zed-industries
Animated/smooth cursor movement
Check for existing issues
- [X] Completed
Describe the feature
Similar to, but not the same as, zed-industries/zed#5179
VSCode and Neovide have the option to animate the cursor motion.
I don't know if I'd use this feature myself, but it looks great in demos and seems like a fun way to flex Zed's performance.
This is likely more useful when Vim mode is more fleshed out because it makes following the cursor easier for people newer to modal editing.
If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature
Neovide does it beautifully.
I think we talked about potentially adding animations to Zed. We have Kay on the team (original author of Neovide!). Going to tag her in to loop her in on this issue.
cc @Kethku
Animations done well are definitely on my todo list. I had hoped to add this sooner, but it required some more infrastructure before it can be landed.
Some blockers right now just for some extra insight:
- Today zed doesn't have animation infrastructure. We animate scroll positions using macos' events, but other than that everything is a response to state change. Further we don't have a next animation frame system built yet. There is a branch that handles this work but I'm cautious to push it immediately until I have an answer for whether the branch maintains our latency goals. This will likely coming after our next big push.
- Cursors today are rendered inside each editor. One major benefit of an animated cursor is that it helps you to know when it has moved from one tab to another. This requires a pretty big refactoring so that cursor positions are reported up rather than rendered directly by each component.
Likely we will land the animation infrastructure and then think about adding flashier features like the cursor. Its definitely on our radar though and appreciate the callout on Neovide ❤️!
I'm extremely excited to add the animation and editor legibility features from Neovide into Zed. Many of the ideas I would have loved to have explored in Neovide weren't possible due to limitations from Neovim and the Skia based rendering system I built for that project. With Zed we don't have any of those limitations, or if we do, we can go fix them because we own the entire stack from windowing apis, to renderer, to text datastructures. The future is bright!
I'm really interested in cursor animations, but I'm also wondering how it would be in a collab session with multiple cursors zooming around the editor. Obviously the Zed team represents kind of an edge case, because we are the ones using it for collab most. We sometimes have company-wide meetings, and the team is now something like 25 people, so it might be absolute mayhem seeing 25 cursors flying around. 😆
First thing that comes to mind would be to solely animate your cursor or the cursor that you're following, since the intention of the animation is to make it easier to follow... but a toggle for animating everything would be pretty funny 😛
This is definitely a must-have for zed! It would be great if we could also customize the animation a bit using the simple JSON file.
agree with @theVedanta, would love to be able to customize the animation itself and the speed
Hoping this will get implemented soon, the vim experience would become much better ;)
Hey folks, looking at this, the infrastructure for animations might be ready? I'm not sure, are you folks planning to add this in? cc @Kethku (absolutely love the work on Neovide!) and @agu-z
In my transition from Neovim to Zed 🙃
Part of making the cursor smooth.
- https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/39095
I recommend zed users to switch to Neovide, Zed developers themselves admitted that they will never build this feature
just delete zed and enjoy a smooth as butter experience with neovide. Who needs all those useless agentic features that zed keeps working on, when you already have neovide lol
typing and caret motion are actually important, experience of development needs to be pleasant in a product. If you think agentic handholding bloat is what zed needs, fine.
this thread should be closed
I recommend zed users to switch to Neovide, Zed developers themselves admitted that they will never build this feature
just delete zed and enjoy a smooth as butter experience with neovide. Who needs all those useless agentic features that zed keeps working on, when you already have neovide lol
typing and caret motion are actually important, experience of development needs to be pleasant in a product. If you think agentic handholding bloat is what zed needs, fine.
this thread should be closed
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