Zed - A Visual Studio Code Killer?

hello ladies and gentlemen it's Mike here at game from scratch and today we're going to talk about a brand new code editor called Zed but before we get into talking about the new one we're going to talk about an old one because there is a direct link here and there was an editor called Adam this was actually created by the founder of GitHub it was a really popular code editor for uh JavaScript and web development especially but it was kind of a semi lightweight modular code editing environment you could add plugins to it it's sort of like the Genesis of the stuff that we use today so this was atom there's a big fan base behind atom sadly uh it did not last but what it did give us is something called electron it used to be called atom shell this allows you to basically uh use a version of chromium which is like the JavaScript runtime that Chrome uses uh to create applications so people have been creating more or less desktop web applications using electron for ages and it all started with atom so atom used electron as its underlying runtime I guess you could call it and this ultimately is what Visual Studio code uses so electron is being used for a ton of different tools slack uses it a couple of other things I can't think of immediately off the top of my head but definitely Visual Studio code is one of the highest profile things working on electron Now problem with electron is there is definitely a bit of a performance cost to be paid and now we have a solution to that but first if you are still interested in atom uh it is dead uh GitHub no longer supports it but there is a community based effort around it called pulsair so I guess we're talking about three Ides today so if you're interested go ahead and check out pulsair I might actually do a video specifically on pulser at some point in the future let me know if you're interested in that down below but now let's get to the focus of today and that is Zed Now Zed Industries again were the people behind a lot of this original technology uh they were the creators of atom and then treesitter which is like um language parsing thing a kind of a replacement for regular Expressions that a lot of these applications use uh and it is all about lightweight code editing but the idea behind it is to be fast so let me show you something right now so here is Visual Studio code one two maybe three seconds to start it up not bad not great all right let's do the same thing with Z instant and it's a little thing like that like basically when it's loading large projects when it's loading things in it loads pretty much instantly so let's just do that really quickly again it's hard to catch on video because it's near instant for visual studio code but there's definitely a speed difference so code maybe three seconds to get up and going Now Zed instant and that's the kind of thing this is an IDE that is focused around being fast it's written in Rust which is a very cool thing and I hope you guys have been kind of enticed by this so because now I'm going to scare a couple of you away there is definitely a downside to zed uh and that is this uh right now there is a reason why I'm using my Mac to demonstrate it the only version that is available at this moment in time is the Mac version although there is definitely a project undergoing uh to get it working on uh Linux and windows and web uh so Linux is the furthest along uh and this is very much being actively updated so if you're interested in where this project is going and what is required there it is going to be ported to these other platforms but for right now this is a um sadly a Mac only product so to those of you that do not have a Mac at this point and aren't looking at something about how it'll show up in the future I apologize cuz uh yeah that's kind of the end of the demonstration for you but this is one of those things that could be coming to your platform soon so still worth checking out you can download it completely free by the way again speed is a very big part of it so it just across the board runs fast it was written using rust uh the fact that it's written using rust I I would think that porting it to other platforms shouldn't be that hard to do another another thing that they've done is they've integrated into the AI solutions that exist in the world today so let's go take a look at Zed over here I've logged into my co-pilot account so what you're going to see if you're in a project this is a rust this is actually the code for Zed so this is an open source project you can download the source code like I said earlier on it is entirely in Rust but let's go here into say one of these tests and let's go here so if I start typing here uh you start getting all the Cod completions like you would expect from it and then uh you got here you get summaries you get explanations as it goes and this is entirely being driven by co-pilot as long as you have a co-pilot account so I'm logged into it you'll see down here it is available right there by the way while we're down here you'll also notice that a number of different languages are supported out of the box uh so uh yeah pretty much the major stuff you can think C++ C even Zig is in here which is kind of cool I don't know why we scrolled there uh but there's uh language server support in there so if you're working say with GD script GD script has a language server so you could use it and it will automatically pipe in the appropriate information and so on the intell sense is being provided by co-pilot but there is another option here as well which I click over here and you'll notice there is this assistant panel and you can actually hook up if you have uh chat GPT if you have a key you can do chat GPT code uh comments and conversations in here as well and that is another aspect of this tool it close that one down over where did you go down here we have a terminal uh which is pretty standard feature these days then we've also got chat so what you can actually do is create chat channels right here it kind of feels like Discord so if you're working with another developer you can invite them into your chat Channel you can chat about your code you basically have this chat server built right in and you can synchronize and have it go to the exact same lines of code as you were typing and going about things which is very cool of course also if you open up a project you get this project view like this uh typical menus are available for you you're finding and searching tools and so on uh if you're into colors and themes there's uh you can't theme it yourself yet that's going to come with the 1.0 release but they've got quite a few of them right here uh so you want to switch up your themes that is very easily done over here your settings are driven this way by the way if you are a uh Vim user there is a full Vim keyboard mode and up here pretty straightforward stuff so you got your finding project your selections your searching and so on uh so yeah it's a f lightweight rust driven um editor or IDE with integration with co-pilot and chat GPT in there as well and it'll be interesting where this guy ultimately develops out to so that is it again chat GPT and co-pilot out of the box fully language aware has language server protocol support in there for auto completions uh so in the Box you do have an integrated terminal you have the themes uh you have Zim uh Vim mode in there as well and then all this team based stuff so if you're working with someone else you can have these chats you can have various different uh conversations going on here have this chat server built in tie things to your code directly automatically jump to the code collaborate with somebody else so then you can have them come and look at your code so if you're working in a team environment this part might be really a cool feature for you again uh work on work with code on any machine so someone hosts it guests come into it you can just go through the source together again navigate together you can see where the current person is looking at in their actual code and then another neat thing about this especially for a game development Channel all of the uh stuff is actually using GPU rasterizing the window on GPU just like a 3D video game so that's why it is so fast and smooth to work with like from a um typing and feedback setting and if you're the kind of person that finds visual studio codee just laggy and too slow and so on this guy is is just basically made for you again designed around multicores um and yeah so they've also got their uh tree sitter that they use here for doing uh the searching quiring with in thing um so yeah that ladies and gentlemen is Zed again it is an open source project now the downside to this guy is that it is currently again only on uh Mac OS for now but there are projects underway for Linux and then ultimately windows so if you're willing to wait around a bit there could be a new competitor for you so if you if you like like the lightweighting this of uh say Visual Studio code but you want it to be much much much faster but you're willing to give up like the plugin stuff this guy could be a good pickup for you now one thing to do definitely be aware of though uh there's also and I never showed it uh here you have your pallet so that's a command shift p on Mac and all your various different commands are available here but you're going to notice if you're used to um working with Visual Studio code you're going to see this is a very small subset but what this thing does is it it allows you access to your code it supports uh a pretty good variety of languages it has that language server support in there and again it engages with two of the most popular AI tools out there uh the chat GPT unfortunately I can't demonstrate that because I don't have a chat gbt 4 key but also uh github's co-pilot which you can uh log into on GitHub like so and have fullon access to so it's definitely an interesting project in my opinion but I'm curious what do you think are you going to check it out if you have a Mac and if you're on Linux or Windows are you going to wait around to see this one let me know comments down below and I will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 81,062

Keywords: Zed, Zed Editor, Zed IDE, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Atom, Atom Editor, Rust IDE, Rust Language, Electron, Electron Javascript, Pulsar, Pulsar IDE, Code Editor, Open Source, gamefromscratch, Rust Programming

Id: zHRcz5G04fk

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2024