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by cjk 161 days ago
Zed has been one of the most consequential changes to my dev tools in years. It's noticeably faster in day-to-day use than VS Code (launch time, input latency, etc.), is way less of a resource hog, and has the best Vim mode of any GUI editor I've ever used.
2 comments

I agree. It's a joy to use, and feels like it was built by people who care about it.
Let's see if that holds up when it has better feature parity. Things always run faster when you have less to do
Zed doesn’t need to run a web browser so I kinda doubt it will ever have “as much to do”
Zed still has to implement a rendering engine, if anything they miss out in several ways by not sharing the same rendering engine

but I mean actual features you see people here asking for because they are missing, those will require CPU cycles and memory

What kind of rendering engine and why Zed has to build it?
not sure, they do something with the GPU for sure, and because how are you going to draw anything on a monitor or screen without a rendering engine? Surely in their code base they have multiple levels of abstraction for rendering, drawing, and layout in their code base. You can see these kinds of things in other comments here and on their github without reading code.

The browser engine is itself an abstraction point that many people find agreeable on both sides, for those of us that don't have a problem with chromium/codium/electron as a technology, seeing it more so as useful and enabling

In my mind, sharing a common engine across chromium/codium/electron is like how so many things use the linux kernel. To me, the more eyes, devs, and consumers of the code makes it better in the long run

Yes, the thing is, the browser is an extremely expensive abstraction layer. It's like having a car factory where everything is built by general purpose robots - it's very versatile, but obviously if you build an assembly line using dedicated machinery, it's going to run much faster.