Zas Editor

https://www.zeditor.app/

by sodality2 • 4 years ago

646 340 4 years ago

coldtea5• 4 years ago

This looks promising. Downloaded it to try, was dissapointed to find no/little support for Python. It does work for Go and Rust though.

If this can get a good plugin ecosystem, it would fly.

Annili23• 4 years ago

Sorry to hear that. At the moment only Go and Rust are supported. We are currently working on plugins. What did you think about the Rust & Go support? Would you use it for Python if we add support?

ziftface2• 4 years ago

I'm wondering why no support for LSP and DAP? Is it missing feature you guys need?

smsx• 4 years ago

I would certainly be very interested in it if there was Python support (and VIM keybindings!).

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

Python support seems like a no-brainer "next language to support" to me :) . I mean if you are going to support additional languages that is.

drcongo• 4 years ago

I would almost certainly buy it if it had Python support. I code in SublimeText all day, and sometimes want another project open in something I can command+tab to, so I've got several secondary editors, none of which I particularly like. I despise VSCode because it feels like Windows XP, Nova has some quirks that I just can't get past, TextMate is currently my preferred secondary, but it's so far behind everything else. I really like the look of the minimap on Zas, very clever.

memco• 4 years ago

Have you looked at code runner: https://coderunnerapp.com/? It has some Python support but not on the level of VSCode or PyCharm IMO.

coldtea5• 4 years ago

Yeah, I've used it for a decade or more to run snippets. But I don't consider it an editor - more of a scratchpad, nor that it has any particular Python support to write home about.

Annili23• 4 years ago

Hi everyone! I'm the lead developer of Zas Editor. I wanted to share some details about the editor you might be interested in.

The text-storage data structure, syntax highlighting and search features are written in Rust, and the UI is written in Swift since we wanted to create a native macOS experience. The Swift and Rust code talk to each other using C FFI, and no, that doesn’t take away the safety features of both languages.

We’re using the Rope data structure for text representation, and the tree-sitter parser for syntax highlighting and some smart features like file outline, local renaming and symbol search. All other language features are powered by LSP servers (rust-analzyer and gopls).

I’d be happy to answer any questions under this comment or anywhere else in this thread.

thamer• 4 years ago

This looks like a great start! There's one thing I couldn't find from this page, which I'm sure many developers would ask about: is there a Vim plugin, or Vim mode? And if not, are you planning to add one?

Annili23• 4 years ago

Hi, thanks for the tip, I will add that to the FAQ. There is no VIM key binding at the moment. We are planning to add one; we know how many developers (including us) would want that.

wanderr• 4 years ago

You might want to put supported languages more front and center and not buried on a hard-to-find faq page. Might also want to allow folks to sign up to be alerted when their favorite language is supported, which will also let you gather data about where there's the most interest.

Annili23• 4 years ago

Thank you for the feedback. We made a change to the landing page, it should be more clear what languages are supported now. The first sentence now is "A new, capable, and fast code editor for Go and Rust, focused on both reading and writing code". A signup is missing, but you can follow us on Twitter @ZasEditor in the meanwhile.

raphlinus• 4 years ago

For the rope, are you using xi-rope, ropey, or did you roll your own? Any thoughts on how you made that decision?

Glad to see stuff like this, it brings back memories.

Annili23• 4 years ago

Hi Raph. It amazing to see you here and thank you for all the xi crates.

Any thoughts on how you made that decision?

The reason behind that is Zas Editor started out as a fork of Xi Editor! We're also using a fork of xi-rope, though we haven't made many changes to it.

If you would like to discuss this more, DM me at twitter @ZasEditor

adamnemecek• 4 years ago

How long did it take you to build it?

PaulDavisThe1st2• 4 years ago

since we wanted to create a native macOS experience.

Can you say more about this choice?

Annili23• 4 years ago

Do you mean why we chose to make it native instead of making it cross-platform?

obutora• 4 years ago

Super cool product!!

pjmlp7• 4 years ago

If the plan is to make a native UI for each platform, good approach.

If it is to stay macOS only, also a possible decision not everything needs to be cross platform, why bring Rust into the picture?

hajhatten6• 4 years ago

Why would support for Rust be a problem here?

samatman• 4 years ago

Why would they not?

Integrating object code into Objective C or Swift is easy, commonplace, people do it all the time.

Rust can generate object code all day, you can insist on the C ABI anywhere you need to, and then you can bring in anything from cargo you want. CocoaPods is... not cargo.

rattray• 4 years ago

Elsewhere in the thread[0], the author claims that Zas Editor started out as a fork of Xi Editor, which was written in Rust.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30953143

fractallyte• 4 years ago

One typo: "dependancies" -> "dependencies"

scrumper• 4 years ago

There's quite a few actually. In the hero image, "Documentation Exlporer"; "variable" needs to be pluralized in the "Automatic renaming" section; conversely "documentations" should be singular in the "Dependancies" (sic) bit you pointed out - this is probably non-native English usage as that pattern appears throughout; "different matches" not "difference matches" under multi find; I'm seeing some stretched images in Safari under the Minimap section; and finally when you download it the .dmg is called "Zzas editor"!

Saying all this to be helpful, not snarky or nitty. It's early days and some missing polish is to be expected on the marketing side. I absolutely love that I this exists and that there's another native choice alongside Sublime (which is decently ok for Rust), I'm super excited to see it grow and once I figure out how to upgrade my Mac Pro to OSX 11 then I'll be trying it out.

Congrats to the developer and I wish the team long success.

newlisp2• 4 years ago

How do you create a new file from Zas? seems like you can only open existing files

coldtea5• 4 years ago

"Right click -> New file" in the sidebar

artspb• 4 years ago

It's great to see more Go editors out there. All the best! A little feedback: it's spelled GoLand, not Goland.

fmakunbound• 4 years ago

How do I extend it etc and what’s the extension language?

terhechte2• 4 years ago

You mentioned elsewhere that VIM bindings are upcoming. I think this product will be an insta-buy for me once there're (reasonably proper) vim bindings. Is there a newsletter or something to know once this feature has landed?

Also as a hint, before you try to re-implement 30 years of VIM bindings and end up with something where everybody misses something, there's a great C library that could be of help:

https://github.com/onivim/libvim

Annili23• 4 years ago

Thanks for the hint. You can follow us on Twitter @ZasEditor for update announcements.

albertzeyer2• 4 years ago

As I understand the documentation, libvim would manage and manipulate the buffer, i.e. basically "own" the text. However, Zas (and most other editors) already handle that, and probably would want to keep it that way. Does this still work together with libvim then, that libvim operates on a shared custom data structure, whatever the editor (Zas) provides to represent the buffer?

ghosty1412• 4 years ago

the curse of vim.

lampshades• 4 years ago

Seconding that VIM bindings are a requirement for me for what looks like an otherwise amazing editor.

johnsea2• 4 years ago

Can't you add some sort of impressum to the website where you give some information about you?

