While I already use VSCode for most things, like many developers I am often curious to see what else is out there. Even though I like some of the ideas behind the Zed editor, and will follow its progress, advertising built in AI is a fairly immediate turn off. The idea of a high performance editor though is still very appealing, and it seems like there are many rust based contenders (not that my rust abilities are anywhere near the level to contribute anything).

While I have long since forgotten where I first read about it, I have been using the Lapce editor for some of my remote development work recently. From the architecture page, you can see a high level overview of how the editor works. The Lapce-UI runs locally on your machine, handling most of the input and interactions as expected. Within the editor, you select a remote server to connect to over SSH, and Lapce will connect and run a remote Lapce-Proxy instance. This remote proxy instance has access to the remote file system and runs the remote plugins or language servers. I use this fairly extensively now when I am editing salt states on my development machine. Similar to other editors, there is also a built in console so that you can run commands on the remote host without needing a separate terminal window also open.

I am not sure what group is behind Lapce and it seems like it has a slower pace than many other editors, but I am looking forward to watch how the project progresses. I wrote a simple VSCode plugin for my worklog management, so maybe one day I can try to write something for Lapce.