ᛋᛁᚵᛁᛋᛘᚢᚾᛑ ᚾᛁᚾᛃᛅWhy do people use #zed? It really looks like the poster child of enshittification.
krig (@[email protected])
One question that has been on my mind since I forked Zed is why it's such a huge project. It's a text editor. What does all that code really do? I still don't know if I understand why. I have looked at a fraction of the code at this point. What does it all do? Fuck if I know. But here, take a look at this for example... Python support in Gram (forked from Zed) is mainly provided by python.rs, a single file containing 2865 lines of code (as of today). One part of that code is a function which lists virtual environments available to the editor. The code to actually discover which venvs are available is handled by a dependency (the PET library from Microsoft) but sorting the venvs in order of importance is handled here: https://codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram/src/commit/b0f5dd51829e2b63bd6ca2d4b39a8313c55522ae/crates/languages/src/python.rs#L1184 It's a single call to the method sort_by on a variable confusingly named toolchains, containing a list of virtual environments. I have been trying to make sense of it for a while. Like, one sort criteria is filesystem distance, which kind of makes sense. Wouldn't it make sense to primarily sort by filesystem distance, and a second sort by Python version? Instead this is primarily sorting alphabetically by executable name, it's looking at multiple environment variables for priority, it's sorting alphabetically based on conda prefix(?)... Maybe I'm missing something, maybe I am not galaxy-brained enough to sort virtual environments with the big fellas. But I then compare this to helix which has no special handling for virtual environments, you just configure the LSP to use the venv you want to use, and I feel like maybe it didn't have to be this complicated?
adenoz@sigismundninja I’ve used it and probably still will at various times. My other main IDE is Positron and editor is Helix. I like Zed cause it’s fast, has very good vim binding support and has some gui conveniences Helix doesn’t. Positron is not fast at all, but does have good features for what I want.
What don’t you like about it?
@adenoz
Never tried it. I used to be curious about it, but lately I've been reading a lot about its anti-features and out of control code base.
I'm an Emacs user. Really curious about Helix though. But also genuinely curious about why many people on Mastodon like Zed.
Duco@sigismundninja I use it sometimes. I'm still missing the good git support, support for non-Unicode files and the over all feature richness from JetBrains IDEs.
But I can not say that anything would be enshittificated at zed. It helps too much for the taste of some people, who want to craft every single character in their file themselves, but the defaults are reasonable for most devs, I would say.
Definitely much better than the most popular editor: VSCode. What are your issues?
@duco I'm not a Zed user, but genuinely curious about why some people use it. (And I'm always in search for a better editor..) My understanding is that Zed has tons of "anti-features" (like VS Code, PyCharm etc..) and the code base seems to be shit.
I'm sure there are real good and innovative features as well.
The post was also a rant about enshittification in general...
(I'm an #Emacs user, but think I'll give #HelixEditor a real try.)
@sigismundninja what anti features do you speak about? 🤔 I have not looked at the source code of zed, so I don't know if it's a mess or not. Did you? Or why do you think it's a mess?
TLDR: I'm ranting about stuff of which I know very little.
Telemetry, AI and subscription lock-in setups. Also super weird 18+ license. Huge amounts of (vibe?) code to do very basic stuff. See my other context reply.
I got all my information from that one guy behind the #Gram fork, so... Yeah.
Before that, some comments made by Richard Feldman made me wonder how they were using Rust in Roc and Zed. The amount of code and the described patterns did sound weird.
@sigismundninja well, they support the use of AI in the editor, but you can turn off all AI with a setting. Then all AI features are gone also from the UI. You can turn off telemetry, too. Collecting anonymous usage data can help to make better decisions. The 18+ is, if you register on their website to use the AI and collaboration features. You don't have to use that, if you just want to use the editor.
@sigismundninja I watched a few of the videos at YouTube when they started with the editor. They wrote a lot of the code in pair programming using collaboration features and it sounded like they have a lot of knowledge about it. They wrote the atom editor before, so they have a lot of experience. I don't know how much vibe coding they use nowadays, though. And I don't know how the source code looks.
@sigismundninja gram is interesting. I didn't know people are really forking zed already to build competing editors. I think it's beneficial to have more choice, like with Firefox, waterfox, zen browser, etc. So everyone can choose the fork that fits their needs. Thanks for sharing that.