5 ms·

What Zed lacks in code generation quality it makes up for in not-being-an-Electron-app

by cnqso 1y ago

shreddit 1y ago
Does it really? At the end of the day i need it to do my job. Ideal values don’t help me doing my job. So i choose the editor best suited and the features i need. And that’s not zed at the moment.
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  There's an analogue here with programming language iteration— Python, Ruby and friends showed what the semantics were that were needed, and then a decade or two later, Go and Rust took those semantics and put them in compiled, performance-oriented languages. Electron has been a powerful tool for quickly iterating UIs and plugin architectures in VSCode, Brackets, Atom, etc, now the window is open for a modern editor to deliver that experience without the massive memory footprint and UI stalls.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- ics 1y ago
  I agree with the main point but I am on battery often and the difference between native vs. one or multiple Electron apps in "doing my job" is easily several hours lost to battery life or interruptions for charging. Not a huge deal, but it's not my ideals that make me frown at charge cycles occurring twice as often.
TiredOfLife 1y ago
Zed includes node.js runtime and 100s of megabytes of javascript. It is essentially Electron.
- beckler 1y ago
  I'm gonna need you to back that claim up dawg, because the only thing I see the node runtime used for, is for when the user loads a js project. then it's basically just a proxy for node/npm afaik.
- skhameneh 1y ago
  Complete nonsense. https://zed.dev/blog/videogame https://zed.dev/blog/videogame https://zed.dev/blog/we-have-to-start-over https://zed.dev/blog/we-have-to-start-over
  - TiredOfLife 1y ago
    ~/.local/share/zed/
    - Kudos 1y ago
      No one's debating your first sentence, they're debating your second.
iamsaitam 1y ago
and then loses by not having plugin support
- nextaccountic 1y ago
  It does have extensions, but they are much more limited. In particular they can't define UI elements inside buffers, so you can't replicate something with rich UI like the Git integration in an extension.
llbbdd 1y ago
Every single new HN thread should come with an automod post badmouthing Electron to save everyone time.
- dcreater 1y ago
  its a bad anti-pattern that trades developer convenience for performance, UX etc. Its fair to hate on it With the advent of coding agents, I really hope we see devs move away - back to the traditional approach of using native frameworks/languages as now, you can write for 1 platform and easily task AI to handle other platforms.
  - evilduck 1y ago
    Absolutely nothing new has been said about Electron since like 2015, it's boring as hell to downvote and scroll past.
    - llbbdd 1y ago
      Fucking Amen.
  - llbbdd 1y ago
    This will never happen and it's a bizarre, legacy fantasy, borne of a fixed imaginary ideal of what computing should be. Programming will continue to move in the direction of ease-of-use and every time I see an out-of-topic reference to Electron in this forum I feel insane, like I'm fighting upstream. You will not see this - you will see more Electron apps, because that is the modern way of building cross-platform apps, and if you genuinely don't understand why that is I don't know how to explain it to you. You won't see another version of those because nobody is going to waste their time building cross-platform native apps at a native layer to performatively impress posters on HN. You, and seemingly everybody else on HN, can continue to pretend that devex doesn't matter, but that's the difference I guess between caring about devex and shipping products.
    - arianvanp 1y ago
diss 1y ago
This is simply not true… that’s the problem. As much as I like Zed, using it for the sake of not being an electron app doesn’t make any sense when Cursor’s edit prediction adds so much value. I’m not starved of resources and can run Cursor just fine – as far as Electron apps go VS Code is great, performant enough. I value productivity. I’ll very happily drop Cursor for Zed the second edit prediction is comparable. I’m eagerly waiting.
ffin 1y ago
I find Zed has some really frustrating UX choices. I’ll run an operation and it will either fail quietly, or be running in the background for a while with no indication that it is doing so.

What Zed lacks in code generation quality it makes up for in not-being-an-Electron-app

by cnqso 1y ago

What Zed lacks in code generation quality it makes up for in not-being-an-Electron-app

Does it really? At the end of the day i need it to do my job. Ideal values don’t help me doing my job. So i choose the editor best suited and the features i need. And that’s not zed at the moment.

mikepurvis 1y ago
There's an analogue here with programming language iteration— Python, Ruby and friends showed what the semantics were that were needed, and then a decade or two later, Go and Rust took those semantics and put them in compiled, performance-oriented languages. Electron has been a powerful tool for quickly iterating UIs and plugin architectures in VSCode, Brackets, Atom, etc, now the window is open for a modern editor to deliver that experience without the massive memory footprint and UI stalls.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
ics 1y ago
I agree with the main point but I am on battery often and the difference between native vs. one or multiple Electron apps in "doing my job" is easily several hours lost to battery life or interruptions for charging. Not a huge deal, but it's not my ideals that make me frown at charge cycles occurring twice as often.

TiredOfLife 1y ago

Zed includes node.js runtime and 100s of megabytes of javascript. It is essentially Electron.

beckler 1y ago
I'm gonna need you to back that claim up dawg, because the only thing I see the node runtime used for, is for when the user loads a js project. then it's basically just a proxy for node/npm afaik.
skhameneh 1y ago
Complete nonsense. https://zed.dev/blog/videogame https://zed.dev/blog/videogame https://zed.dev/blog/we-have-to-start-over https://zed.dev/blog/we-have-to-start-over
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  ~/.local/share/zed/
  - Kudos 1y ago
    No one's debating your first sentence, they're debating your second.

iamsaitam 1y ago

and then loses by not having plugin support

nextaccountic 1y ago
It does have extensions, but they are much more limited. In particular they can't define UI elements inside buffers, so you can't replicate something with rich UI like the Git integration in an extension.

llbbdd 1y ago

Every single new HN thread should come with an automod post badmouthing Electron to save everyone time.

dcreater 1y ago
its a bad anti-pattern that trades developer convenience for performance, UX etc. Its fair to hate on it With the advent of coding agents, I really hope we see devs move away - back to the traditional approach of using native frameworks/languages as now, you can write for 1 platform and easily task AI to handle other platforms.
- evilduck 1y ago
  Absolutely nothing new has been said about Electron since like 2015, it's boring as hell to downvote and scroll past.
  - llbbdd 1y ago
    Fucking Amen.
- llbbdd 1y ago
  This will never happen and it's a bizarre, legacy fantasy, borne of a fixed imaginary ideal of what computing should be. Programming will continue to move in the direction of ease-of-use and every time I see an out-of-topic reference to Electron in this forum I feel insane, like I'm fighting upstream. You will not see this - you will see more Electron apps, because that is the modern way of building cross-platform apps, and if you genuinely don't understand why that is I don't know how to explain it to you. You won't see another version of those because nobody is going to waste their time building cross-platform native apps at a native layer to performatively impress posters on HN. You, and seemingly everybody else on HN, can continue to pretend that devex doesn't matter, but that's the difference I guess between caring about devex and shipping products.
  - arianvanp 1y ago

diss 1y ago

This is simply not true… that’s the problem. As much as I like Zed, using it for the sake of not being an electron app doesn’t make any sense when Cursor’s edit prediction adds so much value. I’m not starved of resources and can run Cursor just fine – as far as Electron apps go VS Code is great, performant enough. I value productivity. I’ll very happily drop Cursor for Zed the second edit prediction is comparable. I’m eagerly waiting.

ffin 1y ago

I find Zed has some really frustrating UX choices. I’ll run an operation and it will either fail quietly, or be running in the background for a while with no indication that it is doing so.