Zed, the new code editor from Atom developers, has entered open beta | Hacker News Reader

Zed, the new code editor from Atom developers, has entered open beta

zed.dev

223 pointsactivitypea171 comments

To save some clicks:

> Currently, Zed only supports macOS.

That was actually from June of last year. It makes sense to start with a limited scope, but given that it's reaching public beta without much consideration for platforms outside of macOS, I wonder if it will ever actually feel "native" elsewhere, or if it will wind up ossified with Apple-specific idiosyncrasies. Time will tell.

Personally, I was mostly interested in their Rust GPUI library, but it hasn't been open sourced. (Yet; it does look like there is a plan to open source some of Zed, though obviously it's possible it never happens.) It sounded like a great idea and even in an early stage would probably be a great addition to the nascent ecosystem of Rust UI libraries.

It doesn't feel native on MacOS either, and wouldn't look any more out of place on Windows or Linux.

Closed-source editor built on a closed-source framework, telemetry built-in with no documented opt-out, hardcoded language servers, macOS only.

It's like they took a look at everything that made Atom and VS Code so popular, and decided to do the exact opposite.

Actually, no, Microsoft also likes to have closed source language servers or plugins like Pylance and part of the C# stuff.

Telemetry built-in with documented never-opt-out, actually.

The moment that you open Zed for the first time, you see a welcome screen that offers telemetry opt-out.

The editor will be open-source and cross-platform, but it takes time to build things.

You can, and should, build things in public.

EDIT: I just don’t trust promises for things to be open source. Notch said Minecraft would be open source, and look where that went. A promise let’s you skip out on releasing the code if it turns out to be a convenient or profitable options.

It should be opt-in

I completely agree and think it should be legally enforced but I also recognize that consensus has not yet developed in business culture, so I recognize I'm not going to have as much persuasive firepower as I'd like to make this argument. VSC is also opt-out and doesn't ask you.

Wow really not what I would have expected - I feel like associating this with Atom is pretty misleading, given all that.

at least you don't have to sign in to use it, looking at you Warp

I'm working on an code editor with a similar philosophy (or at least I'm trying to achieve similar goals) but it's completely open-source (MIT licence). It's called ecode and can be found here: https://github.com/SpartanJ/ecode . It's also GPU accelerated, native code (no electron), has LSP integration and has many similar feature set.

I'm looking for collaborators, if someone is interested please message me.

I looked at the repo and I can’t see any code. Is it in a different repo?

Should have read further.

https://github.com/SpartanJ/ecode#source-code

https://github.com/SpartanJ/eepp/tree/develop/src/tools/ecod...

I was pretty hyped, but I just lost all my interest in the project

It almost makes Discord envious.

Hell of a license:

----

INVESTIGATIONS, MONITORING, & NO OBLIGATION TO PRE-SCREEN CONTENT. Zed may, but is not obligated to, investigate, monitor, pre-screen, remove, refuse, or review the Service and/or Content, including Your Content and User Content, at any time. By entering into the Agreement, you hereby provide your irrevocable consent to such monitoring. You acknowledge and agree that you have no expectation of privacy concerning the transmission of Your Content, including without limitation chat, text, or voice communications. In the event that Zed pre-screens, refuses or removes any Content, you acknowledge that Zed will do so for Zed’s benefit, not yours.

----

Irrevocable consent.

Wait WHAT. That sounds like an April fools license...

yea, thats gonna be a no for me dawg

Not in anyway justifying it, but is this for some kind of "social" feature or does it actually relate to code you write?

I wonder if this is for some kind of content moderation law compliance? It's a shitty licence but exactly the behavior that's incentivized by governments imposing content moderation rules

Yes this is for stuff you upload to their "service" whatever that is. It has nothing to do with the editor itself.

Can you please point out where you find this exclusion? You may be right, and it's hard to examine with the dual numbering system in there, but I've been through it and I don't see anything other than "everything is ours."

Regardless of intent, the way it is written is that the "Service" is what you're agreeing to, and that includes license to run a single instance of the "Application" and the "Tool" on a single device that you own.

It's incompatible with pretty much any activity. It also includes great stuff like:

> you agree to (a) provide true, accurate, current, and complete information about yourself as prompted by the registration form (the “Registration Data”), and (b) maintain and promptly update the Registration Data to keep it true, accurate, current, and complete.

