Why don't you just not use the stuff Zed has that you don't need?
Zeds codebase is a real complicated beast and one of Grams reason for forking is so that the author can "learn to use Rust for serious projects". If Zed were to change its license now, will Gram ever be able to stand on its own?
Wouldn't that just incentivize them to keep building more and more and more and more AI features? I wish to reward the people who build for me, so that they will build more for me. The pitch behind Gram is that it's a hard fork where all the engineering effort still is focused on human use.
Zed's AI features and subscription provide the means to afford development. I don't think it makes the editor any worse, regardless if you make use of these features.
That means Gram is also made possible by Zed's AI features, because without Zed there's no Gram. Besides the "engineering effort" of Gram is just ripping out features.
If you get a bug in Gram, where do you report it? And who will fix it?
If you get a bug in Gram, where do you report it? And who will fix it?
You can report it at codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram. It’s true that the editor is provided as-is and there are no warranties. You are of course welcome to try to fix any issues you encounter yourself. Anyone is welcome to submit patches to Gram.
My main concern is that Zed has thousands of open issues. And that Zeds development is closely tight with gpui which doesn't accept many contributions.
I'll be impressed though if Gram manages to implement a solution for 54150. The Zed team has refused many decent proposals and it's infuriating. Hell knowing a solution would be accepted I might try a PR for Gram myself.
This should be solved in Gram main now, we’ve done a lot of work (including merging variants of some of the proposals that Zed rejected, like falling back to polling)
Well I can't speak for the other person, but I am actually building my own IDE because I feel like neither VSCode nor Zed fully captured the dream behind Atom. I'm trying to build the hackable IDE of the future
Zed LLM features where not part of their initial pitch. It is not what secured them features. They are now adding more LLM features in the hopes to secure more funding. But the bulk of the work was not payed by money given them to them to develop LLM integrations.
Also the focus on LLM features means they have to de prioritize other things like bug fixing. Which many Zed used complain about. So it's no like their pivot to LLM isn't affecting their users (whether or not they use the LLM features being prioritized)
A more likely scenario is they're spending the ~$45M they raised on CRDTs and the rest of their roadmap. They're probably capable of juggling bug fixes with whatever other features they want to include.
Actually, while typing this out I found their explicit response to you: We're Not Building AI Features for the Money. Seems like they're implementing these LLM features.... because they like using LLMs! Who could've guessed?
Actually, while typing this out I found their explicit response to you: We're Not Building AI Features for the Money.
That response seem more apt to the parent, whose claim is
Zed's AI features and subscription provide the means to afford development.
My claim is that their initial value proposition was something else (remote collaboration), and later they pivoted to LLM.
That said your tone seems to be suggesting that you're under the impression that I've said things I haven't. Like people that work and Zed don't use LLMs and that there is some sort of hidden motive behind their pivot to LLM?
When I depend on a project, I prefer their focus to be on things I care about. At the very least, I want their focus to not be on things I actively try to avoid. Therefore, Zed is a completely uninteresting project to me.
The Gram project, however, is aligned with my needs and values.
I'm a happy Gram user after switching to it away from Neovim.
Do you know how relaxing it is without the daily “update available” and “view release notes” ritual? There is nothing I dread more than release notes.
These days you can just auto-close them in VSCode, because you can be 99% sure it's more agentic stuff. I'm not sure when was the last time I've seen any feature that actually improved my workflow. Heck, we could even say "affected", because to me it feels like VSC hasn't meaningfully changed in years, besides what the AI craze brought in.
All I know is that I can place my text cursor and read the surrounding code without a bombardment of popovers, pop-unders, pop-left-and-rights, pop-inlines, pop-in-and-out-too-fast-to-sees.
Odd to see the author seemingly being so averse to LSPs, they are useful and deterministic tools. I can totally understand being dismayed that your editor is slowly being turned into "a prompt with an editor tacked on", but not only do these popovers predate the whole AI craze, I can't personally imagine myself developing without them, it's so much smoother to see errors highlighted and signatures always available, than the old "make edit -> compile -> check errors -> fix errors -> recompile -> repeat" loop.
I don’t see any aversion to Language Servers, only to having the editor move things around and pop things up by itself all the time. Turn off things like inlay hints and inline colour swatches and automatic tooltips and only activate them manually, then there’s no problem.
If that were the author's argument, I'd agree, I also don't like being knocked out of focus by over-eager tooling. But the OP isn't arguing for configuring your editor to be less nosy, rather:
It’s been a few weeks since I returned to Sublime Text. It does everything I need. There is not a single “feature” I’ve missed from VS Code or Zed. Many I’m glad to see the back of.
