There’s a fast new code editor in town

for nearly 10 years now Microsoft's vs code has been the dominant text editor among the soy deev Community I use it on my Microsoft Windows machine to write Microsoft typescript code with help from the latest AI models in Microsoft co-pilot it installs my Microsoft npm packages pushes my code to Microsoft GitHub and automatically deploys it to Microsoft Azure which I then Admire from the Microsoft edge browser but almost nothing in Tech stays cool forever and today we'll look at a fast new open source code editor named Zed it is February 21st 2024 and you're watching the code report a few weeks ago a code editor named Zed built in Rust was open- sourced it's built by the team behind the Adam editor which is a great editor that your grandpa might remember in fact the very first video I made on this channel used Adam and not vsod but wait a minute who cares about a new editor because I was told programming is dead a skill that will soon be replaced by artificial intelligence some people believe this will happen any day now and a new startup called Magic just raised 145 million in part from the founders of GitHub to build a coworker not just a co-pilot they're betting on the idea that coding will ultimately lead to artificial general intelligence at which point we're all totally screwed but I for one am not giving up on coding until the AI straps me into a pod to harvest my organs as of today AI is just a mediocre tool it hasn't actually replaced any programmers and has even showed signs of a plateau in fact many people have complained that chat GPT has gotten worse at coding recently like back in 1969 people thought by 2024 we'd have moon bases and Intergalactic light speed travel but that technology was never meant to be because people figured out that we live on a flat stationary plane right now everybody wants you to think that AGI is coming they could be right and maybe you should just give up and join the Infantry but right now there's also a race going on to build the best AI enabled code editor you've got co-pilot mvs code you've got the cursor editor there's jet brains Ai and a bunch of others and that brings us to zed first and foremost it's an extremely fast high performance editor but also does a great job integrating AI one thing that really chaps my ass about bs code is that it can be slow I'm too old to torture myself learning Vim too poor to afford jet brains and Zed is an attractive option because it's extremely fast the insertion latency startup time and memory footprint are all much better than the competition it achieves this performance by leveraging all of your CPU cores along with the GPU using its own GPU framework it works like a video game where it rasterizes the entire window to deliver 120 frames per second when you open it up the first time you'll notice it's very minimal it has a Vim mode syntax highlighting a few different themes to choose from and an integrated terminal it has a command pallet and overall feels pretty similar to most other editors the company itself raised $10 million last year and has another feature geared more towards teams where multiple people can collaborate in real time on the same code base pretty cool and I imagine they'll have some kind of paid feature around this in the future but another unique feature is that the editor is also integrated with AI out of the box it supports GitHub co-pilot but also allows you to bring in your own open AI key to have conversations about your code right in the editor so instead of paying for a subscription you just bring in your own open aai API key and pay based on the number of tokens that you use you can also highlight a piece of code and then tell the the AI to refactor it it rewrites the code right in front of your eyes like magic but mostly just provides a very clean experience when working with AI in your code currently it's only open AI but in the future I imagine they'll have additional models as well like Gemini's new 1 million plus token window is really impressive and is already showing a ton of promise when working in a large code base overall though my initial impression of Zed is very positive it's clean and fast but there are some big limitations currently it's not extensible so if there's a feature missing there's not going to be a plugin to help you out they do plan on releasing a plugin API in the future but it'll be r-based and likely never be as big as the JavaScript based vs code but by far the biggest limitation as of today is that it's only available on Mac OS that's a big disappointment for a lot of people but they do plan on supporting Linux and windows in the future as long as they find a viable business model first so it may not be a vs code killer as of today but it does have the potential to get there assuming that programming is still a thing done by humans in the next few years this has been the code report thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one

Channel: Fireship

Views: 964,891

Keywords: webdev, app development, lesson, tutorial

Id: JGz7Ou0Nwo8

Length: 3min 58sec (238 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024