How is a MacOS only editor without extensions going to gain enough traction to be widely adopted?
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
208 points (100.0% liked)
Programmer Humor
852 readers
11 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
No kidding. One of the YouTubers I followed was really shilling Zed editor. He didn't seem to mention that it was Mac only.
Well, I guess it's back to neovim on kiTTY terminal for me.
Sometimes I swear Mac based developers think the world revolves around them.
You're already on a superior editor friend. Don't fall for the propaganda of lesser tools (that of course being anything not neovim)
Eeeehhhh, I was kinda jealous of one of my coworkers Doom Emacs setup. He had automated like 80% of his own job with it. Still haven't bothered to try to learn it myself. One of these days...
What did they automate? I'm trying to get some ideas for my Neov... uhhhh... Emacs with evil-mode setup.
He did this thing where he unified his shell history across thousands of hosts - it was super handy given our extensive use of Ansible playbooks and database managment commands. He could then use a couple hotkeys to query this history within a new open document. Super handy for writing out shell command steps or wrapping things in a bash script you're working on. Unfortunately I don't really have a link to HOW to do this, I just remember thinking "Oh my god, that would save me SO much time".
Nowadays, I just have this giant document with hundreds of our runbook commands and enable Github Copilot to make it SUPER easy to do the same thing without establishing an SSH session in the backend.
Wow, that's super useful! I don't have thousands of hosts, but even with a dozen, it would save me so much time. Why have I never thought of doing this? Thanks for the idea! (now I just need a few lonely evenings configuring the thing)
If you're a fan of neovim I'd like to take this opportunity to give Neovide a shout. It's essentially a purpose built terminal emulator that can only run Neovim and has some fun extensions with that in mind, like the ability to configure font, window size, fullscreen, window opacity etc. using Vim commands, implement sub-character scrolling, let Neovim floating windows have transparency, and have fun little animations when the cursor moves. It also has support for all the modern terminal emulation essentials like truecolor, ligatures, and emoji. https://neovide.dev/
I've tried it before, it's fine but had issues running on wayland last I tried. Did they fix the wayland issues? Looking at the issue tracker it seems like there are still a few open Wayland issues.
kiTTY by contrast has had Wayland support for about as long as I've used it.
I've been using it exclusively with Wayland for about a year now and I've yet to have any issues. YMMV however.
Sounds good, I'll take a look too
Macheads don't mention other platforms, because why would you use anything else?
The home page doesn't even mention Apple or Mac at all.
They're planning Linux support
The media coverage for this, half backed suplime clone, is just weird.
With the power of circlejerk
Based on their FAQ, they are not shooting for widespread adoption yet. Extension support and multi-platform appears to be on the roadmap.
Fwiw, I like a lot of the ideas behind the editor, and long-term I might consider it a viable option for some of my work.
They can implement lsp support, sshfs, and it already has multiple themes which would work for me after it gets ported to linux
The single best thing I like about Zed is how they unironically put up a video on their homepage where they take a perfectly fine function, and butcher it with irrelevant features using CoPilot, and in the process:
- Make the function's name not match what it is actually doing.
- Hardcode three special cases for no good reason.
- Write no tests at all.
- Update the documentation, but make the short version of it misleading, suggesting it accepts all named colors, rather than just three. (The long description clarifies that, so it's not completely bad.)
- Show how engineering the prompt to do what they want takes more time than just writing the code in the first place.
And that's supposed to be a feature. I wonder how they'd feel if someone sent them a pull request done in a similar manner, resulting in similarly bad code.
I think I'll remain firmly in the "if FPS is an important metric in your editor, you're doing something wrong" camp, and will also steer clear of anything that hypes up the plagiarism parrots as something that'd be a net win.
Church of Emacs vs. Cult of vi is the only true rivalry. Enlightenment will only be found taking one of these paths.
I'm glad to hear Zed uses the GPU to render its UI, much like every other IDE on the planet.
the framework is actually pretty cool, it uses SDFs to render ui (which is definitely not the most efficient solution but it's really, really cool (it means they can use the same system to render shapes, text, and literally everything else which can be described by a signed distance formula)
wake me up when theres a vim plugin and a linux port
I think it already has vim motions. But I wouldn't know because there is no Linux build.
Vscodium gang?
present... yet until i can toy around with zed in Linux
John fucking Carmack codes in Microsoft Visual Studio, and that's the guy who wrote Doom, the single most important piece of software in history of Man and I'm not even exaggerating.
He doesn't develop text editors, so he uses what's popular. That's what most people do.
So what would you use if you developed text editors?
And as a side note, would would you use for html and php?
IntelliJ suite for web development. Its a little resource heavy, but has all the features baked in.
Doom, the single most important piece of software in history of Man and I’m not even exaggerating.
First of all, that's your opinion, second of all, appeal to authority, third of all, what's that have to do with what he does right now?
It's not opinion though, but a scientific fact.
Don't you try to argue with the experts
Sucks for consumers but that is poetic justice for the zed team. They now atone for their sin of creating electron.
Out of the loop here, what sucks for the zed team?
Probably the reason Vs Code has so many extensions, is that they can easily (low barrier of entry) be created in JavaScript. This is mainly due to the fact that VS Code is an electron application, itself written in JavaScript.
It sucks for zed, because these extensions allow users to customize their workflows to their needs which decreases their liklihood to switch to a different editer. I think the message of the post is that VS Code's large and mature extension ecosystem will somewhat impede users migrating to zed.
The irony in this is that the people behind zed and atom were the ones who initially created electron for atom.
Getting revenge on Microsoft by tightly integrating Microsoft's LLM stuff 😎
I liked Atom, performance was tolerable on my overpowered machine, but MS killing it just sent me back to Vim and modernizing my plugins.
Zed positives: Metal rendering. I use a Mac, so one platform's fine. But negatives: Rust, so I can't/won't touch any internals, and I loathe the Rustacean propaganda wing. No extensions yet. Config is another stupid json file.
You know what's great about vimrc? It's easy to put in a few config commands, and then you realize you're working in the scripting language. You don't have to switch to a whole new file format. Thanks, Bram.
Where would you have to touch internals in zed? In reality would you have to come into contact with rust when using Zed? If it works it wouldn't be apparent what it was build with, wouldn't it?
I often had to poke around inside Atom to see what it was really doing, what some bug was, and to figure out how to write or configure extensions. I don't as often do that with Vim, but it's pretty clean C.
Do you not look inside the overly complex tools you use, especially beta ones? The whole appeal of "open source"/"free software" etc. is you can read the code. But if it's in something you can't stand, that's a disadvantage.
Idk man. I'm still waiting for Fleet.
~~Could someone let me in the joke and tell me what editor this guy's comparing VScode too?~~
Oh Zed. I think it's got promise but cross platform is gonna be necessary for mass adoption.
For the most part it's a business for them, and that's what matters, they target Mac users because they are more likely to pay. If you need speed and customization there is neovim and Helix (Rust based). From users to users, no business interests here. Or VSCode just works for almost everyone.