Hacker News Reader

Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

I’m fanatical about having and using the best tools. I take a great deal of pride in it.

I take great care with my VSCode extensions and their configuration. I likewise take great care with neovim and having it set up properly.

Modern Emacs Lisp is easily the best environment among my daily drivers for interacting with my editor in real time.

Of anything modern I only know Zed a little: Zed in theory might be better than Emacs.

Outside of maybe Zed, which I haven’t mastered, Emacs Lisp is bar nothing the best tool-making tool for serious hackers.

View on HN

Why is zed better ? (Real question I don't know it)

In terms of GUI interaction speed and input latency, Zed imho is better. Just see for yourself the first 2 minutes of their showcase video [1]. They have written their own abstraction layer (GPUI) over Apple's Metal (I'm not sure whether that is portable to Vulkan, DirectX 12 or not). And what is Emacs's most performant rendering backend? PGTK is recently gaining traction.

[1]: https://zed.dev/

I haven’t tried hard with Zed because last time I took a serious go at it (roughly 4-6 months ago) it didn’t have a great story for remote machines.

If you’re doing production work, sooner or later your laptop won’t have the same GPU as the target. At that point an editor without a remote facility becomes an accessory.

If you’re on a Mac, there is an NVIDIA target these days. You have to be able to edit code next to the card.

You sound like you'd enjoy giving the Helix editor a try. It replaced neovim completely for me.

Helix is really great. It’s so nice to not require screenfuls of configuration. And Emacs Lisp fans will feel right at home when the Scheme plugin system lands

How will emacs fans feel at home, in an editor that has mandatory modal editing?

It sounds like the parent is proposing Helix as an alternative to nvim for modal use cases. I’ll have to check it out.

It's a good editor, if modal is your thing. Requests in the past to add immediate-style editing capabilities have basically stated it won't/can't happen.

I keep coming back to Helix ... but... modal editing.

Nope.

Do you have your configuration available somewhere? Would love to see some VSCode inspiration.

I’m actually kind of a newb on sharing dots in the VSCode world, I auth with GitHub to get then on a new machine. Is there a way to publish that?

You can open your settings using cmd/ctrl+comma and there is a button in top right corner that opens the JSON file itself.

That procedure gives this opaque link: https://vscode.dev/editor/profile/github/e5b2f79ed7fbed47d95...

I'm reticent to give you that garbage that I can't diff or know if it's worth anything. Life in the VSCode era.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com