Hello, JS Party people. Those lovely, familiar BMC beats mean that this is another episode of JS Party, your party about JavaScript and the web. I'm K-Ball. I'm your host this week. I'm joined by my friend, Jared. Jared Santo, how are you doing? I'm doing well. How are you doing? I am excited for this, actually. So Jared, in case y'all don't know, is behind every JS Party episode. He's one of the original changelog folks. Even when he's not hosting, he's got his ear on what's going on. And so today I'm excited to actually turn the camera around, take a deep dive into Jared. Sometime last year, we did a dive into another one of our panelists' toolbox. We went into Nick Niecy's toolbox and we covered a bunch of fun stuff. Nick is a tool geek. I think we could have spent that whole episode looking at his vim.files or other things like that. But today, we're going to dive into Jared's toolbox, and I'm kind of a little excited to see how different it is, given that Jared is not just a developer, but he's also a business owner, a longtime podcaster, all these other things. So, Jared, let's go.

I'm excited, man. I am your guinea pig, your lab rat. I am a dead frog covered in formaldehyde, ready to be dissected by UK ball. Let's go. Dive deep.

Okay. Well, so let's start with coding. Okay. Because that's, you know, everybody here has in common. That's where it all starts, man. That's where it all starts. 100%.

So what tools do you use? Okay. So long journey. I mean, Text Editor is the primary tool that I think of when it comes to coding. Old school Vimr. I've told this story before, but I was forced by my college teacher to, my programming 101 teacher and 102, use Vim. He said, you're going to SSH into a Unix box and you're going to code in Vim. He said something like Pico or Nano are great editors if you are writing a email to your grandma. But if you're going to write code, you're going to use Vim. And so I learned Vim not because I saw some fancy video on YouTube, but because I just didn't have any other choices. Well, I had to learn Vim if I wanted to pass my class.

I mean, same, to be honest. I learned Vim, it was a Fortran class, I think, taken as part of my either E or physics or something like

that. Yeah. So I don't know if I would have made it over that hump because it does have that steep initial learning curve had I had a choice. But I did have a choice. I made it over the hump. And my college teacher was very proficient in Vim. And he would live code in class. And we would watch him and be like, oh, wow, you can really move fast if you get good at those things. So that was also motivating. So I learned Vim, used it for many years, still use it off and on all the time, mostly in the terminal, mostly SSH into a machine. That's my go-to in-terminal editor. However, I do like a nice graphical user interface specifically for text editing. And so I picked up TextMate back in the day, eventually moved over to Sublime Text and Sublime Text 2. Never hopped on the VS Code train, although I have installed and I have used it. I use Sublime Text for a very long time. And nowadays, I have recently, within the last six months, switched to Zed as I find it the only other Sublime Text alike that is fast enough and light enough that it feels Sublime-esque. Sublime was always just faster than all the other ones. And VS Code started fast and then has slowly gained, in my opinion, some weight. And so I've been using Zed and really I still keep Sublime Text launched. And just for one-offs, you still can't beat it. And like, I'm just going to open up a buffer and like do some stuff and do some text manipulation and then just get rid of it. It's still faster. But for like project work, I'm shilling in Zed.

So let's dive into Zed a little bit. What does it look like for somebody who hasn't used it?

Zed is very much an editor in the ilk of VS Code or Sublime Text. I mean, it's going to look like that project, you know, the file directory on the left, you know, buffers on the right. Here I am stuck in the middle with you. I don't know how you describe it. It's a text editor, you know, it's built by the major developer that worked on Atom, A-T inside of GitHub, Nathan Sobo. And it's built from the ground up to be really fast. And so that's why I appreciate it. It also has fancy things built right in. But very much, I think, feature for feature, it's going to feel the most like VS Code. But in my opinion a little bit faster a little bit better and so i've been i've been using that uh open source now so that's rad nice

