Zed

Zed also means the number zero in several countries including Canada.

I had a physics professor once from India he kept saying stuff like "From zed to 2Pi" and we all thought it was some new constant we hadn't learned yet.

Zed was the rapist police officer in the mid-nineties Quentin Tarrantino classic, Pulp Fiction. He arrives at his buddy's pawn shop to find Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) and Bruce Willis's character (who's name alludes me now) tied up in the basement. As Zed brutally sodomizes Marcellus, Bruce Willis escapes and kills the pawn shop owner. Zed's fate is left in the hands of the crazed Marcellus Wallace, who has already shot him in the dick with a sawed off shotgun before the scene has ended.

Bruce Willis's character uses Zed's motorcycle to escape and when his annoying whiny French girlfriend asks who Zed is, he responds: "Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead."

In Finland Zed is Sonera's "mobile portal" for their own cell phone customers (actually, Zed is one of the Sonera's daughter corporations).

They offer all the basic stuff that most other cellphone junk providers offer: logos, ring tones, picture SMS messages, and so on.

In my opinion, it's waste of time, but this sort of stuff apparently sells these days - not that Sonera would actually make profit from Zed anyway.

A new Libre, open source programmer's text editor written in Rust.

"We believe the best software is handcrafted, with unparalleled attention to detail. We believe software development is better when it’s a shared experience. We believe there’s a better way to write software—and this is just the start of the adventure."
—Zed Industries

Zed is developed in part by Nathan Sobo, who worked on the Atom text editor. it aims to provide a powerful, yet straightforward tool for coding, with a focus on speed, efficiency, and simplicity. Written in Rust, it's fast, and is designed and developed by programmers for programmers, with many features to enhance productivity and efficiency for developer teams. Integration with git and Github is built in to enhance communication and streamline project development. There is of course support and tooling for major programming languages (and I don't think they just mean syntax highlighting!).

Now I am not a software developer. I once in a while delve into writing little scripts to get my housekeeping jobs done or otherwise enhance or simplify my technical life. A few things in Bash and occasionally Python. Take everything I say with a pinch of salt as I've not yet used the program myself. Vim is my standard for text editing, and while Zed includes vim keybindings, I don't need any features more advanced than Vim has to offer. However, from what I've read, Zed has an extraordinary amount of power and control, and is naturally tweakable and easy to configure.

For collaboration, it includes communication tools and Github integration, meaning that co-operation between developers should be a breeze. It is designed to be fast and responsive, so your next sprint may well be a sprint in reality. It certainly has the appearance of sleekness and simplicity, and apparently stays out of your way when writing, with a clear and simple interface. Maybe it's the new WordPerfect of text editors o replace vi/VIm. If so, I may sign up as I chose my desktop environment and Vim for the same reason. I hate clutter and complexity.

It was originally only released for MacOS running on their ARM chipsets, but has since been ported to Linux (they suggest running curl https://zed.dev/install.sh | sh and it just might¹ work under the Windows Subsystem For Linux, although an official release for Windows is not yet available). Give it a try using the install script above and let me know¹. Yes, you are my guinea pig, I haven't even looked at Windows for seven or eight years.

Currently, it is available in software repositories in the following Linux distros:

Arch Linux (natch!)
Alpine Linux: both Arm and X64
Nix:
Fedora/Ultramarine
Solus:
Parabola:
Manjaro:

Zed is very much alive and improving‼

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¹ It probably won't work, given that I just looked at the install script and saw that it checks for "Linux" or "Darwin", o I'm not at all confident it will get the right details from uname in WSL.

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$ xclip -o | wc -w

Zed (?), n. [F., probably through It. zeta, fr. L. zeta. See Zeta.]

The letter Z; -- called also zee, and formerly izzard.

"Zed, thou unnecessary letter!"

Shak.

 

© Webster 1913.