> You agree not to create an Account using a false identity

So when I move, I have to update Zed with my new address or what? My license is legally invalid? I'm in breach of terms of service?

Yes.

"If you provide any information that is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, or Zed has reasonable grounds to suspect that any information you provide is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, Zed has the right to suspend or terminate your Account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service"

(Oxford commas, bruh.)

"you acknowledge and agree that you shall have no ownership or other property interest in your Account, and you further acknowledge and agree that all rights in and to your Account are and shall forever be owned by and inure to the benefit of Zed."

Thanks for saving me time.

Privacy issues aside, this makes it unusable in a professional setting. Maybe this is a feature for monetization?

That sounds unconscionable, wonder if it would hold up in court (my guess is not).

But do you have the funds/time to find out?

I do, but I wouldn't use this editor based on the ToC alone.

Thanks for pointing this out. Our whole terms-of-service is just standard boilerplate provided by our lawyers, but this part doesn't really apply to Zed. Obviously, there's no "content moderation" for project code that you collaborate on with Zed.

We'll look into adjusting this to make it clearer that we don't do anything remotely concerning or invasive.

Fair enough, but why not push back on the lawyers before pushing the publish button, and spare yourself from a possibly inauspicious start?

Because most reasonable people don't cavil about self-evident boilerplate.

This sounds like a jab at people that are raising this as a concern. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong.

What I've seen is that lawyers or anyone drafting agreements generally likes to overstate their position, or put another way take as much as they can get away with. It's rarely done with explicit malicious intent, more with negotiation in mind. Ask for more than you want and then go back and forth to arrive at something that works.

It's just sort of an added bonus if people agree with the terms.

So anyway, it's incumbent on those negotiating and agreeing to contracts to read what they're signing up for and discuss to arrive at an actual agreement that serves everybody. What happened in the discussion above is actually a great example of that happening, even if it was inadvertent.

And this is NOT self evident boilerplate. It's quite the opposite, and I do not believe any company would get a product out without reviewing the T&C.

So, the terms were at least approved by some, and are now being revised because somebody pointed the problems out in a public forum.

When you go to a tailor for a custom suit, do you double-check that he's taken accurate measurements?

I do check that it fits and that he's delivering what I've asked him to deliver. And if I don't know what a good custom suit should be, then I should not buy one, or I should seek assistance in its purchase.

I don't own a custom suit but I assume I'd be in the room when they were taking my measurements and I my eyes would be open, so I could see the tape. And then I'd try it own before agreeing to taking it home. I'm not sure which side of the argument your analogy is on.

I do a lot of back and forth with our lawyers on terms. I read all of it and give feedback.

I'm glad to hear you'll be addressing this. To an unsophisticated reader like myself, it sounds like you guys are planning to examine the code I edit in Zed, maybe even keep copies of it. Aside from the general creepiness, many programmers are bound by contract to protect their employer's codebase.

Thanks for addressing it.

Also: the thing looks really compelling. I would really like to try it out. But I can't use it. Not with irrevocable consent. If I make something that turns into billions of dollars...well, there are people that would exploit these terms. It's an absolute no-go.

> Obviously, there's no "content moderation" for project code that you collaborate on with Zed.

Not only is it non-obvious, it's explicitly stated that you can do what you want with any content that you are exposed to, which is all of it, because you've granted yourself the ability to surveil everything. And not only what the "Application" or "Tool" sees, but by any means available to you by the "Service."

Thanks for the refreshing honesty! The law industry already seems to use (dumb) automation, no wonder they're so afraid of AGI replacing them.

I can sorta believe that this was provided by lawyers without proper review, because writing this

> In the event that Zed pre-screens, refuses or removes any Content, you acknowledge that Zed will do so for Zed’s benefit, not yours.

is such an outrageous thing to write in the terms. On the other hand, claiming this is standard boilerplate strains credulity.

In any case, seeing this definitely colors how I see the rest of it.

You might also want to consider only asking the user to agree to it when initiating use of the collaborative service rather than when they install the app.

> License: Zed will do so for Zed’s benefit, not yours.

Never in my life have I seen such a boisterous "fuck you" in a legal document. Who are your lawyers, and what on Earth (or off Earth for that matter) are they smoking? In what alternate reality is this a "boilerplate" EULA?

I mean, holy shit.

Luckily I read this comment before starting the thing. (I as always clicked "agree" on the license/TOS screen).

