Zed on Linux is out!

Installer is piping curl into shell
I thought we were past this as a society 😔
- Not until after you convince these projects to stop using discord
  
  As long as they just use it for their community and don't fucking lock documentation behind discord I don't really care. But this trend has been so annoying. Due to this I'm in so many servers I have to quit a server just to join a new one
- https://zed.dev/docs/linux#installing-via-a-package-manager
  
  ooh, available for “x86_65” on Alpine
  (and they’ve fixed that now)
- I mean its already in the nix repos as well as homebrew which means its essentially taken care of
  
  So it should say hey check your distros package repos first.
  
  I've been using it with the nix package manager. It's awesome how easy nix works
- A curl piped into a shell or some unofficial packages from various distros.
  At this point I don't get why these projects are not Flatpak-first.
  
  Flatpak is worse for debugging, development, and reproducibility.
  Its good for user friendly sandboxing, portability, and convenience.
- There are various package manager vectors for installation listed in the docs
- Can't we basically call this a remote access trojan?
  
  Security wise it doesn't matter, you run the code they wrote in any case. So either trust them or don't. Where it matters is making a mess on your computer and possibly leaving cruft behind when uninstalling. But packages are in the works, Arch even has it since before linux support was announced officially.
- That was my first thought as well, but I will say that uBlue distros had a signing issue preventing updates recently, due to an oversight with how they rotated their image signing keys, and the easiest (maybe only?) solution was to pipe a curl command to sh. Even though uBlue is trustworthy, they still recommended inspecting the script, which was only a few lines of code.
  ~~In this case, though, I dunno why they don't just package it as a flatpak or appimage or put it up on cargo.~~
  Edit: nvm, they have some package manager options.
- GPU-accelerated renderer.
  There's a reason why GUIs don't render fonts in the GPU.
  
  Because it's a pain, there's not much more to it really...
- It's made in rust, therefore it must be safe!
- It is worrisome that all the smug elitists are too incompetent to just leave off the pipe and review from stdout, or redirect to a file for further analysis.
  Same people will turn around and full throat the aur screaming 'btw' to anyone who dares look in their direction.
  
  By that logic you have to review the Zed source code as well. Either you trust Zed devs or you don't - decide! If you suspect their install script does something fishy, they could do it just as well as part of the editor. If you run their editor you execute their code, if you run the install script you execute their code - it's the same thing.
  Aur is worse because there usually somebody else writes the PKGBUILD, and then you have to either decide whether to trust that person as well, or be confident enough for vetting their work yourself.
  
  Eh using aur is a bit different since most of# them pull the projects git repo directly anyway. Yeah the project might have vulns but thats on you to inspect before building it as well as the pkgbuild itself

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7054#issuecomment-1916315391
They auto download binaries, even proprietary ones, unsigned and without user interaction.
YEAH security!
- So they're doing the equivalent of VSCode(ium)'s extensions, but installing them automatically and not giving you the option to use alternatives?
  Blegh.
  
  Why are copilot and some other functions not extensions?
  tl;dr: General purpose extensions are not even implemented yet
  zed is very much an early stages editor; it'll look very different a year from now
  
  I think they auto install some binaries like nodejs that are required for baseline functionality, but have a popup window for additional language LSPs
- Quoting the guy:
  "that rewriting those in Rust will take an eternity, so not sure what is actionable here, hence closing."
  That's Rust shining from all its glories here gentlemen...
  The best language, if there is nothing changing.
  That's a thing to make a web server or a library that displays Fibonacci, that's something else when there are humans with changing scopes...
  
  Its not Rusts fault, the devs are simply lazy and making insecure products, as they dont want to rewrite everything.
  
  They were exaggerating to avoid work. Look at the PR diff to determine whether your anti-Rust bias is true.
  
  I use rust only if we need performance, for small services. The industry does the same. People use node for backend but e.g. redis is in rust. It's a good tool if you use it for the right stuff.
  EDIT: redis is not in rust, but e.g. aws writes many services in rust

There ought to be a rule that posts about software releases have to say what it is.
- Zed (a high-performance code editor announced in 2022), not to be confused with Xed (a small and lightweight text editor released in 2016)
  EDIT: or Yed (a small and simple terminal editor core)
- My bad, it's up now

also seems to have some security issues …
- They are addressing this here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/14034
  
  Thats not the point. Why should you trust anything from this project after they would allow third party unsigned binaries from questionable sources
- Lmao fuck this project

I am BEGGING for any editor other than VSCode to have decent remote development. I want to go open source but everything I've tried (remote-nvim, distant, tramp, vscodium, etc.) just doesn't cut it.
- What in hell is remote development? You mean openssh and vim, right?
  
