Multi-purpose text editors and IDE market space is wide, from vi to Visual Studio. But some tools have always been massively used as they provide a good response to the current needs of developers and (Markdown) writers.
Fresh days for IDE lovers
9 years ago, Atom was the rising star, part of the GitHub tools family. Microsoft bought GitHub, driving efforts to make Visual Studio Code the next big thing. You know the rest of the (déjà vu) story.
Since then, we’ve seen some efforts to challenge the situation. Particularly with the rise of LLMs in the AI ecosystem, supporting writers and developers all around the world. It’s been a long time since I’ve witnessed such competition in the IDE space, with a steady stream of newcomers.
As usual, there’s a lot to sort through. All these contenders promise to reinvent the way we write/code, but only a few really succeed and convince beyond their marketing campaigns. And my new favorite here is Zed.
Somehow it ticks all the boxes to be in the spotlight in 2024: it’s Rust based and promotes effectiveness, it includes AI, lot of (collaborative) features, and there is a beautiful story about the team being part of those who built Atom. Sounds great, right?
It’s time to use Zed…
I heard about it some months ago but didn’t take the time to look into it. This week, my teammate Florian Sanders pointed out to me it was now open source (under a mixture of Apachev2, AGPLv3 and GPLv3 licences). The tool evolved a lot recently so I was curious. And now seduced.
To be honest, I don’t care what language is behind a tool. It could have been developed in APL if the team thought it was fun to do. But I look at some metrics which are sometimes related to such a choice. Thus, Rust or Electron doesn’t carry the same mindset, goals, and it tells a lot about how the team evolved in its choices over time. And the result is great.
Zed is fast, it has figures to prove it. It’s also easy as it’s new and light ATM. But it’s still a good job. What I like the most about it it’s how confortable it is to use from scratch, without any customization.
Of course, you can change a lot through settings (JSON way), globally, per project or per language. Zed is good at providing language-specific behavior without many extensions. We’ll see how this evolves over the coming months.
AI and Git(Hub) integrations are light but well designed. I only regret some details: the mechanism to open/close panels, not relying on a cross to click/close or the absence to live preview for Markdown/HTML. And I hope to quickly be able to use open source local or remote LLM easily (I didn’t try so much, excuse me if there is already a 10 steps guide for that on the Internet). My only settings changes are (share yours):
{
"theme": "Andromeda",
"telemetry": {
"diagnostics": false,
"metrics": false
},
"vim_mode": false,
"ui_font_size": 16,
"buffer_font_size": 16,
"show_whitespaces": "all",
"journal": {
"hour_format": "hour24"
}
}…or something else?
Finally, many will regret it’s only available on macOS for now. But since Rust is cross-platform and the tool is now open source, I’m sure it will move fast. Anyway, this has convinced me to actively try out new IDE for my personal projects. Zed is my choice from now on. Maybe that will change.
I hope to be convinced to try new cool things. Let’s discuss it!