I have been a dedicated Nova user for over three years. I switched over from VSCode after tiring of the slow performance and "uncanny valley" interface. I'm a sucker for a well-done native app, and Panic really hit the sweet spot with Nova: a beautiful, minimal editor that felt right at home on macOS. It was also extremely fast to boot, indexing files and rendering 50,000 LOC+ without even breaking a sweat on the M1 Pro. Unfortunately, I've been looking for an alternative as of late due to the high frequency of Nova crashes and lack of updates from Panic. Still, the editor scene hasn't changed much from what it looked like half a decade ago, with a smattering of Electron apps, Coda/Nova, some stalwarts such as Sublime Text and TextMate, and, of course, the venerated Vim/Emacs/Neovim trio. I'm not one to spend a lot of time messing around with my tooling; I just want whatever editor I use to have a shallow learning curve and be performant. Somehow, looking for a new editor last week, I came across Zed's tweet: Zed is officially in public beta for macOS! We've been building Zed in Zed for a year now, and here's what we're loving most about it... 🧵 Since then, I've been playing around with and customizing the editor to see what living with a Rust-powered, minimal editor could look like. Install & Setup Zed was very simple to set up; after downloading the '.dmg,' I had an instance ready to code in a matter of seconds. That's instant points over terminal-based editors. I will note here that Zed is currently only available on macOS. Support for Linux and Windows, according to the team, is: [...] planned, but it is not being prioritized in the short term. Customizing the editor was also very straightforward. They have a default editor configuration that you can use, but I found it easier to open a custom settings file and see what was available via their beautiful autocomplete. There are a few things that I was surprised I wasn't able to customize yet, such as: Setting the interface's font Setting the interface's font size, independently of the editor Enabling (or disabling) icons or colors for the file tree view Allow hiding hidden files Performance This is where Zed really shines. Loading a package-lock.json with over 7500 lines is instantaneous—quite literally. Even Nova would take at least a few hundred ms to parse and color a blob of that size, however, Zed doesn't even flinch. There is also zero scroll lagging, autocomplete delays, etc. that I could notice in any of my testing. I'm not sure of the actual numbers, but in my initial testing, Zed felt like the fastest editor I've ever used. That is to be expected, of course: the editor was written in Rust and, as stated in their docs, performance was a top concern while developing the app over the course of this past year. Put another way, VSCode is a 2000's Land Rover Discovery with tons of buttons and features, whereas Zed is a sleek McLaren F1 - minimal, extremely fast, and with three front seats. Why three front seats? Multiplayer Zed's big bet is on multiplayer. The editor comes with first-class support for real-time pairing, bundled right into the editor. By no means do you need to use the feature in order to derive a lot out of Zed, however, as more people hop on the Zed bullet train, I can see it becoming an integral part of many people's (and companies') workflows. As stated by the team: [Multiplayer] makes it easy to have nuanced, real-time conversations about any part of your codebase, whether the code in question was committed last year or hasn't yet been saved to disk. VSCode does have Live Share, but it feels tacked on to the interface, whereas in Zed, pairing feels just like any other feature within the editor: seamless. It almost invites you to collaborate with your team. Ecosystem As Zed is still in public beta, there is surely a lot coming down the pipeline. For the time being, however, there were a few features I definitely missed from Nova: No extension market (1st or 3rd party) No way to add/edit themes (it comes pre-bundled with a number, however) No dark/light mode based on system Limited git integration No markdown preview Limited language support No spellcheck I could not find anything regarding Zed Industries' plan for supporting extensions (if there even is one), however, I hope they do allow for writing extensions with a scripting language such as JavaScript. Forcing developers to build in Rust may be good for performance, but in a world where everyone is building VSCode extensions, it will cripple the marketplace's offerings from the start. Besides the aforementioned list, Zed really has most of the niceties I'm used to built right in. I have come across a few small bugs, which is to be expected at this stage of development, but none of which have detracted me from getting my work done. Recap Zed is a fantastic editor - it's eye-wateringly fast, extremely minimal (and beautiful), has a talented team behind it, and is a natural transition for anyone who has familiarity with both terminal and GUI-based editors. However, in a world that is dominated by the free, open-source VSCode, I am curious to see how Zed's extension ecosystem grows and what Zed Industries' plan is for monetizing their product. For the time being, I have found the editor a pleasure to work with, and I will be using Zed as my daily driver moving forward. If you're tired of VSCode's large size, cluttered interface, and slow performance, I urge you to download Zed's beta and give it a try. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