The perfect dev stack is a collection of software that each does one job and doesn’t suffer main character syndrome. I want to code, I’m not looking to make lifestyle choices. I don’t want a bloated everything app. Don’t get me started on the “unified toolchain” plague! Show me the latest VC-backed build tool and I’ll show you ten lines of PHP that does a better job.
This to me implies that the author wants their text editor to be strictly a text editor (perhaps with syntax highlighting) and nothing more.
Personally, the contrast is close to ideal, text is easy to parse, the varying sections are well distinguished, and the color scheme pops in a way that’s fun and not distracting.
The one feature I can't live without is: remote ssh, remote wsl, remote containers.
The ability, from my desktop, to open code from any of my machines, and drag'n'drop files or copy/paste code between them as if they were all on my local machine? It's very valuable to me.
One problem with this when used with Sublime Text, is that if you're mounting a remote directory with a significant number of files in it, Sublime Text will basically lock-up while it tries to do whatever internal indexing stuff that it does (which you cannot disable). The extra file I/O latency (even when it's just a few milliseconds) ends up being far too much for Sublime Text in my experience.
I remember following Skinner's blog (almost 19 years ago, jeez) where he describes quitting his cozy job at Google to work on a new editor called Sublime Text.
Multiple cursors and other niceties quickly turned me into a paying customer to support the effort. Still use it occasionally (without the unregistered version nag dialog you sometimes see pop up in talks haha)
yarp. I used to be a BBEdit user, but I very much knew and cared who was behind that. (There also wasn't a good mac vim when I started using that.) Beyond knowing who was behind it, these days, it'd be table stakes for me to have a good vim mode.
I can place my text cursor and read the surrounding code without a bombardment of popovers, pop-unders, pop-left-and-rights, pop-inlines, pop-in-and-out-too-fast-to-sees.
Base Vi/Vim/Neovim are all like this. If we are inflicted with Windows, Notepad and Notepad++ are all like this. I now dislike VS Code because of aesthetics (why must I run a browser underneath my text editor) but found it powerful and programmable when i was using it, but surely all these pop-up things are a result of plugins which can be not installed or re-configured? Or does VS Code come preinstalled with too many plugins now?
They didn't make 'em like Sublime Text even when Sublime Text was new. What was its competition around 2010... Visual Studio, Eclipse, and Atom? CodeBlocks? IntelliJ was okay, there's always vim and emacs, but as far as I recall if you wanted a lightweight graphical editor besides that you were probably using Notepad++, or at least I was.
It's the same effect as "music for the X0s was so much better!" That's not the case, it's that even the "bad" songs that endured enough to be remembered are actually good (or have a memorable gimmick), while all the crap fell into the memory hole. (Of course, there was also a gatekeeper in the shape of music execs filtering what actually made it to the wider public, while now we do have the internet and self-publishing, which may or may not skew the ratio of good to bad, and we have LLM generated music that certainly skews bad.)
Yeah I vividly remember realizing that a decade ago, hanging out with my mom as she nostalgia-binged a bunch of music from her childhood. I went from "woah there's all this 60s and 70s rock I've never even heard of" to "oh I see why I've never heard of it".
Nothing to do with the point of the article, but that's a lovely still from Star Wars. I don't think I've ever seen that meme in such high quality before. Nice job.
I mean sublime is solid but its UI system is absolute dogshit. Inflexible, inconsistent, janky, simply not up the standards of today (like Zed’s for instance). Same goes for Sublime Merge.
I hear and read about Sublime Text quite often, but I can't quite get it. I've tried to multiple times for a few days, but it doesn't seem to have anything beyond what other editors offer, albeit a bit faster. It looks nice, I do like the file browser, but I always keep going back to emacs. I guess that's where I feel comfortable and there is nothing groundbreaking that would pull me away.
If someone can shine some light on why Sublime Text, I'd like to know what I should try with it next time.
I think it's a bit more than that. It seems like the top priority is "how can we render at 60fps with no stutter," with everything else being secondary. You get used to this smoothness over time, come to expect it in other editors, and get annoyed when it isn't there.
I also find that Sublime has the best-looking text rendering of all the editors I've tried. As far as I can tell the default settings offer good character density without being too crowded; it's something I was unable to replicate in VSCode or RustRover.
Finally, since the UI doesn't even support the visual chaos that other editors can have, it is quite calming to look at in comparison. Stare at it long enough, and you almost get the sensation that you're looking at code printed on paper rather than an interactive application.
