We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

memcpy, strchr, etc. use SIMD. The rust HashMap uses SIMD. LLVM can and will auto-vectorize. So yes - of course Zed - "uses SIMD", but it's not a tool you can throw at everything to make it faster.

timvisee• 2 years ago

And auto vectorization isn't all that common. In many cases you need to structure your code in a certain way, in which case you're better off doing it yourself if you want the vectorization benefit.

taminka2• 2 years ago

despite what the article claims, clang and gcc are acc very good at vectorising code, and intel, arm, etc have entire teams dedicated to improving vectorisation in modern compilers

tiffanyh3• 2 years ago

How do you explain the before/after speed improvement then?

instagary2• 2 years ago

I tried Zed, and it felt similar to VSCode. I know there are multiplayer features that are better than live share, but on the surface, I needed convincing to switch.

I would be more inclined to use Zed if it could displace XCode. It pains me to use it from deleting derived data or cleaning the build folder to random crashes.

Contrasting the DX to Android Studio, it's night and day. I always wanted an Android studio-like experience for iOS development.

pm• 2 years ago

Xcode and Android Studio have plenty of warts. What is it about Android Studio's experience that you find lacking in Xcode?

instagary2• 2 years ago

Part of me thinks it could be related to our project using CocoaPods. I've always appreciated how nicely Gradle worked to install dependencies, and the DX always lacked in Xcode. SPM works similarly, but I have yet to try it on a medium-sized codebase. So, my frustration could be related to CocoaPods.

Apart from package managers, I like the auto-import features for frameworks in Android Studio. As well as the "fix it" UX, which is similar to VSCodes. Having an integrated terminal is something Xcode still lacks, and maybe a better UX than a Plist to configure projects; I know XcodeGen/Tuist and other tools exist, but something built-in would be nice for fast project config.

mitemte• 2 years ago

AppCode was more or less Android Studio for iOS. Both are based on IntelliJ. It’s a shame AppCode was recently discontinued.

torlok2• 2 years ago

Had a look at the About page, and the live coding feature does sound useful. I'm sure the guys are excited; it's a fun project. You get to write algorithms, optimise performance, and do GPU programming. But who needs another text editor that will probably never reach feature parity with Vim and a terminal multiplexer.

peoplefromibiza3• 2 years ago

zed is actually very fast though

v3ss0n2• 2 years ago

Only works on Mac Big no no

smarkov• 2 years ago

This might be one of those things like monitor refresh rate where you can only really tell the difference if you've experienced the better version for a while, but I haven't ever felt slowed down by the speed of VS Code.

madeofpalk3• 2 years ago

I would guess most developers do not use vim. Pretending that vim is the universally loved editor that every developer has agreed upon using seems pretty disconnected from the real world.

VS Code came up out of nowhere pretty recently, and is used by a lot of people, so that shows that there is (or was, but still post-vim) opportunity for a new editor. Whether Zed is able to gain momentum to cater for the long-tail that other developers do remains to be seen, but I'm pretty keen to see more products trying to compete for users.

foobarian• 2 years ago

I feel like these classic editors are good to know just for general education like writing cursive. If you end up on some barebones system you will know how to edit a config file and exit. But for day-to-day it's all IDEs nowadays.

dingnuts2• 2 years ago

VSCode came out of nowhere and took the market share previously held by Atom and Sublime Text 2

The folks I know who use Emacs or vim (including me) are by and large still using those tools since before Atom and Sublime got popular. We just have LSP, now, like VSCode does.

abetusk• 2 years ago

I found a SO poll from 2021 result listing percentages of respondents IDEs [0]. There's overlap, so developers can use more than one, but Visual Studio Code is at 71%, Visual Studio at 33%, Notepad++ at 30% and vim in in 5th place at 24% (IntelliJ is at 29%).

[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-popular-...

samatman• 2 years ago

Whether or not a large number of people use vim has no bearing on whether or not Zed will reach feature parity with it.

rhdunn• 2 years ago

I use vim to edit git commit messages and other git related tasks as I'm most comfortable/used to working with the git cli (muscle memory, etc.).

I also use either vim or nano when viewing/editing files on the command line (either msys2 wsl, or headless linux).

