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Comment by conradev | Hacker News Reader

  If you've been a developer long enough, you might recall the teletype package for Atom—both built by Zed's founders.

I first experienced this in SubEthaEdit in 2013 or so, but it has been around since the early 2000s:

  Appropriately working together on a truly collaborative tool, Martin Ott, Martin Pittenauer, Dominik Wagner, and Ulrich Bauer of Technische Universitat Munchen won the Best Mac OS X Student Project for Hydra 1.0.1, a Rendezvous-based text editor that enables multiple people to contribute to a shared document. (Adam and about ten other attendees at MacHack used Hydra to take notes during this year’s Hack Contest.)

It seems like the "unlock" here that makes it different this time is organization-wide sharing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubEthaEdit

https://tidbits.com/2003/06/30/apple-announces-design-awards...

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People have been doing collaborative text editing since the 60s actually! See, The Mother Of All Demos[0], referenced in our first blog post[1] :D

I'd say CRDTs are also a big change. CRDTs make live collaboration much more robust for all parties involved, and they only started to reach maturity in the mid-late 2010s

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

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

SubEthaEdit was a very inspiring software project for me. The fact that a small team could, in a few months, produce an amazing app that solved real problems and gained notoriety was amazing.

As time goes on it feels like much of the low hanging fruit opportunities in software is disappearing faster and faster. I'm also a fan of Zed and everything they're doing, but it's notable that shipping next-gen editor software takes a lot more developer effort now than it did in the 2000s.

> it feels like much of the low hanging fruit opportunities in software is disappearing faster and faster.

Yes I agree but so many things that might seem "done" (and in someways I think software/SaaS as an ecosystem is "done" compared to where we came from).

BUT - so many companies just bloat themselves and their products. I think the end of ZIRP is going to have an effect on that (more enshitification / rent seeking for sure) and I think there will be an opportunity to iterate and make copyware that doesn't take the higher development efforts.

We really need a winning electron alternative that is more resource friendly. That, IMO, will be a big game changer and I know there are lots of promising alternatives already.

> but it's notable that shipping next-gen editor software takes a lot more developer effort now than it did in the 2000s.

Yes, the scope increase is vast, due to more languages, more tooling, more features, higher expectations, and more competition.

> As time goes on it feels like much of the low hanging fruit opportunities in software is disappearing faster and faster.

The Graphic Editor workspace, in fact all the Adobe programs alternatives is quite open.

I remember using Paint Shop Pro, and it was bought and killed by Corel. I would prefer to keep using Paint Shop Pro, instead of Photoshop, because it was super fast and had all the features I used and wanted.

Ask people why they can't migrate to Linux, and half or more of the answers are: Adobe.

I'd forgotten all about it but SubEthaEdit was such an amazing tech when we were using to collaborate internationally back in about '04. It went off my radar but I am glad to see its still available as a free app.

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