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I listened to a podcast interview with one of the cofounders of zed. One of the revealing things is that he went on and on about how important latency was and h
by thefaux 1y ago
I listened to a podcast interview with one of the cofounders of zed. One of the revealing things is that he went on and on about how important latency was and how they had to do their own rendering because of the problems they ran into with electron. He also admits that he never used vim, which already has imperceptible latency relative to the terminal emulator, which has already largely solved the text rendering problem.
I understand that there are advantages to being a native app from their perspective, but for me, it is even better for my editor to be integrated into my terminal editor. And because they built it the opposite way though, they have to also build a terminal emulator into their editor.
There is a real cost to building zed this way. If they were an embedded terminal app, they would get full terminal support for free and would not have to implement 2d text rendering. They could even have made a bundled package with an oss terminal emulator like kitty. Then they could have focused strictly on their editing features and value adds. Every engineer hour spent fixing bugs/adding features to the rendering framework is an hour that could have been spent on value adds.
Personally, there is no way that latency itself can be that value add for me because I use neovim and don't use any language plugins so every keystroke already renders instantly. Clearly then you can do everything zed does in a terminal app within at worst tens of milliseconds of latency.
Of course their target market uses vscode and not vim and either doesn't know or care that you do not need to write your own rendering engine to make a low latency, featureful text editor. I am admittedly very much not the target consumer for zed though.
- dkersten 1y agoNot everyone wants to use a terminal editor and of those people, not everyone wants to use vscode.
- vlod 1y agoLearning a terminal editor will save your ass at 3am when production goes down. No joke.
- nurumaik 1y agoLearning a client-server editor will save your nerves when developing on a remote machine with 200ms ping
- JackYoustra 1y agolearning both is fun!
- opan 1y agoVim and emacs both also support editing remote files.
- nurumaik 1y ago"Support editing remote files" and "work with all plugins on remote that feels like editing on local machine" are different things
- opan 1y agoJust to clarify, for vim I'm talking about the scp:// thing, for emacs there is of course TRAMP. In both cases you're running a local editor and fetching the remote file, then sending it back when making changes. So your plugins and such should work just fine. I am not talking about sshing into the machine and running vim or emacs as a TUI on that remote machine, which is also possible with both editors.
- senko 1y agoLearning and wanting to use as a daily driver are very different things. I use vim on my servers and for writing git commit messages. For everything else, I use another editor (used to be Sublime Text, then Vs code, now Zed).
- kstrauser 1y agoNailed it. I'm fine with using vim to do remote work. I'm not an expert, but I have enough muscle memory to zip through the things I need to do. I don't want to use it exclusively, though. Turns out I'm capable of learning my way around multiple tools and using different ones in different contexts. Who knew?
- andoando 1y agoWhy does a text editor of all things need faster rendering, I have never seen this to be an issue
- adastra22 1y agoWhy do yaks need to be shaved?