Re: IDEs, I mainly use IntelliJ, with VSCode being used for a few things.

jmull• 2 years ago

I can't think of a nice way to express what I think of vim, but I think your general point is apt.

Some pretty full-featured editors already exist that people are happy with or, perhaps, have at least gotten used to. Where does a new editor fit in?

It's neat that it's "multiplayer" but that's an edge case.

I'm also not convinced by the business model. Do people really want channels, calls and chat integrated with their code editor? Personally, I have an almost visceral negative reaction to the idea but maybe that's just me.

ParetoOptimal• 2 years ago

Email in emacs is useful because workflow automation can be done based on emails I'm reading.

Chat is similar.

hresvelgr• 2 years ago

But who needs another text editor that will probably never reach feature parity with Vim and a terminal multiplexer.

Feature parity with Vim is not meaningful in my opinion. LSP evened the playing field enough for all editors to the point where you can daily drive anything and be no less productive than most.

Use whatever you like and helps you get the job done. That includes Vim too, but I'm getting sick and tired of people acting like using Vim is some kind of irreplaceable boon. Becoming a better thinker will make you an exponentially better programmer than any tool.

torlok2• 2 years ago

Vim is just an example. My point was that code at the end of the day is just text, and there's only so many features you need to be able to write/compile/edit efficiently in 99.9% of the cases. Any new power tools for text editing will end up taking more time to learn and remember than be of use.

giancarlostoro4• 2 years ago

In my opinion I wish more editors would become a face to Neovim which can run in a headless mode, allowing you to not have to emulate VIM at all, but take full advantage of it and all its plugins. It still kills me JetBrians chooses to maintain what VIM users call an awful plugin that simulates VIM, when they could just implement a Neovim front-end natively into their IDE, giving them the edge of "we fully support Neovim and all it brings" which is a much bigger selling point than, we have a VIM-like plugin.

satvikpendem5• 2 years ago

The VSCode-Neovim extension does this for VSCode, I use it over the VSCode vim extension which is just an emulator.

lelanthran4• 2 years ago

I did not know this. My google/brace/ddg foo is failing me. Do you have a link to the full reference on how one would use headless neovim to provide a full headless vim with a GUI wrapped around it?

I'm thinking it would be nice if my Lazarus IDE supported Vim commands.

nixpulvis• 2 years ago

Great interview!

Love how much thought is being put into what you “gold-plate”. I’ve always felt that my best work comes around on round two (or three or four…).

Curious what you are planning for the ability to script the configuration? I haven’t played with zed much yet; is it possible today? Would something like Neon [1] help bridge the gap from VSCode and old Atom users?

[1] https://github.com/neon-bindings/neon

scop• 2 years ago

This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable. The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one.

- Brooks, Mythical Man Month

It is always interesting to see v2. I have witnessed cases where they are catastrophic due to feature overload but also cases where they are phenomenal because they are streamlined and lean.

I also wonder, with all the tooling available now at least in the space of web apps, if this quote notion of danger applies as much to v1s as I have seen v1s remarkably bloated these days. I often have to purposefully seek out tools that do less.

p1esk• 2 years ago

help bridge the gap from VSCode and old Atom users

I went from Atom to Pycharm to Vscode. Both transitions were fairly easy. Though I’ve never had any complex configurations.

MR4D• 2 years ago

Fantastic interview where you really get into the mind and mindset of the developers for how they approach development from many different angles. Highly recommended.

I only have one disagreement with them. . .

the perfect name for a text editor in Zig is already taken: Zed

No, it’s “Zag”. ;)

Terretta• 2 years ago

I only have one disagreement with them. . .
> the perfect name for a text editor in Zig is already taken: Zed
No, it’s “Zag”. ;)

Except that `zed` contains `ed`, precursor to `ex`, `vi`, and `edlin` yet still around:

`ed` is a line editor for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It was one of the first parts of the Unix operating system that was developed, in August 1969. It remains part of the POSIX and Open Group standards for Unix-based operating systems, alongside the more sophisticated full-screen editor `vi`.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)

While `ag` (the silver searcher) is fantastic, Zed's more about editing code than searching code:

https://geoff.greer.fm/ag/

monkmartinez• 2 years ago

Except that "Zag" would be at least 3x awesomer[0] as defined by things that are awesomer.