So you've set out to create a new portfolio for yourself. You start gathering inspiration from platforms like Godly and Minimal Gallery, draw some rectangles in Figma, and open your text editor. You pause. There's thousands of ways to build your website, how do you decide which to go with? You want your website to be beautiful for the users, but you also want to be able to quickly add new posts and case studies. You decide you want to have a dynamic website (good choice!), but the dozens of CMS options weigh on you. Do you pick headless or full-stack? What if you just make a theme? So many choices. I was faced with the same dilemma a few months ago. I finally had the motivation to create a new personal website, but wasn't sure where to start. I decided to keep things simple, I'd write it with a library I knew very well: React. That only solved half of the equation, however. When it came time to decide how to power the dynamic content on the site, I knew I wanted it to be free, easy to use, and open source. A static site powered by Next.js and markdown was the obvious choice. View the source on GitHub. To get started on creating your portfolio, run the following commands. I'm using pnpm, but feel free to use yarn or npm! pnpm dlx create-next-app@latest --typescript cd into your new project and run the following commands to install the necessary packages and bootstrap Tailwind: pnpm install dayjs pnpm install gray-matter react-markdown tailwindcss postcss autoprefixer -D pnpm dlx tailwindcss init -p That's a lot of packages. Let's break them down... gray-matter will be used to parse "front-matter" from our markdown files (we'll read more about this later!) react-markdown is a React component to render markdown content tailwindcss postcss autoprefixer are requirements for installing Tailwind for Next.js Phew! Let's continue our setup by finishing the Tailwind install... Add the following to the module.exports in the generated tailwind.config.js file: content: [ "./pages/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}", "./components/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}", "./layouts/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}", "./utils/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}" ], To bring the styles into your project, add the following to the styles/globals.css file: @tailwind base; @tailwind components; @tailwind utilities; Great! Finally, let's create our new directories by running the following in the root: mkdir _projects mkdir public/projects mkdir layouts mkdir components mkdir utils We're finally ready to start coding! To get started, create a new layout file, ProjectCard.tsx in the components directory. This component will be displayed for each project on the home page's grid. In components/ProjectCard.tsx add: import React from "react"; import Image from "next/image"; import Link from "next/link"; const ProjectCard = ({ title, description, slug, photo, }: { title: string; description: string; slug: string; photo: string; }) => ( <Link href={`/project/${slug}`}> <div className="flex-1 flex flex-col gap-2"> <Image src={photo} alt={title} width="0" height="0" sizes="100vw" className="w-full h-full aspect-square object-cover" priority /> <h3 className="text-black font-bold text-xs">{title}</h3> <p className="text-gray-500 text-xs">{description}</p> </div> </Link> ); export default ProjectCard; Now we need a place to display all of our project cards. Create a new layout called Grid.tsx in the layouts directory. In layouts/Grid.tsx, add the following: import React from "react"; import ProjectCard from "../components/ProjectCard"; import type { Project } from "../layouts/Project"; const Grid = ({ projects }: { projects: Project[] }) => ( <div className="flex flex-col gap-12 max-w-screen-md mx-auto"> <h2 className="text-black font-bold text-lg">Projects</h2> <div className="grid grid-cols-2 md:grid-cols-4 gap-8"> {projects.map(({ meta }) => ( <ProjectCard key={meta.slug} title={meta.title} description={meta.description} slug={meta.slug} photo={meta.photo} /> ))} </div> </div> ); export default Grid; Let's add a demo project now! In the _projects at your root, create a new file. The name doesn't matter, but I find it helpful to make it the same as the URL slug. In that file, add soemthing similar to the following: --- title: Example Project slug: example-project date: February 1, 2023 description: Just an example project! photo: /projects/example-project.jpg --- Something about Example Project... The area between the ---'s is called "front-matter", and it's what we brought gray-matter in to parse for us. Everything under the second seperator is the content of the case study. It can be any valid markdown. Save the file and let's move on to tying things together! In your pages/index.tsx file that Next.js generated, replace the content with the following. Feel free to ignore the missing Project type for now. We'll add that soon! import React from "react"; import path from "path"; import { promises as fs } from "fs"; import matter from "gray-matter"; import dayjs from "dayjs"; import Grid from "../layouts/Grid"; import type { Project } from "../layouts/Project"; const PROJECTS_DIR = "_projects"; export async function getStaticProps() { const projectsDir = path.join(process.cwd(), PROJECTS_DIR); const files = await fs.readdir(projectsDir); const postPaths = files.filter((file) => { const ext = path.extname(file); return ext === ".md"; }); const projects = await Promise.all( postPaths.map(async (file: string) => { const contents = await fs.readFile(path.join(projectsDir, file), "utf8"); const parsed = matter(contents); const project = { content: parsed.content, meta: parsed.data, }; return project; }) ); const sortedProjects = projects.sort((a, b) => dayjs(a.meta.date).isAfter(dayjs(b.meta.date)) ? -1 : 1 ); return { props: { projects: sortedProjects, }, }; } export default function Home({ projects }: { projects: Project[] }) { return ( <main className="mx-10 sm:mx-0 my-10"> <Grid projects={projects} /> </main> ); } This may look a little confusing if you've never seen getStaticProps before, but you can read more about it in the Next.js docs. All it's doing here is getting an array of Projects that we then use dayjs to sort from a human-readable date in the metadata and pass that array as a prop to our Grid. Now just run pnpm dev and you should see your project