Zed, the new code editor from Atom developers, has entered open beta

To save some clicks:<p>&gt; Currently, Zed only supports macOS.<p>That was actually from June of last year. It makes sense to start with a limited scope, but given that it&#x27;s reaching public beta without much consideration for platforms outside of macOS, I wonder if it will ever actually feel &quot;native&quot; elsewhere, or if it will wind up ossified with Apple-specific idiosyncrasies. Time will tell.<p>Personally, I was mostly interested in their Rust GPUI library, but it hasn&#x27;t been open sourced. (Yet; it does look like there is a plan to open source some of Zed, though obviously it&#x27;s possible it never happens.) It sounded like a great idea and even in an early stage would probably be a great addition to the nascent ecosystem of Rust UI libraries.

Closed-source editor built on a closed-source framework, telemetry built-in with no documented opt-out, hardcoded language servers, macOS only.

Hell of a license:<p>----<p>INVESTIGATIONS, MONITORING, &amp; NO OBLIGATION TO PRE-SCREEN CONTENT. Zed may, but is not obligated to, investigate, monitor, pre-screen, remove, refuse, or review the Service and&#x2F;or Content, including Your Content and User Content, at any time. By entering into the Agreement, you hereby provide your irrevocable consent to such monitoring. You acknowledge and agree that you have no expectation of privacy concerning the transmission of Your Content, including without limitation chat, text, or voice communications. In the event that Zed pre-screens, refuses or removes any Content, you acknowledge that Zed will do so for Zed’s benefit, not yours.<p>----<p>Irrevocable consent.

Pretty nice. Gave it a whirl and a few thoughts:<p>1. Very performant. Opened a large(ish) rust project and the auto-completion and goto symbol were both very snappy. Scrolling is very smooth and haven&#x27;t noticed any hiccups or pauses so far. 2. Doesn&#x27;t seem like there is a way to disable font ligatures? I find them really annoying and wish I could disable. 3. Stuck with the built-in themes, none of which I particularly like.<p>Overall seems very promising, will keep an eye on it.

This actually looks really, really good. Looks like I need to update macOS from 10.15.5 sometime soon. I use a Hackintosh, so this&#x27;ll be fun (I&#x27;ve been putting it off because I finally got it to &quot;work&quot; and got scared&#x2F;wanted to be productive again).<p>Any idea on their plans to monetize? I assume they will eventually charge, since they raised a 10M series A.

No mention of extensibility is a big red flag, and if it isn&#x27;t open-source it presents the same risk as anyone adopting Atom originally ended up getting burned by.

They say performance on par to slightly better than Sublime Text, that&#x27;s interesting, I like it when developers care about performance. Unfortunately, it is MacOS only, so I couldn&#x27;t try.<p>Performance turned me off from VSCode and brought me back to Sublime Text. VSCode is not that bad, and I use it occasionally, but the advantages it has over Sublime Text is not worth the performance penalty for me.

Looks interesting, especially around their &quot;multiplayer&quot; editing. I wish them success, we need more serious competition in this space. VSCode is so damn good I probably won&#x27;t switch, but if this came to parity with some features in VSCode (especially the plugins I use) I could see myself making the jump.

It looks interesting but, given how Atom was abruptly taken out the back and put out of its misery, are many devs are going to invest the time in going all in on Zed?<p>EDIT: Just had a look inside the app bundle to see if they were using Electron again. Looks like this is built round WebRTC instead.<p>EDIT2: Actually the actual &#x27;zed&#x27; binary is just under 284MB, so maybe Zed&#x27;s not built round the WebRTC framework, but just uses it for networky stuff ???<p>The binary is pretty big by itself.

Cudos first of all on taking on such a big challenge, and seeming to do a good job of it.<p>As someone who uses a lot of VSC plugins and commands I can&#x27;t imagine switching any time soon (also no Windows support makes it a non starter for me personally) - but I can still be super impressed!

To me it&#x27;s a kinda distasteful design that despite being a graphical application, this is using monospaced font for the titlebar, tab headers, file tree, etc. Looks odd on Mac.<p>In general Zed seems to be at a decent starting point though. Aside from its &quot;multiplayer editing&quot; aspect, it comes across like it has been very heavily influenced in terms of scope by Sublime.

What a beautiful design. And it feels faster than Sublime 4. Using Treesitter + LSP out of the box like Helix makes Zed productive with zero config.<p>Multi-buffers seems genuinely useful for project wide search panel as well as for cases where multi-line strings are used to define external file contents but miss out on syntax highlighting.<p>Looking forward to trying the live collab features.

Will download and setup. I hope they have sustainable business around it. For myself I do not mind ~$100 or so for a single version and upgrade in every couple of years if I find it useful. I have SublimeText and I will use both if this new editor has certain features to raise productivity.

I&#x27;m really looking for a lighter-weight GUI editor. Too many random shortcut keys to memorize in Atom, and VS code is getting wayyyy to bloated. It always has an annoying welcome message at startup, annoying notifications about things I could install, and way too much text in the UI. I don&#x27;t like settings and other dialogs being tabs alongside code, even though I know it hip to do that nowadays. I search for &#x27;ssh plugin&#x27; and there about 35 of them.<p>SSH remote editing is about the only &quot;plugin&quot; I need, and if it&#x27;s built into the editor that would be nice.<p>Very often I find myself going back to terminal vim because VS code has gotten to be too much, and also too annoying to deal with if I want to keep multiple projects&#x27; repos open at the same time.

