1029: The Workflow of the Future With Zed

**Nathan Sobo** (0:00)
Our vision is really, it was always conversations in the code, linked to the code, rather than snapshots of the code. But what's changed in the past two, three years and really acceleratingly, like since last fall, at least for people that write Rust, is that now conversations are becoming sort of the source of our code. Like we were thinking we'd write all the code and have conversations in it. Now conversations are the beginning, and code comes out of that. It's a downstream artifact.

**Scott Tolinski** (0:35)
Welcome to Syntax. Today, we have Nathan Sobo from Zed on the show. Nathan, previously from Warp and then...
It's a Also at GitHub for nine years is now the co-founder and CEO of Zed, the text editor that I use every single day, one of my favorite applications on my computer. So Nathan, welcome to Syntax.

**Nathan Sobo** (1:01)
Thank you very much.

**Scott Tolinski** (1:03)
Would you like to get into, I know I gave a little bit of a backstory on who you are, but maybe like you could dive in just a little bit more of how you ended up at Zed?

**Nathan Sobo** (1:13)
Yeah. I mean, I have been obsessed with the idea of building the ultimate tool for software development basically for myself for a very long time. I think it was right when I graduated college the year after 2006, that I had been using TextMate, which was hot and new at the time. I'd used Eclipse, I'd used Emacs, hadn't used Vim at that point, although that did come along later. And I just wanted to build a tool that combined all the things I loved about these various editors into one product. And I completely underestimated how difficult that would be to do.
And it took kind of until now, I think, to really even begin to get close to, yeah, basically bringing the speed of TextMate with the features of something like Visual Studio Code.
And then also bringing in this collaborative dimension. That came along eventually, and that was based on my time at this company, Pivotal Labs, which was a pair programming shop. You would show up and there'd be nine to six with a one hour lunch break just pairing all day long. Really? And back then we would plug two keyboards into the same machine, two keyboards, two mice, and just like work through problems together, code together, and that taught me so much. I became such a better software developer so rapidly. But I always wanted a tool that could replicate that experience that we had in this shared office, like over the Internet and turn the Internet into that whole experience. And Zed is as close as I've ever gotten. Until what comes next. Yes.

**Scott Tolinski** (3:07)
Yes. I can't wait to get into what comes next. Because I got a preview of it. And it definitely like takes, it makes sense to hear you say that about pair programming given what I have seen in this. So that's really super, super cool. So you pick Zed and was Rust, because that is built on Rust, right? From the ground up.
Was Rust the choice initially or did you land on Rust somehow?

**Nathan Sobo** (3:37)
Well, once upon a time, I talked the founders of GitHub into hiring me to build an editor called Adam. Yes. Some people may remember.

**Scott Tolinski** (3:45)
Oh yeah.

**Nathan Sobo** (3:46)
In the process of creating Adam, we also created this framework called Electron, which is still around and probably running on all of our machines in some shape or form. Eating way more RAM than the apps that it's running really justify.
The big idea with Adam was we wanted to make it hackable, and we wanted it to run on every major platform. It really seemed like if we could build on web technology, which was already something people were familiar with, was really a flexible technology. You can load CSS and everybody knows JavaScript. If we could just figure out a way to masquerade a web browser as a desktop app, we would achieve our goal of this flexible, hackable system that ran on all the three platforms, and we did. But unfortunately, the trade-off that we made, the devil's bargain that we made was that the overhead of the browser and the abstraction that it presents, which is this kind of lowest common denominator, common standard that needs to run in a backward compatible way on all these different browsers. Well, although that is reducing down, but still it really put a limit on the performance and the user experience that we could yield. So after Adam ran its course and Microsoft acquired GitHub, and I was sitting there using Visual Studio Code, I just wasn't happy. I just couldn't see a future where I continued writing all my software in this web browser masquerading as a desktop app. Just the performance wasn't there, the aesthetics weren't there for me. This collaborative dimension, even though they did introduce live share, it never really worked as well as I wanted it to.