Zed is a modern open-source code editor, built from the ground up in Rust with a GPU-accelerated renderer.
I still don’t understand why I should need GPU acceleration for my fucking TEXT EDITOR
Probably because it’s more efficient. GPUs are designed to render things, which editors do. In a text editor, you’re effectively rendering fonts over a fixed background, which I assume is pretty efficient using the GPU.
We’re not talking about crazy 3D effects here.
Yay to battery savings!
Shouldn’t the DE/Window Manager be handling that? Seems like doing it on a window by window basis would be inefficient (and look inconsistent).
That’s a totally unrelated part of the stack. These days you just have a compositor that combines the output of applications.
The model of out of process rendering in Xorg was done pre-2000s but GPUs became the norm and don’t work well this way.
Same reason you need it for your terminal (see kitty terminal). It’s surprisingly slow to cpu render text, gpu rendering is more power efficient and far more responsive
It was surprising how gpu accelerated rendering helped read logs better. Niche case, but better was better.
Surprisingly slow compared to GPU rendering. But… is it really “surprisingly slow”? If it was some 10mhz machine, then sure… I’d agree with you.
Look at the benchmarks on kitty https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance/
I mean, it should be clear. Smooth and fast and snappy. If you don’t want that, use neovim like me :)
Terminals applications are, by definition, not smooth. You can’t have smooth scrolling, or anything else really, with a text grid.
