. Hopefully when you're ready to work on accessibility in your UI framework, AccessKit [1] will be ready. I'm hoping to have usable Windows and Mac implementations by the end of this year. [1]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit
  - zamalek 4y ago
    Accessibility is a peeve of mine (for no other reason than sympathy). Thanks for your work on this.

gosukiwi 4y ago

Atom was the first editor I wrote plugins to and contributed to core. I prefer it over VSCode, as it does less, and it's easy to customize for web devs. Sad to see it go, but it's for the best :(

gigatexal 4y ago

Add a really good vim mode and I’m there.

nathansobo 4y ago
Earlier this year Keith Simmons, the author of Neovide (https://github.com/neovide/neovide https://github.com/neovide/neovide), joined our team. He's been working on Vim bindings and paying a lot of attention to getting it right. As you probably know there's a lot of surface area, so this will take time.
- gigatexal 4y ago
  Fantastic. Let us pay you so this sticks around.
- frizkie 4y ago
  Amazing to hear this, looking forward to hearing more about the project.
- petepete 4y ago
  Hoping he also adds animations. Neovide is beautiful.

sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago

Humble question, I don't mean to sound confrontational, I ask of genuine curiosity: Why not contribute to VS Code instead? For Julia, Atom+Juno was excellent. It was the first time I could select+run on a proper IDE (I was coming from python+notebook). To me this was revolutionary. Then I discovered VS Code, so Atom+Juno stopped making sense. You seem to be a very competent developer, so why not just contribute to VS Code?

vlunkr 4y ago
Not the person you're responding to, but it sounds like they're going in a different direction with Zed in terms of the tech stack, where VSCode is pretty similar to Atom.
nathansobo 4y ago
Our goal is to build something substantially better than VS Code.
- gregmac 4y ago
  Can you be more specific about this, and what you're prioritizing? Eg: Speed? Different UI layout? Fundamentally different design/UX philosophy?
- GordonS 4y ago
  What would you say are planned to be the primary selling points over VSCode?
  - exyi 4y ago
    From the other parts of the thread: Performance, maybe better collaboration?
    - galaxyLogic 4y ago
      I think that's a worthy goal. I find it really bad that in this age of super-mega CPUs apps still feel not much faster than say 20 years ago. The reason I think is because like cities apps are built on top of other apps, like VSCode on top of Electron. Secondly when you re-create from scratch you can keep the best features and drop the ones we've learned are not so useful. Godspeed!

input_sh 4y ago

I just wanted to say I really liked your product and despite multiple attempts to switch to VS Code (in anticipation of this day), I kept returning to Atom. I don't know why, I could never get VS Code to feel right to me, while Atom always felt right despite many of its quirks I've gotten used to over the years. Looking forward to its spiritual successor!

nathansobo 4y ago
Thanks very much!

Aeolun 4y ago

Hmm, curious how this will compare to Jetbrains’ fleet editor. Of course, they share the problem that I can’t yet use either :)

nathansobo 4y ago
We're pure Rust and hopefully faster. But yeah, plenty of competition in the space!
- fmntf 4y ago
  I work on the linux kernel using CLion and the IDE is still fast. I would not be interested in a non-Java IDE for the performance.
  - exyi 4y ago
    Are you using 32-core / 100GB RAM monster machine? I do everything on my rather powerful laptop, but Jetbrains IDEs are just too much. I can't have more than one project open at time, which is limiting. I didn't try CLion, only IntelliJ for Scala and Rider for C#/F#, all on smallish projects and it will still take 3-6GB of memory :| I'd be interested in even lighter than VSCode IDE ;)
    - nwatson 4y ago
      I often have several simultaneous PyCharm projects open with separate completely introspected and navigable virtualenv's with lots of installed libraries, and also ongoing DataGrip, and at times CLion or IntelliJ sessions ... all the Jetbrains IDEs are performing quite well. At times running Docker as well. 32GB Macbook Pro M1.
      - 4dregress 4y ago
        Yeah I'm doing the same on an 2021 intel Mac, I love jet brains stuff!
    - deleted 4y ago

tormeh 4y ago

Any chance of collaboration with https://lapce.dev/ https://lapce.dev/ ?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
woojoo666 4y ago
Wow this does seem to share a lot of features. Rust based, WASI plugins, real time collaboration. And it's open source!

