Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim

> Yes, this is awful and something the default should've changed

> years ago instead of continuing this massive collective time waste.

This doesn't seem feasible, because that would go against the culture and long-term practice of doing things. That's why approach of "starting from scratch and doing it right without the baggage" like Helix's works so much better.

I think I'm actively trying to not do anything dynamic/complicated. :)

If Zed breaks things too much in the future (to the point that its JSON config doesn't let me do something I need to get my work done) I'll probably go back to using Neovim. We'll see how it plays out over time. For now I'm enjoying having less configuration knobs.

> Lua is great, but one JSON file is even better

Yeah that single line makes me doubt the whole post, how can a format without comments be an upgrade to any configuration file is beyond me. My customized configs were full of ‘this was broken on this day by something else, link to obscure thread’ before I accepted the way of default.

> I try Zed and VSCode and I always come back to this setup.

I have Ctrl+` set to switch focus between the editor and the terminal panes in VSCode, so I can toggle between them pretty easily as this is also my workflow

If anyone's wondering, here's what I have in my keybindings.json

    {
        "key": "ctrl+`",
        "command": "workbench.action.terminal.focus"
    },
    {
        "key": "ctrl+`",
        "command": "workbench.action.focusActiveEditorGroup",
        "when": "terminalFocus"
    },

Another (neo)vim+tmuxer chiming in. One major missing feature (compared to vscode) is opening file links from the terminal back in vim. It was such a major pain to me, so I ended up writing a tmux plugin to solve it. I thought you might find it useful - https://github.com/artemave/tmux_super_fingers

I've always just closed vim to use the terminal, and started it up again to go back to editing. I find it difficult to operate any other way.

I know people who use ^Z to suspend vim and then foreground it again.

Yeah the tmux / vim combo is so hard for me to beat with other editors still. I used Zed exclusively last month thinking the LLM integrations would be a compelling enough reason to finally switch. Like the post author, I'm a little fatigued with config / plugin churn since I switch languages frequently and it always takes some customizing to make vim work well when I do that.

As the author describes though, I found myself copy-pasting a lot between LLM chat and editing buffers. In tmux, I have a really simple function that copies select panes (using tmux capture-pane) into my prompt, or I can give it full files for context. Most of the time though, I can do something like `llm -t 0 -t 1 'what is this libSSL error indicating? here's my code', where -t 0 gives it my vim pane and -t 1 gives it the terminal I'm running things in. I've been surprised that this somewhat rudimentary approach has felt far more effective than the more sophisticated editors I've been trying.

Is this just me? Does it seem to others that the LLM-enabled editors coming out these days still require a lot of copy-pasting of context that can be easily provided with just a dump of tmux output?

Everything-is-just-text might be crude but dang does it make quick and dirty LLM integrations a snap!

i had the same workflow but now i use zed w/ tmux (tmux inside the zed terminal)

What I find strange about an open source product funded by VC money is that all of the people are helping make it a better editor and yet when they eventually exit none of the money will go to them.

Compare that to vim where it's truly an open source product.

Back in the '90s I would customize my development environment to within an inch of its life, but after going from one machine to the next, one toolchain to the next, one operating system to the next, year after year, culminating in one ridiculous six-month period when I had to pave my dev machine and reinstall everything from scratch every two weeks (yes, this was stupid; yes, I knew it was stupid at the time; no, I had no way out of it, not if I wanted to keep my job) - I learned that adapting myself to the defaults was a lot less work than adapting the settings to me.

Or, to put it another way: every step you take away from the mainstream has a cost, so you had better know how much you are willing to pay and budget your quirks accordingly.

>I will never understand how you go back from a very customized editor setup

because when the very customized setup inevitably breaks the amount of headache you have is roughly proportionate to the amount of customization, whereas software with strong defaults tends to deal with that for you.

This is particularly the case with neovim which, in almost deliberate defiance of any systems thinking, just tends to consist of a few dozen moving parts loosely tied together and you have to sort of pray that updating some doesn't just break things. Paraphrasing Russ Ackhoff, if you take the best part of every car and put it together you don't get the best car, you get something that doesn't even drive, this is how I've felt more than once with very bespoke editor setups

> I will never understand how you go back from a very customized editor setup to the one with "reasonable defaults with little to no things to configure".

That's one of the reasons why I chose Vim over Emacs after switching back and forth for a while.

I do prefer the design of Emacs because I prefer having full control over my environment - I even coded more than a couple of tiny, application-specific editors - but sometimes I have better things to do than e.g. reading docs or searching for a plugin/extension mod that does what I need, or do it myself; sometimes I am a mere luser who want things to "just work" out-of-the-box.

Surround is amazing. I agree that all these vim modes are nice, but nothing beats the real thing.

Avante is much more active and polished at this point, but there's alternatives:

https://github.com/baketnk/l.nvim (self-shill, docs overhaul needed)

which was inspired by the original:

https://github.com/yacineMTB/dingllm.nvim

Also brand new from ggerganov: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vim

dingllm is very straightforward, you submit your entire selection/buffer and it streams out to the current position. mine is a bit more complex with configurations, context management and so on.

The thing I always tell people is just roll your own. The docs are there, the LLM is there, use them. At the end of the day it's just an http call against text from your buffer to put text in a buffer.

Still early days, but something to watch.

https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim

If you want something like composer but want to stay fully FOSS/CLI oriented, check out https://github.com/ai-christianson/RA.Aid

Copilot has a vim extension that works quite nicely, but doesn't do all the things that cursor does.

I’ve been pretty happy with aider. I have it running in a separate tmux window and can switch between it and nvim easily.

What is cursor in this context? A vim plugin?

codecompanion.nvim is pretty cool.

I use Neovim with Copilot assistant plugins all the time for work