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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

To paraphrase an old quote, "every new text editor grows until it is bloated with collaboration and AI features."

Thank god we still have vim and Emacs.

Except, as I understand it, the collaboration features were one of the primary things they wanted to do with Zed. So this isn't a case of bloat. The first blog post on the site is "How CRDTs make multiplayer text editing part of Zed's DNA".

I always wondered are people really doing this collaboration stuff. I tried it at the start of the lock downs era. But i quickly found it annoying, but maybe its because the implementation was just bad back then.

> Thank god we still have vim and Emacs.

Emacs has had AI since before it was cool again.

M-x doctor

Emacs[1] has been bloated with collaboration (gnus, etc) and AI features (doctor, lisp in general) for decades!

[1] Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping

    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root          24 Oct 29  1929 /bin/ed
    -rwxr-xr-t  4 root     1310720 Jan  1  1970 /usr/ucb/vi
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  5.89824e37 Oct 22  1990 /usr/bin/emacs

I'm not getting the same results for ed?

    $ whereis -b ed | cut -d' ' -f 2 | xargs ls -l
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 55504 Feb 22  2020 /usr/bin/ed

But your emacs is still 5.89824 * 10^37 bytes in size like parent commenter, right?

Clearly it grew a lot in size since 1929. It doesn’t waste nearly that much space on my timex sinclair.

(To explain and thus ruin the joke, https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html)

Alternative reply:

    while :; do echo ?; done

Is only 24 bytes.

I spent a few minutes trying to work out your pipeline. I think this is easier

    ls -l $(which ed)

Except Sublime Text ;)

I'm still happy with vim/nvim as daily work tools (also currently exploring kakoune and helix... because why not).

Think of vim/nvim setup as a one time process: a bit complicated, but once done then you are ready to go. Of course, I use text editors for... code editing. No need to turn it into an IDE or mail client or whatever.

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