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!
Neovim.
Nano Vim Vi
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.
Who cares if it supports AI if it doesn’t ship with it by default?
Most ship with it by default now, but the good ones make it really easy to opt in or fully out (which one it is exactly differs by editors)
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 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.
sublime editor has never steered me wrong before
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 peice 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.
Emacs!!!
Should work with embedded webkit widgets for the preview.
Neovim. No other editor comes close to it.
I love Neovim, but it lacks live HTML preview that the OP specifically requested
That’s super easy to fix with tools like entr. That’s what I use when I write Markdown documents so I can automatically generate the plain text file to a PDF document using Pandoc, and preview it simply by saving the file in Neovim. :)
I also second this!
You can disable AI in Zed
The mission page for gram, as someone unfamiliar with it until this thread, is genuinely a thing of beauty.
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.
Thank you! Noted!
Neovim so many plugins and customization you can look st chadvim or lazyvim plugins for it
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 tainted: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/15433/commits
are you literally showing a 2 line change and saying “helix is tainted” because this tiny tiny change was co-authored by claude? lmao come on
I will say why did they even bother using Claude for this.
What? That PR does very little?
You don’t understand they didn’t use metadata!
Vscodium
Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS Code. VSCodium is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code.
I second this!
