Hi. I’m looking for a good code editor that doesn’t have any AI in it at all. My problem is, I like modern code editors like VSCodium, but I think it has AI or at least supports it. I know Zed has AI and Zed is kind of complicated to use. Here are my requests for a code editor:
No AI or telemetry Built-in live preview for HTML Built-in terminal Extensions
Right now, I’m using Pulsar, but it has no live preview that I know of. Any suggestions help. I’m not a fan of notepad++, though. It’s very complicated to setup and use. Thanks in advance!
It’s great, even has a Helix mode for us Helix users!
Is that a thing ?
Is what a thing? Helix?
Looks like sublime text. How does it differ?
It is actually a fork of Zed with AI features removed.
If you like/don’t mind working in the terminal, Neovim can do basically anything, it’s hyper-modular. But the learning curve is very steep. The people who use it are absolutely devoted, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but it’s not made with the beginner in mind.
If you want a traditional GUI app, Kate from the KDE team is a really nice, reasonably lightweight IDE. Kate IDE
It’s like a simplified VSCodium. It has all the basic IDE features, LSP and syntax highlighting for 400+ programming languages, tabs/panes/window support, code breakpoints, Git integration, built-in terminal execution, and community plugins for various other features.
The one thing Kate doesn’t have for your use case, is a built-in live HTML preview. Technically, Kate actually supports a simple HTML live preview if you enable it, but only in the Linux version, and from what I read online, other than very basic HTML stuff, it’s not very good. There may be a community plugin that somebody built, but you would need to research that yourself.
If you’re willing to go into the terminal based editor rabbit hole, I recommend going straight to helix, coming from vim/neovim in the past it’s much easier to get into and maintain since it’s batteries included and doesn’t take huge dotfiles to configure it like you want, and the movement feels more intuitive to me than vim’s
Helix is the least complex terminal editor in that it’s easy to configure and doesn’t try to outsmart you like most of the graphical ones. Neovim and Emacs are also good choices with comprehensive plugin support.
Have you tried disabling the AI in Zed? There’s a toggle in the settings to disable all AI features. I’ve disabled the AI and it’s actually a really nice, responsive, clean editor. Just one toggle, and it doesn’t re-enable itself. The whole “AI-native” marketing really put me off trying it, but it’s now become my go-to IDE for when I’m working on a project where I want a more fully-featured IDE than Vim (my go-to for just editing text files eg standalone scripts, small projects).
If you don’t want to do that, or if you try it and still don’t like Zed, maybe Kate?
Who cares if it supports AI if it doesn’t ship with it by default?
People here gave great suggestions!
- simple graphical: Kate
- powerful but complicated graphical: Emacs
- simple terminal: Helix
- Powerful but complicated terminal: Neovim
- (honorable mention) graphical: Geany
Live HTML previews isn’t a dealbreaker feature. Use external tools like https://github.com/Abenezer-Daniel-1/live-html
So now this requirement is decoupled from your editor.
I read that Emacs does have live preview, but that could be wrong. I’m not advanced enough yet to use Emacs, but maybe someday I will be!
Emacs has basically everything. If you are willing to set it up.
Like I said, my suggestion is to not get hung up on the live preview feature and use an external tool for that. This way you can decouple your editor from that specific functionality you need.
Helix and Gram. Try em out. Gram even has a Helix bindings mode.
nvi
What do you need/use that you find in modern editors that you can’t get in something like Emacs? While there are AI integrations for Emacs they are all optional.
Built-in live preview for HTML
Only in electron based editors AFAIK. It requires an integrated browser engine, and electron already is an integrated browser engine so that makes it easy.
VSCode and Pycharm do it all for me. You can turn all that shit off.
I think I might move to VSCodium, hail libre!
I know CherryTree, hirarquical rich text notes and also programming editor (FOSS, GNU GPL), existed long before AI https://github.com/giuspen/cherrytree
Zed has a simple disable_ai: true config setting which disables everything related to AI.
I have never heard it’s complicated from anyone. I use it every day and it’s amazing.
I’m giving Zed another shot. I like the layout. I’m not sure if it has Live Preview or not, but I’ll look into it.
You should try Gram instead. It is a Zed fork with all the AI and other anti-features removed.
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