greyhair 4y ago

Just make it keyboard centic. I don't want to touch the mouse.

nathansobo 4y ago
Definitely a priority.

artursapek 4y ago

PascLeRasc 4y ago

I think Atom was perfect, for what it's worth. I've always found it to be faster than VS Code.

kobalsky 4y ago

Cool project. Since it's not mentioned on the website, what will be your roadmap regarding security? I feel that all IDEs have security handled as an afterthought, VSCode made some progress but it's far from being there. I just want to be able to use a code formatting / language extension without having to worry about it subverting my whole computer in a future update. vscode is halfway there with containerized development, but apparently they didn't intend that to be security measure and they make it clear to only run trusted extensions. I'm guessing there are ways to access host files through the bridge. It's obvious that we still have to trust extension authors, but an IDE with the correct security sandboxing can limit the blast zone if it gets compromised (leaking a source file vs getting a rootkit installed and ending up releasing compromised updates to production)

hit8run 4y ago
Did that happen to you? Sounds scary…

CJefferson 4y ago

What is the accessibility (for example for blind users) of your custom UI framework like?

Communitivity 4y ago

Sounds interesting. I've love to take part in the alpha and provide feedback. I've done software engineering professionally for 25 years in Javascript, C++, Rust, Java, Erlang, Elixir, Clojure and Python (mostly Java and C++). I've used Emacs, VS Code, Visual Studio, and other IDEs.

Petersipoi 4y ago
https://zed.dev/waitlist https://zed.dev/waitlist

alephnan 4y ago

All these new generation text editors are cool and all, but I feel they are mostly rehashing the UI of VSCode. VSCode is fast enough, and the perceived speed of text editors / typing only needs to be so fast. Looking forward to innovations in UI. Cause otherwise, VIM is comparable if not better in performance than modern text editors.

thewoolleyman 4y ago

Best of luck with Zed, Nathan! I've always been impressed with your brilliance, vision, hope, and positivity. Hope we can catch up again soon, until then keep changing the world for the better!

omaranto 4y ago

Is it caled Zed because it is inspired by the old Zed text editor? https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/spe.4380100107 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/spe.43801001...

ljm 4y ago

How many times do you have to re-invent the text editor?

lytedev 4y ago
For the same reason people have and use many different tools in all sorts of professions.
bananamerica 4y ago
I love Emacs and use it every day, but not everyone is up to the time commitment of maintaining it.

eikenberry 4y ago

When will the source repository going to be made public and what license do you plan to use? For the editor and the UI kit. Looking forward to seeing how that all works.

ravedave5 4y ago

Please be aware of the second system effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

neoneye2 4y ago
Also implementing undo for a big project is tricky. If the user switches to another file, collapses/expands things, runs a plugin, auto-formats some code, and then undoes things. What will undo be like for a collaborative editor?

jonathankoren 4y ago

Is Zed a company? I wish you luck, but I'm pretty skeptical that a whole company can survive on making a text editor, or even editing tools in general. Wouldn't it be safer for user if you open sourced this? As someone that loved Atom, and have been screwed over by Facebook's Nuclide, and now Github's Atom, I have to think about my options. (No emacs isn't an option.)

marxplank 4y ago
why isn't emacs an option? It's the longest continuously maintained open source code editor there ever has been and still outperforms electron editors half a century after it first appeared

hannob 4y ago

I've spend a few minutes on your page, yet I couldn't answer the following questions: * Do you already have a working editor I could test or is this merely an announcement? * Is this an open source project or a proprietary product? Does it cost money? If yes how much?

