[sanskritical]

If you want an example of an actually lightweight modern desktop editor to take inspiration from, try zed.dev

Zed is written in Rust, insanely fast, consumes virtually no resources, has an Emacs input mode (which I use exclusively) and despite not having the greatest support for Emacs LISP (only via limited third party extension, its singular flaw) has replaced emacs-ng as my daily driver.

[kurouna]

Thank you for the comment and the suggestion!

I have actually tried Zed, and I completely agree with you—it is an outstanding product. Its speed and incredibly low memory footprint are truly impressive.

However, while it does feature an Emacs input mode, I found that the range of supported Emacs commands is still somewhat limited. Because of this restriction, I couldn't quite operate it with the same feel and depth as a dedicated Emacs environment.

That being said, Zed is definitely a masterpiece of modern desktop editors, and its architecture is highly inspiring!

[gozzoo]

I’ll never get why people hype up Zed. Sublime Text already has all the same perks—and beats Zed at the very things it claims to improve. Sure, it might not have every advanced feature, but for “vibe coders” who don’t need a full IDE and just want to skim or tweak generated code, Sublime Text is the better choice.

[sanskritical]

Someone already mentioned the hoarderware issue, which is big for me, so I'll give my other concern.

Years ago on Twitter I believe it was lcamtuf that asked "Would you pipe a text file into less?" and Dan Kaminsky (RIP) replied -- "Not now that you asked if I would, no." The obvious implication is that people largely didn't think of simple text parsing utilities as places of concern for security issues, but that is not really in line with reality. I work with crypto and it seriously matters if I got owned in that I can lose amounts of money entrusted to me that I could never hope to recover or repay. I believe it is a basic fiduciary duty to use as much code as possible written in safer languages. Sublime Text is a massive C++ app and I can't look at the code. I am going to preferentially treat the Rust app as better. There's plenty of CVEs in editors. If I could I would replace every binary written in an unsafe language on every machine I ever use.

My editor touches every bit of infrastructure I have. I use it every day to change the behavior of production machines. I have no choice to treat my editor as trusted. So it needs to be trustworthy to the maximum degree possible.

[wiseowise]

Zed is open source and free (as in beer), to start with.