[0]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/awesomer

euroderf• 2 years ago

ed just had a release and nowhere can I find release notes.

This is depressing, considering that ed is the linchpin of the contemporary I.T. environment.

steinuil• 2 years ago

ed is the standard text editor.

cjk• 2 years ago

I only wish they’d realized it was time to start over before unleashing the cancer that is Electron upon the world.

paxys• 2 years ago

I wish developers would break out of the silicon valley bubble and realize that the majority of their potential userbase – including technical users – are on Windows and Linux. Heck that's the entire reason Atom (and them VS Code) got popular. No one cares about the nanoseconds of performance you are able to optimize. Working across all my devices and development environments (including the web) is table stakes for all software today.

projektfu• 2 years ago

They do care about latency, and I credit these developers for having a goal to minimize it. VS Code isn't bad but when regular Visual Studio changed its design like 10 years ago, latency and lag went through the roof.

However, the tech stack itself isn't the solution to latency. Doing an unbounded operation before responding to input will cause it, so will overusing memory and/or cache.

smoldesu• 2 years ago

You're right, and it's weird to hear them dunk on Atom when it had so many de-facto features Zed still lacks. They're very proud of their technical stack and their performance, but it feels more like they're defending the cathedral to discredit the bazaar.

It's their call, but I feel like I've seen this story play out the same way you describe hundreds of times. I'll never forget when the warp.dev people came to HN looking for feedback and got torn to tatters by the community. A single-platform POC editor is cool, but not really a functional replacement (or even comparison) to what Atom did and the community it garnered. I'm glad they're making what they want, but they're absolutely trapped in bubble-vision afaict.

digdigdag• 2 years ago

Before anyone jumps on a new text editor band wagon, just a note on the license they have you agree to in using it:

"Customer Data consisting of User content created while using the Solution is classified as "User Content". User Content is transmitted from Your environment only if You collaborate with other Zed users by electing to share a project in the Editor.

[...]Zed's access to such User Content is limited to debugging and making improvements to the Solution."

No commentary from me. Come to your own conclusions.

__jonas• 2 years ago

I would like some commentary from you, sounds very reasonable to me, I don't understand what the problem is.

Of course if you choose to share your project with others for collaboration, the content of that project is transmitted from your machine, what else would you expect? How would it work otherwise?

makeitdouble2• 2 years ago

I didn't get it at first, but as I read it the last "Zed" is not the editor but the company.

Basically the Zed company also gets access to the code you're sharing with other users.

toastercat• 2 years ago

It'd be more appealing if user content was e2e encrypted during sessions.

shp0ngle• 2 years ago

This actually looks very reasonable...?

mixmastamyk4• 2 years ago

It’s not unreasonable.

The thing is every time you load company proprietary code and/or sensitive data you better make sure you don’t hit the share button as well.

Not the end of the world but also something we didn’t have to think about until recently. That pushing a button (other than delete) could potentially get you fired.

WuxiFingerHold2• 2 years ago

Not at all. Very reasonable would be if they asked you:

- Only if you explicitly consent we will store your code or parts of your code on our servers.

- Only if you explicitly consent we will read your code for improving our product.

- Otherwise your code will never be stored on our servers. Data may reside in memory during sessions, but will never be stored.

The issue is that you when using Zed you implicitly agree that they store and use your code the moment you use the flagship feature of the editor.

It's their product, they can do whatever they want. But this behavior is a big red flag for me.

shubhamjain• 2 years ago

I used Zed for a while. The biggest performance improvements I noticed, compared to VS Code, were in start-up times and the opening of files. Sure, Zed feels snappy in those areas, but I feel VS Code is simply not that bad speed-wise when it comes to everyday coding. Especially, in the era of M1 Macs. Zed may win the battle in the longer term, but I feel slow performance has to truly annoy the fuck out of the user to convince them to make the switch. Right now, I am sticking with VS Code.

bihla• 2 years ago

For our team, VS Code is reaching that point. The Macbooks can’t keep up with VS Code’s decay.

Unfortunately Zed lacks good defaults (like a way to change tabs without the mouse) and certain vs code features like snippets. Makes it difficult to transition a team which has been dependent on Vscode and which has absolutely no interest in spending our days configuring tools

dewey• 2 years ago

Are you running a lot of extensions or giant file sizes or how are the computers not keeping up with VS Code?

mountainriver2• 2 years ago

The ecosystem around VScode is so hard to beat. I found their AI features far more limited than what I have available in vsc.

