Zed code editor hears your prayers, rolls out AI-free mode Zed, a fast new Rust-based text editor aimed at programmers, now lets you totally disable LLM bot integration. We're sure some users will rejoice – but how many? "You Can Now Disable All AI Features in Zed," the developers announced late last week, and by the time you read this, it should be available in the latest build of …
Indeed. I am not a fan of LLMs but one day being able to say "rewrite this Rust (and inevitable many hundred dependencies) into C" will be liberating for so many projects that are plaguing the open-source world currently.
Just think, minor Linux drivers without the shite and .... actually most Rust stuff is perpetually half-finished or irrelevant so it wouldn't really have that much impact come to think of it. Maybe librsvg?
AC because Rust discussions should be limited to niche Reddit groups.
Odd that they had to do something. I just haven't entered my LLM credentials into Zed and well... no LLM interactions from it. I guess they're talking about baked in autocompletes? "LLM stuff" does hog the Command-R shortcut, which I'd like to use for Symbol search (like VS Code).
Whenever I do want to interact with LLMs I fire up VS Code, but Zed is now my primary editor, as I was sick and tired of occasional slowdowns with VS Code.
It's not perfect - out of the box its Python auto-completion is sketchy at best, it lacks easy bookmarking and snippets (there are plugins, I think).
But it's very fast, clutter free and doesn't insist on rising above its station as an editor.
The snippet gap has been taken care of by finding a terminal snippet manager and then writing some glue code to point it to my existing VS Code snippets. My typical workflow is to jump from the terminal to the editor, rather than the reverse, so that works for me. The bookmarking gap is still outstanding.
I've used (recent ones only) Sublime Text, VS Code and Zed and a pre-release, still-not-always-stable, Zed is my preferred option for now. Older ones include KEdit, XEdit (MVS) and, shudder of shudders, Eclipse.
> Can we have this as a global feature in all software? Please?
Sure, but you will need to wait a decade or two, till AI eventually becomes has-been.
Remember a couple years ago when tablets were all the rage? Everybody claimed desktops/laptops would disappear and tablets would replace everything. Microsoft even turned Windows 8 into a tablet OS... And what happened really? By now tablets are a niche product, for specific (mostly home) uses, and most people still work using desktops/laptops.
The same will happen to AI, eventually.
Conflict-free Replicated Data Types is just optimistic replication (like MS Access), with declared convergence.
This works for database types like dates and numbers, but it's not clear to me how it works for paragraphs and sentences. Maybe that is what the AI has been used for? To classify code text into replication tokens?
A lot of sniping going on ... BUT at least you are given the choice !!!
Maybe this will encourage others to do the same and the small cracks in the 'AI' edifice continue to grow until the whole monstrosity comes tumbling down !!!
I say Hurrah for small mercies and please pass on the idea to others !!!
:)
Why would I even go through all the work to switch over to Yet Another Editor that has 'AI Integration!' as one of its primary advertised features? It's obvious where their interests lay (and it's not in letting you disable the LLM).
You're basically voting for the Leopards Eating Faces Party and now we're at the part where they say 'okay we won't eat your face if you say you don't want your face eaten, honest, guv!'
And it's not like I see any reason to switch away from xemacs/notepad++ for this even without all that. Fad editors pop up all the time and re-learning all your muscle memory is a huge deal. I say 'yeah I'll see what's up there in 5 years' and here I am still using xemacs and notepad++. Though yes, I eventually switched from emacs to xemacs, and I switched to notepad++ for Windows, so it can happen. Not seeing anything compelling here, though.
> And it's not like I see any reason to switch away from xemacs/notepad++ for this even without all that.
XEmacs? Really? Still? Why? I'm curious.
I don't have a strong position on this. I prefer not to use programmers' editors for writing. I like something more wordprocessor-like.
I think in a crowded market the shiny new stuff has appeal. It is fast, although I'm not sure it's really much quicker than something old and honed like a Scintilla-based editor (Geany, Notepad++ etc.).
But the collaborative editing and the comms features are quite radical and could have value for teams, even "AI" bollocks aside.
I had the same question, but possibly from a different angle: why XEmacs instead of GNU Emacs? I used XEmacs for a while when GNU Emacs didn't work well on X, but these days GNU Emacs is fine on Linux, MS Windows (although they'd rather you didn't) and (for all I know) macOS as well.
For the wider question of "why Emacs?", personally it's because I've been using it since 1987 and my fingers know their way around it. I've picked up enough vi(m) to get by for simple tasks and these days I do my paid work in IntelliJ IDEA, but Emacs is where I'm most comfortable for general text-wrangling.
Started using emacs in 1984, basically stayed in all day for email, editing, file transfer etc. knocking up ad-hoc macros.
Now because I can’t guarantee what going to be on any machine and I’m forced to use Windros. The muscle memory has about gone, I end up with vi or nano in a container, though I do set the command line editor to emacs or gmacs, ‘cos I loathe vi. Each to their own I don’t want to restart that old war.
> I do set the command line editor to emacs
Sure but that's Emacs not _XEmacs_.
https://www.xemacs.org/
-- huh, new version in June, after 2 years. Well I never.
XEmacs was a fork, backed by jwz's then employer Lucid. It's been dormant for decades, and GNU Emacs now does everything it did. There's a 1-man fork of the fork, SXMacs, which has seen a handful of updates this decade, but that's all.
https://www.sxemacs.org/
> why XEmacs instead of GNU Emacs?
Honest question, honest answer - like you, I switched to xemacs when gnu emacs wasn't cutting it with various features, and now at this point I'm just here by inertia? I have nothing against gnu emacs at this point.
xemacs is semi-morbid now, but honestly neither gnu emacs or xemacs have added anything in over a decade that I care about, so mostly it's that I do not care to rewrite all my xemacs scripts to emacs. There are significant gotchas with how they named their options, and xemacs still works fine, so I'm still on it. This goes back to my original thing about how I *will* switch given compelling reasons, but it's not there yet.
Honestly, most of the time when I'm not doing SRS coding I just use zile - which is a lightweight emacs, like nano with emacs bindings.
I used to work on a single-floppy Linux distro that turned an old PC with network cards / modems etc. into, basically a router.
1.44Mb to boot the OS, have drivers for all the possible networking, and then do all the NATting, routing and everything else necessary as well as be a DNS caching server and all sorts of other things.
I remember being quite put off when people started publishing 2.88Mb boot images, and then later ISO images of it.
Now 1.44Mb is probably not enough for the HTML/CSS/Javascript on this comment posting page, without even the images included on it.
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