what's the plug-in story for zed well

now we're going to get into jared's toolbox and i am not really a plug-in guy so like there are plugins i have a I install some stuff. It's fledgling, I would say. It's nowhere near what VS Code has. So if you are a plugin person, nowhere near what Vim has or NeoVim, just because it's a pretty new editor and a pretty new community. And they've been building like the extensibility story after they built a few of their other stories up. And so it's like bare bones in there and a lot of first party stuff. So they're trying to batteries include that sucker. So a lot of it, I just don't care about, like it's built in. But if you are heavy into plugins and extensibility, like snippet support just landed recently, which was holding me off for a long time. Cause I do have some snippets that I use commonly and I just couldn't even use them in Zed. That's there now. So like it's getting there, but yeah, plugins are probably the current thing that's limping along in that ecosystem just because it's a pretty new editor. And

I see on their blog, their latest blog post is introducing Zed AI. Are you using the LLM based coding tools inside of Z?

Yes. So they first built Copilot right in when Copilot kind of got big. And then they realized there's more to life than Copilot. And so they made it to where you can switch in different models, different tools. And then they've just recently launched like a first-party ZAI. So you're plugging into their deal it's a i think it's going to be a paid arm it is a business so they're trying to find ways of making money i think teams is one of those ways and i think that ai is another one of those ways that they'll make money off of this editor i just plug it into llama 3.2 and so i do use llama inside of zed but you can use whatever model you like, ChatGPT, Mistral, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All right. Well, so staying on the software train for a little bit, any other tools outside of editors that you find yourself going to?

The terminal. I mean, I'm a big terminal guy, so we could live in the terminal for a while if you want to.

Do you use Tmux? Are you one of those who like, oh, I need my custom terminal setup? What does it look like? Not

so much anymore. I was definitely a tweaker and a configurator as a youth when I had the free time and the desire to really make my system look cool. I used to have one of those terminals that would come down from the top. Did you ever have this one where it was a hotkey away? They're probably still out there. And it was like a heads up display for your terminal. So you would just like hit a hot key and it would slide down over the top of your other stuff and you'd be like coding and then you'd hit it again and it'd just slide back up again. And when I worked in an office, that was cool. Cause like people would see that and they'd be like, wow, this guy's hardcore. I don't care about such things anymore. So I use like built in terminal.app. I don't have I term. I'm not using Wes term or kitty or any of the fancy stuff that Nick Neesey thinks is rad. They are rad, I'm sure. But terminal.app is just good enough for me. I'm a longtime Tmux user. And I use Tmux mostly via a configurator tool called Smug smug which if you have been around long enough you're a tmux guy right i am yeah so do you use a configurator i know they're like a tmux desk sessions thing no

i i have like a i have an old tmux config that i have that my my finger is like embedded in my brain and fingers that i have then passed down from machine to machine over probably decades at this point.

Yeah, most of my configs are kind of set in stone because I'm just like set in my ways. So I don't really need to like, I'll add a new function into my bash RC or whatever it's called CSHRC at this point. Like once a year, I'll add a new function and be like, oh, that's a nice quality of life improvement. But I've got so much built up over the years that I don't think about it as much anymore. However, Smug is a Tmux configurator. So there's also Tmux sessions, which is a plugin for Tmux that does a similar thing. And there's an old Ruby gem called Tmuxinator, which is where I got started. And it's basically like define your Tmux sessions in a YAML file or in a list of YAMLs. And you can start up Tmux with all your settings into a project, bam. And then you can suspend it, restart it, et cetera, et cetera. And so smug is now basically a rewrite of Tmuxinator in Go, which means, you know, universal. It's actually fast? Yeah, well, not just that, but it's not going to like, you don't have to do the whole gem file thing. You know, like there's no gem install. You're not like, which version of Ruby is this? Oh, I got to get a different version of Ruby. Universal binaries for the win. I think it's just like brew install Smug. And I use Smug to control Tmux, and then you're inside tmux obviously but my tmux is pretty basic you know just like a couple open not tabs what are they called panels yeah a couple open panels you know switch between them just basics basics but i do use it all day every day there

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