Caret vs Zed

Chrome text editor showdown

Recently I’ve been looking for a decent text editor for Chromebooks. For work I mostly use Sublime text editor on OS X. In the past I’ve installed Ubuntu on my Chromebooks, either with Crouton or Chrubuntu. After getting an Asus C201 recently I wanted to see what native options there were for ChromeOS, as I intend to mostly just use it for hobby coding and blogging.

The only two powerful text editors I could find in the Chrome Web Store were Zed and Caret. All the other chrome text editors I could find were very simple and didn’t really have any concept of projects. After experimenting with each for a week or so, I figured I’d share my findings here. I took into account both the current state of the apps and the quality of their git repositories, because I’m not unwilling to help build features that I want to use.

Zed

Strengths

• Has a project switcher that works almost as well as Sublime’s (sometimes it does crash though)
• Has the ability to search entire projects for a string
• Supports multiple edit panes
• Auto triggers code completion

Weaknesses

• The UI looks dated and is not aesthetically pleasing
• There is no concept of “open” tabs. You can only have one file per edit pane at a time
• The git repository appears to be largely abandoned, with many open issues with no response and no commits for several months. There are also open pull requests that are months old with no response
• The code base is largely undocumented
• It is buggy:
• The sidebar sometimes disappears
• Custom hotkeys you’ve set stop working for a minute or two after adding a new project
• If you use multiple editing panes they often get into a bad state and you have to close them and reopen them
• The built in settings syncing doesn’t work reliably

Caret

Strengths

• Modern looking design
• Settings syncing is more reliable than Zed’s
• Lets you have open file tabs at the top
• The repository is very active and the maintainer responds quickly and reasonably to issues and pull requests
• The codebase is well documented

Weaknesses

• No way to search all files for a string - added 10/23/15
• No way to show the current file in the sidebar, for example after you’ve opened a file using fuzzy search.
• No support for multiple edit panes
• No real project switcher. You have to manually open a project file and manually save it each time you update it

Conclusion

Neither text editor has plugin support like Sublime or Atom. As a result of this, there are some things that will probably not be possible for them, like highlighting VCS changes in the gutter the way Sublime plugins can. Neither of them have very powerful file trees in their sidebars; they are just for opening files and not deleting, creating, or moving/renaming.

Despite these weaknesses, I think either one of these would suffice for hobby coding. Both of them do have good fuzzy file search like Sublime’s. They also both have a robust command palette and you can map custom keys to any command. For now, my plan is to mostly use Caret. Although looks aren’t everything, it is far more pleasing to use than Zed is. The lack of support for project-wide string search is a big deal to me though, so I’m currently working on building that functionality into Caret.

Update 10/23/15 — I’ve now added project-wide search functionality to Caret.