The Changelog #531 has a great interview with Nathan Sobo. Until ui-based debugging, I will have to stick with other IDEs though, sadly.<p>EDIT: At the end of said episode, Nathan talks about debuggers and mentions that users depending on that might have to wait a bit. So there’s that!

One of the creators was interviewed recently on this podcast <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rustacean-station.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;antonio-scandurra&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rustacean-station.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;antonio-scandurra&#x2F;</a>

I thought a lot of the Atom developers moved to create Pulsar Editor.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pulsar-edit.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pulsar-edit.dev&#x2F;</a><p>Also, the community forked Atom into a community edition (CE), still getting updates?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom-community&#x2F;atom&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atom-community&#x2F;atom&#x2F;</a><p>What makes this &quot;Atom Developer Editor&quot; different than Pulsar or Atom-CE.

No PHP support which is a bummer, I&#x27;ll keep checking back in though!

I just installed on my Monterey Macbook, but it won&#x27;t launch. No window appears. I tried launching from a python file, still nothing.<p>Well, if as you say in your site&#x27;s vision section, &quot;the editor should disappear&quot;, it seems you got it.<p>WAIT. It took a full 5 minutes to come up the first time. So be forewarned.

Since <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35170422" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35170422</a> is a Show HN of the same project, we&#x27;ll move the comments thither and re-up that one.

It&#x27;s very nice but I just wish vim binding was a bit better, I know it&#x27;s in beta&#x2F;alpha at the moment so I&#x27;ll wait for it for a bit until this gets improved..<p>(% is missed, and o in visual to go at the begin of the selection or end...)

* for MacOS :(

I have no idea how this happened, but somehow after installing Zed, Zed now is the default editor for code files in my macOS (before, it was VS Code). And now I need to figure out wtf Zed did to undo it. Not cool.

Show HN with developer over here, maybe should be this thread&#x2F;merge Dang<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35170422" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35170422</a>

I&#x27;m gonna stick with neovim - from the Zed homepage seems like its using all the same base technologies, Treesitter, LSP, and some out of the box support for the capabilities these base layers offer.

Will it be open-source?

Downloaded it and gave it a spin. Seems quick. The team collaboration features look great. Themes look fun. But. I switched from Sublime to VS Code in order to have a Copilot extension that works out of the box. I would love to see either a copilot extension or something integrated for ChatGPT. That has become a new essential these past few months and I&#x27;m willing to sacrifice some editor smoothness for it.

Ahh bummer :&#x2F;<p>&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zed-industries&#x2F;community&#x2F;issues&#x2F;174">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zed-industries&#x2F;community&#x2F;issues&#x2F;174</a><p>&gt; Hey y&#x27;all – We are excited that you all are excited to try Zed. Just want to make sure expectations are in check – We plan to release on multiple platforms for 1.0, but work on these has not even begun yet.

This thread is further proof why developers are the worst market to sell to. Frugal and distrustful are not what you want in a customer.

How does this compare to Pulsar-Edit?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pulsar-edit.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pulsar-edit.dev&#x2F;</a>

&gt; Work with code on any machine<p>Is there a headless mode similar to VS Code&#x27;s Remote? I would like to launch a Zed server in a VM and connect to it from the host.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;remote&#x2F;remote-overview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;remote&#x2F;remote-overview</a>

My first thought was &quot;Okay, sure, but how does it perform after I load it up full of essential plugins like vim mode and such&quot; but seeing that vim mode is built-in is kind of amazing.<p>It appears to be more limited than I&#x27;m used to (e.g. colon commands don&#x27;t work, ergo :wq does not) -- but it is indeed extremely fast.

When I clicked I had the vague sense that I had seen &quot;code at the speed of thought&quot; elsewhere, and a quick google showed that it&#x27;s a pretty common thing for people to claim, especially about editors or related features. Maybe not the best choice of motto.

I would love to see compiler integration with Zed. Like be able to hit run and it runs my rust code.

I like the remote code editing feature. I would love a solution that lets me write code on my iPad, including running the code locally. If I could run a server at home and connect to it it would be great. Is there anything like that?

Zed is nice, really nice, but has some issues on M1 from what I see... Fails to load the JS language server. On intel machines there&#x27;s no error.

None of the typical JVM languages supported, sad.

Impressive start. What&#x27;s the story on extensions &#x2F; plugins? How are the existing languages supported? (LSP?)

Not open and only for macOS? No thank you.

Interesting, I use to use an editor called &#x27;zed&#x27; on MS-DOS that cane with zortech c.<p>This one looks a lot different :)

The only Zed I know is Zed A. Shaw, I suppose this isn&#x27;t named after him?

Nope sublime still feels faster, better with far more language support.

Looks really nice, but I&#x27;ll wait until you embed neovim :)

I&#x27;d like to see comparison with emacs and vim.

I really miss Atom...

when windows?! seriously I want to try this baby out!

Kmll

Title is missing the biggest feature: it&#x27;s written in Rust!

It&#x27;s weird to show screenshot of an editor with white background, most programmers use dark themes right?