Community usually wins

the_gipsy• 2 years ago

But the goal I've always had is a lightweight editor that is minimal that I love using that feels like a text editor, but has the power of an IDE when needed, without all of the slowness in the experience and kind of heaviness in the UI, but still powerful. That was very early on what I wanted. And for it to be extensible.

Sorry for being that guy, but vim. Nvim specifically.

127• 2 years ago

For those wanting a text editor/light IDE for Linux, Kate is surprisingly good.

srini_p2• 2 years ago

Yes, it is my go to editor on Linux. I like the default color scheme of this editor very much. And, we can customize it with Javascript scripts.

noodlesUK2• 2 years ago

I tried out the editor because of this post: it looks very promising. Unfortunately I can't use it because it doesn't have support for remote hosts/devcontiners. That feature of VScode is critical to my workflow, as I don't actually want to program on a Mac host, but rather use my Mac as a portal to the VMs and containers I actually code on. It massively helps with segmentation of my projects and improves my security posture (by not having a development environment or dependencies on my actual host machine).

FredPret• 2 years ago

I love this about VSCode. I wish Pycharm could easily do this without sending the code away for processing.

dieortin2• 2 years ago

It can, there is a remote workflow similar to the one from VSCode. Search for “jetbrains gateway”

8organicbits• 2 years ago

I use development virtual machines to segment projects and clients also although I just run my editor in each VM. What's the benefit of the vscode remote hosts/dev containers over a normal remote session?

campbel• 2 years ago

In my experience its mostly the input lag when dealing with the remote environment. I'm quite sensitive to delays in editor input, so I prefer something native. If you aren't sensitive or your remote connection is fast enough for your preferences, I don't think there are many other advantages.

satvikpendem5• 2 years ago

GPU acceleration is not always guaranteed on the VMs, as well as input lag.

noodlesUK2• 2 years ago

I find that the experience doing this is essentially unbearable due to graphics problems on retina displays, input lag and the like. I also figure that the kind of person who wants an editor which is designed to paint as fast as possible probably wouldn’t want to have a whole VM and spice/similar client sitting between them and the editor.

xnyan• 2 years ago

I just run my editor in each VM

In addition to lag and a poor visual experience as others have mentioned, there's the issue of two (or more) operating systems with two separate shells/UIs. When using VMs or a VDI/remote desktop the cognitive overhead of remembering which OS shell I'm in for the purposes of keyboard shortcuts, clipboard, switching between programs and etc impacts my productivity significantly.

VSCode (or any other editor with similar features) shell is great because it completely separates the editor environment from the dev environment. I can run as many instances of VSCode as I want each with their isolated dev environment of the target host, but all managed by one shell, one window manager and one clipboard.

mixmastamyk4• 2 years ago

sshfs solves most of these problems and I’ve found it good enough. Better than switching to a partly proprietary editor anyway.

tormeh• 2 years ago

Lapce supports this, if you're keen on trying new editors.

wodenokoto• 2 years ago

Do you have links to good guides on getting started with such a work flow?

nicce3• 2 years ago

I switched to Nix on Mac. If dev dependencies are your only problem, there are many non-container solutions for that.

giancarlostoro4• 2 years ago

There was an editor I forgot the name might of been Omnivim, which was coded in ReasonML, but compiled natively to a UI, and supported VS Code plugins, which is still wild to me.

Anyway, development kind of died off on it, it had insane potential in my eyes.

Hopefully Zed can achieve a similar feat (more likely targetting VS Code plugins?) or some other rich plugin ecosystem.

raphinou• 2 years ago

It was onivim2. Iirc it was a one-man show, and stopped when funding dried up. I also hoped to see a a lot from it. Maybe the dev took too much work on his plate, with an unproven language with limited libraries?

https://github.com/onivim/oni2

satvikpendem5• 2 years ago

ReasonML is simply OCaml, I wouldn't call that unproven, but it does have limited libraries compared to JS or Rust.

srini_p2• 2 years ago

It has 50% less memory footprint than VS Code on startup, I will take it.

ldelossa• 2 years ago

Super cool project, which really means nothing when its MacOS only :laugh:

charlie02• 2 years ago

Do we really need another IDE?

steve_adams_86• 2 years ago

We have in the past. Why wouldn't we now?

charlie02• 2 years ago

What would this new IDE do that VS Code (or other IDE) can't already do?

