I don't get along very well with the HN Rust Community (and I think I'm even less popular with them than they are with me), but fair is fair and the Rust folks have been absolutely revolutionizing the modern terminal experience.

Put differently, I take the opposite view: seeing that a piece of terminal kit is written in Rust gives me a quite high Bayesian prior on the quality and usefulness of the tool. Something like 70% of the command-line nix packages in my home manager are written in Rust.

> seeing that a piece of terminal kit is written in Rust gives me a quite high Bayesian prior on the quality and usefulness of the tool.

I maintain clap, the most common CLI parser for Rust. When soliciting feedback on changing some of the `--help` formatting, a piece of a feedback I got from a couple of people was some of the distinctive look told the reader it was written in Rust and using clap and "that means a certain baseline of quality and behaviour".

For me the thing is if is written in rust it has more chances to get more contributors, besides all the rust benefits (fast, performant as if it were written in C, but without the worries of the memory issues).

Also just because I use rust, I could contribute, for C/C++ editors I will not be able, maybe I'll also give a chance if the editor were written in Go, but no other language, all the others are slow.

Also rust IMHO has a few apps (including commands) that are worth checking:

- Helix - Alacritty - Wezterm - Nushell - Zoxide - Starship

Then are others to replace grep, and other commands that I cannot remember from the top of my head.

> This reduces my interest in both projects.

That's funny, it's the opposite for me.

> As a user, I do not care what language my editor is implemented in.

I do care. I don't like using Electron apps, even if I have to grudgingly use them a la VSCode. If an app is in Electron or some other slow framework like a Python GUI, my interest immediately drops to zero. If it's in Rust or some other low level language, at least I know it'll be fast.

Don't let the “built|written in Rust” taglines put you off either project.

Both are fast editors built by passionate teams offering compelling out-of-the box experiences. They're worth taking five minutes to download and try (or apply for the waitlist in the case of Zed).

Think this in a jokingly way: since only smart and dedicated people can master Rust, software written by these people must be good most of the time. Just like how literate people in ancient societies are mostly elite class. You don't expect a peasant to write a history book.

Of course, same as how our societies develop, when Rust inevitably become more popular, this perception will no longer hold. One day, Rust will join amongst C and C++ and become tool for everyone. Until then, "Written in Rust" is just a cheap but effective differentiation ad.

> As a user, I do not care what language my editor is implemented in.

Perhaps its a proxy for speed. You don't want your editor written in python.