wodenokoto 4y ago
From the webpage, I figure this much: - It's in closed alpha, so yes they have a product, no they don't have a product. - It is a closed project. It probably will cost money, it is not decided how much.

folknor 4y ago

Interesting! I just wanted to let you know my perspective, which is probably quite unique. I started using atom pre-1.0, a long, long time ago. I immediately jumped to vscode when I realised it existed. The reason is a bit weird; it's the find-in-files/project (c-s-F/Ctrl+Shift+F) sidebar search/replace feature. Compared to the Atom (and from what I can see in the youtube talk, zed has the same "problem") which opens c-s-F results in the main window, vscode opens them in the sidebar and doesn't clutter the main view with it. The reason this is powerful to me is that I code mostly in domain-specific, esoteric, private languages that have no API documentation, no stdlib or docs, and no online resources to learn from. So the only way to learn is by example, or talk to someone who knows. Learning by example is usually much faster than talking. So what I do is any new project is just a subfolder in a workspace that contains all known code in the language and the way I find out how to do something is c-s-F. When the results cover the main view, or even parts of it (which is also possible with atom), it's just way too intrusive. The sidebar file list is useless to me at this point - where the result comes from is irrelevant. So why not use that space? Also of course the fact that vscodes cross-file search was blazingly fast was an upside as well (I believe they used ripgrep for that since the start?) Another thing I want to mention is (and you highlight the keyword search in that youtube talk around 18:54) the power of the command palette search method that is available in vscode: first-letter-matching. I don't know what the proper name of it is, but essentially "ps" matches "pub struct" for example. Obviously it matches it with a lower score than something that starts with "ps", but it's very powerful for matching in the command palette. Thanks for listening.

theteapot 4y ago
> I code mostly in domain-specific, esoteric, private languages, no stdlib or docs, and no online resources to learn from. Jesus, who are you?
- denysvitali 4y ago
  A brainfuck developer?
- tmp_anon_22 4y ago
  Retired? Or in Academia?

jzzskijj 4y ago

I have to assume no-one in the team saw Pulp Fiction (1994) when you ended up picking up the name "Zed"...?

slightwinder 4y ago

> Written in Rust, custom native UI framework Interesting. I think a major reason for VS Code's success is their usage of web-stack, which is stable, powerful and well documented, enabling easy access to higher customizations for anyone. It will be interesting to see how much a custom UI can emulate this without html&css.

lifeplusplus 4y ago

i hate vscode is written in electron, i always noticed the latency, it's good enough but it's annoying. atom was same but worse. what I also disliked about atom and sublimetext, is how you needed to install 20 extensions to get basic functionality and they weren't always compatible, with each other. Vscode approach of having most of basic functionality builtin but behind flags which can be disabled meant most people had good setup from the get go. Vscode to me was like jetbrains but faster and lighter. Although in some cases jetbrains was more robust. If there is vscode that was written natively. I'd be so happy. Even if there is a new branch of vscode that is 6 months behind in features but is built in native it'd be huge for me.

ClawsOnPaws 4y ago

Hey, Please don't forget about accessibility. Getting this right from day 1 will make your life a lot easier in the long run. If I remember correctly, I was never able to use Atom with a screen reader. Hearing custom UI already makes me nervous and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to use Zed with a screen reader either. Blind developers exist. Please don't forget about us. It's one of the few areas where we can actually make a meaningful difference together with our peers on an equal playing field.

serial_dev 4y ago
How do other editors/IDEs perform in terms of accessibility? What are your favorites?
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  I've only ever heard good things about Visual Studio in this area, not sure if other IDEs are comparable. I do know Eclipse has a specialized build for this purpose as well. I wonder if XCode is also decent in this regard. I think Notepad++ might be only other one from memory that I know of.
- dharmab 4y ago
  Visual Studio is quite good: https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc
- ClawsOnPaws 4y ago
  My favorite is VS Code by far. I use it daily. They recently also added a bunch of sound cues to help figure out if code is folded or a line contains an error. It's pretty great. Auto completion reads well, the parameter hints read, even the built-in terminal works. So overall I'm really happy with it.
  - exysle 4y ago
    Would you mind commenting on XCode? I heard that Apple really cares about accessibility.

