From General Zod to Superman - Crafting Stories in Zed Editor

Pretentious title! Good start! I have nothing to add to this discussion. I just like this editor and wanted to write something here that will remind me to use it again in a while when/if it becomes available for Linux.

TLDR: I think this code editor is very cool and has a massive potential. I hope they don’t mess up with adding a plugin ecosystem to it!

Out of morbid curiosity, I started using the Zed editor on my Mac. Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor developed by the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter. Written in Rust so it has to be blazingly fast! 😊 It’s a joke, calm down.

Over the past year, I have switched between Helix editor and VS Code, but for the last couple of months, I have been using Helix exclusively.

I’ve been genuinely impressed by Zed. When you open a file, it automatically detects its type and downloads the corresponding LSP (language server). The list of supported languages is not extensive, but it’s still impressive. It’s a great example of how to create a product that stays out of your way.

For C development it downloaded clangd and setting up missing dependencies in code was rather easy. For this project I use SDL2 for rendering terminal emulator. It’s a hobby project, don’t worry about it.

If you are going to give this a try and you are using C, I suggest checking two files in the root of your project folder. If you don’t have them, create them.

compile_flags.txt

-I/opt/homebrew/include
-I/opt/homebrew/include/SDL2

Easy way of checking what the appropriate includes for a specific library is to use pkg-config and in my case pkg-config SDL2 --cflags-only-I. But this is nothing new to C/C++ devs. Just a noter for people who are using Visual Studio.

.clang-format

ColumnLimit: 220
BasedOnStyle: Mozilla

I prefer Mozilla coding style for C so you can set that up.

They really have something special here. Although there is no version available for Linux yet, I will stick to Helix. This impressive piece of engineering is, above all, an amazing example of craftsmanship.

They have a bunch of amazing integrated functionalities like live desktop sharing, code sharing in a live coding session. There is a lot of pretentious marketing speak there but the product is still amazing!

For me the speed and the simplicity of the product was the most impressive thing. You get that: it just works feeling. A rare thing in 2023.

They also managed to add Github Copilot in a non obtrusive way. To me, everything feels very intentional and specifically selected. It’s minimal yet maximally effective.

It is a perfect balance between VS Code, Jetbrains IDE’s and something like VIM or Helix.

I just hope they DON’T add plugin support and keep it like it is. They as a vendor should add stuff to it with great deliberation and thought. And this way the product will stay fast and focused. That’s my two cents.

Amazing job!