Annili23• 4 years ago

Added my info on the contact page

mro_name• 4 years ago

looks wonderful!

notimetorelax• 4 years ago

Hi, the image in “Simplicity of Command Line + Expressivity of Graphical UIs.” section is not cropped leading to horizontal scroll on mobile.

lewantmontreal• 4 years ago

Rust-analyzer destroys my Vscode experience in larger codebases (language features, formatting, version control becomes incredibly slow). I don’t know if there’s anything you can do about it but I hope it will be solved at some point.

amarant• 4 years ago

Hi! This looks really cool, great work! It seems to be Mac-only for now, is Linux support on your roadmap at all?

cute_boi• 4 years ago

As it is written in Swift, I highly doubt linux support is in their roadmap.

asimpletune• 4 years ago

I really like that it’s a one time price. Thanks for your work!

radiKal07• 4 years ago

Any changes it will support more languages? I would love to use this for Kotlin.

jamil74• 4 years ago

+1 For Kotlin, Swift would be nice too.

rob74• 4 years ago

Looks really nice, and I wish you a lot of success with it - if you offer most of the features of VSCode and GoLand in a faster and more elegant way, you may be able to carve out a niche for your product, even if it's not cross platform like all the other major editors/IDEs - but since I'm not a macOS user, I'm not in the market for it.

grncdr• 4 years ago

This looks really great, do you have any plans to support either arbitrary LSP servers, or integrate any more in a "blessed" way? I'd love to use this with Ruby & Solargraph for example.

JaggerJo3• 4 years ago

Really cool project!

Did you consider using ANTLR instead of tree-sitter parser? Don't know too much about tree-sitter but is seems to be a batteries included approach to building parsers?

andrem• 4 years ago

The payment process is a little tricky - it doesn't ask you for an email address and displays the license on the resulting page. If I don't record the license key manually I will need to get in touch with you to try and recover it.

It would be better to get it emailed or get some prompt to record it etc.

throwawaybner3• 4 years ago

What editor were you using in the past? emacs, vim, vs?

leephillips3• 4 years ago

Mentioning that it’s Mac only, and that it’s not free software, would help keep plenty of people from wasting their time.

klibertp• 4 years ago

Thank you - not sure about others, but I'd probably waste some time if not for your comment.

I would like to say a bit more, but basically anything of value I could add to the discussion would start a flame war, so I'll have to abstain :(

madduci4• 4 years ago

It's 2022 and still shipping [insert platform here]-only binaries?

nu11ptr• 4 years ago

This wouldn't keep me from checking it out IF it ran on Linux (they say it likely will eventually) and IF it was significantly better than the competition (vscode+rust-analyzer or intellij+rust plugin). The challenge proprietary software has at this point in certain categories like editors/IDEs is that the free stuff is quite good, so it will have to be MUCH better to succeed. Possible, but hard.

bborud4• 4 years ago

I think it is okay to assume that people who frequent a forum mostly inhabited by people who create software for a living would be okay with software that you would have to pay for.

marcodiego• 4 years ago

Thanks for the warning!

hasukimchi• 4 years ago

In the preferences, the code analysis icon is missing.

And auto-updater tells me that I have version 1.0 and there is a new version 1.0.0 . And if I try to update, there is an update error.

It is also a bit confusing if you buy it, because you go to download and can then decide to download for trial or purchase. If you purchase, you just get a screen with the key. But no download. It is not nessasary clear, that the trial is also the main download.

And after purchasing, there is no invoice.

bovermyer3• 4 years ago

When you say there's no invoice, do you mean there's no email at all with license key/etc. to confirm your purchase, or are you specifically referring to an invoice email?

btat1-2• 4 years ago

"Why should I use Zas Editor instead of free XXXX?". I don't know, I have no Mac.

from_endor• 4 years ago

Congratulations on the launch. There is a demand for a native, fast IDE. I gave Zas a quick spin in our fairly large Go codebase:

Pros:

- really fast

- clean, fresh, minimal UI

Cons:

- Maybe I did something wrong, but one thing I do almost every day is rename something. Right-click a function name (or press F2), pick a better name, done. Zas seems to only rename the occurrences in the current file vs. the declaration.

- The "Open file" suggestions are not great. If I search for a file `moo.go`, one of the first suggestions is `some/folder/moo/some/more/other.go` and then further down the list somewhere it shows `moo.go`

- CMD + click on a symbol should jump to the declaration (or usages)

EDIT: we use GoLand today. Functionality-wise it is great (also builtin TypeScript/JS support is a real plus) but it is slow and hungry.

prime31• 4 years ago

Any plans to support other languages, specifically Zig? It would be nice if it even just supported wiring in any LSP like Sublime Text LSP and Neovim LSP do.

efreak• 4 years ago

You may want to make it more obvious this is a native Mac app, not cross-platform. I ignored the window decorations and shortcuts (like I usually do), as those are commonly shown under the assumption of the developer's preferred OS; there's no definitive statement that this is a Mac-only app until the very bottom.

jibbers• 4 years ago

This looks banging! Amazing work so far.

I found a typo on your /faq page: > Of course! You can try the for 1 week.

Annili23• 4 years ago

Thank you! Fixed it

atarian2• 4 years ago

Looks great. One thing I recommend is defining a smaller width for the content on the landing page so it doesn't take up the whole screen. Otherwise, it takes a lot of effort to read left-to-right.

Annili23• 4 years ago

Thank you for the feedback! We are on it. Just quick question, are you on a desktop?

atarian2• 4 years ago

Yes, desktop with 30" monitor.

Annili23• 4 years ago

@dang our post was marked as [dup]. The title is too ambiguous. Can we update it to 'Zas Editor: Capable, Fast and Native CodeEditor Designed for Reading and Writing'.

pvg• 4 years ago

Looks like two submissions were merged, if you want to reach the mods email them, though, summoning dang is not reliable. On the other hand the current simple title is a lot better than the old florid one that reads too much like an ad so you're probably fine as is.

gbraad3• 4 years ago

"Zas Editor: mac-only editor for Reading and Writing"

zhaihuailou• 4 years ago

I've been looking for such an editor. Native UI experience. Hopefully the fish console will be added. golang debug. Plugin functionality.

sawaali• 4 years ago

There has been a resurgence of native editors these days (Helix, Nova, …). Every time I rush to check if there are vim keybindings. It's a dealbreaker otherwise!

