Nathan Sobo recently open-sourced Zed, a code editor that focuses on performance, integrates AI capabilities, and supports software teams’ collaboration out of the box. For performance, Zed leverages a Rust code base, multicore- and GPU-optimized code, with a custom Rust GUI framework. For collaboration, Zed relies on CRDTs and team channels. Zed is currently Mac only.
You can code in Notepad in the same way you can eat off the floor with your hands. Using better tools is a nicer experience.
As for performance, when one of the world’s most popular editor runs on Electron, it’s not that hard to see why performance could be an issue when working on large projects on older hardware.
I’ve never personally had an issue with VSCode’s performance, but I’m also fortunate enough to be in a position where I can afford a relatively modern machine. Many others have to make do with what they have, which is why Zed might appeal to them.
I mean, I rock JetBrains for a lot of stuff. It’s a pig on resources, but man does it have a great feature set.
Electron has other drawbacks than performance as well.
The big one for me is that my workflow is based on vim, where you split tabs into buffers. There is no way to split a tab into windows in VSCode. Only windows into tabs, which is super dumb and annoying because related files are never shown together unless you click a bunch of tabs. Apparently the reasoning for this insane behavior is “yeah well electron is based on chromium so tough luck we can’t do shit”.
What do you mean by:
Do you mean, drag a tab out of a window to create a new window? Because if so, you can do that in vscode.