I don’t think it will dethrone Neovim for me, but this makes me wonder whether Kate could become my second editor and allow me to largely drop VS Code, especially with the DAP support. The session support also looks interesting.
I have been using neovim extensively for past several years. I also use vscode occasionally. Last year I tried Zed and was very impressed with its speed, responsiveness and featureset. Now it is available for Linux has well, but I have not tried linux version yet.
I use Kate only causally for some small temporary text snippets. I use Neovim with DAP fine using nvim-dap + nvim-dap-ui. I also recently started using LSP in neovim, and it's actually pretty powerful.
I should honestly give DAP a try in Neovim. I think DAP being newer, seemingly getting less attention than other elaborate technologies to integrate like LSP or Treesitter, and having a more complex UI made me suspect it might not be reliable. Adding a DAP plugin to a secondary editor also feels less risky. But it sounds like my concerns may have been addressed, if not overblown all along.
If you worry about it interfering with other stuff, you can lazy load nvim-dap + nvim-dap-ui on demand (using lazy.nvim for example), but it's not really interfering with what I use in my experience.
Plus I use sessions for key mappings, i.e. temporary sets of mappings used for debugging for example, which can be reset to what they were after debugging is finished. This way you can assign a bunch of common combos for stuff like step in / step out without it messing up other existing mappings which you can restore after you are done.
I have tried zed, and promptly uninstalled once I saw it was automatically downloading and running nodejs. I want an editor that is lightweight, not one that starts running extra crap I neither need nor want in the background. That was on top of the big focus on LLM integration (itself already a significant negative for me), but which I was willing to overlook to try out the rest.
I don't think Zed is very good in its current state. Too much extra cruft out of the box which you need to disable.
Using a runtime doesn't automatically mean it's bloat. I mean, do you uninstall Python from your system immediately after installing a distro?
I would much rather an editor provide as many runtimes as possible for plugins, so that developers from all walks of life can contribute. This is largely the success story of Neovim, which lets you interface with it in 7 different languages. Most editors that are constrained to only one language for plugins have a completely barren ecosystem.
Are you sure that was Zed? I see that it's 98.3% coded in Rust. But if you're right and it still depends on node.js, I'll have to scratch that off my list.
It was definitely Zed. I forget what it was that used node.js, and I was able to disable that with some effort. But it annoyed me because I shouldn't have to, you know? In my opinion the default out of the box install should be sleek and not use many resources, and only add more stuff if I ask for it.
We use node.js to run a number of language servers and formatters (which are often written in node due to the VSCode ancestry...).
There've been a lot of requests to disable language servers by default; but I think that's not the right default for most users – things should work out of the box.
That said, better control over this is definitely something we will add.
You're right, I just checked the Arch package and it has a non-optional dependency on the nodejs package[1], which means you're forced to install it even if you don't use it. That sucks. :(
I actively avoid any desktop app that uses JS, yes. I find it to be a silly design choice to use a web language (which the vast majority of people, even its creator, agree is not very good) outside of the context of a web environment. And in my experience such apps are serious memory hogs (like VS Code which takes something like 1 GB of memory to display the same files that take Sublime Text 300 MB).
Fasterthanlime recommended it a while back on Mastodon so that did pique my interest. The focus on AI kind of put me off Zed, though. I don’t know whether that’s fair—I see one of their blog posts touts “Out of Your Face AI”—but that was my reaction.
Well, I use KDE for a while now, but one thing I've always tried to avoid was Kate ;-)
My primary editor is vim (cli), and my secondary editor is kwrite. Nowadays, I think kwrite is part of the Kate package, just simpler, as I don't like the whole session feature when you just want to edit a single file.