Annili23• 4 years ago

I believe Nova added support for vim keybindings recently. We're going to add vim keybindings soon. In fact, we're starting to regret not implementing the functionality for this release!

bobbylarrybobby• 4 years ago

It's especially interesting because thanks to Neovim, implementing vim mode should be more or less trivial -- Neovim has a server mode where you send it keystrokes and it sends you back buffer edits and/or UI to display. And since it's real vim you get to keep all your vim config, plugins etc in your IDE. I'm surprised I haven't seen it really take off yet.

conradev• 4 years ago

At that point it’s just a UI for Vim, and wouldn’t have the rope data structure, live variable editing, LSP integration, etc

Unless, of course, you have it configured in Vim

mikedc• 4 years ago

If the VSCode Neovim extension is anything to go by, this does result in a considerably improved UX versus the usual Vim-key approximation. In addition to your Vim config, it plays surprisingly nicely with all other VSCode editor features, so you can basically work both ways at once.

divan• 4 years ago

I've tried Helix few days ago and was more than impressed – almost everything you want from code editor is there out of the box, and transition from neovim was super fast. The only thing the holds me from switching completely is lack of Copilot.

But yes, there seem to be a momentum of rethinking editors and frustration with popularity of a slow and heavy editors.

sundarurfriend• 4 years ago

Helix - or rather Kakoune† - has better-than-Vim keybindings though, in my view. It's what Vim keybindings would be if they were built from the ground up, without decades of cruft and bolted on bits, and instead had a coherent design to them that was easy to make sense of and intuit. Vim has that with its command grammar, a neat way of combining smaller comands into larger ones, but not with the individual command keybindings themselves.

† I'm still not sure what the difference between the two is, except that the Kakoune dev had to take a year-long break because of having a newborn child, and Helix development continued in that time.

smitty1e• 4 years ago

All of the chrome and tailfin is fine, but if it doesn't work well headless over ssh and emulate vi, then I'm not the audience.

_zzaw2• 4 years ago

This looks really good. I was a major fan of Coda, but I’ve been disappointed with Nova, so I’m looking for something else.

The fact that this isn’t saddled with subscription pricing is a huge plus. I don’t even consider software I can’t own; $24.99 as a one-time payment with a year of updates is more than fair.

deaddodo• 4 years ago

This is one of the reasons I like JetBrains subscription service. Even if you stop paying, you get a fallback license that updates every year (I believe); so you have perpetual access to their product, even if slightly out of date.

_zzaw2• 4 years ago

What if JetBrains goes out of business?

pjmlp7• 4 years ago

It only happened after the pitchforks and torches were brought out, and they caved in to offer an alternative to the original subscription plans.

cjohnson3182• 4 years ago

If it's a good product, I'm happy spending a lot more than $25 a year.

skinnymuch2• 4 years ago

Why disappointed in Nova [maybe vs Coda]? I didn’t use Nova much myself so didn’t get to see enough of its issues

mikl• 4 years ago

For those wondering, Zas only supports Rust and Google Go for now.

bufferoverflow• 4 years ago

I don't see myself switching from VSCode any time soon. The plug in system is just too amazing, too vast. I understand how hard it would be to create something competitive.

lykr0n• 4 years ago

Man. I would buy this in a heartbeat if it was on linux.

Good luck! It looks like an amazing product.

djur• 4 years ago

This looks pretty great, but I'm through paying for commercial programming tools that aren't portable to everything I might be developing on. Right now I'm developing on a Mac for work, but in a year that might be different, and the time and money I put into this editor will be wasted.

donatj2• 4 years ago

The time isn’t wasted if you got good code out of it, and it’s $25. That’s like two trips to McDonalds these days. I paid more than that for the concessions at the movie I saw tonight.

hbbio• 4 years ago

Looks slick and well built. I would really like to try.

However, there is no info about the team, company, etc. Even social accounts are brand new. To install a closed source binary with no provenance info is a bit harsh, the only way I could test would be on an offline spare Mac.

Is any data collected?

Given that it started out as a fork of xi-editor, I think you should consider switching to an open source + subscription business model: You may get a much larger userbase (as again you seem to have built a great product), you'd gain trust even if you prefer to remain anons, and you can bundle additional services (e.g. sync the configuration between multiple devices through iCloud can be a paid subscription-only service, additional themes, binding of Apple latest kits etc.).

With tiny bits of added value, many would be able to pay $20/y for convenience and you may end up with more revenue. Also, you may use the App Store to charge for the subscription, it is easier for many of us with payment info already in.

hajhatten6• 4 years ago

They seem to be dodging the telemetry questions on HN.

No open source and completely anonymous developers behind it.

Not having a clear decision made about how their DRM is supposed to work, and ask people to delete their posts regarding it...

Huge red flags here.

Annili23• 4 years ago

No data is collected other than the serial number of your Mac for making sure you can only use your license on one computer, which we realized was a bad idea, and made changes.

We’re going to add a privacy policy in the website. We haven’t already done that because we didn’t really expect this much attention within hours of releasing. We were expecting few downloads and more technical feedback.

nemothekid• 4 years ago

With tiny bits of added value, many would be able to pay $20/y for convenience and you may end up with more revenue.

If you look at the landscape of editors, it's pretty much split between FOSS or Paid and closed source. I wouldn't recommend this route; OP would simple end up supporting a bunch of people who would never pay for this app. Going FOSS for a code editor only makes sense if you are already working for a huge tech company.

Annili23• 4 years ago

Hi, in the current and only version, your Mac’s serial number is collected, which used to be used to ensure one license can be used on only one computer (this is not the case anymore).

andai• 4 years ago

Automatic renaming is amazing. Such slight reductions in friction make a big difference. I can already tell I would be much more likely to refactor often with such a feature.

Unfortunately, I don't have a Mac at the moment. Are there any other editors with such a feature, or is it unique to Zas?

Annili23• 4 years ago

Zas Editor developer here. As far as I know, it’s a feature unique to Zas Editor.

I can already tell I would be much more likely to refactor often with such a feature.

I’ve been working on Zas Editor in Zas editor for a while now, and can confirm the difference it makes

seanw4444• 4 years ago

Dogfooding your editor! Nice.

georgia_peach• 4 years ago

Meanwhile, Rob Pike uses Acme and hates syntax highlighting. As comfortable as I am with Vim, he's probably right.

An editor that makes it easy to write more code can be counterproductive when the actual goal is to write less of it.

pkulak• 4 years ago

Good editors help me write less code faster.

pjmlp7• 4 years ago

He is stuck in the past.

I am coding since 1986 and definitely don't share his opinion.

nurettin• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure there is a huge group of jetbrains customers who like tight, fast executables and would switch to this editor if it had a working auto import and type checking/autocomplete feature for Python. At least an attempt at autocomplete for js would be a bonus.

cjohnson3182• 4 years ago

I mainly work in Python and Vue, so that would be huge for me.

I use VSCode, but it weirdly forgets how to tab-shift things over, and/or forgets how backspace works. (I just close/reopen and it's fine again.)

hajhatten6• 4 years ago

Been wanting something like this for a while now to switch from vscode.

Considering not even terminals are safe from phoning home telemetry.

You guys are charging for this, how much telemetry is the app sending home?

Wish you guys all the luck.

ranguna• 4 years ago

You should try vscodium, it's vscode minus all the Microsoft bs

hajhatten6• 4 years ago

It's a shame vscodium isn't being talked about more.

