Zed Founders Chat #4

Summary

The transcript discusses the development and philosophy behind Zed, a code editor that aims to balance power and speed. The team talks about the spectrum between full-featured IDEs and minimalist editors, their preference for minimalism without sacrificing performance, and the challenges of integrating collaboration and other features without cluttering the user experience. They also touch on the importance of extensibility, community feedback, and maintaining a high-performance editor that avoids bloat.

Takeaways

• 🌟 The ideal tool would combine powerful features with a sleek, minimal, and fast user experience, avoiding the trade-off between performance and feature-richness.
• 🚀 The goal is to create a tool like Zed that is powerful yet maintains a fast and minimalistic UI, similar to the streamlined design of a Tesla Model S.
• 🤔 The line between IDEs and text editors is becoming increasingly blurred, with modern editors gaining language awareness and smarter features through technologies like language servers and Treesitter.
• 💡 There's a desire for an editor that integrates development environment aspects, such as collaboration and terminal usage, without clutter or performance loss.
• 🔧 The vision for Zed includes a balance between being opinionated about its core features and being open to extensions that allow for customization and additional functionality.
• 📈 The development of Zed is focused on extensibility and performance, ensuring that adding new features or extensions does not compromise the core user experience.
• 🔄 Emphasis on community feedback is crucial for refining Zed, with active engagement helping to shape the tool based on real-world usage and user needs.
• 🛠️ Extensions are seen as a way to enhance Zed's capabilities without bloating the core product, allowing users to tailor the experience to their preferences.
• 📊 The team behind Zed is mindful of the balance between including 'batteries included' and relying on extensions for additional features, aiming to provide a solid foundation out of the box.
• 🎯 Zed's philosophy includes innovating and offering better ways to perform tasks, but also respecting user familiarity and standards when it benefits the broader user base.

Q & A

What is the main goal for the development of Zed in terms of user experience?

The main goal for Zed is to combine powerful features with a sleek, minimal interface that is super fast, without introducing latency or sluggishness. The aim is to provide a tool that is both incredibly powerful and user-friendly, focusing on minimalism in the UX.

How does the speaker feel about the traditional trade-off between powerful IDEs and faster editors?

The speaker has always been frustrated with the trade-off, as powerful IDEs often come with a cost of slowness and a cluttered UI. The dream is to have a tool that is both incredibly powerful and fast, without sacrificing performance for the sake of features or minimalism.

What is the speaker's analogy for the ideal user experience in an editor?

The speaker uses the analogy of a Model S Tesla, where the door handle pops out when needed but is tucked away when not in use, to illustrate the ideal user experience of having features available when needed without creating drag or clutter.

How has the landscape for editors and IDEs changed over the past 10-15 years?

The landscape has changed significantly with the introduction of language servers and technologies like Treesitter, which have allowed editors to gain language-aware features and smarter syntax understanding without the traditional bloat of IDEs.

What is the speaker's vision for the future of Zed in terms of collaboration?

The speaker envisions Zed integrating more concerns related to collaboration, moving away from the traditional IDE model where everything is bundled into one experience, and instead focusing on a more seamless and efficient workflow that acknowledges the existence of other people and collaboration.

What does the speaker think about the concept of 'opinionated' software?

The speaker is cautious about being too opinionated, as they do not want to dictate a single way of doing things. However, they do believe in innovating and offering a better way of doing things when they are confident in their vision.

How does the speaker feel about the addition of emojis or pixelated emojis in Zed?

The speaker is open to adding emojis or pixelated emojis as long as it aligns with the aesthetic of Zed and does not detract from the overall user experience. The decision would be made based on community feedback and the value it adds to the users.

What is the speaker's stance on the integration of web technology in Zed?

The speaker is hesitant about integrating web technology due to concerns about slowing down Zed. However, they acknowledge that certain utilities provided by web technology could be valuable and are open to exploring these options carefully.

How does the speaker view the role of the community in the development of Zed?

The speaker highly values the community's engagement and feedback, as it provides insights into how Zed is used in the real world and helps shape the development of the software to better meet user needs.

What is the speaker's approach to handling feature requests and potential over-complication of Zed?

The speaker is cautious about adding features that might complicate Zed or slow it down. They prefer to maintain a focus on core features and performance, and are willing to remove or refactor features that do not align with the vision of a fast and minimal editor.