Building the Zed Text Editor (with Nathan Sobo)

Developer Voices

I’ve often wondered how you build a text editor. Like many software projects, it’s a simple idea at the core with an almost infinite scope for features. How do you build a solid foundation to expand on? Which features matter for launch? And how do you hope to satisfy the needs of every programmer, working in every language?

My guest for this episode is Nathan Sobo. He’s tackled this problem once before with the Atom editor, and he’s back older & wiser with Zed - a new editor written completely from scratch in Rust. It has a modern UI, a wide spread of language support, and a completely different way of looking at team collaboration. But with so much ambition, what are Zed’s priorities, and what’s been left for a future version?

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Zed Homepage: https://zed.dev/

Segment Trees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segment_tree

Ropes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)

Rust Executors: https://rust-lang.github.io/async-book/02_execution/04_executor.html

More about Roc: https://youtu.be/DzhIprQan68

More about TigerBeetle: https://youtu.be/ayG7ltGRRHs

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

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Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins