WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 45599486

(no title)

breadwinner | 4 months ago

I watched the video on the home page and thought it is weird that they spend an inordinate amount of time on frame rate. Who picks an editor based on frame rate?

If you want to talk about perf in the context of a text editor show me how big of a file you can load--especially if the file has no line breaks. Emacs has trouble here. If you load a minified js file it slows to a crawl especially if syntax highlighting is on. Also show me how fast the start up time is. This is another area where Emacs does not do well.

So Zed is available on Windows--but only if you have a x64 processor. Lots of people run Windows on Arm64 and I don't see any mention of Arm64. This is where the puck is heading.

Also noticed Emacs key binding is in beta still.

discuss

order

poly2it|4 months ago

It's not just frame rate, but also input delay. If you're using Visual Studio Code, you might be used to waiting 100 ms for a character you typed to appear. My personal workflow is based on Kitty and Neovim, which I've configured so that it can launch within 20 ms. Working without any input delay allows me to explore and edit projects at typing speed. As such, even tiny delays really bother me and make me lose my flow. I would believe Zed's focus on performance is motivated similarly.

Also, I do not believe Windows on Arm64 is a very large demographic? Especially for developers, unless they're specifically into that platform.

marcosdumay|4 months ago

The only IDE I have used where frame rate is noticeable was Visual Studio (not Code).

Once you are beyond a bare minimum, every other speed metric is more important. Zed does really well on many of those, but some depend on the LSP, so they become the bottleneck quickly.

adastra22|4 months ago

You literally can’t tell the difference in a 20ms delay. That is an order of magnitude lower than the neural feedback loop latency. You may think that you can, but studies don’t back this up.

STKFLT|4 months ago

High frame rates (low frame times, really) are essential to responsiveness which, for those who appreciate it, is going to make much more of a difference day to day than the odd hiccup opening a large file (not that zed does have that issue, I wouldn't know as I haven't tried opening something huge).

adastra22|4 months ago

This is one of those things that make me question whether I experience the world fundamentally differently than many of you.

I have never, ever felt “latency” in editor UI. Any editor UI. It’s editing text for Pete’s sake. I can only type so fast, or read so fast.

breadwinner|4 months ago

That's an interesting take. For whatever reason, frame rate is not one of my complaints about existing editors such as Emacs, VS Code, etc.

1718627440|4 months ago

It's expected for editors to have non-perceivable latency. It's just text, how hard can it be.

bschwindHN|4 months ago

> Who picks an editor based on frame rate?

Me! Frame rate and input latency are very important for a tool I use for hours every day. Obviously that's not the only feature I look for in an editor but if an editor _doesn't_ have it, I skip it. I also try to work on devices with 120Hz displays and above these days.

1718627440|4 months ago

I think the claim is more that an editor is supposed to have an arbitrary good frame rate.

jay_kyburz|4 months ago

Yeah, Kate will choke on a large single line file. Its one of the very few issues I bump into from time to time.

scuff3d|4 months ago

This always makes me laugh. The editor was barely announced two years ago. They've built it from the ground up with native support now for three different operating systems. They're experimenting with some cool new features, and even though I don't care about it I've heard their AI integration is pretty damn good.

But waaaaah they don't support a processor that accounts for probably less then 10% of Windows Machines

breadwinner|4 months ago

Ubiquity is pretty important when you're going to invest in learning a new editor. This is one of the advantages of vim for example. It is available everywhere... linux, windows, terminal, gui, etc.