Brajeshwar• 2 years ago

Recently, my faithful Sublime Text journey kind of ended, and I did not want to tinker/fix it. I have been using it since its first year of release.

So, I had to decide on an IDE to live for the next few decades or for as long as I needed one. The final battle was between Emacs and Vim. I had played around with both in my prior developer life. I took time to read up, play around, and realize I'm not living in an IDE (Emacs), so I ended up with MacVim. I set it up enough to my liking.

Just as I was getting around, a recent release of Zed surfaced on Hacker News. This is my go-to IDE for now. I still fire up MacVim for quick edits and to keep learning in case I need to settle down on it.

Disclaimer: I'm not a regular developer no more.

KORraN• 2 years ago

What are the reasons that you have decided to drop ST?

blovescoffee• 2 years ago

I've been using ST for 10+ years. I pulled a copy and installed some extensions recently. Most extensions I want have multi-year gaps since last updated. ST crushes VS Code performance wise but the DX I'm used to with Code is much better than in ST because of the community.

niyyou• 2 years ago

Sad they do not allow to use a custom OpenAI host address, so one can use a local LLM instead (https://ollama.com/blog/openai-compatibility).

miki1232117• 2 years ago

Their custom UI framework might be all fun and games for now, but that will probably change once they realize they need to implement accessibility. Doing this in a custom framework without sacrificing performance won't be easy and is going to require lots of messy, per-platform work. It's not like it's optional for them either. It would be for a simple editor that you can just decide not to use, but they're positioning Zed as a collaboration tool, so making sure that everybody on a given dev team can use it is going to be crucial.

I wish developers finally learned this lesson. As a screen reader user, I'm sick of all these "modern" tools written in Rust (and yes, it's nearly always Rust) where Voice Over just sees an empty window. It's far easier to dig yourself out of the trap of no accessibility if all you need to do is to slap a few aria labels on your buttons and sort out some focus issues than when you need to expose every single control to every single OS.

At least there's AccessKit[1] now, which might make the work a bit easier, though I'm not sure how suitable it is for something as big as an editor.

[1] https://accesskit.dev/

Jtsummers2• 2 years ago

Here's their only blurb on accessibility:

Currently, many of Zed's themes are largely inaccessible. We are working on a new accessible theme system, which will launch with Zed 1.0
A11y (accessibility) in Zed will be a long project. Likely lasting far beyond 1.0. Due to GPUI being written from the ground up we don't have access to the same a11y features that Swift, Web-based apps or [insert other language] does.
Making Zed accessible will be a joint effort between things on the Zed side, and building out features in GPUI.
For now, you can join this discussion to talk further about a11y in Zed: Accessibility (a11y) in Zed [links to: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/1297]

And that link is useless, it goes to a Github issue about back and forward buttons.

https://zed.dev/docs/themes

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/1297 - the link they use that's supposed to be for accessibility discussions. It appears it's supposed to be a link to this: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/6576

So they've thought about it, but they haven't actually done it yet.

sangnoir4• 2 years ago

So they've thought about it, but they haven't actually done it yet.

In my experience, a11y shouldn't be an afterthought but baked-in from the beginning. Doing the latter results in hacky, harder-to-maintain code.

notso4112• 2 years ago

Why bother with accessibility. If a disabled wants to use an IDE, use a different one??

mplewis• 2 years ago

Accessibility helps all users, not just disabled users.

sangnoir4• 2 years ago

It can take an instant to become disabled: there is no permanent and distinct set of "disabled and "not-disabled" people.

kevingadd• 2 years ago

I'll take this seriously since lots of people probably wonder this even if they don't bother to ask it.

Disability isn't a permanent state that you start with. It's something that can happen to you 5 years into your career, or 15. It can also be temporary - you break your leg and now you need crutches, a cane or a wheelchair until you heal, for example.

