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Comment by sph

1 year ago

To paraphrase an old quote, "every new text editor grows until it is bloated with collaboration and AI features."

Thank god we still have vim and Emacs.

Except, as I understand it, the collaboration features were one of the primary things they wanted to do with Zed. So this isn't a case of bloat. The first blog post on the site is "How CRDTs make multiplayer text editing part of Zed's DNA".

  • I always wondered are people really doing this collaboration stuff. I tried it at the start of the lock downs era. But i quickly found it annoying, but maybe its because the implementation was just bad back then.

> Thank god we still have vim and Emacs.

Emacs has had AI since before it was cool again.

M-x doctor

Emacs[1] has been bloated with collaboration (gnus, etc) and AI features (doctor, lisp in general) for decades!

[1] Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping

I'm still happy with vim/nvim as daily work tools (also currently exploring kakoune and helix... because why not).

Think of vim/nvim setup as a one time process: a bit complicated, but once done then you are ready to go. Of course, I use text editors for... code editing. No need to turn it into an IDE or mail client or whatever.