Into the ~/.Trash it goes.

Hey, we're actively working to get in touch with a new lawyer to help us do a better job with this. I agree this isn't cool. I was rushed to get the launch out and didn't review the terms carefully enough. We will try to do better going forward. Our goal is to be respectful.

Pretty nice. Gave it a whirl and a few thoughts:

1. Very performant. Opened a large(ish) rust project and the auto-completion and goto symbol were both very snappy. Scrolling is very smooth and haven't noticed any hiccups or pauses so far. 2. Doesn't seem like there is a way to disable font ligatures? I find them really annoying and wish I could disable. 3. Stuck with the built-in themes, none of which I particularly like.

Overall seems very promising, will keep an eye on it.

This actually looks really, really good. Looks like I need to update macOS from 10.15.5 sometime soon. I use a Hackintosh, so this'll be fun (I've been putting it off because I finally got it to "work" and got scared/wanted to be productive again).

Any idea on their plans to monetize? I assume they will eventually charge, since they raised a 10M series A.

No clue, I'm not affiliated with the devs in any way, I've just been very excited about it since one of the devs tweeted this: https://twitter.com/nathansobo/status/1498053586059620354

However, my first impressions of the keyboard navigation aren't great :(

Nathan was a former coworker of mine and he is not only an unbelievably talented software engineer but also one of the most humble and friendly guys I know. Glad he's still at it with Zed!

What forms of keyboard navigation are you missing? We try to make sure everything is controllable from the keyboard.

I haven't played enough with it to give good feedback, I've edited my comment to be more fair.

* Seems to me that a lot of the keyboard shortcuts are chords or require hitting an arrow key, sometimes even both. Example: VS Code's default mapping for vertical split is cmd+backslash, but Zed requires cmd+k -> arrow key.

* The project panel (file tree) doesn't support hjkl for navigation. The website says Vim mode is still under construction, but in my mind that applies to actual buffer editing, not general UI interactions. My impression is that today most editors, hell even a lot of websites, support hjkl or similar for navigation in cases where it doesn't conflict with anything else.

My perspective is that "keyboard-focused" implies "ergonomic shortcuts and UI navigation without leaving the home row". If I'm gonna move my hand from the home row to reach the arrow keys, I might as well just reach for the mouse and get 10x the possible interactions. Anecdotally, I tested myself just now and I'm pretty sure it takes me more time to "find my footing" when I move my fingers to the arrow keys than it does to just grab a mouse and click something.

This might be wrong expectations on my end, but my hope is that Zed can bring the powerful navigation of Doom Emacs/Spacemacs minus the bugginess and terrible performance of Emacs. Whenever the devs talked about Zed, I just imagined VSpaceCode without the jank that comes when you override 90% of an editor's default bindings. What I'm seeing from an hour of usage doesn't feel that much more powerful than VS Code in terms of keyboard navigation (kudos on the snappy performance though, it really is night and day). I'm aware this is an early beta, I just hope you folks agree and are going to push more in this direction.

Yeah, they don't seem to have any serious Emacs person in their team. So, like so many people who try and build editors in the last few decades, they seem to miss some fundamental things (while focusing on other worthy things like the core rope+crdt enabling fast local & collaborative editing).

They talk about things like having a plug-in type system in the future based on e.g. WASM but, as you're pointing out, their fundamental perspective is built around the simplistic notion of a control panel with fixed functionality that's primarily accessed via a bizarre set of keymaps. On this front, might as well stick with JetBrains.

The first thing I always do when I go into any new editor is set up the "Select All Instances of highlighted word". So like how there is cmd-d for the next occurrence, I also like having a shortcut to select _all_ occurrences. Would love for this to be added.

More generally, this looks really awesome and also really enjoyed your team's blog post detailing the GPUI implementation (even though large parts of it went over my head)

Yes, these are an absolute must :) Came here looking specifically if this was possible. The cool thing is that is currently the only thing I've been missing after playing for a couple hours! I've tried vscode yearly to see if it had become tolerable, but alas. This is the first time I've tried something that might steal me away from Sublime.

There's an issue for it: https://github.com/zed-industries/community/issues/75

I couldn't find a way to show/hide various panels. e.g. line numbers, the bars with the (<- ->) arrows etc.

Would be great to allow toggling visibility of each of these pieces via an action to maximize screen real estate. Really annoying in VSCode that they force you to go into settings for some of the visibility toggles. Of course, didn't spend very long investigating.

