Finishing | Su Mi
Produced by | CSDN（ID：CSDNnews）
Recall that in 2022, GitHub's official website released a news about the retirement of Atom: all projects under Atom were archived on December 15, 2022. At the time, many people lamented that Atom was an 11-year-old cross-platform text editor designed for programmers, but after Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, Atom was gradually phased out by GitHub due to performance and ecosystem issues.
Now, two years later, Atom founder Nathan Sobo is back with a new code editor called Zed with a vision that "developers everywhere need a better code editor", which is also open source.
As soon as Zed was open-sourced (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed), it attracted the attention of many developers.
Developed on Rust, Zed outperforms VS Code based on the Electron framework
Nathan Sobo used to develop not only the Atom editor, but also the Electron framework for building cross-platform desktop applications.
It's worth noting that VS Code is a lightweight IDE built on top of the Electron framework. This time, though, instead of following in VS Code's footsteps and adopting Electron, Nathan Sobo used Rust to build and compile to native code.
Nathan Sobo officially explained, "Rust's unique type system allows us to work in parallel on multiple cores without compromising the stability of the application. Zed uses copy-on-write data structures and Rust's expressive async primitives to offload CPU-intensive tasks away from the main thread, resulting in responsiveness that is not possible with a single-threaded editor. ”
At the same time, compared to VS Code, which has over 55,000 extensions, Zed doesn't have as many plugins. The arrival of Zed is an effective solution to developers' dissatisfaction with VS Code's performance.
Support for the latest GitHub Copilot, OpenAI
In addition, in the era of AI, in order to enhance the coding experience of programmers, Zed has followed the development trend of cutting-edge IDEs and integrated advanced AI tools.
At this point, Zed supports GitHub Copilot out of the box, allowing you to use GPT-4 to generate or refactor code by pressing Ctrl+Enter and then typing a natural language prompt.
Mikayla Maki, a member of the Zed team, revealed that as of now, GitHub has not officially provided an API to interact with Copilot. However, thanks to the open-source Neovim plugin, we have access to a documentless, streamlined LSP server that helps the Zed team handle their interactions with GitHub.
Nowadays, Zed already has built-in support for LSP servers, so accessing Copilot is as easy as downloading Copilot LSP from the Neovim plugin repository.
During the process of fine-tuning Copilot's behavior, Mikayla Maki shared, "Balancing its visual and psychological load is critical, as an overactive Copilot can backfire and conflict with established features such as LSP autocomplete." We've introduced a setting to disable Copilot for each language, adding a 75ms delay before inserting 'suggested text', and prioritizing the language's true LSP (Language Server Protocol) over Copilot in the event of a conflict. ”
Second, Zed also supports OpenAI's models. Developers can choose the model type and change it at any time, even during AI conversations.
Of course, there are certain prerequisites for using this function. Developers need to have an OpenAI account and configure an API key in Zen. These keys are billed based on the number of tokens used, and Zed displays the number of tokens remaining for the selected model at any time. Interaction with OpenAI's large language model is via the Cmd+Enter shortcut, rather than pressing a Enter key, which Zed's team explains as the goal is to make it "feel as much like a normal editor as possible."
Unlike other IDEs, Zed also has an inline assistant feature that allows you to see the context of the surrounding code. Marshall Bowers, another member of the Zed team, also published an article on the experience of using the AI capabilities in Zed (https://zed.dev/blog/ai-continues-to-impress) and said, "While I still don't believe that AI will make software developers obsolete, these experiences have convinced me that there is definitely room for AI to be intelligently integrated into our development tools and workflows." ”
Why open source?
In fact, a year after Nathan Sobo left GitHub, he devoted himself full-time to building the Zed IDE.
Not long ago, Nathan Sobo posted that although Zed is a preview version, they have decided to open source Zed (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed), with the editor licensed under the GPL, the server-side components under the AGPL (GNU Affero General Public License), and the GPUI (GPU-accelerated UI) under the Apache 2 license.
As for why he chose to open source, Nathan Sobo said, "We believe that open-source Zed will make it the best product possible. Our mission is to build the world's most advanced code editor and put it in the hands of millions of developers. This is a wide-ranging issue and we need all the help we can get. Considering that all of Zed's users are programmers, it makes the most sense to open Zed to the largest talent pool. ”
As for the old and very real problem of open source and commercial survival, the Zed team also put it on the table, and responded head-on, "Openness is not in conflict with business success. Rather than selling you a proprietary editor, we'd rather sell you services that integrate seamlessly with your editor, making you and your team more productive. 」
Based on this, the team has launched a neat little feature called "Zed Channels". With Zed Channels, you can share links and write code together in real time.
However, since Zed is still in preview, this feature is free for anyone. In the future, when the beta period ends, the Zed team plans to start charging for private use, as well as offering server-side computing to support AI functions for a paid service.
In addition to this, Zed assures that "we are 100% open source of the code we have written so far." In the future, though, we may still offer proprietary products for commercial and enterprise use cases, but we always want proprietary code to be a small fraction of our open source code. We also intend to make sure that our need to generate revenue in no way affects your need to write software. We will never display banner ads in your code editor, and if we do, you can always create a Zed from the source code. ”
summary
Finally, compared to the towering tree of VS Code, Zed is actually just getting started, and there are many shortcomings:
- As mentioned above, VS Code has over 55,000 extensions, while Zed has only a rudimentary plugin model and no extension ecosystem.
- Zed language support is limited, and while Rust, TypeScript, and Python are well supported, some languages (such as Microsoft's C#) are not yet supported.
- The current Zed only supports Mac, and no other platforms are supported yet.
However, the launch of Zed also provides developers with more options, and many people like to hear about it:
I'm very picky about my tools, especially latency, and I try Zed every now and then and it's pretty good. Clean, minimalist design aesthetics, compact code, it's a nice piece of work, and I really like it.
However, with the right markup and tweaked GC, emacs 29 is just as fast and has more amazing packages than VSCode.
It's a market for those who want to be faster than VSCode but less effort than emacs, and I wish them the best of luck: I think it's the frontrunner out there.
- View Zed source code: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed
reference
https://zed.dev/blog/zed-is-now-open-source
https://devclass.com/2024/01/25/rust-based-zed-editor-now-open-source-with-built-in-support-for-openai-and-github-copilot/