I can't compare it to emacs, since I really haven't used that. However, Sublime's IDE features are quite limited and are almost entirely dependent on its plugin system. It's probably Sublime's weakest point (along with its inflexible UI rendering). If you're expecting those features you'll be disappointed -- its strength is rendering and editing, not anything beyond that.
Main thing why I like sublime text and sublime merge is a feeling of finished product. It's reliable, predictable, fast and somewhat minimal, sublime is mostly the same for a long period of time.
After a multi-year detour wading through the quagmire of bloatware that is modern software I’m back to coding in Sublime Text
Me too! Actually, since I started using more coding agents from the terminal I found the need to just have a simple text editor to easily (and comfortably) navigate a codebase without too much fluff, and Sublime keeps being my favourite
I used sublime as my "quick edit" editor (for standalone file edits, for working on full projects i use vscode), but i ultimately didn't like it.
I have switched to KDE's Kate for this use-case, which works well and is fast, even under windows.
The only time Kate lagged was when I pasted in 38 000 lines of CSS, lol.
For in-terminal quick edits, I like using micro.
rkaw92 | 16 days ago
I recently discovered Gram, a Zed fork. Seems like it scratches the same itch.
kwas | 16 days ago
For something a lil more mac-assed there's also the nimble https://coteditor.com/
jmc | 16 days ago
+1 to Gram. Zed is a great editor! ...too bad it has all the other stuff I don't need or want. Gram fixes that problem.
Levitating | 16 days ago
Why don't you just not use the stuff Zed has that you don't need?
Zeds codebase is a real complicated beast and one of Grams reason for forking is so that the author can "learn to use Rust for serious projects". If Zed were to change its license now, will Gram ever be able to stand on its own?
conartist6 | 16 days ago
Wouldn't that just incentivize them to keep building more and more and more and more AI features? I wish to reward the people who build for me, so that they will build more for me. The pitch behind Gram is that it's a hard fork where all the engineering effort still is focused on human use.
Levitating | 16 days ago
Zed's AI features and subscription provide the means to afford development. I don't think it makes the editor any worse, regardless if you make use of these features.
That means Gram is also made possible by Zed's AI features, because without Zed there's no Gram. Besides the "engineering effort" of Gram is just ripping out features.
If you get a bug in Gram, where do you report it? And who will fix it?
krig | 16 days ago
You can report it at codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram. It’s true that the editor is provided as-is and there are no warranties. You are of course welcome to try to fix any issues you encounter yourself. Anyone is welcome to submit patches to Gram.
Levitating | 15 days ago
My main concern is that Zed has thousands of open issues. And that Zeds development is closely tight with gpui which doesn't accept many contributions.
I'll be impressed though if Gram manages to implement a solution for 54150. The Zed team has refused many decent proposals and it's infuriating. Hell knowing a solution would be accepted I might try a PR for Gram myself.
krig | 15 days ago
This should be solved in Gram main now, we’ve done a lot of work (including merging variants of some of the proposals that Zed rejected, like falling back to polling)
conartist6 | 16 days ago
Well I can't speak for the other person, but I am actually building my own IDE because I feel like neither VSCode nor Zed fully captured the dream behind Atom. I'm trying to build the hackable IDE of the future
PuercoPop | 16 days ago
Zed LLM features where not part of their initial pitch. It is not what secured them features. They are now adding more LLM features in the hopes to secure more funding. But the bulk of the work was not payed by money given them to them to develop LLM integrations.
Also the focus on LLM features means they have to de prioritize other things like bug fixing. Which many Zed used complain about. So it's no like their pivot to LLM isn't affecting their users (whether or not they use the LLM features being prioritized)
jado | 16 days ago
A more likely scenario is they're spending the ~$45M they raised on CRDTs and the rest of their roadmap. They're probably capable of juggling bug fixes with whatever other features they want to include.
Actually, while typing this out I found their explicit response to you: We're Not Building AI Features for the Money. Seems like they're implementing these LLM features.... because they like using LLMs! Who could've guessed?
PuercoPop | 15 days ago
That response seem more apt to the parent, whose claim is
My claim is that their initial value proposition was something else (remote collaboration), and later they pivoted to LLM.
That said your tone seems to be suggesting that you're under the impression that I've said things I haven't. Like people that work and Zed don't use LLMs and that there is some sort of hidden motive behind their pivot to LLM?
hjvt | 16 days ago
I don't trust VC funded software with no clear way to profitability.
mort | 15 days ago
When I depend on a project, I prefer their focus to be on things I care about. At the very least, I want their focus to not be on things I actively try to avoid. Therefore, Zed is a completely uninteresting project to me.