Also after selecting VSCode keybindings, CMD+\ does not split the editor as it does in VSCode. Seems like a bug

Having some kind of leader keybinding would be great along with something like "which-key" for discoverability.

Checking out Spacemacs or Doom Emacs would give a clear idea of what I'm talking about.

If unfamiliar with emacs, VSpaceCode is a VSCode extension that ports Spacemacs-style keybindings pretty successfully, although the UI is suboptimal due to limitations of VSCode extensions.

Re: Your Hackintosh

The good news is that if you used OpenCore + vanilla macOS install (basically if you followed the excellent OpenCore Install Guide [1]) and don't have any weird hardware (Intel CPU + iGPU / AMD GPU) you can pretty much just perform updates as normal through Software Update. It is certainly important that you make a backup of your EFI (might as well make a backup of the entire drive you can restore to in case something goes wrong) as well as double check the OC guide to see if there's any snags to look out for when updating.

One time-consuming thing I did when I ran a Hackintosh was to have a separate drive that I used as a macOS update test bed for major versions, and then if all went well I would perform the real update on my main drive.

I would also recommend you look at /r/Hackintosh and maybe ask around there for any advice.

Good luck!

[1] - https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Install-Guide/

> One time-consuming thing I did when I ran a Hackintosh was to have a separate drive that I used as a macOS update test bed for major versions, and then if all went well I would perform the real update on my main drive.

This is a great idea. I'll probably give this a try. Last time I tried to update macOS (AMD GPU OpenCore build), I had to restore from backup. Haven't tried again since.

The editor will be free, and they will monetize the network features (or so they say)

https://zed.dev/faq#how-will-you-make-money

Our plan is for the core editor to be free and open-source.

We'll charge money for our backend service that powers collaboration in Zed. We have ambitious plans to improve the way that people work together on code. So far, on that front, we've been focused on real-time collaboration, but we have a lot of ideas for how we can improve asynchronous collaboration as well, by having discussions take place directly in the code editor.

A lot of us have been following along with Zed hoping that the clarity and action on the open sourcing front would be done or at least in the process of happening before the public beta but from what was shared in the podcast, it doesn't sound like any progress has been actually made on this front.

Especially, since Zed does have a very clear distinction/dividing line of "completely functional local editor" == permissive open source vs. "all of the real-time & async collaboration features" == proprietary that is easy to explain.

Frankly, I would happily pay for great, fully supported, high-quality real-time collaboration for my teams.

Anyway, as you can see, not having any useful progress on this front instantly shuts down lots of people and there's many of us who won't even consider doing more than checking it out until this is done.

No mention of extensibility is a big red flag, and if it isn't open-source it presents the same risk as anyone adopting Atom originally ended up getting burned by.

I felt burned by the loss of Atom. Why is this project going to be different?

I'm so angry about Atom, I haven't been able to move on. I'm using Pulsar out of spite. I'd like to move to emacs (for all its faults, it will never do what Atom did) but I can't be arsed to learn to configure it so it works exactly the way I want it to. I don't have the energy to learn an entirely new tool, I don't know what to do.

I'm trying to learn emacs too - last night I kept ChatGPT open and asked it any questions I had ("what's the hotkey to open up a new window below the current one") and I'm getting better really quickly.

You all should check out the community Atom fork or Pulsar Editor (from some of the OG Atom dev team)

https://pulsar-edit.dev/ https://github.com/atom-community/atom/

Yes, I just said I'm using Pulsar. I don't think it has a future though, since the community seems to be gone (so all the extensions are unmaintained). Hopefully I'm wrong. For now I'll just keep using it until I run into something too broken to work around.

I'm so angry about Atom, I haven't been able to move on.

You'll not even remember Atom when you get to college.

I used to be a big Atom fan, made a PR for them, my whole end-of-school project was an Atom plugin... but then one day I bit the bullet and tried VsCode and, then I never looked back.

Everything that Atom did, VsCode does better. The theming is different, the extensions are slightly different, but otherwise it's just incredibly good. I get why they shuttered Atom after a while.

Yeah but it's made by Microsoft. I knew they were going to kill Atom the day of the Github acquisition. Right now vscode is good, but I have no guarantees that in 5 years they won't pull an asshole move and I'll have to go through all of this again. In fact, depending on who you ask, it's already happening with the C# extension[1], and nothing promises me that the same won't happen with other parts of the editor.

