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---
title: From General Zod to Superman - Crafting Stories in Zed Editor
url: crafting-stories-in-zed-editor.html
date: 2023-05-22T12:00:00+02:00
draft: false
---
Pretentious title! Good start! I have nothing to add to this discussion. I just
like this editor and wanted to write something here that will remind me to
use it again in a while when/if it becomes available for Linux.
**TLDR:** I think this code editor is very cool and has a massive potential.
I hope they don’t mess up with adding a plugin ecosystem to it!
Out of morbid curiosity, I started using the [Zed editor](https://zed.dev/)
on my Mac. Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor developed by
the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter. Written in Rust so it has to be
blazingly fast! 😊 It's a joke, calm down.
Over the past year, I have switched between [Helix editor](https://helix-editor.com/)
and [VS Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/), but for the last couple of
months, I have been using Helix exclusively.
I've been genuinely impressed by Zed. When you open a file, it automatically
detects its type and downloads the corresponding [LSP (language server)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol).
The list of supported languages is not extensive, but it's still impressive.
It's a great example of how to create a product that stays out of your way.
For C development it downloaded [clangd](https://clangd.llvm.org/) and setting
up missing dependencies in code was rather easy. For this project I use
[SDL2](https://www.libsdl.org/) for rendering terminal emulator. It’s a
hobby project, don’t worry about it.
If you are going to give this a try and you are using C, I suggest checking
two files in the root of your project folder. If you don't have them,
create them.
**compile_flags.txt**
```
-I/opt/homebrew/include
-I/opt/homebrew/include/SDL2
```
Easy way of checking what the appropriate includes for a specific library is
to use `pkg-config` and in my case `pkg-config SDL2 --cflags-only-I`. But this
is nothing new to C/C++ devs. Just a noter for people who are using Visual
Studio.
**.clang-format**
```
ColumnLimit: 220
BasedOnStyle: Mozilla
```
I prefer Mozilla coding style for C so you can set that up.
They really have something special here. Although there is no version available
for Linux yet, I will stick to Helix. This impressive piece of engineering is,
above all, an amazing example of craftsmanship.
They have a bunch of amazing integrated functionalities like live desktop
sharing, code sharing in a live coding session. There is a lot of pretentious
marketing speak there but the product is still amazing!
For me the speed and the simplicity of the product was the most impressive
thing. You get that: it just works feeling. A rare thing in 2023.
They also managed to add [Github Copilot](https://github.com/features/copilot)
in a non obtrusive way. To me, everything feels very intentional and
specifically selected. It's minimal yet maximally effective.
<video src="https://zed.dev/img/post/copilot/copilot-demo.webm" autoplay loop></video>
It is a perfect balance between VS Code, Jetbrains IDE’s and something like
VIM or Helix.
I just hope they **DON’T** add plugin support and keep it like it is. They as a
vendor should add stuff to it with great deliberation and thought. And this
way the product will stay fast and focused. That’s my two cents.
Amazing job!
|
