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To paraphrase an old quote, "every new text editor grows until it is bloated with collaboration and AI features."

Thank god we still have vim and Emacs.



Except, as I understand it, the collaboration features were one of the primary things they wanted to do with Zed. So this isn't a case of bloat. The first blog post on the site is "How CRDTs make multiplayer text editing part of Zed's DNA".


I always wondered are people really doing this collaboration stuff. I tried it at the start of the lock downs era. But i quickly found it annoying, but maybe its because the implementation was just bad back then.


> Thank god we still have vim and Emacs.

Emacs has had AI since before it was cool again.

M-x doctor


Emacs[1] has been bloated with collaboration (gnus, etc) and AI features (doctor, lisp in general) for decades!

[1] Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping


    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root          24 Oct 29  1929 /bin/ed
    -rwxr-xr-t  4 root     1310720 Jan  1  1970 /usr/ucb/vi
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  5.89824e37 Oct 22  1990 /usr/bin/emacs


I'm not getting the same results for ed?

    $ whereis -b ed | cut -d' ' -f 2 | xargs ls -l
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 55504 Feb 22  2020 /usr/bin/ed


Clearly it grew a lot in size since 1929. It doesn’t waste nearly that much space on my timex sinclair.

(To explain and thus ruin the joke, https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html)


Alternative reply:

    while :; do echo ?; done
Is only 24 bytes.


But your emacs is still 5.89824 * 10^37 bytes in size like parent commenter, right?


I spent a few minutes trying to work out your pipeline. I think this is easier

    ls -l $(which ed)


Except Sublime Text ;)


I'm still happy with vim/nvim as daily work tools (also currently exploring kakoune and helix... because why not).

Think of vim/nvim setup as a one time process: a bit complicated, but once done then you are ready to go. Of course, I use text editors for... code editing. No need to turn it into an IDE or mail client or whatever.




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