Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003

I have tried zed, and promptly uninstalled once I saw it was automatically downloading and running nodejs. I want an editor that is lightweight, not one that starts running extra crap I neither need nor want in the background. That was on top of the big focus on LLM integration (itself already a significant negative for me), but which I was willing to overlook to try out the rest.

I don't think Zed is very good in its current state. Too much extra cruft out of the box which you need to disable.

View on HN

Using a runtime doesn't automatically mean it's bloat. I mean, do you uninstall Python from your system immediately after installing a distro?

I would much rather an editor provide as many runtimes as possible for plugins, so that developers from all walks of life can contribute. This is largely the success story of Neovim, which lets you interface with it in 7 different languages. Most editors that are constrained to only one language for plugins have a completely barren ecosystem.

The main issue is that Zed doesn't package them (or rely on having them installed on the system), but instead downloads binaries from the web.

Oh, that sounds pretty bad. I wonder if there's a reason...

Are you sure that was Zed? I see that it's 98.3% coded in Rust. But if you're right and it still depends on node.js, I'll have to scratch that off my list.

It was definitely Zed. I forget what it was that used node.js, and I was able to disable that with some effort. But it annoyed me because I shouldn't have to, you know? In my opinion the default out of the box install should be sleek and not use many resources, and only add more stuff if I ask for it.

Zed maintainer here.

We use node.js to run a number of language servers and formatters (which are often written in node due to the VSCode ancestry...).

There've been a lot of requests to disable language servers by default; but I think that's not the right default for most users – things should work out of the box.

That said, better control over this is definitely something we will add.

Is it true Zed downloads node.js as a binary from the web? Why wouldn't you use the system provided node or package it with Zed if it's necessary?

We currently download node if the system version isn't recent enough (we used to always download it, but I fixed that...).

You're right, I just checked the Arch package and it has a non-optional dependency on the nodejs package[1], which means you're forced to install it even if you don't use it. That sucks. :(

[1] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/zed/

It's probably for some extensions. So things like LSP and formatters

Do you not use anything at all that has a V8-based JavaScript runtime? Or is it the node-specific things you dislike like their bizarre Stream API?

I actively avoid any desktop app that uses JS, yes. I find it to be a silly design choice to use a web language (which the vast majority of people, even its creator, agree is not very good) outside of the context of a web environment. And in my experience such apps are serious memory hogs (like VS Code which takes something like 1 GB of memory to display the same files that take Sublime Text 300 MB).

Zed on my Mac is taking 180MB of RAM right now. That's far less proportionally than Emacs use to be teased about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com