scotty79 4y ago

Please, please, please, make it infinitely pluggable from the start. That's the strength of Atom and similar editors. That anybody can create a plugin either for something very niche or just connect some huge amazing tooling directly to the editor. If you can make editor in Rust pluggable or scriptable with JS, Lua, C#, Python and whatever someone knows and is comfortable with you got a winner.

zamalek 4y ago

> Just starting our private alpha this week I'm holding thumbs, I have been massively excited about your elevator pitch since your original announcement. Good luck!

jjtheblunt 4y ago

jeppester 4y ago

In VS Code the collaborative editing (live share) seems like a dirty workaround put on top of an architecture not built with multiple users in mind. I use live share all the time because it's the best thing we have for pair programming, but I often wish for a better solution. We often get disconnected for no reason, editors get out of sync, terminal sharing is near useless. If you can produce something that doesn't feel like a hack, then I'm all in! Features I would love to have: - Terminal sharing should work like tmux with window size "smallest". It's the best solution I've found for having a shared terminal. - Let us join a collaboration session from the terminal: `zed [URL]`. No annoying website that takes ages to open, or having to open the editor before joining the session. - Let me start a server on a port and let others join that server. I can forward that port if I need to. - Let me start a headless server on a shared dev env, and let me and others connect to collaborate

cercatrova 4y ago
Have you seen https://tuple.app https://tuple.app?
- jeppester 4y ago
  Thank you for the suggestion. I have tried tuple, but for me it feels like a step back compared to live share. It has poor linux support, and sharing one screen is not as good as connecting to each other's editors. It just feels worse to watch a video feed compared to something that's getting rendered locally. I do however believe that tuple can work very well if you are in an environment where everyone has mac computers and similar screen setups.

404mm 4y ago

Hi, when can we expect to see some first preview?

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

"Mission-critical tools should be hyper-responsive." Did not seem to be important with the worlds slowest dev-tool ever, Atom. ;) "Real-time collaboration produces better software." At design level, ok. Programming is in most cases not a co-op operation. If it is, then you are probably creating solutions while writing code which is the best guarantee for bad solutions. “Conversations should happen close to code.” Agree to some degree, this is a big flaw with GIT. It is also a flaw with many programming langs and tools. Even if I use collaboration features in VS and VSC many langs are simply not designed for presenting code to people not highly familiar with the specific code base. So, an editor may not solve the problem here. “Your editor should disappear.” I mainly code in VS and what I can do in VS in 10 mins takes me a couple of hours in VSC. A tool should aim to be the default of a problem. The amount of time I have seen wasted over the years with people trying to master VIM or git from a prompt is just ridiculous.

ghshephard 4y ago
I don't use Visual Studio, so I'm intrigued as to what VS can do in 10 minutes that takes 2+ hours in VSC?
- LocalPCGuy 4y ago
  One example could be scaffolding out a CRUD app and DB fairly quickly. Even excluding scaffolding, VS can eliminate a lot of the boilerplate that takes time if you need to type it out yourself. Not saying you can't setup VSC to do those kinds of things also, but VS is a tools included solution out of the box. (I say this as someone who hasn't touched VS in a few years now, but used it daily for a few years before that, and who generally enjoys using good/fast text editors.)
  - merlinran 4y ago
    I would argue that boilerplates should be minimized in the first place. Regardless how fast it is to generate them, reading them over and over again together with the code human write is a huge waste of energy.

infogulch 4y ago

"collaborative" "Rust" "code editor" "CRDTs" is very reminiscent of Xi Editor by @raphlinus which shared all of these traits. Xi was abandoned with the conclusion that CRDTs aren't suitable as a basis for text editing interactions, or at least that implementation wasn't. Is Zed related to Xi in history or as inspiration? Why are you confident that Zed will be able to overcome the issues that blocked Xi's advancement?

