Zed: The Next Phase
Thanks for posting, and great work so far! Unfortunately, I encountered a few deal-breaker issues with Zed. So here are a few criticisms, if this helps you improve the project (but by no means let this detract from the current success of a great project!):<p>1. IMO you're using the wrong text matching algorithm for file search. This is pretty critical, considering it's the main interface for opening files.<p>Zed seems to search for simple text substrings only, whereas both Sublime Text 2 and Xcode look for the longest common subsequence. This is <i>huge</i>, for me at least; in Xcode or ST2 I can type the first few letters of one of my files, followed by a few more letters from different words in it, followed by ".cpp" and it finds the file.<p>Zed (as is) is completely unusable to me, because my project folder contains many similarly named files (.h, .cpp) as well as a ton of other source files from external libraries/modules with similar sub-words with what I'm searching for which for some reason always show up first and saturate the search results. With Zed there's no way to narrow down to what I'm looking for besides typing in the full name of the file. With ST2 or Xcode this is not a problem due to LCS.<p>2. This is not your fault necessarily, but it's a big deal to me: Text rendering is slow in Zed (and in every other web-technology-based code editor I've tried, e.g. Light Table).<p>For example, scrolling is even choppier than Xcode. The primary (if not sole) reason I moved away from Xcode to ST2 was because Xcode's horribly laggy UI was driving me crazy.<p>This is a bit of a personal rant, but we're living in an age with multi-gigaflop CPUs and multi-terraflop GPUs, yet we have somehow regressed to a point where scrolling (of all things) is laggy? IMO this is absurd, as an industry trend in general. For this reason, I generally dislike the trend to write everything (including local apps) in HTML/CSS/JS. These technologies really weren't designed to support this sort of complex dynamic UI. While it's quite impressive what's possible despite this, the stress of forcibly warping HTML/CSS/JS to accomplish some of these UI feats shows through as horrible inefficiency.