At the end of January we open-sourced Zed and had zero Linux support. Now, three months later, you can compile & run Zed1 on Linux and actually use it. And I mean really use it
This is very true. The performance is not the best, but it’s still miles ahead of VSCode even in this early build. You can even get a single binary out.
I’m curious what the business plan is for Zed. I was listening to an interview with the ?founder/?ceo and it seems they have an investor, which means they will have to make money somehow. I don’t mind paying for a good editor if it trumps emacs in a significant way (I’m probably not the target audience for this anyway), but I’d still like to know the business case.
The big plan is to replace the GitHub / Pull Request based workflow (for companies). The goal is to have a collaborative real time work environment for pair/mob programming. Some smaller plans are paid AI programming and so on.
At Zed, though, we want to use each platform as best as we can to build a high-performance application that is and feels native to the platform. That often means talking directly to the platform, in order to use it to the best of its abilities.
On macOS, for example, Zed makes direct use of Metal. We have our own shaders, our own renderer, and we put a lot of effort into understanding macOS APIs to get to 120FPS. Zed on macOS is also a fully-native AppKit NSApplication and we integrated our async Rust runtime with macOS’ native application runtime.
Clearly the same “care” is not present in the Windows version (the Windows platform.rs is just a few shims into Win32). Taking advantage of Windows would require at least to support DirectWrite.
The Zed team hasn’t started on Windows support yet. IIUC what’s there right now is community driven and has a lot less momentum behind it than the Linux build. Current Windows status is, “it builds and runs, mostly.”
This is very true. The performance is not the best, but it’s still miles ahead of VSCode even in this early build. You can even get a single binary out.
I’m curious what the business plan is for Zed. I was listening to an interview with the ?founder/?ceo and it seems they have an investor, which means they will have to make money somehow. I don’t mind paying for a good editor if it trumps emacs in a significant way (I’m probably not the target audience for this anyway), but I’d still like to know the business case.
Otherwise, GPUI is inspiring! Great work!
The big plan is to replace the GitHub / Pull Request based workflow (for companies). The goal is to have a collaborative real time work environment for pair/mob programming. Some smaller plans are paid AI programming and so on.
Great! I’m very curious if Zed will stick with Blade or switch to something different in the future.
Clearly the same “care” is not present in the Windows version (the Windows platform.rs is just a few shims into Win32). Taking advantage of Windows would require at least to support DirectWrite.
The Zed team hasn’t started on Windows support yet. IIUC what’s there right now is community driven and has a lot less momentum behind it than the Linux build. Current Windows status is, “it builds and runs, mostly.”
My personal laptop can’t compile it, and on my work laptop i only got an invisible window.
Will try again when there’s a binary package.