on the home page! Feel free to add more projects and see how it sorts by date and adds them to the grid. Now, if you try and click on a project, you'll notice it takes you to a 404 page. Let's go ahead and add a single project layout by creating a file called Project.tsx in layouts. In Project.tsx, add the following: import React from "react"; import Image from "next/image"; export type ProjectMeta = { title: string; description: string; slug: string; date: string; photo: string; }; export type Project = { meta: ProjectMeta; content: string; }; const Project = ({ project, renderedProjectContent, }: { project: Project; renderedProjectContent: string; }) => ( <div className="flex flex-col gap-8 max-w-screen-md mx-auto"> <h2 className="text-black font-bold text-lg">{project.meta.title}</h2> <h3 className="text-gray-500 text-base">{project.meta.description}</h3> <Image src={project.meta.photo} alt={project.meta.title} width="0" height="0" sizes="100vw" className="w-full h-full" priority /> <div className="flex flex-col gap-8" dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: renderedProjectContent }} /> </div> ); export default Project; ⚠️ Note the dangerouslySetInnerHTML. It's ok to use here as the only user's content that will be rendered there is your's. This is not a great practice, however, and you should not do this on a platform that other's are able to post content to. In the next step, we are going to be writing a utility to generate that HTML. To do so, create a new file called markdown.tsx in the utils directory and add the following: import React from "react"; import Link from "next/link"; import * as ReactDOMServer from "react-dom/server"; import ReactMarkdown from "react-markdown"; const Img = ({ ...props }: any) => ( <img className="rounded-[8px] max-w-screen-lg mx-auto w-full" {...props} /> ); const Text = ({ children, node }: { children: React.ReactNode; node: any }) => { if (node.children[0].tagName === "img") { const image: any = node.children[0]; return <Img src={image.properties.src} />; } return ( <p className="flex-1 flex-grow w-full text-xs leading-6 max-w-screen-md mx-auto"> {children} </p> ); }; const Anchor = ({ children, href }: any) => ( <Link href={href} className="inline underline"> {children} </Link> ); export const renderMarkdownToHTML = (markup: string) => { return ReactDOMServer.renderToStaticMarkup( <ReactMarkdown components={{ p: Text, img: Img, a: Anchor, }} > {markup.trim()!} </ReactMarkdown> ); }; This component uses react-markdown to enable us to define JSX component mappings for markdown elements! Feel free to get creative here and expand upon what's already in there. So far so good! We're getting close. Now we just need to create a new file called [slug].tsx in pages/project that will pull that new component in. In [slug.tsx], add the following: import React from "react"; import { promises as fs } from "fs"; import path from "path"; import matter from "gray-matter"; import ProjectLayout from "../../layouts/Project"; import { renderMarkdownToHTML } from "../../utils/markdown"; import type { Project } from "../../layouts/Project"; const PROJECTS_DIR = "_projects"; export async function getStaticProps({ params }: { params: { slug: string } }) { const projectsDir = path.join(process.cwd(), PROJECTS_DIR); const files = await fs.readdir(projectsDir); const projectPaths = files.filter((file) => { const ext = path.extname(file); return ext === ".md"; }); const projects = await Promise.all( projectPaths.map(async (file: string) => { const contents = await fs.readFile(path.join(projectsDir, file), "utf8"); const parsed = matter(contents); return { content: parsed.content, meta: parsed.data, }; }) ); const project = projects.find((p) => p?.meta?.slug === params.slug); const renderedProjectContent = renderMarkdownToHTML(project?.content!); return { props: { project, renderedProjectContent, }, }; } export async function getStaticPaths() { const projectsDir = path.join(process.cwd(), PROJECTS_DIR); const files = await fs.readdir(projectsDir); const projectPaths = files.filter((file) => { const ext = path.extname(file); return ext === ".md"; }); const projects = await Promise.all( projectPaths.map(async (file: string) => { const contents = await fs.readFile(path.join(projectsDir, file), "utf8"); const parsed = matter(contents); return { content: parsed.content, meta: parsed.data, }; }) ); const paths = projects.map((project) => ({ params: { slug: project?.meta?.slug }, })); return { paths, fallback: false, }; } const Project = ({ project, renderedProjectContent, }: { project: Project; renderedProjectContent: string; }) => ( <main className="mx-10 sm:mx-0 my-10"> <ProjectLayout project={project} renderedProjectContent={renderedProjectContent} /> </main> ); export default Project; Similar to the index.tsx page, we are grabbing the list of projects again, however this time we are filtering to find the single project whose slug matches that in the dynamic page's URL. Then, we are defining a function called getStaticPaths that is another special Next.js feature to dynamically create the static paths for generated content (in this case, our Projects!). You can read more about that in the Next.js docs. Great! If you go back to the home page and click a project, you should now see it takes you to a single project page! That's really all you need to get started! You now have a simple markdown-powered portfolio. You can use this as a jumping-off point to continue building out the (easy-to-update) portfolio of your dreams! Here's some ideas to get you started: Use next-sitemap to generate a sitemap to all of your dynamic routes to make it easier for search engines to index your site As you probably noted, some of the code we wrote isn't very DRY; maybe extract some of the repeated code into more utils Add a navbar and footer Add more pages to tell visitors about yourself or how to get in touch with you Looking foward to see what y'all create! View the source on GitHub.