However, would really love something native as I run so many windows of different projects at once in a regular day.

rwalle2• 4 years ago

Telemetry can be very easily turned off. It would take less time for you to Google "how to turn off VSCode telemetry" and finish it than writing this comment. This is ridiculous.

bogwog3• 4 years ago

That's assuming you know that your editor is collecting your data and sending it to someone else. And since VS Code is a Microsoft product, they'll probably turn the telemetry back on after an update, only allow you to disable a subset of data collection, or simply ignore your preferences and send it anyways.

agambrahma• 4 years ago

Nice, would use this if I hadn't settled for SublimeText in this niche (fast editing or large files, things worth doing outside of JetBrains)

armchairhacker• 4 years ago

I’m assuming it only works for os11 or os12?

You should put that in the FAQ, i still have an old mac that can’t upgrade

smcleod• 4 years ago

OS 10.15 goes out of support in October anyway

isaacimagine• 4 years ago

From the domain name I confused this with the Zed editor[0] for a second. Despite both being editors written in Rust with zed* domain names, they are different. Really interested in both projects though.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29566960

cutler3• 4 years ago

The soon to be sanctioned Zed editor.

saagarjha2• 4 years ago

Why would it be sanctioned?

blipmusic2• 4 years ago

EDIT:

The website now states:

    > Can I use one license on two computers?
    > Yes.

What great turn of events, thank you for reconsidering! You have my money. :)

——-

Old post (now incorrect):

    > Can I use one license on two computers?
    > No. It sucks, but that is the only way to prevent abuse.

The editor looks great, but this sucks to the extent that this won't work for me at all, unfortunately. Parallels' old-school licensing theme meant I'm dropping them as well. This is not about the value of the product or the price itself, $25 seems more than fair if this meets my needs, regardless of open-source alternatives.

I, and I suspect many others, develop on multiple computers, sometimes on a single day. If you worry about "enterprise abuse", perhaps consider a commercial license. Or add a higher priced tier that is per user, not per device. I think (i.e I don't actually know) there's a reason editors such as Sublime Text have per-user licenses (to be fair its price tag is also four times that of Zas Editor).

Are people actually abusing per-user, "honor" licenses that much nowadays? And here I'm thinking about difficult-to-verify customers who are willing to pay in the first place.

Annili23• 4 years ago

We realized how big of a mistake that was. We updated the server and the website. It is now possible to use one license on multiple computers.

edit: We would appreciate if you could mention that your comment in case someones reads your's without reading this one.

Intermernet• 4 years ago

I think it would be better if they add an edit to the beginning of the comment. The transparency of your reply and admission of a mistake is actually a very good signal to many of us. I trust people who own their mistakes.

LeoNatan252• 4 years ago

This just shows how important first impression is, and how difficult it is to rebuild trust after that. Asking people to delete their comments/reviews is not a good approach.

JodieBenitez• 4 years ago

Good balance of speed (which is definitely an underrated feature!) and intelligent code completion/features here. I like it.

markeibes• 4 years ago

Wake me up when I can write Purescript in it

evaneykelen• 4 years ago

Excited to see yet again a code editor being launched. Going to give it a spin. Tiny nitpick, there’s a typo in the FAQs: …is avaialble for…

jll292• 4 years ago

Another typo (section Documentation Explorer): dependancies -> dependencies

beprogrammed• 4 years ago

Looks very nice, and the price point looks perfect. Of course I only use open source software, so I take this as a challenge to reimplement these features in emacs.

surrTurr• 4 years ago

Website looks sketchy, zero information on who is actually behind this project or what kinds of data are collected. Also, without proper plugin support (LSP!) I can’t see this going anywhere. Looks similar to Code Edit [1], an open source editor for macOS that’s currently in development.

[1] https://github.com/CodeEditApp/CodeEdit

hajhatten6• 4 years ago

I had totally missed this project. Thanks for the link!

seanw4444• 4 years ago

Won't it, though? People use JetBrains IDEs all the time as opposed to things with tons of plugins. It sounds like that's the style they're going for, just a little lest slow and bloated, based on their website.

vr463• 4 years ago

I love a new editor.

But I long ago realized that a text editor was a massive long-term investment and after two editor companies abandoned me, I switched (back) to Vim and doubled down. Had I stuck with Vim in 1992, I could have saved a lot of time.

That said, today it’s Neovim, with IntelliJ kept around for its power and the fact that I often have to open client projects. And VSC for specific plugins that save time (e.g. inspecting SSL cert details b instantly.

8fingerlouie3• 4 years ago

I've certainly been down that rabbithole.

Started with Vim, planned on eventually learning Emacs (still do), and then to whatever editor was "flavor of the month", including TextMate and Sublime Text.

Sublime Text was great in it's day, and i still hold a license for the latest version, but it is caught in a death spiral it seems. Whenever i check if it "does X", it turns out it maybe does, but VS Code has a much better plugin than ST ever did.

And so, after a couple of decades, i appear to have come full circle, and now mostly use Vim again, unless a task requires "specific tools", i.e. writing Azure Functions, which is much easier to handle in Visual Studio or VS Code.

jhoechtl• 4 years ago

I currently settle on Emacs (again) after three years of NeoVim. LSP is so much better integrated and works for my needs out of the box. I currently don't miss treesitter, expect for semantic selections at point.

But I realized I could get rid of a massive and ever changing NeoVim configuration mess. Using Emacs 29 though.

lysium• 4 years ago

You might enjoy Spacemacs. For me, it combines the benefits of both Vim and Emacs. https://www.spacemacs.org

nlnn• 4 years ago

Exactly the same here.

I've also gotten so used to vim keybinding support in almost everything I use (e.g. IntelliJ, VSCode, Obsidian) that I doubt I'd invest in anything without that.

It sounds like that's on the cards for Zas in future though, so looking forward to giving it another try then.

vr463• 4 years ago

Very good point, actually - Vim keybindings are absolutely the thing to learn, we will forever discuss which editor/guitar is great, but as long as the muscle memory stays the same, you can compare...

square_usual• 4 years ago

This looks amazing. I'm definitely the target market for this - I shelled out for Nova, and I'm always on the lookout for fast and well made macOS editors. The Rust/Go-only thing is an unfortunate dealbreaker, as much as I like Rust, I don't use it enough to justify paying a separate fee for it. But if this got more languages I'm all up.

Annili23• 4 years ago

We’re definitely going to support more languages. You can follow us on Twitter @ZasEditor to see the update announcements.

m4xw3llx• 4 years ago

I think the title would better if it is "Zas Editor, only for Mac".

gbraad3• 4 years ago

It only mentions this at the very bottom of the page. Either other platforms are considered at some point, or be clear about this.

The screenshots suggest macOS use, but you can't be for sure as any program can be rendered like this on a mac.