raphlinus 4y ago
I've been talking to Nathan and think he has a good handle on the issues. One of the biggest mistakes in xi was an over-reliance on async and a loose coupling between the main logic and the UI surface. Zed isn't making those mistakes. I'm eager to see what the come up with and look forward to friendly competition in the open source Rust UI space when they release their toolkit.

diziet 4y ago

Will it be native Sublime Text fast? Not on electron? I tried using VScode and Atom. Both were noticeably slow compared to sublime text. I can do silly, bad practice things like open a 50 meg log file in sublime and search for simple regex in the editor. Electron based editors stall and potentially crash.

iamnbutler 4y ago
I may be biased, but at least sublime fast, hopefully much faster! Moving to Zed felt like going from a 30fps to 144fps. You should be able to open stupidly big files and shouldn't experience much to any lag. Nathan has a demo he likes to give opening one one of those huge json files and searching, using multiple cursors, etc. It is pretty cool to watch.
ghshephard 4y ago
50 Megabytes? That's tiny I would hope in 2022 that any text editor can handle a 50 megabyte file. I routinely (like every day) open 500 megabyte files in SublimeText, and just checked to make sure that it can handle 1.5 Gigabyte files without much difficulty (it can). Admittedly - once we get into the 5+ Gigabyte file size, startup times become annoying enough that I usually switch over to vim. So, thank you for bringing this up as an important requirement for modern text editors - they should be able to open up multi-gigabyte text files without even breathing hard.
- diziet 4y ago
  I hear you, but atom and vscode are noticeably slower at interacting and searching even at those small file sizes. So we're in violent agreement here!

deleted 4y ago

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beliu 4y ago

In case folks are interested, I had a delightful interview about a year back with Max Brunsfeld, one of the original Atom devs who is now working on Zed: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/max-brunsfeld https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/max-brunsfeld. (YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jf8AqaZ7IU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jf8AqaZ7IU) Very excited about where this new collaborative editor goes!

LoveMortuus 4y ago

Does 'lightning-fast' mean that the application will be light on the system or does it mean that it's well optimised but still demanding enough that you require a modern computer? I'm asking because I like to use my laptop Acer Aspire One most because of the size and because it the incredibly good feeling keyboard. BUT the system is 32-bit and running Intel Atom which means that before VSCode moved away from 32-bit I could use it, but it would take some time to open and I wouldn't really call it writing in real time, if you know what I mean~ :D But I love the keyboard shortcuts and the multiple cursor functionality, which is why I stuck with it for as long as I could!

smcleod 4y ago

Great to see you've dropped Electron!

giancarlostoro 4y ago

I'm a huge fan of Text Editors, I've made a few basic ones myself. Thank you for creating Atom! For ages before Atom was a thing I grew fascination with using web servers for front-end UI and thereby using HTML / CSS for a local applications UI, I had seen this in SlickBeard and a few other usenet applications that used a web interface instead of a standard GUI interface to render a UI. I also remember a Google program that did this, though I can't recall the name. It might sound crazy to some to do it this way, but because the web server is localized to your system and your browser is usually responsive once open, every app I used that worked this way was always highly responsive and just worked. I was dreaming of taking Vibe.d and CodeMirror and making something you could install as a daemon on any machine and code from anywhere. When Atom came out I was obsessed with it for a while, it was a whole other approach from what I was thinking of! Did you ever do a write up on how you came to the thought of just taking a browser engine and turning it into your own sandbox and what that entailed in the earlier days? That seems like a fun story. Because of Atom we got great innovations that followed, for example Slack, Discord, VS Code, and the list goes on... and on... Heck POSTMAN! Which is probably used or has been used by every developer under the sun.

shuntress 4y ago

This actually looks really promising despite fitting snugly into the "Show HN: Hey check out my cool unique new project" mold. I know it's not the main point of the DevXConf presentation but I really like the look of that multi-buffer feature.