[1] https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276

I know you wrote about emacs in your other post. If you are looking for something that doesn't change, try emacs (1985), vi/vim (1978), or sublime (2008). Microsoft's Visual Studio has been around since 1997, so Visual Code has a more likely chance of longevity in my opinion.

They are building a per-user recurring revenue stream along with very strong lock-in features (embedded communications, limited/paid extensions). They won't need lot of traction if they're able to boil the early adopter and enterprise frogs.

Great business model but the editor is designed around it first and foremost.

They say performance on par to slightly better than Sublime Text, that's interesting, I like it when developers care about performance. Unfortunately, it is MacOS only, so I couldn't try.

Performance turned me off from VSCode and brought me back to Sublime Text. VSCode is not that bad, and I use it occasionally, but the advantages it has over Sublime Text is not worth the performance penalty for me.

IME, Zed's real & perceived performance is way better than Sublime.

Disclaimer: I do work at Zed!

I was actually pretty surprised when we did our measurements, and would say those numbers don't match the perceived performance (oe the feed. I haven't experienced an app that feels more fluid for basic things like scrolling before Zed – Obviously I have bias, but that is my 2c!

Looks interesting, especially around their "multiplayer" editing. I wish them success, we need more serious competition in this space. VSCode is so damn good I probably won't switch, but if this came to parity with some features in VSCode (especially the plugins I use) I could see myself making the jump.

It looks interesting but, given how Atom was abruptly taken out the back and put out of its misery, are many devs are going to invest the time in going all in on Zed?

EDIT: Just had a look inside the app bundle to see if they were using Electron again. Looks like this is built round WebRTC instead.

EDIT2: Actually the actual 'zed' binary is just under 284MB, so maybe Zed's not built round the WebRTC framework, but just uses it for networky stuff ???

The binary is pretty big by itself.

is it an electron app? like vs code?

It does not seem like. They mention they have a custom GPU accelerated UI.

You got in before I edited my comment ^^

No. It's written in Rust, with a custom UI framework. More details in this blog post: https://zed.dev/blog/videogame

Yep. Looks like you're right

  >strings /Volumes/Zed/Zed.app/Contents/MacOS/zed  | grep rust

returns a load of references to 'rustc' and 'cargo'

That's max! One of the Zed Industries cofounders :D

Ok thanks max finally a non Electron editor I can download and try without panicking about the fans spinning non stop..

Is it possible to install using nix or brew? In mac

> Actually the actual 'zed' binary is just under 284MB

MicroEmacs for DOS was 50K.

    du -hs /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app 

    42M /Applications/Sublime Text.app

To compare it to a peer that's cross-platform and GUI.

This is about 6x as large, just for the main binary. Which pretty much always means it'll also eat a ton more memory, and probably burn lots of processor cycles while idle for no reason at all, given the way this usually works.

[EDIT] Maybe they're including debug symbols or something? Since it seems to be in beta.

> WebRTC

Right now, this is just used for the screen-sharing feature.

> The binary is pretty big by itself

It is. One major reasons is that we're shipping a "fat binary" (x86_64 and arm64 build in a single file). We did this to simplify the download process for users, but now that the app is getting bigger, we should probably start shipping two separate DMGs, to reduce the download time. That would cut the binary size in half.

Atom's death was not so abrupt. It had a slow, lingering demise.

Cudos first of all on taking on such a big challenge, and seeming to do a good job of it.

As someone who uses a lot of VSC plugins and commands I can't imagine switching any time soon (also no Windows support makes it a non starter for me personally) - but I can still be super impressed!

To me it's a kinda distasteful design that despite being a graphical application, this is using monospaced font for the titlebar, tab headers, file tree, etc. Looks odd on Mac.

In general Zed seems to be at a decent starting point though. Aside from its "multiplayer editing" aspect, it comes across like it has been very heavily influenced in terms of scope by Sublime.

Same, I hate the used font. I’m in since closed beta and still waiting for the option to finally get rid of that default font

https://github.com/zed-industries/community/issues/446

What a beautiful design. And it feels faster than Sublime 4. Using Treesitter + LSP out of the box like Helix makes Zed productive with zero config.

Multi-buffers seems genuinely useful for project wide search panel as well as for cases where multi-line strings are used to define external file contents but miss out on syntax highlighting.

Looking forward to trying the live collab features.