Accessibility also helps people who you wouldn't traditionally classify as disabled: Designing UI to be usable one-handed is obviously good for people who have one hand, but some people may be temporarily or situationally one-handed. Not just because they broke an arm and it's in the cast, but perhaps they have to hold a baby in one arm, or their other hand is holding a grocery bag, or they're lying in bed on their side.

Closed captions in multimedia software or content are obviously helpful for the deaf, but people who are in a loud nightclub or on a loud construction site could also benefit from captions, even if their ears work fine.

So, ultimately: Why should someone who's used to using a given editor have to switch any time their circumstances change? The developers of the editor could just put the effort in to begin with.

markisus• 2 years ago

I'm guessing this was downvoted for being rude, but I think there is a valid question here. It looks like Zed is putting a lot of work into minimizing the latency between a key being typed and feedback being displayed on a visual interface which is easily parsed by a sighted user.

If a programmer is using audio for feedback, then there is probably be some impedance mismatch by translating a visual interface into an audio description. Shouldn't there be much better audio encoding of the document? There would also be many more wasted cycles pushing around pixels, which the programmer will never see. An editor made specifically for visually impaired programmers, unencumbered by the constraints of a visual representation, would be able to explore the solution space much better than Zed.

Szpadel2• 2 years ago

I'm not surprised that most of rust guis are not a11y friendly, there is no established gui library yet, none of them I would call mature yet

Not long ago there weren't any gui libraries that wouldn't be just binding to existing C framework or was in proof of concept state of lifecycle

I'm sure this situation will improve in the future and I understand frustration of someone that rely on a11y features, but you need to understand that everyone first will try to achieve solid gui library before will start adding accessable functionality

yoyohello13• 2 years ago

System76 is making headway getting a11y accessibility for Cosmic Desktop. They are doing a lot of good work in the Rust gui space.

CharlesW3• 2 years ago

I wish developers finally learned this lesson.

From a product perspective, re-inventing the wheel for something that — at best, many years from now — will be at parity with native presentation layers in terms of performance, a11y support, user experience, etc. is normally considered a risky move. Many startups have failed in part from pouring resources into shiny non-differentiators.

The only examples of successful products that use non-native UIs either (1) leverage web technologies or mature frameworks like Qt, or (2) are Blender (age 30). Apple did this with iTunes, but iTunes felt unpleasant on Windows, and people used iTunes for Windows in spite of this. I understand the appeal of creating frameworks like GPUI, but the article doesn't explain the relationship to the problem Zed is trying to solve.

miki1232117• 2 years ago

There's also Zoom, which apparently uses an internal, heavily-modified fork of some Chinese UI framework on Windows (and QT on everything else). They did go the extra mile and add accessibility support though, their American clients, particularly the ones in government, healthcare and education, didn't really give them any other option.

There's also Google Docs, which uses weird tricks instead of rendering straight to DOM. They didn't even bother implementing accessibility in that layer, something which would probably have been impossible back then. Instead, they offer an accessibility mode and mark their entire UI as hidden to assistive technologies. When the accessibility mode is on, all speech is generated by a micro screen reader implemented in Google Docs directly, and the generated messages are sent as text to be spoken by your real screen reader. This is an ugly hack that doesn't really support braille displays very well, so they later implemented yet another layer of ugly hacks that retrofits the document on top of an actual DOM.

Your point still stands though, these are exceptions that prove the rule.

zokier2• 2 years ago

The only examples of successful products that use non-native UIs either (1) leverage web technologies or mature frameworks like Qt, or (2) are Blender (age 30). Apple did this with iTunes, but iTunes felt unpleasant on Windows, and people used iTunes for Windows in spite of this

Successful non-native UIs? Microsoft Office. Every single Adobe product, including the ones they got from Macromedia. I feel most professional software fall in this category. Spotify originally launched with completely custom UI. On Windows it is more difficult to name successful products that used native UI than those that did not.

pmarreck2• 2 years ago

Honest question out of curiosity-

Are there possibly AI-based solutions possible that can add assistance at a more generic level that doesn't require software that has "deep" knowledge of the window architecture (and the actual text in it etc.)? My understanding is that this is how tech like VoiceOver works- it knows the actual window definition and all the elements of it at a programmatic level and can take advantage of that.

I'm not asking if they're already available (although that would be a nice option), but for projects like this that wanted the speed of rendering on the GPU (at the possible cost of, as you said, VoiceOver seeing an "empty window"), it would be at least a fallback position.

