Zed – The Editor for What's Next

(EDIT: if his name sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because he is the author of https://interpreterbook.com/ and https://compilerbook.com/ )

How about a text editor which represents code as a syntax tree that is formatted as you type? Or one that has support for embedding multi-media content within source files? Or one with advanced program rewriting capabilities (in-lining functions, replacing struct members into getter methods, etc)? These things would all change the a user's experience much more than replacing the CPU rendering with GPU rendering. A text editor is the window through which we interact with code. It is an immensely rich domain for experimentation, yet the best most come up with is "what if there was a 10ms smaller latency on keyboard input?"

I think the issue here is one of perspective. As programmers, we see the code. We tend to put more focus on the features that took us the longest to implement. But often, these are not visible or relevant to the user. We like to show off the 80% of the effort that gets 20% of the outcome rather than the 20% that yields 80%. I think there's also a measurability bias at play. It's easy to make the case that a faster thing is better than a slower thing, but harder to make the case for an interesting feature. One is measurable but the other is not.

I update the editor regularly, have tried heaps of suggested fixes and reset settings each time. It’s a mess.

It’s a beautiful, fast, powerful editor and I want to use it, but I’m pretty frustrated. I keep hoping an update will address the autocomplete at least, but as of last week it will still stop functioning while I’m working.

I remember when being multiplayer was their big selling point.

These are pretty minor criticisms, and for the most part I really like using it. Additionally, the fact that it's open source means that it's just a fork away from ripping out the sign in button manually.

However, I can't see myself moving away from Emacs. I've been using it for almost a quarter of a century and have seen many editors come and go in that timeframe: BBEdit, Textmate, Sublime Text, Atom and so on. The current hotness is VS Code, but I personally believe that will be abandoned at some point as well.

It would be great if some of the learnings of Zed can be backported to Emacs, however unlikely that is due to the amount of old cruft there.

No thanks!

Fair warning, it is HIGHLY recommended you come in with a working knowledge of Vim first.

I don't make any use of the AI features though, and as a solo dev the collaborative aspect is also not useful to me.

I don't know if i'm ever going to get out of the terminal at this rate :s