Will download and setup. I hope they have sustainable business around it. For myself I do not mind ~$100 or so for a single version and upgrade in every couple of years if I find it useful. I have SublimeText and I will use both if this new editor has certain features to raise productivity.

I'm really looking for a lighter-weight GUI editor. Too many random shortcut keys to memorize in Atom, and VS code is getting wayyyy to bloated. It always has an annoying welcome message at startup, annoying notifications about things I could install, and way too much text in the UI. I don't like settings and other dialogs being tabs alongside code, even though I know it hip to do that nowadays. I search for 'ssh plugin' and there about 35 of them.

SSH remote editing is about the only "plugin" I need, and if it's built into the editor that would be nice.

Very often I find myself going back to terminal vim because VS code has gotten to be too much, and also too annoying to deal with if I want to keep multiple projects' repos open at the same time.

Sublime Text is by the most mature product in this category.

Yeah, but it's not free, and creating a ticket for purchasing a license for my work machine is a PITA. I'm sure the actual cost isn't an issue, and it would likely get approved, but the friction is there, the purchasing/reimbursement UI at my corp isn't nice.

> and also too annoying to deal with if I want to keep multiple projects' repos open at the same time.

This was a big annoyance for me when I tried vscode. Maybe it's atypical, but I'm typically accessing 3-5 different repos every day. Having to open a window instead of just quickly doing a cd and opening vim gets old fast.

So define the random shortcut keys via GPT-3 & and use 'text to speech' to automate 'visual cues' using ar glasses[0] to avoid all the memorization?

ar/vr glasses instead of Inkbox[1]/pierader[2] would make for 'ligher' gui.

[0] Open source smart glasses : https://github.com/TeamOpenSmartGlasses/OpenSourceSmartGlass...

[1] : https://github.com/Kobo-InkBox/inkbox

[2] : https://gitlab.com/guyjeangilles/piereader

The Changelog #531 has a great interview with Nathan Sobo. Until ui-based debugging, I will have to stick with other IDEs though, sadly.

EDIT: At the end of said episode, Nathan talks about debuggers and mentions that users depending on that might have to wait a bit. So there’s that!

One of the creators was interviewed recently on this podcast https://rustacean-station.org/episode/antonio-scandurra/

I thought a lot of the Atom developers moved to create Pulsar Editor.

https://pulsar-edit.dev/

Also, the community forked Atom into a community edition (CE), still getting updates?

https://github.com/atom-community/atom/

What makes this "Atom Developer Editor" different than Pulsar or Atom-CE.

No PHP support which is a bummer, I'll keep checking back in though!

I just installed on my Monterey Macbook, but it won't launch. No window appears. I tried launching from a python file, still nothing.

Well, if as you say in your site's vision section, "the editor should disappear", it seems you got it.

WAIT. It took a full 5 minutes to come up the first time. So be forewarned.

Since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35170422 is a Show HN of the same project, we'll move the comments thither and re-up that one.

It's very nice but I just wish vim binding was a bit better, I know it's in beta/alpha at the moment so I'll wait for it for a bit until this gets improved..

(% is missed, and o in visual to go at the begin of the selection or end...)

* for MacOS :(

Cringe as usual

I have no idea how this happened, but somehow after installing Zed, Zed now is the default editor for code files in my macOS (before, it was VS Code). And now I need to figure out wtf Zed did to undo it. Not cool.

Disclaimer: I work at Zed!

This wasn't our intended behavior for this.

A team member just dug into our implementation of LSHandlerRank and it looks like we are using "Default". Apple's definition of the "Default" rank is this: "This app is an opener of files of this type; this value is also used if no rank is specified".

From our team member's investigation it looks like VSCode doesn't set any LSHandlerRank (which in theory from the definition above should be the same rank, but from your experience that doesn't seem correct.) Sublime uses uses "Alternate" as it's LSHandlerRank, which its definition is "this app is a secondary viewer of files of this type".

We will audit what other editors set and discuss if it makes sense to change the rank we are using.

Thanks for pointing this out.

Show HN with developer over here, maybe should be this thread/merge Dang

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35170422

I'm gonna stick with neovim - from the Zed homepage seems like its using all the same base technologies, Treesitter, LSP, and some out of the box support for the capabilities these base layers offer.

Will it be open-source?

Yeah, the plan is to open-source the editor itself before we release 1.0. We will probably keep some part of the collaboration system closed-source, so that we can build our business around that feature set.

