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Comment by wolfadex | Hacker News Reader

For me the "killer feature" is a graphical editor (like VSCode or the Jet Brains editors) but with performance more like vim. I'm also very much enjoying the modal editing, which VSCode lacks.

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Wait, Zed is a modal editor? All i've seen is that it has vim mode, which most editors have and i generally find it insufficient.

Granted these days i still prefer Kakoune style modal editing (i use Helix, currently), so not sure i could move back to Vim style anyway. Nonetheless if Zed has real, first class support i'd be interested... but a second class compat layer is not sufficient in my view.

How's it work for you?

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40929169 this post suggests it's lacking. Which is always the problem to me with emulation :/

It's not a modal editor, it just has a modal (vim) emulation mode.

>> I'm also very much enjoying the modal editing, which VSCode lacks.

The VSCode Vim plugin works great:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevi...

When I specified the modal editing I was referring to how the workspace search in Zed brings up each result in an editable "window" allowing me to make edits across my whole project from 1 tab. VSCode's workspace search feels much more limited in comparison.

That sounds like an interesting feature. Could you provide a link that gives more information about it? I am not finding it in the docs.

I'm not seeing it in the docs, maybe I should write up a little something on my editing experience!

Also to correct my self, I think I mistakenly said `modal` when I should have said `buffer` earlier.

So searching across the project brings up your results in multiple buffers, each about 5 lines (expandable to more) and you can do all of your normal editing within each/all of the buffers.

If I happen to write something up, I'll try and remember to share it in this thread.

That is a unique feature. Most editors I have used use the search as a way to jump to buffer locations of the matches.

We call them 'multibuffers' :D

https://zed.dev/features#multi-buffers

The VSC Vim plugin barely works with default keybinds and not at all as soon as you start modifying it. It's also super slow

FWIW Emacs also fits that bill.

It does, though I found learning and setting it up to be more complicated. My preferred editor is one that's very simple to setup and use (e.g. Sublime, VSCode, Zed, nano). Emacs is cool, and maybe someday I'll get around to using it but so far it hasn't met my needs.

Fair enough, I have personally spent a decent chunk of time configuring my Emacs setup (though it has mostly stabilized at this point). You may be interested in checking out Doom Emacs[0] if you want to take a stab at it in the future. It sounds like it would be an out of the box experience closer to what you would want.

[0] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

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