  Pair programming over the net. The old school way is tmux and vim but to do that you and your partner need port 22 open and most enterprises are gonna be like "hell no you can't let people connect to your company owned work laptop SSH into your machine"
- Apparently Lapce has remote development as its core feature. But I only (re?)learned of it today..
  How didn't tramp work out for you?
- Have you tried running doom emacs in tmux on the remote server and accessing it with ssh? Doom emacs is all the good of an emacs environment, all the good of vim keybinds, and they worked in a decent amount of optimizations so it only loads the necessary stuff on demand (mine has a startup time of just over 1 second, slower than vim but barely an inconvenience). Can write a quick script to ssh copy (or git pull) your current configs on the server so you only have to maintain one set of configs if you want
  
  scp ~/.config/doom/config.el username@server:~/.config/doom/config.el
  Run emacs in tmux if you want to keep the emacs session open across multiple ssh sessions
  
  holy mother of latency
- Tramp is awesome :)
- Is VSCode not open source?
  
  Vscode is like Chrome
  And
  VS Codium is like Chromium
  
  It has Microsoft BLObs baked in as part of the build process. VS Codium is the FLOSS distribution of VS code's open source code. Liveshare doesn't appear in the package repo Codium uses (because of the Microsoft BLObs it contains as an extension). For work I manually download the live share extension VSX and load it into vscodium
- What about gitpod?
- What I do is use distrobox or any devpod and install it in the container and launch from cli. Works perfectly for me.
- IntelliJ products my dude! If you go on there education side you can find the packages for free to compile yourself. There's tons of guides online to do it.

I still don't understand why I should need GPU acceleration for my fucking TEXT EDITOR
- Shouldn't the DE/Window Manager be handling that? Seems like doing it on a window by window basis would be inefficient (and look inconsistent).
- Same reason you need it for your terminal (see kitty terminal). It's surprisingly slow to cpu render text, gpu rendering is more power efficient and far more responsive
  
  It was surprising how gpu accelerated rendering helped read logs better. Niche case, but better was better.
  
  Surprisingly slow compared to GPU rendering. But... is it really "surprisingly slow"? If it was some 10mhz machine, then sure... I'd agree with you.
  
  Same reason you need it for your terminal
  So I don't.
- Sppeeed
- I mean, it should be clear. Smooth and fast and snappy. If you don't want that, use neovim like me :)
  
  But... Neovim is smooth, fast and snappy 😭
- Smooth scrolling? Maybe I'm wrong

What's that?
- Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from the makers of Atom. It is written in rust.
  
  New Editor, by Atom Devs, Rust
  
  Oh man I LOVED Atom. Giving this new one a test drive now :)
  
  Zed is not an IDE, it's a code editor. No, they aren't the same things, it's like saying a table and a kitchen are the same thing.
  
  Thanks. I briefly used Atom (on Win) but stopped as it was terribly slow to startup.
  What is the software license for Zed? It's Github page isn't clear.

I can see the beginning of something truly great in this editor. It's going to become better than VS code in a year.
It's already great for some languages like Go and Rust.
- VScode is proprietary and slow. If you are using something like that you should use VScodium
  
  But aren't both the same speedwise?
- I hope that's true, but it will be an uphill battle for them to get people to move. VS Code is already pretty good.

Interesting project, how ever it will be hard to compete with existing editors and its plugin eco-systems.
- It supports LSPs, and has treesitter syntax highlighting and git integration which honestly makes it 90% of the way there already
  
  Vim keybindings or death
- I don't think so. The guys who write the plugins are the cracks and the cracks will use zed.

I still do not understand why Zed makes such a big deal about being GPU accelerated when you'll be hard pressed to find a single text editor nowadays that isn't.
- Yeah, I don't see why I should care about that. Gimme some crazy graphical effects, particles and shaders!

Anyone care to compare this with Helix?
- Very first impressions since I literally just downloaded before writing this, and haven't read the manual, I may change my mind with more experience.
  It's incredibly snappy, to my eyes as fast as Helix.
  A lot of stuff that took me a while to figure out in VS Code was immediately obvious. How to toggle inlay hints for Rust? Parameter Icon > Inlay Hints (with the keyboard shortcut there for easy toggling).
  Interactive is generally intuitive because it seems pretty permissive. Tab vs Enter to autocomplete? Either! ctrl-shift-Z vs ctrl-Y to redo? Same thing!
  After being so used to Helix I often reach for keybinds that don't exist. I might have to learn Vim keybinds because I'm definitely going to keep trying Zed.
  Not sure how I feel about what seems to be an inline discord-like chat/voice-call feature.
  Going to check out if there's git integration, because I couldn't easily find it.
  
