Zed is a modern open-source code editor, built from the ground up in Rust with a GPU-accelerated renderer.

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29 points

I still don’t understand why I should need GPU acceleration for my fucking TEXT EDITOR

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38 points

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

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0 points

Same reason you need it for your terminal

So I don’t.

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5 points

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.

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4 points

Look at the benchmarks on kitty https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance/

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18 points

It was surprising how gpu accelerated rendering helped read logs better. Niche case, but better was better.

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3 points

Better in what sense?

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16 points

I mean, it should be clear. Smooth and fast and snappy. If you don’t want that, use neovim like me :)

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4 points

But… Neovim is smooth, fast and snappy 😭

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3 points

Terminals applications are, by definition, not smooth. You can’t have smooth scrolling, or anything else really, with a text grid.

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3 points

Hold down j and lmk how smooth it is 😅

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5 points

Smooth scrolling? Maybe I’m wrong

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50 points

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!

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3 points

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).

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21 points

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.

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9 points

The job of the window manager is to manage windows and very little else. Font rendering is done by the widget toolkit, usually via freetype/harfbuzz.

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17 points

Sppeeed

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8 points

Think about battery life too 🎉

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