The Team Behind GitHub's 'Atom' IDE Build a Cross-Platform, AI-Optional 'Zed Editor' (itsfoss.com) 29
Nathan Sobo "joined GitHub in late 2011 to build the Atom text editor," according to an online biography, "and he led the Atom team until 2018." Max Brunsfeld joined the Atom team in 2013, and "While driving Atom towards its 1.0 launch during the day, Max spent nights and weekends building Tree-sitter, a blazing-fast and expressive incremental parsing framework that currently powers all code analysis at GitHub."
Last year they teamed up with Antonio Scandurra (another Atom alumnus) to launch a new startup called Zed (which in 2023 raised $10 million, according to TechCrunch). And today the open source blog It's FOSS checks in on their open-source code editor — "Zed Editor". Mainly written in Rust, it supports running in CLI, diagnosing project-wide errors, split panes, and markdown previews: By default, any added content is treated as plain text. I used the language switcher to change it to Rust so that I would get proper syntax highlighting, indentation, error detection, and other useful language-specific functions. The switch highlighted all the Rust elements correctly, and I then focused on Zed Editor's user interface. The overall feel of the editor was minimal, with all the important options being laid out nicely.
[Its status bar] had some interesting panels. The first one I checked was the Terminal Panel, which, as the name suggests, lets you run commands, scripts, and facilitates interaction with system files or processes directly from within the editor. I then moved to the Assistant Panel, which is home to various large language models that can be integrated into Zed Editor. There are options like Anthropic, GitHub Copilot Chat, Ollama, OpenAI, and Google AI... The Zed Editor team has also recently introduced Zed AI in collaboration with Anthropic for assisting with coding, allowing for code generation, advanced context-powered interactions, and more...
The real-time collaboration features on Zed Editor are quite appealing too. To check them out, I had to log in with my GitHub account. After logging in, the Collab Panel opened up, and I could see many channels from the official Zed community. I could chat with others, add collaborators to existing projects, join a call with the option to share my screen and track other collaborators' cursors, add new contacts, and carry out many other collaborative tasks.
One can also use extensions and themes to extend what Zed Editor can do. There are some nice pre-installed themes as well.
Last year they teamed up with Antonio Scandurra (another Atom alumnus) to launch a new startup called Zed (which in 2023 raised $10 million, according to TechCrunch). And today the open source blog It's FOSS checks in on their open-source code editor — "Zed Editor". Mainly written in Rust, it supports running in CLI, diagnosing project-wide errors, split panes, and markdown previews: By default, any added content is treated as plain text. I used the language switcher to change it to Rust so that I would get proper syntax highlighting, indentation, error detection, and other useful language-specific functions. The switch highlighted all the Rust elements correctly, and I then focused on Zed Editor's user interface. The overall feel of the editor was minimal, with all the important options being laid out nicely.
[Its status bar] had some interesting panels. The first one I checked was the Terminal Panel, which, as the name suggests, lets you run commands, scripts, and facilitates interaction with system files or processes directly from within the editor. I then moved to the Assistant Panel, which is home to various large language models that can be integrated into Zed Editor. There are options like Anthropic, GitHub Copilot Chat, Ollama, OpenAI, and Google AI... The Zed Editor team has also recently introduced Zed AI in collaboration with Anthropic for assisting with coding, allowing for code generation, advanced context-powered interactions, and more...
The real-time collaboration features on Zed Editor are quite appealing too. To check them out, I had to log in with my GitHub account. After logging in, the Collab Panel opened up, and I could see many channels from the official Zed community. I could chat with others, add collaborators to existing projects, join a call with the option to share my screen and track other collaborators' cursors, add new contacts, and carry out many other collaborative tasks.
One can also use extensions and themes to extend what Zed Editor can do. There are some nice pre-installed themes as well.
Where's Slack IDE (Score:3)
I'm still waiting for Slack to release an IDE. I mean, they've recently added lists. The next logical step is to follow Emacs route to keep developers confined.
It won't matter (Score:2, Offtopic)
Slashdot won't understand the fontsâ-
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Both funny and insightful. Tough call.
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Why is Slashdot the only website I can think of that can't display text properly?
I think it's things like £ " ' (Pound, double quote, single quote) etc. Though those look okay to me in the preview, so maybe they only look correct to people in the UK?
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can't display text properly
Or won't. A conscious decision made (supposedly) to minimize the possibility of IDN homograph attacks [wikipedia.org].
No ubuntu or debian support (Score:2)
Re: No ubuntu or debian support (Score:5, Funny)
Use the SOURCE, Luke.
Optional AI, for now. (Score:2)
Hopefully it remaims that way. Now that they've taken VC money there will be pressure to make it mandatory and in your face.