We have some work to do to decide exactly what will be closed source and separate that out from the rest of the application code.

Awesome!

No.* From their FAQ:

> Will Zed be open source?

> We'd like to be as open as possible while maintaining the ability to run a profitable business. This probably means some kind of "open core" model, where the editor is available under the GPL but other parts of our system remain proprietary. The timeline and exact strategy are still uncertain at this stage.

* It's a judgment call to call something open core open-source. This is my opinion. The "other parts of our system" makes it sound like vscode, which doesn't feel very open source now. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

Downloaded it and gave it a spin. Seems quick. The team collaboration features look great. Themes look fun. But. I switched from Sublime to VS Code in order to have a Copilot extension that works out of the box. I would love to see either a copilot extension or something integrated for ChatGPT. That has become a new essential these past few months and I'm willing to sacrifice some editor smoothness for it.

Ahh bummer :/

> https://github.com/zed-industries/community/issues/174

> Hey y'all – We are excited that you all are excited to try Zed. Just want to make sure expectations are in check – We plan to release on multiple platforms for 1.0, but work on these has not even begun yet.

Developing on a mac is terrible; will take a look when other platforms are supported.

Only if you're trying to build for Windows.

No macOS is a horrible developer platform in general. The only thing that makes it remotely viable is the tireless efforts of the Homebrew project.

I can't imagine thinking macOS is a good programmer OS

I can't imagine not. Productivity on Windows is atrocious - I can't even launch an app without seeing an ad. And what is this Cortana and why does she want to help me so much?

It works all ways. Let people like what they like. No one is forcing you to do anything on a Mac.

windows is equally as bad if not worse for me than macos. in no way would I suggest you use that.

Don't forget the first-party container runtime. Even Windows has one (or, er, three?). I am mostly responsible for maintaining our local development stack scripts, and Colima (to be clear, a heroic project) and MacOS are a continuous source of problems (full time problems when M1 first launched, down to at least 2-3 issues a month). I was helping a coworker with getting scripts working on Windows/WSL and how much effort was it? Download it and run it - no changes. How much effort was it when I migrated to Ubuntu (hurrah Intune for Linux)? All I had to do was disable Colima in our scripts.

The GP comments throws shade at Windows. Honestly? Probably still a better developer platform than MacOS. Working on MacOS is full of not-work.

For lack of a better term, I've been a full-stack programmer for 27 years. I ran Linux on the desktop for 19 years. I've run MacOS for about 8 now. And, always, Windows, of course, because companies. I've developed extensively for PHP, VB, C, ASP, VB.NET, C#, some Python, a tiny bit of Java, and (my fave) Ruby on Rails. My main projects of the last 10 years use a large C# program which I compile to run on Mac, Linux, and Windows. So, I've been around the block. A couple times. I'm typing this from a Mac. When I've wanted a "container," I've used a real VM. I just installed Docker desktop last week for some new work in machine learning. YMMV. TACMA.

> When I've wanted a "container," I've used a real VM.

I mean, sure, that's great for you. Maybe you've just never visited a block where you can't reasonably use a VM to replace containers, such as a good amount of shops where local environments approximate production (i.e. containers).

> I just installed Docker desktop last week

All I can say is, "good luck!" DD is by far the worst container runtime for MacOS.

i've found some luck with OrbStack by kdrag0n

How dare there be choices?

I’m a developer - I do a huge amount of work on Sql Server and .Net.

Unless I need to update some Sql Server CLR Procedures, all my development is done on my Mac using the Jetbrains suite or Azure Data Studio.

So it obviously works for many of us.

You do you, we’ll do us.

no I know it works, I just got a m2 pro 32GB mac mini to do diffusion and GPT related stuff and found that all the apis are broken and the neural engine actually has no real support for any of the interesting generative ai programs yet. doing my best to port things over but having to rely on the free labor of homebrew developers is grating

What makes it terrible?

It's like if Ubuntu locked you in a jail

Only windows is worse

that’s still better than windows in my book

I guess I was hoping for a more concrete example.

specifically the weird discrepancy when porting anything there, the lack of bootcamp support (used to be a thing). just feels kinda like iOS on the desktop give all of the restrictions. The universal codesigning and difficulty with making macos/ios apps unless you have a developer account and pay $100 is also a slap in the face.

just gives off an unprofessional vibe.

but to be honest I would never use windows for development either unless I'm only using WSL2

I have no issues with people who like it; it's not for me for a multitude of reasons.

