Mastodawn

Why do people use #zed? It really looks like the poster child of enshittification.

@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?

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ᛋᛁᚵᛁᛋᛘᚢᚾᛑ ᚾᛁᚾᛃᛅ 3d ago

@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.)

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Duco 3d ago

@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?

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ᛋᛁᚵᛁᛋᛘᚢᚾᛑ ᚾᛁᚾᛃᛅ 3d ago

@duco

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.

https://gram.liten.app

GRAM

Gram is an open source code editor with built-in support for many popular languages. Gram is an opinionated fork of the Zed code editor.

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Duco

@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.

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Duco 3d ago

@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.

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Duco 3d ago

@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.