KuroSaru• 4 years ago

Hit and a miss. Looked good till goto osx only. Never-ending those who have osx sure it be a potentially good solution. Back to vscode or sublime-text for me

deanc• 4 years ago

What's the roadmap for other language support?

gbraad3• 4 years ago

You lost me at "Download for Mac. Buy for $24.99"

Not that I am against paid software, but the added value is bound to a single platform. It must provide a lot of 'functionality' and specifics to make it worthy. Especially is it is just an editor with the idea to become an IDE, which will likely impact performance over time. I am merely guessing here. But since performance is a major selling point, I wonder how this will be in the future. Note: I am NOT a mac user anymore. Still use sublime for time to time, but fully moved to VScode. If I look for speed or search functionality, I would use vi again. At the moment I care more about the presentation, refactoring and navigation. The extensions of vscode make this experience for me more powerful; remote ssh, marked mindmap, markdown rendering, etc plus it can run on a remote host and be accessible from a browser. Accessibility and the same experience across platforms are key to me.

Success with the editor. It does look promising! but not for me.

kaeruct• 4 years ago

I get a horizontal scroll bar on this landing page, not sure why. I'm on Firefox if that matters...

sam_goody• 4 years ago

I have not done any research, but the paid IDE's that are used by my friends are:

1. Sublime Text

2. Jet Brains PHPStorm

3. Panic Nova

A quick Google search shows about a dozen others, plus at least ten free editors.

Is there any resource that allows me to compare these?

JaggerJo3• 4 years ago

Wish I could use this. Add F# support and I’ll shower you in money.

StreamBright• 4 years ago

I wish there was something like this that supported syntax highlighting and intellisense for all the tree-sitter languages and nothing more.

iamsaitam• 4 years ago

It's new code editor for mac season it seems.

kissgyorgy2• 4 years ago

Quite an asshole way of phrasing "it is a subscription" with very small letters. At least it's a dark pattern.

alin232• 4 years ago

I have the same licensing model in Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) You buy the app as is now, and you get to keep this version of the app forever. Just like you would buy any other good.

On top of that, you also get 1 year of free updates, and you get to keep using those new versions forever as well.

How is this a subscription?

Why should the developer work forever for you on a meager $25 payment?

rplnt3• 4 years ago

Just like you would buy any other good.

Software is not a "good". If you bought "go ide" a year+ ago and your updates ran out, you can throw it away now.

On top of that, you also get 1 year of free updates

They are not free, you subscribed to them by paying the subscription. What is free is the copy of the software after your subscription ends.

How is this a subscription?

It's a subscription because the product you buy is supported for one year.

Why should the developer work forever for you on a meager $25 payment?

This is irrelevant to the topic at hand.

FWIW, I think it's a good model, for both user and the developer, but I would not try to pretend it's not a subscription with a big bold text. Just avoid the word and all is good.

kissgyorgy2• 4 years ago

You and I both know very well that software is not something you buy and you can use forever without adjusting it to new operating systems over time.

I don't have a problem with the model, I have a problem with LIES.

jatins2• 4 years ago

I didn't think it was a dark pattern at all. In anything, they are quite explicit about it.

forrestthewoods• 4 years ago

Zas Editor was specifically developed for macOS.

Cries in Windows :(

hit8run2• 4 years ago

Hey. I'm an Editor/IDE aficionado. This could be the start of a really nice macOS native editor. Panics Nova is nice but it is lacking good Go support. However there are many things to get right.

These things are needed in order to get competitive imho:

- Plugin API

- Plugin Marketplace

- Proper LSP (you seem to have that already)

- DAP Support (you stated you are working on it. Good!)

- Out of the box support for go-templates, css, js and html.

You already have a very good foundation from what I see! Keep it up. I'll buy I license just to see where this is going :)

cormacrelf• 4 years ago

On the plugin API, meh. I've spent a lot of time making Vim work for me over the years, adding all sort of plugins etc. Would that time have been better spent using something that was complete & worked already?

The answer is technically no, because I've used more than two languages in that time, more like 25 different dev environments I needed my editor to cater to. If you're only using one language, this is great. Everyone has better things to do than the meta-work of making a dev environment. For most people the dev environment is noise that gets them no closer to actually achieving something. Not having a plugin API means it's impossible to waste your time on that.

If this is a yearly subscription, and you can request features / improvements, then you should think of it as "I've got a guy (girl/etc) in Canada who handles my dev environment for me".

sverhagen• 4 years ago

Praise to all IDEs (or any app really) that manages to bring a good offering across platforms, instead of just tailoring to macOS (or Windows for that matter). But I'll sit here and take my downvotes now :-)

interactivecode• 4 years ago

You're already familiar with https://www.chimehq.com/ a native go specific editor?

hit8run2• 4 years ago

Of course ;) bought a license but it lacks important features for me.

rplnt3• 4 years ago

Native. Fast. Lightweight.

Comparison is missing editors that would compete with this. VS Code is huge and slow, but somehow people use it and love the extensibility and broad support. Goland is just a beast that does so much more it's not even in the same league.

What would make sense in the comparison chart is something like ST3.

Dave3of5• 4 years ago

Fast and slow are relative.

VSCode opens within about 2 seconds on my machine which for me is fast. For some users they want it to open even faster than that so something like vim makes sense.

Visual studio 2019 on the other hand takes about a minute to a large project and with resharper even longer.

madeofpalk• 4 years ago

I am surprised at just how slow Visual Studio proper is compared to VS Code, at things like typing and updating linting/compiler warnings.

speedgoose3• 4 years ago

VSCode opens in 1s on my machine (macbook pro m1). Good enough for me.

laurent123456• 4 years ago

And once it's started (in my case it's always running), switching files is instantaneous.

otikik• 4 years ago

Fast does not mean only "fast to open", though.

When I think about a fast editor I think about opening a 2GB log file and looking for some text, or editing a multi-megabyte Markdown file with syntax highlighting on without any slowdown (something my NeoVim currently struggles with).

rplnt3• 4 years ago

What you say just underlines my point from above. People who are happy with performance of VS Code are not looking at performance graphs in a new editor. And those who seek performance are probably not using VS Code anyway.

PS:

macbook pro m1

People were able to run IDEs and code editors 20 years ago. My 5 year old MB Pro is struggling with VS code. Not anything smart either, just UI, syntax highlighting, ... So while "good enough for me" is absolutely valid position, VS Code is objectively slow.

kelsolaar• 4 years ago

“It can to generate symbols for projects” —> “It can generate symbols for projects”

KrishnaShripad• 4 years ago

Does this have Vim key bindings? Can't find it anywhere on the landing page. I am very reluctant to give up my Neovim + Kitty setup. Most editors I have used consume a lot of RAM and end up becoming slow on big projects (especially when used in conjunction with LSPs). Operations aren't as smooth as I would like them to be. I have used Vim bindings with VSCode and even though it is manageable it still has a lot of quirks and performance issues that put me off. Eventually moved to Neovim and have never looked back. But if I get a better experience with Zas Editor (no compromise on performance though) I would definitely switch.