(So does this mean that ALL content that renders through the GPU, such as games, are inaccessible to you? If so, I'm sorry...)

Not sure if this might help you but I have an Apple shortcut defined on my iPhone called "GPT Explains" that is activated by a double-tap on the back of the phone (which you can assign, as you probably know, in Accessibility settings)- it takes a screenshot, ships it off to OpenAI and returns with a description of what it's seeing, any to-English translation of non-English text, and any counterarguments to any claims made in a meme, etc. (yeah, the prompt for this is kinda wicked, lol). If this is helpful to you, I can give you a link after I remove my OpenAI key (you'd have to provide your own).

EDIT: I made a copy of it without the API key: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/0d063c6810d74a35a017e5a5f69...

miki1232117• 2 years ago

iOS already has such a feature, but it's obviously not 100% accurate, not real time, and not great for battery life.

It's good enough if you have to click a broken "I accept your terms and conditions" checkbox, but nowhere near good enough to daily drive your phone with. In other words, a band-aid solution for when everything else fails, mostly for situations where the app you're trying to use is mostly usable, but has an accessibility barrier preventing you from carrying out a crucial step somewhere.

There's also vocr on Mac (and equivalent solutions on Windows), which recently got some AI features, but it doesn't even recognize control types (a very basic feature of any screen reader), just text. Again, good enough to get you through most installers where all you're doing is clicking "next" ten times, probably good enough to get you through the first-run experience in a VM that doesn't yet have a screen reader installed, at one tenth the speed of a sighted person, but that's about it.

nojvek• 2 years ago

Don’t want to downplay the concern. With modern machine learning is there an opportunity to build a better accessibility tool?

Something that works on any set of pixels and sees like a human does?

I.e parses text with OCR.

KTibow• 2 years ago

That would be useful if the normal way fails but would always be slower and not as accurate than intentionally implemented accessibility

intalentive• 2 years ago

The part about just using the underlying primitives instead of relying on a 3rd party’s abstraction layer really resonated with me. As often as not I find myself fighting with the abstraction and having to go down a layer, where there is much greater freedom.

I don't know about zero cost — every abstraction has a cost, I guess

Part of the cost Rust incurs is the compile time. But thanks to LLVM it seems you can in general have zero-cost abstractions, if we mean high level syntax with low level performance. Feels like a golden age of language design atm.

Anyway, the “let’s do it right, and do it ourselves” philosophy is attractive and I’ll be downloading Zed to check it out.

briandw2• 2 years ago

I really love native apps, but I'm stuck using VS code for now. It just kills me to see how much power goes to blinking the cursor in VS code. I tried Zed for a bit but couldn't make it work. I loved that its so light weight and fast. Looking my all my VS code processes it 3GB vs Zeds 300MB. 1/10 the ram is a meaningful difference. However I really need the Jupyter Notebook support that VS code provides. I'm also too used to doing remote dev on a Ubuntu box from my mac and VS code works great for that. I hope they stick with it long enough to get to supporting my workflow.

briandw2• 2 years ago

Looks like the Notebook request has been open for over a year. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5273 So according to the Lindy effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect, it'll be more than a year before we see anything.

a_wild_dandan• 2 years ago

I guess that I'm lucky. I presently have multiple VS Code projects open (local & remote), and a Notebook running, and rarely break ~650MB -- less than 1% of my Macbook's memory. Maybe everyone has more extensions on than I do or something.

MikusR• 2 years ago

How much power goes to blinking the cursor in VS code? And how it compares to other functionally similar editors.

jazzyjackson2• 2 years ago

As a lowly web developer I must not know what i'm missing, can anyone explain what the issue is with an array being a list of references? Why is there a chase going on, is someone trying to get away?

