How and why is this important? At any time I have two browsers with dozens of tabs and on top of it a slack client active, how another instance of a browser engine could hurt in this mad world?
and i say this as a proud career long web developer. i just really like zed.
I understand that there are advantages to being a native app from their perspective, but for me, it is even better for my editor to be integrated into my terminal editor. And because they built it the opposite way though, they have to also build a terminal emulator into their editor.
There is a real cost to building zed this way. If they were an embedded terminal app, they would get full terminal support for free and would not have to implement 2d text rendering. They could even have made a bundled package with an oss terminal emulator like kitty. Then they could have focused strictly on their editing features and value adds. Every engineer hour spent fixing bugs/adding features to the rendering framework is an hour that could have been spent on value adds.
Personally, there is no way that latency itself can be that value add for me because I use neovim and don't use any language plugins so every keystroke already renders instantly. Clearly then you can do everything zed does in a terminal app within at worst tens of milliseconds of latency.
Of course their target market uses vscode and not vim and either doesn't know or care that you do not need to write your own rendering engine to make a low latency, featureful text editor. I am admittedly very much not the target consumer for zed though.
I use vim on my servers and for writing git commit messages. For everything else, I use another editor (used to be Sublime Text, then Vs code, now Zed).
At 3am i am not in the mood trying to remember where my 714 page how to save a file and exit vim manial is
For those that are interested, this will get you 90% there:
exit without saving> :q!
exit with saving> :wq
beginning of line> 0
end of line and edit (enter insert mode)> shift-a
delete line> dd
insert mode> i
stop insert mode> ESC
undo> u
show line numbers> :set number
go to line number (e.g line 5)> :5
I still use vim for quick terminal edits, git commit messages, and doing stuff over ssh. But for my day to day heavy text editing, I do not want to sit in a terminal and be limited by what a terminal can display.
I have my entire set of plugins and things installed here and now the productivity that I get off this setup even exceeded my long-loved Jetbrains IDEs. I hope that will be temporary though, seriously. The only thing that I strictly dislike about VSCode is the number of high quality themes available - and there are not that many.
Recently stumbled upon VSCodium which is a clean VSCode fork that can work with any VSCode plugin, but I am yet to try it out.
These days I'm stuck on QTCreator most of the time. It's OK for core editing functionality but there's a lot that I miss, and some things like the generic Language Server support just aren't fleshed out much.
I'm tempted to use another editor whenever I'm not working on UI files but it adds some friction.
Technically yes, but if you care about legally, you can't use extensions from Microsoft's marketplace, which excludes Microsoft's own closed extensions such as WSL/SSH/devcontainer remoting and Pylance. It ships with Open VSX instead.
At least it is noticeably fast.
FWIW, I've yet to find a better text editor than Sublime Text.
It will improve. I'm glad they are at least targeting it as well.