Annili23• 4 years ago

We’re currently working on VIM key bindings. If you’re interested, you can follow us on twitter @ZasEditor

Shadonototra• 4 years ago

Very nice, i love the redesigned minimap, it actually is now a useful feature, nice

albertzeyer2• 4 years ago

I wonder if it really still make sense to develop an editor as a commercial product. This is probably a massive effort, and the revenue is maybe not so large.

There is IntelliJ and Visual Studio. IntelliJ is successful, yes, but they have a long history, and the editor is really good. Visual Studio is maybe also successful but I'm not sure how profitable it really was or is.

But otherwise? Sublime Text and others were maybe successful at some point but not sure how profitable they really were. If you count the amount of development which went into it vs the revenue.

For me as a user, I'm extremely hesitant to use any non-open source editor. An editor is a long-term investment. I would not touch this Zas editor unless maybe in 5 to 10 years when it is widely used by many people or when it has become open source but otherwise not. Yes, it looks nice from a first glance but that is by far not enough.

My personal only exception is IntelliJ because it is so good. PyCharm specifically, although I have used other IntelliJ products in the past, starting with the original Java editor, 15 years ago or so, which was heavily praised by some friends.

But otherwise, I want to be able to extend the editor easily, also its core itself. I want to be able to support it when the original developer stopped working on it. Or port it to other systems the developer does not care about. Or do some changes the developer disagrees with. Etc. I want to be sure that it is in principle possible to run this in the next 10-20 years. Or not only me. The nice thing with open source is that many people think likewise, and then there will also be others doing such effort, like supporting it on recent systems, adding features, fixing bugs, etc. So then it is a community effort.

jamil74• 4 years ago

Yeah, people in this thread are praising the one time purchase but I'm almost seeing it as a red flag - how do we know a niche product like this will stick around without recurring revenue? I don't know if that's paid major upgrades or similar.

Edit: As a sibling comment pointed out it does actually do paid upgrades after a year so ignore my comment.

spiderfarmer• 4 years ago

The Affinity Suite does the same and they're still around, even though there's massive competition in Adobe CS competitors.

JaggerJo3• 4 years ago

Not the current target audience as my language of choice is not supported, but I'd also prefer a subscription.

febeling2• 4 years ago

Permanent license with one year of upgrades is - for serious users - a yearly subscription. With a price tag of $25 that sounds quite reasonable and also viable.

jstummbillig2• 4 years ago

I mean you are obviously conflicted but you basically already provided the conclusion: Yes, it makes sense – if it's good enough.

Most of the world's coders have probably not been born yet. Code tooling is still getting more valuable per hour spend on developing it. If IntelliJ was worth it in the past, so is potentially every tool from here on out.

Of course with web IDEs and AI coding, the whole space might still end up somewhere else entirely, requiring very different things, but alas, that's always a potential outcome.

ben-schaaf• 4 years ago

Sublime Text and others were maybe successful at some point but not sure how profitable they really were.

Still profitable enough to be larger than it's ever been, enough to fund new products like Sublime Merge and continue releasing updates. I'd argue any small business that provides a lively hood for at least one person is fairly successful.

biztos• 4 years ago

I have a paid license for Sublime but I still feel like I’m looking for the “right” editor for me, and if I find anything that looks like it might be it I will happily pay (after a small free trial to see if, like Nova, it’s not for my use cases).

My gut tells me there are a lot of people in this situation.

[Edit: since Go is my main language and I want to learn Rust, I will definitely be giving this a try!]

ThinkBeat• 4 years ago

The regular Visual Studio (Community, Pro, Enterprise) (if that is still the names used) is quite profitable.

As a regular person you can use Community for free within some limitations. (I think now that there is feature parity between Community an Pro)

If you work for a big company you need Pro or Enterprise sold as subscriptions for rather a lot of $$$. esp the Enterprise version.

The Enterprise version does have some great features that most devs. never get to use

Jataman606• 4 years ago

I think parent meant 'profitable' as how much Microsoft profits from it, not if it's good value for money for consumers.

samrocksc• 4 years ago

I love that pricing plan.

Annili23• 4 years ago

Zas Editor developer here. I think it’s important to address a problem a few people have mentioned so far: no data is collected other than your Mac’s serial number, which used to be used for finding how many computers a license is used on (we no longer do that)

We’re going to add a privacy policy in the website. We haven’t already done that because we didn’t really expect this much attention within hours of releasing. Honestly, we were expecting few downloads and more technical feedback.

oneeyedpigeon• 4 years ago

FYI typo on your faq page: "hunderds"

jxub• 4 years ago

And "dependancies" on the landing page.

jatins2• 4 years ago

At least from the website this looks really nice and brings with it some fresh ideas -- kudos on the ship!

Tangential: Are you the only developer on this? How long did it take from first line of code to current state? This sees like a monumental effort, so curious.

Annili23• 4 years ago

I’m not the only developer, but I’ve %90 of the work. Hopefully, we can get more support and expand

How long did it take from first line of code to current state?

It started out as a part-time side project and after a while I started working full time on it. So, I’m not sure I can give an accurate answer to your question. The first commit was made in August 2020

webmobdev• 4 years ago

Thank you for not releasing this software on a subscription / rent-a-software business model, and for reasonably pricing it. Most SaaS applications make me feel like a hostage to them, and just not worth the expense and hassle of it.

ushakov• 4 years ago

yep, feels refreshing to own software you pay money for

speedgoose3• 4 years ago

FYI, the mac serial number seems to fit under the European personal data definition.

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

chubs• 4 years ago

It looks fantastic! I don't really have much to add besides: Congrats! I hope you succeed! Great work!

hsn9155• 4 years ago

Looks promising. Price is very reasonable. Now trying it out. Unless I find a major issue I'm very likely to buy it.

Is there any chance of supporting other languages? I'm asking because I'm one of the (probably few?) people who would be happy if Odin was added to the list of supported languages. (It should be easy to parse, even has library support for parsing and extracting docs).

bestest• 4 years ago

Yet Another Editor with no option to use vertical tabs. Bummer!

dsincl12• 4 years ago

Looks like a good start. I need VIM-mode to be able to use it as a daily driver.

The ordering of files and directories is a bit chaotic compared to VSCode. I get a "Go is not installed" popup every time I click a .go file which is weird since it's installed and available for the terminal opened in the editor. I would love more language support as well, Elixir would've been awesome.

donatj2• 4 years ago

I'm getting the same "Go is not installed" error. I can't find anywhere in the UI to configure the path to Go - it's most certainly installed.

_s_a_m_• 4 years ago

Ehem, Windows, anyone?

ki_• 4 years ago

"Zas Editor has search and navigation features VSCode does not have"

Im sure vscode has more options than Zas. Personally i need: move last open tab to left, vi-mode and sequence keybindings with context. Other than that i need my settings/extensions to be synced across devices. Does Zas have these?

I'd check it myself, but it's mac only and im on Linux. There is no info if this will change or not. FAQ should give more info.