The Gram project, however, is aligned with my needs and values.
I'm a happy Gram user after switching to it away from Neovim.
jmc | 16 days ago
It works for me now, so if it were frozen in time I'd be fine for as long as it works. My main editor is Helix anyway.
loige | 16 days ago
I love they also have official wallpapers on the Gram's website. Gave me the nostalgia I didn't know I needed...
alper | 15 days ago
Thanks for this. I could really use something bare but good.
nemin | 16 days ago
These days you can just auto-close them in VSCode, because you can be 99% sure it's more agentic stuff. I'm not sure when was the last time I've seen any feature that actually improved my workflow. Heck, we could even say "affected", because to me it feels like VSC hasn't meaningfully changed in years, besides what the AI craze brought in.
Odd to see the author seemingly being so averse to LSPs, they are useful and deterministic tools. I can totally understand being dismayed that your editor is slowly being turned into "a prompt with an editor tacked on", but not only do these popovers predate the whole AI craze, I can't personally imagine myself developing without them, it's so much smoother to see errors highlighted and signatures always available, than the old "make edit -> compile -> check errors -> fix errors -> recompile -> repeat" loop.
chrismorgan | 16 days ago
I don’t see any aversion to Language Servers, only to having the editor move things around and pop things up by itself all the time. Turn off things like inlay hints and inline colour swatches and automatic tooltips and only activate them manually, then there’s no problem.
nemin | 16 days ago
If that were the author's argument, I'd agree, I also don't like being knocked out of focus by over-eager tooling. But the OP isn't arguing for configuring your editor to be less nosy, rather:
This to me implies that the author wants their text editor to be strictly a text editor (perhaps with syntax highlighting) and nothing more.
alper | 15 days ago
VSCode is one of many examples of how Microsoft cannot help but destroy software. It's where good things go to die.
nemin | 15 days ago
I feel you're exaggerating a little. The app still works just fine, it's just not really receiving any significant non-AI features anymore.
alper | 15 days ago
Code felt nice but now just feels bloated. But also the find in project functionality is still leagues better than whatever the hell Zed is doing.
jamesw | 16 days ago
This website is beautiful
SoapDog | 16 days ago
I agree. I was looking and loving it so much.
loige | 16 days ago
Been following the author for a while and all I can say is that the content is just as good!
ryan-duve | 16 days ago
What particularly do you like about it?
anex9d | 16 days ago
Personally, the contrast is close to ideal, text is easy to parse, the varying sections are well distinguished, and the color scheme pops in a way that’s fun and not distracting.
linkdd | 16 days ago
The one feature I can't live without is: remote ssh, remote wsl, remote containers.
The ability, from my desktop, to open code from any of my machines, and drag'n'drop files or copy/paste code between them as if they were all on my local machine? It's very valuable to me.
orib | 16 days ago
Yeah, this is one of the reasons I use plan 9 as my ide, even when writing Linux code.
junkblocker | 16 days ago
Say more?
Levitating | 16 days ago
You can also just mount your remote machine with sshfs.
gered | 16 days ago
One problem with this when used with Sublime Text, is that if you're mounting a remote directory with a significant number of files in it, Sublime Text will basically lock-up while it tries to do whatever internal indexing stuff that it does (which you cannot disable). The extra file I/O latency (even when it's just a few milliseconds) ends up being far too much for Sublime Text in my experience.
ggpsv | 16 days ago
This is what I have done for a while with proyects running in lxc containers or VMs, which I develop with for varying degrees of isolation.
The only drawback is that in some cases you have to manually reload folders as Sublime can't watch them as if files lived in the host.
Other than it works great, the LSP client can also be configured to use remote LSP servers.
kevinc | 16 days ago
I'll surely be reusing "main character syndrome" to characterize single-window apps that want to be platforms.
cryptocode | 16 days ago
I remember following Skinner's blog (almost 19 years ago, jeez) where he describes quitting his cozy job at Google to work on a new editor called Sublime Text.
Multiple cursors and other niceties quickly turned me into a paying customer to support the effort. Still use it occasionally (without the unregistered version nag dialog you sometimes see pop up in talks haha)
Happy to see the posts are still up: https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/2007/11
sny | 16 days ago
Eh, as long as the software in question is closed source I very much do care.
