Building a platform that open sources itself

https://zed.dev/blog/open-sourcing-zed-on-zed

by signa11 • 3 years ago

91 16 3 years ago

katspaugh• 3 years ago

I've just tried the editor and noticed an issue: the "O" in "Open a project ⌘O" looks a lot like 0.

tommica• 3 years ago

Just took the editor for a quick spin, and it's kinda neat in it simplicity - of course being in beta means that lot of features is missing so maybe that is why it feels so responsive

jasim• 3 years ago

I've been using Zed for a few days now, and it is really nice!

I tend to use JetBrains IDEs for development and Sublime Text for everything else, with VSCode being an "if I don't have any other choice" option.

Zed is already feeling like a great meld of IntellJ and Sublime - the features of an IDE with the lightness of Sublime, and excellent aesthetics that Atom was once known for.

james2doyle• 3 years ago

I'm also a Sublime user and am excited about Zed. Once they have more options for adding LSP clients (they support limited languages and one client per language) and snippets, then I think it will really take off

kaliqt• 3 years ago

I think it's a pretty sweet concept. I saw you guys are hiring an AI engineer. That's basically the main thing that would hold me back, I want copilot or better. It makes coding much simpler.

VSCode has a massive ecosystem of plugins, that's hard to go without. However, they're not all that necessary. AI assistance and SSH (remote into a server and have the IDE take on that machine, so browse the files, access the terminal, etc.) are the main two requirements for any IDE for me.

kabirgoel• 3 years ago

Zed has copilot support. I’ve been using it, and it works pretty well.

GarethX• 3 years ago

They have Copilot: https://zed.dev/blog/copilot

senko• 3 years ago

To save non-Apple users the trouble, as of May 3 '23:

Cross platform support is still very much on our radar and we’re dedicated to support both Windows and Linux in the future

colesantiago• 3 years ago

So basically the Zed editor will be open source?

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

I don't understand how this "open sources itself". That very phrase makes no sense to me.

What do they mean?

ikornaselur• 3 years ago

Kind of sounds like they're just open sourcing the development of a platform.. On the platform?

Like if Github had the source for github public on github? Sounds a bit weird though, as its not "open sourcing itself", what ever that would really be

Edit: actually, I'm more confused now. Zed is just an editor? Not a platform?

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

Kind of sounds like they're just open sourcing the development of a platform.. On the platform?

That is also a sentence that doesn't make sense to me. Are they perhaps meaning something different than usual by the term "open source"?

fermigier• 3 years ago

A first step to "open source oneself" would be to choose and communicate on an open source (i.e. OSI approved) licence.

norir• 3 years ago

I am curious why they chose to build their own rendering engine. They could have first written a terminal application with the same (at least functionally) collaboration features and gotten a cross platform solution almost for free. From a latency perspective, it's hard to imagine that they can do substantially better than, say, kitty + neovim. Hats off to them for pulling off a poc, but I do think the rendering engine is a liability for them that will potentially taketh as much as it giveth. In other words, is it worth investing a significant portion of their $10MM investment on rendering when it is still quite uncertain what the market for editor based collab tools looks like?

habitue• 3 years ago

Think of a terminal app like html: a cross platform UI markup language but with massive limitations. (The markup is terminal escape codes and various extensions).

If you want speed, memory efficiency, and a good UI[0] you have to go with a native toolkit. Luckily, with rust and wgpu[1], there is actually a reasonable route to native performance in a cross platform way. The way they've chosen to go isn't actually that unreasonable[2]

[0] to state the obvious: terminals are not good UI. I have a fondness for a cool tui, but it's clear they're more limited than native graphical UIs.

[1] https://wgpu.rs/

[2] https://zed.dev/blog/videogame

Building a platform that open sources itself

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