A summary of my likes and gripes with code editors I’ve tried (1/2):
VSCode: Best UX, but owned by Microsoft, and proprietary (code-oss doesn’t have access to everything). Also copilot shoved down my throat and telemetry and copilot are bundled in the oss version as well. CLA required to contribute.
Zed: Fine, but not immune to license changes as zed industries owns all the code in the repo (CLA required to contribute). Also big on AI and UI still feels a little clunky.
(2/2)
Helix: Best collaborative project (not owned by one group, and immune to license changes (no CLA)), but I can’t get in the mindset of modal editing. Feels easy to contribute to though, and that matters a lot to me.
Kate: KDE FTW, but also LSP support is just ok, and I’ve ran into many hiccups with my expected workflow.
Lapce: Not immune to license changes (Apache-2.0), but no CLA, so that’s nice. Looks like vscode, but has a long way to go to be actually stable.
@Rerum I like vscodium, but I feel sad every time I see the number of patches (https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/tree/master/patches) they have to maintain to de-microsoft everything.
I care about having an editor that's open source AND sustainable, and ones that are primarily owned by one company are not sustainable sadly. They can be forked in the case of a problematic close-sourcing, but there's no guarantee it will have as much momentum afterward. I like projects with maintainers that are committed to open source.
Related to Zed owning all the code in the repo, the EULA for the editor is pretty crazy for an open source project. Read: term-limited license, cannot decompile, disassemble or attempt to learn the source code underlying the editor, Zed making "certain versions" of the Editor available at the zed github. It feels just as bad as VSCode with this kind of crap.
It really feels like they're trying to be open source only as long as it's convenient for them.
Ryan Brue
Jonathan Capps
Rerum