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Eh.... depends on their pitchdeck. If they've pitched it as a minimalist thing for devs who dont want all that stuff, in effect a vim rather than an emacs for the GUI generation, then they'll have strong case to put to the board that adding that guff would destroy their value proposition.
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Eh.... depends on their pitchdeck. If they've pitched it as a minimalist thing for devs who dont want all that stuff, in effect a vim rather than an emacs for the GUI generation, then they'll have strong case to put to the board that adding that guff would destroy their value proposition.
Unless they develop a following. If you have a following, you *WILL* be shoved into the AI data aggregation routine, whether you like it or not. That's how they "keep the machines learning." See a group large enough to be worth pilfering, then shovel AI dreck into their workspace. We've already got the AI Prophets telling us that if we don't use AI for absolutely every aspect of our work life then we are doing ourselves a disservice. And management types are believing it, because salespeople are of course p
Doesn't run on Windows yet (Score:2)
Only on Mac or Linux. Looks like an interesting project but I'm not clear on what this 'editor' delivers that other full IDE's don't have.
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To me it speaks that it manages to be sleek, fast, have an uncluttered look, and not relying on humongous things like Electron.
Also, there i actual research on the data structures behind the scenes. I helped a bit optimize the choice of memory allocator and parameters for the lengths of the ropes. It can load very large files almost instantaneously.
It has a few rough edges and some features are incomplete, but it has enormous promise. The windows version is coming out soon.
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Is there a debugger? Is this thing actually an IDE? I can't tell from the website.
Re: Doesn't run on Windows yet (Score:2)
Not yet, and I am not sure there will even be one. It is meant to be a project-oriented editor, not an IDE.
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There are no binaries for Windows. That's not the same thing as not running on Windows.
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The same thing that FTE did, and then Sublime Text, and then Atom and Pulsar - an editor for text files. Something that is flexible enough for syntax highlighting, search and replace, indentation, a folder/browser pane, a preview if you want (for Markdown or HTML files) and a few other bells and whistles, but without all the bloat of an IDE.
As someone who can write all the code he needs without having his hands held, I've yet to find an IDE that feels "snappy" for lack of a better word.
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I wrote code for many years with nothing but the vi editor and print statements for debugging. Doable but very tedious. An integrated debugger saves loads of time, and if there isn't one in the editor I won't spend much time in it.
Re: Doesn't run on Windows yet (Score:2)
Many IDEa are slow because they are 1) written in Java and/or 2) they integrate the debugging information in the editing structures in a suboptimal way and/or 3) they have a heavy user interface and/or 4) the internal data structures of the editor are badly conceived to start with.
A lot of programmers that understand debugging have limited understanding of text editing, and so on. Understanding of efficient algorithms is today less widespread than it used many years ago, even though we know a lot more of ve
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Its faaast. Like, lightning fast , in my experience.
VS Code is plenty powerful but its slower than the IntelliJ IDEs that are clearly meant to be alternatives to visual studio proper. This thing doesnt have a full blown web browser hiding under its html ui, its native, and fast enough to replace pure text editors (notepad, TextEdit etc) as a go to quick and dirty script editor whilst retaining a plugin capacity to ,eventually, match (and potentially surpass) VS Code
Bah! My fingers only speak vi (Score:3)
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Zed speaks vi very well. It has an actual vi mode and almost all keybindings are the same.
Not the first editor named "zed" (Score:3)
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However, it remains -- to this day -- an essential tool for anyone who styles themselves a Unix/Linux expert to master.)
Why?
I know about ed. But in 30 years of Unix administration, I have never had to use it. vi has always done the job if a commandline wasn't enough or a config file needed to be changed.
Re: Not the first editor named "zed" (Score:2)
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Constantly.
But sed and ed are two different tools doing two different things. Related maybe, but sed != ed
Different? vs VSCode? (Score:2)
It looks similar to Code/VSCode editors (sure - Atom-based) but how Zed's different and better than these with AI plugins such as CoPilot?
Re: Different? vs VSCode? (Score:2)
Maybe I misunderstood what you meant, but Zed is not atom-based. VSCode and other editors based on it have direct Atom ascendancy, however in the case of Zed is mostly in the developer team, and thus many concepts about what an editor should be are similar or evolved from those in Atom.
Slow on QubesOS on older dual core laptop (Score:1)
I am running Qubes OS on an older laptop (lenovo x270 with dual core). I use neovim for development and it runs well. I just tried installing zed and it is very slow in the user interface (moving around with vim keybindings). Sad. Guessing because it looks like they need to emulate GPU support under Qubes.