GPUI 2 is now in production – Zed (opens in new tab)

I'd love to try this, though the large number of projects that only support MacOS perplexes me. This excludes at least 80% of people with computers that would like to use your software and effectively limits it to a class of folk with money, creating a sort of nasty exclusivity to the software that does this when there doesn't seem to be a platform-limiting factor.

Their Windows Support Issue was opened on Jun 29, 2022 and the Linux one on the same day, so they're just under two years old. It seems that this isn't source-available right now either, though they mention they'll open source it at some point, but it prevents contributions toward this end too.

The websites this (https://github.com/zed-industries/community/issues/2197) list as the reason for blocking the other OSes though it's quite sparse and doesn't say much.

Genuine and non-argumentative question; why? Easier to focus on one platform for the purposes of achieving good stability before supporting more than one OS, or trying to get a userbase that is typically more willing to pay for your software? Investor pressure?

Edit: Another comment mentioned the FAQ. So it is about validating the project toward the end of making money it seems. I guess they chose Mac because Apple people have a history of being more willing to pay for stuff.

I've been using Zed for the last few months as my secondary driver. Still miss some features that I really find helpful in VSC, such as showing the Tailwind class on hover in Elixir LiveView code, but apart from that, Zed is really good and smooth, specially when it comes to collaboration. Collaboration just works, including a clear audio stream.

One thing I do use Zed heavily for, though, is their assistant panel to interact with GPT-4-Turbo. That panel is really well done (its essentially a text editor), and using GPT-4 on a pay-per-request basis instead of $20/month for ChatGPT is just much more cost-effective for me. The panel stores all previous conversations in a folder on your system too, so it's easy to grep through it if required. You can even edit the model's reply, just like on the OpenAI Playground.

If Zed plan to open source the editor, what is the monetisation strategy? Paid features like "multiplayer"? How does that feature work for companies that don't allow code to leave their networks?

> GPUI rasterizes the entire window on the GPU

Other programs I have seen do this on Linux and Windows tend to have blurry fonts. I hope that is not also the case here.

I really love Zed, was my primary driver.

Then I went to update to a newer version and Zed stopped working and I can’t revert back to an older version. I see someone else also has the same bug filed. Hope they can figure out the fix. I miss using Zed.

Zed is great, have been using it to do the Rustlings exercises and learn Rust:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings

If you've been looking for an excuse to learn Rust, check it out.

I see the measurements on the homepage lists zed and sublime as basically the same. Anyone know how they measure - and how helix and neovim compare?

I'm not bothered at all with helix startup time...

Nothing about whether they might support other OSs :/

This is terribly off topic, but I immediately thought this was Zed Shaw and became genuinely excited that he was jumping into AI (and out of, iirc, painting and music). While I don’t consider myself a fanboy (fanman?) of anyone, I definitely admired him/his code some of which I ran in production. It has been a while since I’ve seen him post here.

So instead of making an app people can actually use (outside of the 10 people with Macs) they're rewriting large parts of it instead?

Makes sense..