JavaScript is... You think you have an array of objects, but you really have an array of pointers to objects. So every single time you're walking over that, you're chasing it down.

taspeotis• 2 years ago

Pointer chasing, bad for cache locality.

jazzyjackson2• 2 years ago

ah, that closes the loop for me, thanks

qwertox• 2 years ago

I think it refers to the fact that you can't just compute an offset from element 0 to get to an element N, like you could if you'd have an array of structs or classes. Assume a struct uses up 128 bytes, then you can get to element N by using a pointer of N * 128 and you'd be positioned directly at the memory location of that struct. - Edit: cache locality like sibling comment mentions sounds more convincing.

losvedir4• 2 years ago

I don't use Zed, but I noticed José Valim using it when he was live streaming a coding session. I mostly use VSCode, but one feature he used in Zed was really compelling: he did a "Find All", which was similar to VSCode in that it opened a results pane with snippets from all the files that matched, but then he was able to edit the snippets directly from there, and was able to use multi-cursor editing and all the other usual niceties. That was pretty neat and impressive to me, since in VSCode you have to actually click the search result to open the file, and then edit it there. It wasn't quite enough to make me switch, but I've been thinking about it from time to time whenever VSCode annoys me.

czottmann• 2 years ago

This sounds like it could be very useful. Does it work like this VSCode extension, "Search Editor: Apply Changes"?

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jakearl....

losvedir4• 2 years ago

Mmm, -ish. I searched for an extension in VSCode when I saw it in Zed, and that extension came up. But it looks like you still have to open the editor tab to save it and stuff. It was much more streamlined in Zed. You just made the change right there, and I think if you hit "save" on the search results it would save to all the files that you touched.

hprotagonist• 2 years ago

emacs has had occur and multi-occur since the 80s that can do this. it’s amazing.

more recently, interfaces to tools like ripgrep also have the ability to have an editable mode, super handy for refactoring.

(and of course you can edit file names in bulk, too ..)

https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/searching-buffers-occ...

https://rgel.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Wd...

difflens• 2 years ago

Hmm maybe I don't understand fully, but can't you do this in VSCode by doing a `Find And Replace All`? (Cmd + Shift + F on Mac)

fatboy2• 2 years ago

In VSCode if you do super-shift-f for find-in-project, at the top of the results pane, just right of where it's marked "x results in y files" there's a link button titled "Open in editor" which I believe does what you're describing. I'd actually forgotten about it until I read your comment so I'll start using it again now.

losvedir4• 2 years ago

I don't seem to have that. There's nothing to the right of my "x results in y files" summary. Maybe you have an extension installed?

quickthrower2• 2 years ago

That is neat. It would avoid the need to craft regex in many case.

One of my favourite tricks is multi cursor, edit and use end of line or next word shortcuts to make bulk edits.

Doing that across files would be cool!

brigadier132• 2 years ago

Jetbrains ides already do this.

It's absurd but one of the primary reasons I use Jetbrains over vscode is because i can search for a directory and open it in the navigation pane.

derekperkins• 2 years ago

I've never seen that functionality in JetBrains, which has been my main driver for years. I hope it's there

coolgoose• 2 years ago

One thing I don't get, and I hope I didn't miss an obvious comment, is that for all the complains about elektron and js being slow, vscode was and still is faster than atom.

zogrodea2• 2 years ago

I think that's just like one C++ application being faster than another equivalent C++ application due to using smarter data structures and whatnot.

VS Code and Atom have different code bases with different decisions and that makes a difference despite them both using Electron and JS. (Hopefully I have understood your question properly.)

perryizgr8• 2 years ago

Zed feels good to use, even though it lacks a lot of features I regularly use in vs code. But the biggest hurdle for me is that windows is not supported. I switch between my laptop (mac os) and desktop (win11) depending on where I'm working from for the day. And its too much stress for me to remember a completely different set of workflows and shortcuts. So, for now I wish zed the best, but vs code remains my editor of choice.

WuxiFingerHold2• 2 years ago

I have the luck to were able to buy a Ryzen 7 2700, 32 GiB and some Samsung NVMe (don't remember) some years ago. Running Ubuntu LTS.

I hate VS Code so much for many reasons, but performance or memory usage are not among them. It starts in some seconds, never been a problem. Runs fast enough. At work I got a MacBook Pro, performance is even less of an issue, of course.

So, I'm not sure all the work done regarding performance is the most efficient way to get into the market. It's features, like their collab stuff, I'd say.

Or usability features. What I hate most about VS Code are the clunky editor navigation shortcuts. Code navigation is fine, but moving around the editor, opening files, command palette, ... if you ever have used neovim with telescope or JetBrains IDEs then VS Code feels so cumbersome.

We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed

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