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. No other editor comes close to it.
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.
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.
Emacs!!!
Helix and Gram. Try em out. Gram even has a Helix bindings mode.
vim
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.
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.
You can easily disable all AI features in Zed.
not enough. we need ZERO a.i trash. Why need to waste developing energy in develop a.i shit? no need. i repeat: we need ZERO A.I trash in a text editor
Gram, an AI free Zed fork, fits this perfectly.
As an other commenter mentioned, you can read their mission statement here: https://gram-editor.com/docs/mission/
well, seems like Gram just take it down. F
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
