Zed is now open source

mac@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 166 points –
Zed is now open source - Zed Blog
zed.dev
40

But I thought Zed was dead, honey..

How in the world can you support iOS release, but not Linux? For a TEXT editor with very little graphical layer.

From their FAQ:

##What platforms does Zed support?

As of now, we only support macOS.

We are a small team, so it's critical for us to be laser-focused. As a startup, one of our key priorities at this early phase is learning, and right now, we're focused on the following questions:

  • What are the key features we need to get traction on any platform?
  • Are our assumptions about our eventual business model valid?

While we'd love to support users on Linux and Windows, adding those platforms doesn't really help us answer those questions. We're investing a lot to make Zed portable, but adding other platforms comes with opportunity cost in the short-term and maintenance overhead going forward. Right now those costs don't make sense for us.

As Zed matures on a single platform, this cost/benefit ratio will shift, and it will make sense to expand to other platforms. We hope you'll give it a try when that happens.

As a general timeframe, you can expect us to begin work on supporting these platforms after Zed is open source, but before version 1.0. Any news will be posted to our platform-tracking issues.

Linux support is listed on their roadmap.

It’s not like there is a shortage of text editors on Linux. This is fine.

It's not like there's a shortage of text editors on MacOS either though

Firstly, you mean macOS. Secondly, the graphical APIs are completely different, and even then macOS uses BSD userland.

I don't know a great deal about this software, or if this has changed recently, but it does look as though Linux support is on their roadmap for 2024

E: I misread, I don't think Linux is on the table for 2024. It seems to be on their long term roadmap at least.

Sooo.... are you down for blueberry pancakes?

The only good thing to come from this new editor so far is the frank statement by the original Atom Developers (who invented Electron, just to run Atom) admitted that Electron is not a good solution for a code editor, because who in the heck wants to edit their code in a web browser anyway.

Now we just need to convince the devs of Keybase and Obsidian the same.

Well, looking at how popular VSCode is, looks like people don't mind the web browser thing

What VSCode uses is a super cut down and highly optimised version of electron, designed specifically to run a code editor. It's still not as good as real native code, but a lot of people are willing to put up with it because the plugins available for VSCode are pretty good.

People put up with it because, really, most people don't care if the technology is a little wacky as long as the features are good.

For me, it is more "better than the competition." PlattormIO for example is extremely jank and I run into an out of date library that prevents it from compiling. Of course there is no error saying anything remotely related to that, so it's at least one, 30 minute google searching session per project to correct libraries using old, broken dependencies.

Not to mention that the build and upload buttons on the command bar literally don't work at all. In windows I have to use the built in terminal to build or upload and in linux at least the build and upload buttons in the PIO sidebar work.

But the problem is that it is STILL easier, faster, and has more features than the competition. In my (only embedded devices) experience, it is still faster than pieces of shit like STM32CubeIDE, MPLabX, and Eclipse as far as speed and user-friendliness. Doesn't help that STM ships a bunch of broken HAL libraries for chips outside of their main moneymakers.

Keybase is pretty much abandoned after Zoom acquired them.

Hmm, I somehow missed that update. Thanks for making me aware.

Looks really awesome, going to try it out when there's a Linux version. VSCode is great, but could use some more performant competition.

No Java/Kotlin yet? And its biggest selling point seems to be the AI integration? Well that's a hard pass then for my company and work environment.

I was wondering what could happened with Atom. Nice to see it died to reincarnate into a powerful IDE.

That note was very interesting to me, because there's also Pulsar which is what I have been trying out, which also relates to Atom. I'm not sure if "fork" is the right word as I don't know the complete history, but installing packages uses atom packages / github sources so it's fairly similar. I wonder what led to this other one

I saw this the other day and downloaded it on my work machine. Thanks for reminding me that I wanted to try it at home with my existing data. Very cool conceptually. We'll see if it can unseat Sublime Text as my primary editor.

Ed: for some reason, it only opens to a solid pink, full-screen window on my home machine. Unable to open a text file. Too bad. Maybe in the future.

Anyone used this? At work we got IntelliJ IDEA so eh, we just use the group coding feature of that, is this one cool for other languages like js or so?

zed has always been open source. Seems that you are just trying to squat its name, am I right?

120 stars... not exactly a common household name. Meanwhile zed the editor has 12k stars, gaining or losing 120 wouldn't even register. Your comment is delusional

It is common that libraries have fewer stars than end user apps. Especially if they never spammed in communities.

The reasons why almost nobody has heard of them don't matter, the point is that nobody has heard of them - meaning they have no fame to steal or popularity to piggy back off of

Unless this is a drop-in replacement for vim, I don't wanna hear about it!

Well... you asked for one: helix-editor.com

So far it's nice, but I still prefer my vim+mods

I’m all in on helix, it has replaced emacs and vim for me quite handily.