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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

This rant is a bit unfair, by your definition the only true code editors are big IDEs like Eclipse, Visual Studio or slim for emacs, and then only for a tiny subset of languages.

Most of us right now are probably writing code in "notepad clones" by your standards. I'm sure there is room for one more.

That being said, while reading the "Why Zed?" page[1] I kept thinking "emacs can already do that" all the way.

Well at least kudos for going open source, I wouldn't even consider investing time learning to use a closed source text editor, it's too important a tool to depend on the whims of the devs.

[1] http://zedapp.org/vision

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I'm inclined to agree with the OP. There is huge power in having a semantic IDE. Many old timers will say that Smalltalk is the most productive language they ever developed in, precisely because of the power of its semantic IDE.

Just a few things you get cheaply when your IDE is semantic aware: - Complex refactorings with a single keystroke - Context aware code completion - Instant feedback on potential compilation errors/type errors

You can sort of hack these things into something not semantic aware, but it's not quite the same thing.

  That being said, while reading the "Why Zed?" page[1] I   kept thinking "emacs can already do that" all the way.

IMHO people who think "emacs can already do that" will think that regardless of what the topic being discussed is.

"Oh here ... I have made a plane that flies"

"emacs can already do that"

classic.

That's because emacs can already do anything, if you're willing to learn how. Still though, it's not a very useful thing to say.

That wasn't my point really. Of course emacs lisp is turing complete so yeah, you could probably pilot an airplaine using an emacs AI, it's still pretty far fetched though.

On the other hand the features described in the page I linked are mostly already built into emacs, at most you need to flip a couple customization switches to get the same idea.

Basically: remove the toolbars, enable ido-mode, use tramp for remote editing. The splitting thing is built in although you'll need to redefine a couple functions to get the exact behaviour shown in the gif (nothing very fancy though).

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