Other than that, i dont like editors that are language specific. I dont want to use a different editor for each language. It says it supports go & rust. But what if you are making a http server that serves some basic HTML files? It would be kinda annoying if it didnt support html/css/js indenting or syntax errors.

I would agree that vscode is kinda slow. Although it's fast enough for me. It seems faster than a couple of years ago. Still, i dont like my apps being written in electron. It's a waste of memory, CPU and electricity. So that's a win for Zas if they dont use electron.. What are they using? Would be nice to know.

I like the bussiness model. But it just cannot compete with vscode. I think could have. And it would have been the smart choice.

boundlessdreamz• 4 years ago

This looks great. Please consider adding support for Ruby. I know some of the smart features will not be possible/difficult in Ruby but if you can add some smarts around Rails support, you might attract a decent chunk of developers. Also almost all Rails development happens on Mac.

Edit:

The trial should ideally be 1 month. It takes a while to put the editor through its paces.

Also support for running a command outside the editor (for example auto-formatting / linting) is essential

deagle502• 4 years ago

Better yet, the trial should only count down when the app is being used. It will be long expired before the features we are waiting for before purchasing get implemented.

gampleman2• 4 years ago

As a an aside: I wonder if we are hitting a local maximum in terms of programming languages/ecosystems. These days if you want to experiment with some truly novel programming concept (see for instance Unison, Dark, Luna), you have to compete with truly excellent IDEs, Git, excellent code hosting like GitHub, large open source package ecosystems, high quality linters and auto formatters, and other niceties.

So if your language/ecosystem can't take advantage of those things (for instance not being traditionally text based), you have a huge cost before you can meaningfully demonstrate any superiority. To do that you probably need dozens of people working for several years, and I don't think the economics are there for it.

gampleman2• 4 years ago

The symbol minimal is really cool! Is there a similar plugin for VSCode?

chimbosonic• 4 years ago

Nice product just a FYI your website doesn't render well on UltraWide screens.

defluct• 4 years ago

Not saying that the website shouldn't support it, but do you really need to fullscreen your browser with an ultra wide monitor?

AlphaGeekZulu• 4 years ago

The editor looks really nice! And the price tag is absolutely fine for what it promises.

But, with 30 years experience in software development, I won't even look into primary development tools that are not cross platform. I am mainly on Linux, often on Windows (usually because clients force me) and sometimes on Mac (for iOS development and cross platform testing). I want the same toolset no matter the hardware or OS.

capableweb• 4 years ago

I am mainly on Linux, often on Windows (usually because clients force me) and sometimes on Mac (for iOS development and cross platform testing). I want the same toolset no matter the hardware or OS.

Just came to the comments to say exactly the same. If I can't use a tool I'm supposed to use daily, on the three main platforms me (and others) are stuck with, then I can't justify to use it at all, unless it's forced on me (hello xcode et al).

danpalmer• 4 years ago

There's an interesting potential future here where Apple acquire/acqui-hire the team behind this.

As much as I'm keen to see software like this, making an editor work as a business is hard, and Zas has a long road ahead of it.

However Apple could really use something like this. Xcode is big and bloated, with a ton of support for features that are no longer the future of Apple's platforms (Storyboards, Objective-C, SVN integration...). A clean start with a modern codebase designed for languages fairly similar to Swift, plus the shift towards Swift Package Manager for managing builds (rather than xcodebuild), could be great improvement.

b3morales• 4 years ago

Xcode's source editor got a big rewrite in Swift just 4 or 5 years ago. They trumpeted about it at WWDC.

saagarjha2• 4 years ago

That effort is clearly what's backing Swift Playgrounds.

jstummbillig2• 4 years ago

Cool!

Curious, what is your rationale behind having a 7 day trial? The time a customers invests to dive into and get attached to your product seems like best predictor for a future sale.

twic2• 4 years ago

Zas Editor reparses your code on every keystroke without compromising performance. Having a maintained AST at all times brings many intelligent features to the editor.

How does this work in the presence of syntax errors? 95% of the time you're writing code, your code is syntactically invalid, because you've started some new construct but not finished it yet, so you need syntax highlighting, code completion, etc to work sensibly in that situation. Getting that wrong is what killed RLS, IIRC.

iovrthoughtthis• 4 years ago

you still have the previously valid tree because the parsing is incremental

i suspect it's tree sitter under the hood

twic2• 4 years ago

Bold of you to assume that the previous state of my code was valid!

ris58h• 4 years ago

They use tree-sitter https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ It's ok with errors in AST and just marks such nodes as invalid. There is a long (42 minutes) but worth to watch talk about tree-sitter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1rC79DHpmY Or the shorter version (20 minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CGzC_iss-8

alexruf• 4 years ago

Congratulations. Zas looks very cool, I will definitely try it out and see if it can fill the (large) gap between Visual Studio Code and a full-featured IDE like Goland or CLion for me.

Can you please give an outlook in which direction you plan to go with Zas Editor in the future? Is the plan to target only a few specific programming languages, like currently Golang and Rust, or do you want to become a generic code editor like Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text and support a large number of languages and formats?

greybox• 4 years ago

Any plans to bring this editor to other platforms? As a game developer a Mac isn't an option for me

peter_retief• 4 years ago

I see only a download for mac, I am on Linux. My current setup is actually ok, use vim and sometimes vscode. 24 usd isn't that expensive but what would I get that vim doesn't do?

deagle502• 4 years ago

This would be an instant buy if it matched some Goland features/plugins:

-Ideavim (.vimrc support, custom mappings to editor actions)

-AceJump/EasyMotion

-Color scheme customization

samoit• 4 years ago

Is there a linux version?

c0balt• 4 years ago

If not could any of the people who have alicense test if it's compatible with darling[0]?

[0] https://www.darlinghq.org/

rambousek• 4 years ago

I don't want more IDEs

Lorak_• 4 years ago

Why don't you mention the fact that it is Mac-only before bottom of the page (download section)?

swah• 4 years ago

Well, why didn't you infer that from the page design? :)

rwalle2• 4 years ago

Why should a user infer anything?

This is simply bad user experience. A person who uses Windows may be confused but they can only be sure after reaching the bottom of the page. Not to mention it is not rare that a multi-platform application use Mac screenshots, including (surprisingly) VSCode, from time to time

cdash• 4 years ago

Mac only? No thanks. Support multiple platforms and then maybe it would be worth considering, even at increased price.

farukuzun• 4 years ago

Love it! Some feedback:

- Showing type of the variable when you hover. Goland does it perfectly. - Being able to add mouse actions to shortcuts. A use case would be cmd+mousewheel to increase/decrease font size - Importing themes from GoLand.

mritzmann• 4 years ago

I am an Apple MacBook user. However, personally I try to use only software that is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. This allows me to switch operating systems more quickly, should I choose to do so. Don't want to make myself dependent on one manufacturer.

tut-urut-utut• 4 years ago

Valid point. I know it's easier for the developers to support only one or two platforms, but I see full support of all major platforms as a sign of maturity.