derelicto 4y ago

Thank you for everything! Atom paved the way for the next gen of editors. Curious to see what comes out of zed! Live collab seems amazing. As a wishlist item, can we get a native vim mode with .vim.rc support? :D

ksec 4y ago

>Mission-critical tools should be hyper-responsive. >When you move the cursor or type a character, you should see pixels on the next refresh of your display—every time. Even sub-perceptual pauses add up over the course of a day to create unnecessary stress. I remember there were lots of research for this in Next-Generation Atom during the Atom era, before VSCode came along. Having a UI and text responsiveness within 16ms on a 60Hz Monitor is a tall order which I believe even Sublime is incapable of. Considering 95% if not 99% of developers on HN thinks VSCode is very fast or fast enough, I am not sure this point is worth pursuing. Personally I really want to see it happen. As I hate latency.

still_grokking 4y ago

How does it do in comparison to the other upcoming "better VSC"s? Like for example: https://v2.onivim.io/ https://v2.onivim.io/ https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/

xwolfi 4y ago

You're not going to get it right. At worst you ll make the same mistakes and at best you ll do the opposite mistakes. No migration, sunsetting, "this is legacy, let s redo it all" will ever fix anything. Fix what doesnt work.

rattray 4y ago

Funny, this doesn't sound like a spiritual successor to Atom at all. What made people excited about Atom (compared to Sublime Text, which people switched from and was ~always faster) was the extensibility. Sounds like this won't have that. It's only a successor in the sense that it's built by the same people and tackles some of its challenges.

rattray 4y ago

I'm not sure if this feedback is useful, but I have to say that a collaborative text editor doesn't feel like that big of a sell. Pairing in VS Code over Zoom has gotten a lot better over the last year or two, to the point that I choose it for simplicity over more purpose-specific tools like VS Code Live Share (which is a bit slow/glitchy but fine, and overall "neat") or Tuple (which is great). Would I pay money for "VSCode, but faster"? Absolutely. I'm waiting multiple seconds for keystrokes to apply sometimes and don't know why. But the extensions are what make it VS Code – if I just wanted "a faster text editor" I'd uninstall all my extensions and just keep using VS Code (it'd blaze), or switch to Sublime. I'm excited to see more people working in this space, so I certainly wish you luck!

ThinkBeat 4y ago

This will be interesting. For me Sublime seems to hit all the same spots without the web assembly plug in feature.

sgtnoodle 4y ago

Good luck! A clean slate code editor with Rust's memory safety guarantees sounds great. Just don't fall for the 2nd system fallacy. Keep things simple and pragmatic. I tried Atom for a while, but it didn't cope well with other IDEs renaming files before overwriting them. I tried to fix it, but the response I got from the community was rather dismissive. It was quite irritating to present obviously wrong behavior and be told that it was correct. My attempts to dive into the code myself lead me down a rabbit hole of dependencies of dependencies of dependencies, to the point that I just gave up. I switched to vscode and it has mostly stayed out of my way.

lenkite 4y ago

first class VIM keybindings also please!

niutech 4y ago

Why not collaborate with developers of existing code editors such as Xi Editor (https://xi-editor.io https://xi-editor.io) or Lapce (https://lapce.dev https://lapce.dev) instead of making yet another one? As for lightweight alternatives to Atom, there is also Lite-XL (https://lite-xl.com https://lite-xl.com).

PoignardAzur 4y ago
Speaking as someone involved in the Xi community, there's not that much to collaborate with. Work on Xi has completely stopped, and work on the Druid GUI framework is still in early stages. I think it could be interesting to compare notes re GUI frameworks (especially since the Druid community is about to see some overhauls there) but I don't think it would have saved them that much work if they'd done that from the start.

wvh 4y ago

A new approach with native speed and incorporating LSP and easy extensibility at its core instead of bold-on – as in older editors – sounds interesting. LSP and across-file editing doesn't always fit nicely into the old tab-per-file or view-per-file paradigm. Is there going to be an open-source version with free license available for Zed, or will this be a commercially licensed project?