runs only on MacOS
And
get it into the hands of millions of developers
Seems contradictory
Yup. Especially since it’s written in Rust… Like why? Rust has a great cross-platform story.
they’ve written a custom GPU framework to achieve the performance the level of performance they have. it’s currently only compatible with macos, but is being ported to other operating systems.
Why in the world wouldn’t you just use Vulkan? Then it would still be portable to other platforms with probably still good performance, no?
Sounds cool! Too bad it’s only on MacOS atm
They wrote their own GUI toolkit (oof) and it’s hardware accelerated (argh), so OS portability is going to be unusually difficult unless they planned for it from the beginning. No mention of that in the article, so I doubt they did.
They already have very experimental Linux support. You have to build whole app yourself though. I’d say that in month or two we’ll get a binary. You can track Linux porting progress in this issue
I mean on the one hand, the hardware acceleration is awesome. The GUI toolkit is not of course (I assume MacOS has a default one to make everything look like it belongs?), but at least they made it look like a native app instead of the usual electron shit where it’s clearly a web page with a window border and some design 15y old me might think is cool but 16y old me would already have been ashamed of.
As I understand, GUI toolkits will usually support various widget styles or “Look and Feels”.
So, they can just use a glossy graphic for a button on macOS and a flat graphic on Windows 11, without having to reimplement the whole application in the native toolkit. It will usually not feel entirely native, but at least, it won’t look out of place…
Its already possible to build manually on linux and there’s a tracking issue.
*edit. same as the other post
Edit: I’m writing this out of my ass, so don’t quote me.
They wrote that they GPU(I?)-accelerate the font rendering. Well, indeed, fonts are usually rendered with CPUs because it’s slow to use the traditional VRAM (which sits in the GPU) for this task, given that the text itself is stuck in the RAM (sitting right next to the CPU). With integrated chips like the Apple Silicon, it probably makes sense to move the font rendering into the GPU because the memory is unified. GTK is absolutely not designed to do this, AFAIK.
But that also means that, to get this particular benefit of their dedicated GUI framework, you probably have to buy an Apple Silicon Mac. There are PCs with similar architecture, iirc, but that also means that there’s no way you can upgrade your GPU or RAM individually in the future… My fear is that, on a standard PC, it might be just as responsive as other editors.
How would they know a release date if they haven’t finished making it yet?
Looking forward to the memes once this dies
(Zed’s dead)
I’ll be watching this one. It looks nice. Please come to Linux. I do loves me my vim. I did not like setting it up as much as I thought I would to be an IDE. I’m sorry I was mean Zed.
I’ve been trying out Helix as of late. It’s a bit different than vim, but I’m beginning to like it.
what do you mean? Helix uses LSP servers, usually the same ones used by Vim and VS Code.
were you using it without the LSP’s installed? If you were, then you would only get completion based of the treesitter grammars, which would be very limited.
Yes, that was mean, because nobody is able to make another editor as powerful as vim.
Time will tell for sure, but helix is looking really good and once they have support for plugins I’m rather sure it will be a very, very powerful editor.
I don’t think helix will ever catch up to a lot of vims lesser know features of which there are a lot. I think that’s by design as well, I think that helix wants to have a smaller surface area than vim and for a lot of people that will be the right choice. I personaly use ex-commands for example, or the quickfixlist fairly often so for me I have a hard time imagining helix not feeling like a step down power-wise (as nice as multiple cursors are).
I tried it briefly. It certainly is a lot snappier than Atom ever was, I’ll give it that. Seemed to be pretty good with Python, but when I opened some C++ source, it went around reformatting my indentation and replaces tabs with spaces. I will have to see if there is a way to disable all that, as I found it obnoxious.
It was more than just tab conversion. For example, it decided on its own that:
if(...) {
...
}
else {
...
}
would look better like:
if(...) {
...
} else {
...
}
I mean I guess I could live with that, but really? I imagine there’s some config where you can disable all this, but it just doesn’t seem worth some giant git commit every time I touch a file with the editor.