If it doesn't, it's a sign of issues either with used libraries, programming language or tools.

pindab0ter• 4 years ago

As a counterpoint, I only exclusively work on macOS and vastly prefer native interfaces over Electron apps, which is what the majority of cross platform applications use.

coldtea5• 4 years ago

Good for you. But now it's time for Zas Editor to make its case!

aweb• 4 years ago

Wow that sounds like a really interesting editor for Golang! Only missing thing I absolutely need is the debugger+a test runner. Once those are here I think I'll buy a license!

unwind• 4 years ago

Cool! I'm not on Mac so not for me, but always inspiring to see innvoation in editing.

One more typo, under "Exceptional Performance": "It can to generate symbols [...]", the "to" should not be there.

bogwog3• 4 years ago

This looks really nice, especially the smart refactoring features and built in documentation search... but a Mac-only app disqualifies it for me. I need an editor that I can rely on no matter what OS I'm on. That's a bigger deal today than it was a decade ago. Having to switch my tools when I need to use a different OS is a massive productivity drain.

This is clearly a very niche product, being Mac-only and targeted at Rust/Go devs. I wish you luck with it though, because the world definitely needs more people making and innovating code editors (even if they're not all for me).

nimar• 4 years ago

Very interesting - i really enjoy that some innovation is happening in editors.

This feels similar in goal to LAPCE [1] which was also on HN [2] a couple of weeks ago, except that LAPCE is OSS and available for all platforms.

[1] https://lapce.dev

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30708505

jules• 4 years ago

I just tried the editor for Rust and it is great. I love the way errors and warnings are displayed. The navigation mode is also a brilliant idea. For larger files however, the screen real estate used by the navigation on the right hand side is not quite big enough for me. You still have to scroll a lot and hunt for what you want to find.

It would be great to somehow display more things to navigate, possibly using more of the screen (especially if you're using a big external monitor), possibly with some visual of the dependencies between them (so that you're not trying to find things in a long linear list). Especially when you're browsing new code the dependencies would be very helpful to get a quicker understanding of the structure of the code, and for your own code they might also suggest ways to refactor/reorder code in the file.

I'll definitely try out this editor for the next couple of days, and maybe switch from VS code. I find the comments of the people saying that they won't pay for an editor quite strange. I would gladly pay $24.99 per year for a 1% productivity improvement.

specialist• 4 years ago

Nicely done. The Super Search and Multi-Find features look very interesting.

zorr2• 4 years ago

Congrats on launching, the screenshots look great.

Lately I've seen a few MacOS specific apps here on HN (another one was the terminal app ) and they all look really good UI wise: the general UI, popup/search dialogs, dropdown menus for command palette, file trees etc.

I would love to write apps that look and feel like this on other platforms (mainly Linux for me personally) but the toolkits don't seem to have that level of polish or even lack most of these controls/components. Gtk, Qt and Java Swing all have pretty simple controls and require a lot of customization or reinventing the same custom controls.

The closest I have gotten is with JavaFX but that does not seem officially supported/maintained anymore. Are there any other toolkits that aim to have this level of polish?

mrtesthah2• 4 years ago

Native. Fast. Lightweight. Zas Editor was specifically developed for macOS. That enables it to be more performant, have a significantly lower memory usage, and have faster startup times than non-native apps.

Yes, please. Give me this right now!

paulvnickerson• 4 years ago

Congrats on launching - hope things work out for you guys!

jedisct1• 4 years ago

"for Go and Rust". This is a bit limiting. Any chance to expand to other languages?

hsn9155• 4 years ago

As a side note, I really like the design of this landing page. Instead of a "hero unit" with a salesy blob text in marketeese, there's a useful description of what the product is, what it does, and what value it adds to the end user, in a way that the user immediately understands.

Each feature description is accompanied by a picture/animation to demonstrate it.

I wish more product marketing pages followed this format, instead of the crappy soulless format of "hero unit" with marketing blob followed by three text boxes in a row with more marketing bullshit.

Xevi• 4 years ago

With web development being as prevalent as it is nowadays, is there any plan to support HTML, CSS, JS/TS? Go and Rust are often used for web backends, so it would make sense to support frontend languages as well. Especially since Rust can be compiled to WASM.

jebronie• 4 years ago

Its really fast, responsive and pretty! Some things are missing imo: - An option to disable font ligatures - CTRL+click to go to definition

mgdev• 4 years ago

So many critics here.

"It's paid!"

"It's not multi-platform!"

"It doesn't support my language!"

Dear Zas Editor creator:

Good on you for creating something that solves your problems and challenges you intellectually.

Good on you for putting yourself out there by making it public.

Good on you and for making your efforts sustainable by charging real money for it.

Good on you for taking the first step, and shipping before it's "perfect".

Good on you for taking feedback graciously.

sixstringtheory• 4 years ago

A lot of this is possible in Xcode, but kudos to the team for packaging everything so nicely in this editor, and there are a few standout features I haven’t seen in other editors/IDEs:

- multifind

- find in all enums (declaration/structure-specific search)

- the “minimap”

Like another poster said, just the few niche functions alone would be a cool acquisition target for Apple. I’d love to see the best/unique parts of this make it into Xcode without having to maintain the rest of the wheels that have been reinvented here.

I guess you kinda have to reinvent all those wheels as a foundation upon which to build new unique features for a text editor though…

atultw• 4 years ago

minimap exists in Xcode but it's not quite the same. It only shows `// MARK: ` comments.

Would love for Xcode to have more language support. Maybe an lsp client.

LtdJorge• 4 years ago

When I see these kind of super-polished UIs, I wonder why can't we have that in Windows? Or Linux, for that matter, but I get the why on Linux.

GUIs are so much better in Mac, it's not even close. What's stopping Microsoft from getting closer?

andrew_shay• 4 years ago

This looks really impressive. I wish there was a Windows client because I would try it now.

jan_299dwe• 4 years ago

I really like what I see there. There is certainly a lot room above VS Code and Jetbrains IDEs.

- Both VS Code and Jetbrains IDEs have issues handling large files

- Both have only good not great usability. Jetbrains IDEs are actually very good but the huge feature set is becoming a problem even if you don't use all the stuff

- Both have their problems with with code intelligence. Jetbrains IDEs are mostly flawless but esp. Webstorm lags heavily regarding the support of some JS frameworks, e.g. Svelte, Vue 3 SFC and Tailwind CSS. The support is also going downhill with Jetbrains.

The price of 25$ is a no brainer. Totally fine for a good product.

Mac only is very unfortunately a dealbreaker for me as Linux user.

digitalsin• 4 years ago

Really liking this editor! It's incredibly performant on Apple silicon for Go development. I'm not sure it is mature and feature-complete enough to take on Goland, but for a v1 release it looks promising.

mistik956• 4 years ago

I'm lost.

Zas Editor

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