From system management and integration, lack of apps, being a walled garden etc. People call out the heroics of homebrew, but this problem exists on Windows - you can use chocolatey and whatnot in the same way.

I have different gripes with Windows which are also mentioned here. Whereas with Apple products I feel like my freedom is suppressed, with Windows I feel Big-Brother like oppression.

M1 Air is a great laptop. I love it for the battery life and weight. I only use it when traveling, specifically en-route when a traditional keyboard/mouse isn't viable.

All of my development is still done on Linux even when using a local editor via VS Code Remote SSH support.

looks around and waves hands at hundreds of thousands of Bay Area developers using Macs

A Unix box with a nice UI? It's what I always wanted.

what I don't understand is how it's seen as acceptable to pay several thousand dollars for a machine that is sold as a "full experience" and then relying on the work of some people outside Apple that build homebrew and make it actually usable for development

People outside Dell built Windows. People outside Microsoft built the components of WSL. There's not a laptop in existence where one party built everything I'd need on it.

Can't other platforms use https://www.darlinghq.org/ to run that MacOS application on Linux?

Darling will hopefully one day support complex GUI applications, but it's not there yet.

From https://www.darlinghq.org:

> Does it support GUI apps?

> Almost! This took us a lot of time and effort, but we finally have basic experimental support for running simple graphical applications.

From https://docs.darlinghq.org/known-nonfunctional-software.html:

> GUI applications will not work in Darling at this point in time, with very few exceptions.

> Any complex GUI application in general will not work at this point in time - only simple "Hello World" type GUIs will work.

This thread is further proof why developers are the worst market to sell to. Frugal and distrustful are not what you want in a customer.

How does this compare to Pulsar-Edit?

https://pulsar-edit.dev/

> Work with code on any machine

Is there a headless mode similar to VS Code's Remote? I would like to launch a Zed server in a VM and connect to it from the host.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview

My first thought was "Okay, sure, but how does it perform after I load it up full of essential plugins like vim mode and such" but seeing that vim mode is built-in is kind of amazing.

It appears to be more limited than I'm used to (e.g. colon commands don't work, ergo :wq does not) -- but it is indeed extremely fast.

When I clicked I had the vague sense that I had seen "code at the speed of thought" elsewhere, and a quick google showed that it's a pretty common thing for people to claim, especially about editors or related features. Maybe not the best choice of motto.

There's a popular book on vim titled "Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought."

Yeah a lot of them are vim-related one way or another. Not just that book but lots of blog posts etc.

I would love to see compiler integration with Zed. Like be able to hit run and it runs my rust code.

I like the remote code editing feature. I would love a solution that lets me write code on my iPad, including running the code locally. If I could run a server at home and connect to it it would be great. Is there anything like that?

You can't run your code locally, but VSCode (but NOT VSCodium sadly) has a set of remote development plugins (ssh, containers, etc) that allow you to edit locally, run on a remote server.

Also see code-server (https://github.com/coder/code-server) for another option.

Zed is nice, really nice, but has some issues on M1 from what I see... Fails to load the JS language server. On intel machines there's no error.

None of the typical JVM languages supported, sad.

Impressive start. What's the story on extensions / plugins? How are the existing languages supported? (LSP?)

Not open and only for macOS? No thank you.

Interesting, I use to use an editor called 'zed' on MS-DOS that cane with zortech c.

This one looks a lot different :)

The only Zed I know is Zed A. Shaw, I suppose this isn't named after him?

Nope sublime still feels faster, better with far more language support.

Looks really nice, but I'll wait until you embed neovim :)

I'd like to see comparison with emacs and vim.

I really miss Atom...

when windows?! seriously I want to try this baby out!

Kmll

Title is missing the biggest feature: it's written in Rust!

Is that a feature?

It's weird to show screenshot of an editor with white background, most programmers use dark themes right?

I don't.

Me neither. I find white text on black background to be much harder on the eyes.

For me it depends on the time of the day. Also I prefer light background on video call screen sharing for some reason I can't really articulate.

I don't know, but light text on dark backgrounds is more difficult for the eye to read. It takes more effort to discern the characters, thus causing more eye strain.

(If your editor seems too bright to look at, I might suggest reducing your monitor's brightness.)

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