alt Hacker NewsIt's not clear to me why you would want your editor to run in as many environments as possible unless you're a system administrator? Generally, most of us do our serious coding work on the major OS platforms and we would want a native editor that takes advantage of those platforms and the hardware they tend to run on maximally; if we need to edit something on some other box elsewhere, we could either use Zed's remote development system or just use MicroEmaca Nano or VI depending on which key bindings were used to.
The advantage I find personally, at least compared to something like emacs, is not just that you get high fidelity scrolling, but that the editor can open 60,000 line code files instantaneously syntax highlight all of it using trees that are and be butter smooth and responsive the entire time I'm searching through making multi-cursor edits or moving through the file. As well as being able to open for instance log files that are multi-megabytes large without having to worry about anything.
Plus, Zed has a lot of refinements and features over other editors, even if you discount the benefits of GPUI. I've spoken at length before about why I think its approach to coding agents is the best at sort of enhancing the human in the loop and keeping you in a flow state and preventing skill degradation[0], but I also think the range and design of the editing actions are better than almost all modern text editors, closer to what something like Emacs provides, and the UI is overall more streamlined and pleasant to use than something like VS Code, even though it's generally the same philosophy. There's also the collaboration features and the edit predictions.
> It's not clear to me why you would want your editor to run in as many environments as possible unless you're a system administrator?
All I really was trying to say is that one may find themselves in a more limited environment at some points, I was not so much thinking of remote editing for the reason you mentioned that most developers or even system admins(unless restricted for security reason or some other) can just remote in and most editors these days do this well. but in a situation where one may be installing their system or their graphics acceleration has broken for what ever reason and now one is without their trusty editor so although I hardly every use emacs in a tty or pty it's a fallback in case something goes wrong so I can fix it while still using my editor.
>that the editor can open 60,000 line code files instantaneously syntax highlight all of it using trees that are and be butter smooth and responsive the entire time I'm searching through making multi-cursor edits or moving through the file.
this definitely sounds interesting, emacs when dealing with very large log files and such is not always fantastic and some features become painfully slow or completely unusable .
Your other points on the AI features are interesting I have been using Aider and tried aidermacs but ended up going back to a shell buffer with some basic commands to switch back to the buffer and other features to control it, while in one of the code buffers. So will definitely look at some of the AI features when I give it a spin.