Post by Veronica Olsen 🍂

After setting up Catppuccin Mocha for Zed, I did switch to the same theme in VSCode though. I think that may be as much change as I can handle.

After all, for a developer, there is no single thing you spend more time in your life looking at than your code editor. Even if I'm no longer primarily a developer, I still spend a lot of time in front of it.

And yes, my playing around with IDEs today was prompted by your post earlier, @iamkonstantin 😁

I mostly played around with Neovim today.

@veronica Oh I'm so sorry 🙈. I really didn't mean to unlock a sidequest 😂

@iamkonstantin Haha, I didn't have dinner till around 22 last night thanks to you!

But really, I've been testing other IDEs on and off for months, so this was merely a nudge.

@veronica I come from Emacs (which was fine for C, PHP and Python stuff 10+ years ago). Then had a longer flirt with Eclipse as I got into C++ before landing on vscodium. Both of them with Emacs "mode" enabled. The "Awesome Emacs" addon is definitely one of the best ones.

I do have Zed high up on the list to check out for real. But,yeah, it's really hard to switch... So much emotions attached to the editor ...

@dazo What bothers me the most with VSCode, aside from the whole Electron bloatware thing which is a rant for another time, is that they went from thorough monthly releases to weekly slopware releases, and almost exclusively focus on AI features, which I have anyway turned off.

Zed is also highly AI focused, but I like that it is easy to configure with local models if I ever wanted to. (I really dislike AI auto-complete. It's easily the most annoying feature ever added to IDEs.)

@veronica Yeah agreed! The Electron bloat is bad, but amazingly enough better than the Java JVM in Eclipse. I do love the snappiness of Zed, but is fairly annoyed by its AI embracing.

@dazo At least it's easy to turn off. I guess for IDEs, it's better to have some competition for the Nazi-tech from xAI. I'm still pushing for people to get off Cursor at work.

@veronica @dazo As an alternative to Zed is the fork https://gram-editor.com

@aslakr @dazo Thanks for the tip! Someone actually told me the same thing earlier today. I should check it out.

@veronica Tried PyCharm? Generally preconfigured to be "ready to use" for most usecases. The stuff Jetbrains makes is generally some of the best you can get.

If you want a zed / neovim like editor that is a tad easier to start with, Helix could be a good option.

@lettosprey I really dislike PyCharm's UI, so I am not considering it, no.

@veronica That makes sense. It's quite a "workbench" compared to the others. For Kotlin development, it is hard to find a good alternative, and it is the default tool at work.

I moved from Zed to Helix for Gleam projects. It seems to mostly work "out of the box". I still end up depending on an external git tool with neovim / zed / helix, though.

@lettosprey Yeah, I prefer at least some level of minimalism. Most traditional IDEs are in the opposite end of that spectrum. I haven't used Visual Studio in a couple of decades, but it at least used to be awful. I can't remember what we had at CERN, but I think it may have been Eclipse, which has the same problem.

@veronica i keep promising myself that when i reach a reasonable stage in my project, I'll move from the ever declining JetBrains Golang to something lightweight and stable.

@chris_e_simpson Oops, deleted my post because I managed to misunderstand you as saying JetBrains was lightweight, which made no sense to me. 😅

My former colleague's poor laptop used to overheat and crash if he opened two instances of PyCharm at the same time.

@veronica you're aware of the neovim controversies? Maintainer didn't feel any urge to remove DHHs praise of neovim and was even fairly condescending to people who asked for removing it.

@dazo Ah, right, I knew I picked up something bad about it somewhere. Yeah, that's pretty shitty.

@veronica have you considered sublime text? I know it’s not free, but it’s constantly my go to. The lsp extensions give enough functionality for me.

@ogi The price tag is not a problem since it's one-off, but how is the extension infrastructure?

@veronica depends on what you’re looking for. Since there is a lsp plugin/extension you can get things like pylance or other linter plugins without issue (I can even get linting on OpenGL stuff!) There are plenty of color scheme/theme options. You can configure “projects” with custom “build” commands but I generally don’t do that. It took a little work getting the Python linting stuff to work right (due to me using pyenv primarily).

The plugin/extension infrastructure isn’t anything like vscode though.

The “remote development” tooling offerings are pretty weak, but I’m ok with that.

@ogi At home I mostly do Python+Qt and some C++, so I don't need a lot of extensions. Most of my extensions are formats, like XML, rst, toml, and so on. It's a little more complicated at work, but I don't think I'll switch there yet. Especially not to one that requires a license. That's always a pain to deal with at work.

@veronica I started with https://helix-editor.com/, looks great, and noticed the same thing, it’s difficult to switch.

@mpejcoch I should give it a try then. A colleague tried to switch from Neovim to Helix, but gave up.