> The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs.
> It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become.
It's a bit ironic to see those two in the same message but I'd argue that right there is an example of why software becomes bloated. There is always someone who says "but it would be great to have X" that in spirit might be tangentially relevant, but it's a whole ordeal of its own.
Diffing text, for example, requires a very different set of tools and techniques than what just a plain text editor would already have. That's why there are standalone products like Meld and the very good Beyond Compare; and they tend to be much better than a jack of all trades editor (at least I was never able to like more the diff UI in e.g. VSCode than the UI of Meld or the customization features of BC).
Same for other tangential stuff like VCS integration; VSCode has something in there, but any special purpose app is miles ahead in ease of use and features.
In the end, the creators of an editor need to spend so much time adding what amounts to suplemental and peripheral features, instead of focusing on the best possible core product. Expectations are so high that the sky is the limit. Everyone wants their own pet sub-feature ("when will it integrate a Pomodoro timer?").
This is a sharp observation, and it goes even further: BeyondCompare easily allows one to hop into an editor at a specific location, while Total Commander, with its side-by-side view of the world, is n excellent trampoline into BeyondCompare.
In this kind of ecosystem (where visual tools strive to achieve some Unix-like collaboration), the super power of editors (and IDEs) is their scripting language, and in this arena it is still hard to beat Emacs (with capabilities that were present maybe 40 years ago).
> It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become.
It's a bit ironic to see those two in the same message but I'd argue that right there is an example of why software becomes bloated. There is always someone who says "but it would be great to have X" that in spirit might be tangentially relevant, but it's a whole ordeal of its own.
Diffing text, for example, requires a very different set of tools and techniques than what just a plain text editor would already have. That's why there are standalone products like Meld and the very good Beyond Compare; and they tend to be much better than a jack of all trades editor (at least I was never able to like more the diff UI in e.g. VSCode than the UI of Meld or the customization features of BC).
Same for other tangential stuff like VCS integration; VSCode has something in there, but any special purpose app is miles ahead in ease of use and features.
In the end, the creators of an editor need to spend so much time adding what amounts to suplemental and peripheral features, instead of focusing on the best possible core product. Expectations are so high that the sky is the limit. Everyone wants their own pet sub-feature ("when will it integrate a Pomodoro timer?").