iamnbutler

Cool, I'll take a look.

gpui will support web eventually - we always planned it, and i've tinkered with some folks on the team on it a bit. The problem is the crate needs to split into core/web/native (and maybe mobile?) as web needs a new executor and native has a number of deps that won't play nice with wasm...

someone did get a very claude-driven demo of gpui on the web up (you can find it in the discord somewhere.)

I would love that too though, a true cross platform solution.

> How was it like working at Zed? Any reason for leaving?

Working at Zed was great. I was employee #4 (#1 after the founders) - it was fun, often hard - Nathan & co helped me learn Rust and I fell in love with it.

I wanted to do something pretty specific (tl;dr, basically skunkworks type work) which was the reason I left.

There are always pros and cons to every role, but I appreciate that Zed is building from the ground up. DeltaDB will be very exciting - we were sitting on our hands waiting for it for a lot of the really exciting things we wanted to do with Zed.

Having to take on investors is never awesome - but as much as I don't like it, I do doubt Zed would never have existed without them.

But yeah, getting paid to design and write rust UI every day was a blast.

They haven't. They are just heads down on other work. It wouldn't make sense for them to abandon it - they have no alternative. What that message was about was supporting _community_ prs and development of gpui.

Focus ebbs and flows at Zed, they'll be back on it before long.

I would be curious to hear about where folks are finding gaps in the rust ui ecosystem though...

I've written quite a lot of rust UI code for Zed over the past few years so I'm mostly familiar with the pros and cons of gpui, but I haven't spent much time with Iced, Dioxus, Xilem, etc.

I started the gpui-ce fork but I'm becoming somewhat more interested in a fresh framework that is more aligned with the rust ecosystem in general - using crates like glam/glamour, parley, palette, etc

Lots of gpui was built with build Zed/a text editor in mind directly, and as folks have mentioned here, it is hard for Zed Industries to justify work on gpui that is purely for the community. Nathan is usually pretty pragmatic around not optimizing early, and gpui is generally serving Zed's needs at the moment (from what I know, I haven't worked on Zed since July)

I do think ZI would generally benefit if gpui did get pulled out of Zed if there was a community that was passionate about taking it over... but that is time and effort in itself.

I don't work at zed anymore but I do find it funny that anyone would think that the collaboration features of zed are "tacked on"...

We started building zed in zed using it's collaboration in early 2021. Collaboration has always been part of it's DNA. Nearly everything at zed is written in pairs over collab.

Thanks, I'll take a look at these. We aren't done–A good amount of the Zed team uses our assistant heavily every day so we'll continue to refine it.

I shared this with the team. I need to spend some time in Cursor to understand their mental model, it seems a lot of folks have come to enjoy using it.

We do also have extensibility planned for the assistant, you can see a taste of it in the slash command code if you want to check it out.

AFAIK you can use `/workflow` with some other models other than Claude, but I can't speak to which off the top of my head.

Haha I actually agree – I always prefer them side by side.

We don't have side-by-side diffs yet, but once we do I'll make sure it works here :)

Hey! I'm Nate from Zed. You can also use the /file command to drop entire directories, or even globs into the assistant.

For example, you can do /file *.rs to load all of the rust files in your project into context.

Here is a simple but real example I used a while back:

"/file zed/crates/gpui/src/text_system.rs

I have a font I want to check if it exists on the system. I currently have a &'static str.

Is there something in here that will help me do that?"

I haven't interfaced with the lower level TextSystem that much, so rather than dig through 800 lines of code, I was able to instantly find `is_font_available()` and do what I needed to do.

This is actually the first time I’ve seen someone unhappy with search - can you tell me a bit more what you are looking for?

There is lots of room for improvement of course, but I’d love to hear what your desired search experience is.

Lots of the app’s UI right now is a layer of components on top of gpui (check out the ui crate!) that are pretty Zed-specific at the moment.

Some of these things will likely be made more general and have dedicated gpui elements built for them (button, input…)

I think not rushing to cover everything right out the gates is giving us the time to feel out apis that feel good to write and work well for us. Hopefully in the near future that translates to a UI library that is awesome for the whole rust community to use.

Hey! Nate from Zed here - have you had issues with proportional fonts in Zed?

Let us know if so - they should just work™, but would love to know if that is not the case.