  Going to check out if there's git integration, because I couldn't easily find it.
  Asking this because I'm noob, not elitist ass: Why a git integration in ide instead of using the cli? I've been working only on few projects where git is used, but the cli seems to be a ton easier to understand how to work with than the git integration in vscode which I discarded after few attempts to use
  
  Git integration seems to be so embedded that it's easy to miss. Open a git repository folder and you can switch branches and whatnot. But, like, in the command palette, there's no Git > Pull or Git > Clone as in vscode. (I have barely scratched the surface so it might be there hiding in plain sight.)
- Zed has a lot more features and is GUI-based. Helix is more focused and is CLI-based. I think a more direct comparison would be with VSCode(ium).
- Why Helix over (neo)Vim?
  
  Better/simpler experience out of the box. With Helix you install the LSPs for languages you use and you're set with a fully featured editor. Manual configuration is only needed for setting themes, keybinds, and small setting changes. It also feels much faster than a fully configured vim/neovim. Lastly its keybinds are inspired by Vim/Kakoune, but different from both.
  
  A better out of the box experience-- fewer plugins required. More discussion here: https://urbanists.social/@markstos/112586854536602496

How's Lapce?
- Not much documentation. I tried to use it, but it was really hard to figure out anything.
- I tried to read the code but the underlying concept was too complex for me to understand

I was so happy about this! Been using it on my work MacBook and have been excited to use it on my main laptop!

I tried saving to a file that required root and it didn't give any prompt to enter the password. On VSCodium normally if you are trying to write to a file that requires sudo then it prompts you.
Is there a way to save to root files with Zed?
- Use sudoedit
- Maby launch editor with sudo?
  
  Found the Windows user. On Linux we actually have polkit that can elevate privileges with a GUI prompt.

Zed seems cool, but not much better than other options. I am still kind of thrown off by the immediate GH/CoPilot integration. Am I the an old man left in the caves of feeling that I don't need the AI help?
- They'll probably dial it back once the hype settles

Great another editor. Now what we need is a good PS alternative so we can all move away from Windows.
- PS?
  
  Most probably Photoshop, else PowerShell

Lots oft running npm wrappers for an allegedly Rust dritten Pierce of Software

text editor
GPU-accelerated renderer
What the fuck?
- Sounds pretty cool. Sometimes ill do a quick series of edits in vim and it fuckin chugs. I'm definitly gonna try it
- Pretty common feature. Sublime, Lapce, VS Code, certain Emacs distributions, certain NeoVim GUIs... We live in a world where a lot of people have GPUs and CPUs aren't getting faster so if you want to get more work done (ie, running LSPs, tree sitter, completion engines, snippet engines, debuggers etc) you need to offload some of that work somewhere

Always

Ohhh shiiit

I never understood the need
- Vscodium but not running in a browser.
  
  If it can’t run in a terminal, what is the point?
  
  VScodium is running in the browser. It is electron based.
- It's not you who needs it.
  It's for buzzword chasers and cost cutters.
  Rust (=> fast and hip)
  Shared (=> outsourced)
  AI generated (=> robot devs)
  Get it?
  
  The Rust hype at least makes sense. The other two are just utter bullshit.

Zed is now officially the best editor ever
- Why?
  
  Because I like it

built from the ground up with rust. Why the fuck is that the first and usually only (non-)feature to mention in any project written in rust? Who the fuck cares?
I fucking hate the rust cult.
- Because most things built with Rust are faster than their equivalent, especially electron-based apps.
  So as a user, regardless of the cult following, i'm happy that this tech exists and is being adopted so fast.
  
  Because most things built with Rust are faster than their equivalent, especially electron-based apps.
  And safer, since Electron is just Chromium, which is mainly written in C++.
  
  It's primarily about safety, not speed. Any C or C++ program should match the speed but not the correctness.
- You seem upset. Blink twice if someone is forcing you to use it.
- Just go outside and touch some grass.
- In an era where every single good code editors are built on Electron, its good to know something isnt
- I care because I know the values of those programmers in a narrow scope and won't be as annoyed when I inevitably have to go debug the rust code instead of C.
  However, that values statement was challenged by automatic binary downloads without user confirmation.
  Luckily the fix is already in progress, but its concerning it was ever implemented.