Apart from that, hard agree to pretty much everything in this post.
hoistbypetard | 16 days ago
yarp. I used to be a BBEdit user, but I very much knew and cared who was behind that. (There also wasn't a good mac vim when I started using that.) Beyond knowing who was behind it, these days, it'd be table stakes for me to have a good vim mode.
kghose | 16 days ago
Base Vi/Vim/Neovim are all like this. If we are inflicted with Windows, Notepad and Notepad++ are all like this. I now dislike VS Code because of aesthetics (why must I run a browser underneath my text editor) but found it powerful and programmable when i was using it, but surely all these pop-up things are a result of plugins which can be not installed or re-configured? Or does VS Code come preinstalled with too many plugins now?
icefox | 16 days ago
They didn't make 'em like Sublime Text even when Sublime Text was new. What was its competition around 2010... Visual Studio, Eclipse, and Atom? CodeBlocks? IntelliJ was okay, there's always vim and emacs, but as far as I recall if you wanted a lightweight graphical editor besides that you were probably using Notepad++, or at least I was.
ekuber | 15 days ago
It's the same effect as "music for the X0s was so much better!" That's not the case, it's that even the "bad" songs that endured enough to be remembered are actually good (or have a memorable gimmick), while all the crap fell into the memory hole. (Of course, there was also a gatekeeper in the shape of music execs filtering what actually made it to the wider public, while now we do have the internet and self-publishing, which may or may not skew the ratio of good to bad, and we have LLM generated music that certainly skews bad.)
icefox | 15 days ago
Yeah I vividly remember realizing that a decade ago, hanging out with my mom as she nostalgia-binged a bunch of music from her childhood. I went from "woah there's all this 60s and 70s rock I've never even heard of" to "oh I see why I've never heard of it".
kwas | 15 days ago
AIUI it was really just platform specific editors. Notepad++, Kate, BBEdit, TextMate, the like.
rainbow_bird | 16 days ago
Nothing to do with the point of the article, but that's a lovely still from Star Wars. I don't think I've ever seen that meme in such high quality before. Nice job.
ale | 16 days ago
I mean sublime is solid but its UI system is absolute dogshit. Inflexible, inconsistent, janky, simply not up the standards of today (like Zed’s for instance). Same goes for Sublime Merge.
fengshaun | 16 days ago
I hear and read about Sublime Text quite often, but I can't quite get it. I've tried to multiple times for a few days, but it doesn't seem to have anything beyond what other editors offer, albeit a bit faster. It looks nice, I do like the file browser, but I always keep going back to emacs. I guess that's where I feel comfortable and there is nothing groundbreaking that would pull me away.
If someone can shine some light on why Sublime Text, I'd like to know what I should try with it next time.
stip | 16 days ago
I think it's a bit more than that. It seems like the top priority is "how can we render at 60fps with no stutter," with everything else being secondary. You get used to this smoothness over time, come to expect it in other editors, and get annoyed when it isn't there.
I also find that Sublime has the best-looking text rendering of all the editors I've tried. As far as I can tell the default settings offer good character density without being too crowded; it's something I was unable to replicate in VSCode or RustRover.
Finally, since the UI doesn't even support the visual chaos that other editors can have, it is quite calming to look at in comparison. Stare at it long enough, and you almost get the sensation that you're looking at code printed on paper rather than an interactive application.
I can't compare it to emacs, since I really haven't used that. However, Sublime's IDE features are quite limited and are almost entirely dependent on its plugin system. It's probably Sublime's weakest point (along with its inflexible UI rendering). If you're expecting those features you'll be disappointed -- its strength is rendering and editing, not anything beyond that.
binjip978 | 15 days ago
Main thing why I like sublime text and sublime merge is a feeling of finished product. It's reliable, predictable, fast and somewhat minimal, sublime is mostly the same for a long period of time.
aziis98 | 16 days ago
Me too! Actually, since I started using more coding agents from the terminal I found the need to just have a simple text editor to easily (and comfortably) navigate a codebase without too much fluff, and Sublime keeps being my favourite
kraxen72 | 15 days ago
I used sublime as my "quick edit" editor (for standalone file edits, for working on full projects i use vscode), but i ultimately didn't like it. I have switched to KDE's Kate for this use-case, which works well and is fast, even under windows. The only time Kate lagged was when I pasted in 38 000 lines of CSS, lol. For in-terminal quick edits, I like using micro.
jussi | 16 days ago
Last time I checked, I wasn't able to install Sublime Text due to the OpenSSL 1.1 dependency
https://github.com/sublimehq/sublime_text/issues/5984
I'd love to have it, love the UI and functionalities!
citrusui | 15 days ago
Looks like they finally updated OpenSSL per this news post: https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-4200