xi-editor VS Servo

Was confused until I realised I'd confused Zed, with Xi[1] which is also rust based, and which incidentally has a frontend called "Xim"..

Also there's a wiki-editor (like Tomboy[2]) called "Zim"[3].

[1] https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor

Project site linked from the GitHub[0] is https://xi-editor.io. Linked doc is a mirror of this[1], which was afaik originally written by Raph Linus.

[0]: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor

[1]: https://xi-editor.io/docs/rope_science_01.html

> thing that gets deleted when you hit backspace

Is there a canonical source for this part, by the way? Xi copied the logic from Android[1] (as per the issue you linked downthread), and I vaguely remember that CLDR had something to say about this too, but I don’t know if there’s any sort of consensus here that’s actually written down anywhere.

[1] https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor/pull/837

This is pretty much how copy-on-write ropes work. Check out xi-rope, Ropey or crop, they're all built using B-trees and implement the behavior you described.

Helix is awesome, though once Lapce (spiritual successor to Xi editor) gets the Helix/Kakoune editing model, I may have to jump ship

Home (xi-editor.io)

Maybe take a look at the Xi editor (https://xi-editor.io/) (written in rust I think) that uses a client server architecture.

Have a look at what Lapce uses. The editor is coming along nicely, and iirc, they use the Xi editor as a plug-in.

Raph Levien posted a retrospective about using CRDT’s for collaborative editing in xi-editor here [1]. His conclusion is

“I come to the conclusion that the CRDT is not pulling its (considerable) weight. When I think about a future evolution of xi-editor, I see a much brighter future with a simpler, largely synchronous model, that still of course has enough revision tracking to get good results with asynchronous peers like the language server.”

[1]https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor/issues/1187#issuecomm...

Firefox was special in that Mozilla created Rust to build Servo and then backported parts of Servo to Firefox and ultimately stopped building Servo.

Thankfully Servo has picked up speed again and if one wants a Rust based browser engine what better choice than the one the language was built to enable?

https://servo.org/

> At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.

When Servo is done, it's going to be a beast.

It's getting hundreds of commits per week:

https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/commit-activity

- App::tick allows the app to handle internal events(Servoshell does something similar with `spin_event_loop` at https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/611f3ef1625f4972337c247521f3a1d65040bd56/components/servo/servo.rs#L176)

The CEO said

> It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.

"From scratch" sounds very impressive. "custom JS VM" is as well. So let's take a look at the dependencies [1], where we find

- html5ever

- cssparser

- rquickjs

That's just servo [2], a Rust based browser initially built by Mozilla (and now maintained by Igalia [3]) but with extra steps. So this supposed "from scratch" browser is just calling out to code written by humans.

[1] - https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/main/Cargo.tom...

[2] - https://github.com/servo/servo

[3] - https://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/servo-2025-stats/

> Honestly at this point they don't seem to need help finding bugs or missing features. As long as the devs can find them in 10 seconds themselves, they don't need reports from users who won't contribute code.

Then why, oh sage, does the project ask people to Get Involved [1] and tell those who click that button - the first prominent one on their landing page - the way to the code [2], the way to contribute [3], the way to build the project [4] and where to report any issues they run into [5]?

Also, that is that nonsense about the developers being able to find them in 10 seconds themselves? It sounds to me like you've swallowed the LLM propaganda hook, line and sinker and consider field testing and bug reporting superfluous now that your personal Robby the Robot takes care of everything. Maybe he will, or maybe he won't, who knows? Talking about LLMs, the project does have some stipulations around using them to contribute [6] which spell out the reasons why Robby might not be as helpful as he seems to be.

[1] https://servo.org/contributing/

[2] https://github.com/servo/servo

[3] https://book.servo.org/contributing/getting-started.html

[4] https://book.servo.org/building/building.html

[5] https://github.com/servo/servo/issues

[6] https://book.servo.org/contributing/getting-started.html#ai-...