SubEthaEdit VS zed

Currently vim, but I’m very excited about Zed.

https://zed.dev/

The software engineering world has changed a lot, but it seems like both workers and companies haven't fully caught up yet. Recently, I've been having a lot of fun using Zed. It made programming enjoyable for me again, just like it was many years ago. Some people think Zed is just another unfinished editor, but that's not right. Zed is an AI tool. If you're not using Zed with GitHub Copilot and OpenAI GPT, you're not using it correctly, and you likely don't need Zed at all.

I don't mean to reply-guy this thread, but it builds on Windows (and Linux)

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/docs/src/dev...

You can try it out by downloading it from here https://zed.dev/

Now, fast forward to last year's Rails World conference that I was a lucky attendee of. What a breeze of fresh air! Among the many many inspiring people, talks and presentations, I noticed one thing: most people use VS Code, some use Vim but – more importantly – a lot of people tweak their editor / IDE almost as routinely as they tweak the code they work on professionally! And I thought: I want that too, how come I've lost this mindset here? I’ve taken for granted that I can tweak every imaginable aspect of my Linux OS as well as the Gnome environment so why not my IDE – the program that I literary spend most hours a day in? That was the final nudge for me to try to switch to something – anything really – that would be feasible for me to tweak and that’s how I ended up in VS Code. I’m not saying this will be my final IDE destination (looking at you Zed, Fleet or perhaps even Vim) but I know I want to stay closer to where a more active developer community around the editor is.

The GitHub issue #4424 for Zed relates to the lack of a feature for using local large language models (LLMs). In response to this, I proposed a workaround that enables the integration of local LLMs into Zed. This solution addresses the need for a non-proprietary, offline alternative to mainstream models like ChatGPT, potentially increasing privacy and control for users.

To integrate a custom model in Zed, I bypassed the limitation of only using OpenAI models. I did this by running the Mistral model from the Ollama library and cloning it to appear as "gpt-4-1106-preview." The steps included pulling and running the Mistral model, then using Ollama's commands to clone it. I updated Zed's settings to point to the local API URL of the cloned model. Restarting Zed applied these changes, enabling the use of the local LLM within Zed's environment.

For more details, you can refer to the GitHub issue directly: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4424#issuecomme...

There's no great mystery here, if you look at the internal function that's being called, it contains a TODO explaining that the code is unnecessarily quadratic and needs to be fixed:

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/12b12ba17a380e321...

So if selecting all matches requires calling this function for each match then I guess it's accidentally cubic?

I also spotted two linear scans before this code (min by key and max by key).

It seems like a combination of the implementation being inefficient even for what it was for (and that this was known), then it was used for something else in a naive way, and the use of a bad abstraction in the code base came at a performance cost.

I don't think this is a case of Rust either demonstrating or failing to demonstrate zero-cost abstractions (at a language level). A language with zero-cost abstractions doesn't promise that any abstraction you write in it is magically going to be free, it just promises that when it makes a choice and abstracts that away from you, it is free (like with dynamic dispatch, or heap allocation, or destructors, or reference counting, etc).

Hey! I'm the mentioned Thorsten. Linux is actively being developed. Here's a PR from 2 days ago that shows file-opening in Linux starting to work: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/7852

And so far Linux support has been a big community effort. I think more community member contributed to Linux support than Zed teammates. Very cool to see.

So: Linux is in the works. Windows will probably happen after that, or if someone in the community wants to emulate what the Linux users are doing and start before that.

I took Zed for a spin this week, and this post covers what I noticed whilst using it as my day-to-day editor.