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!
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.
You can disable AI in Zed
I know CherryTree, hirarquical rich text notes and also programming editor (FOSS, GNU GPL), existed long before AI https://github.com/giuspen/cherrytree
VSCode and Pycharm do it all for me. You can turn all that shit off.
I think I might move to VSCodium, hail libre!
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
Neovim so many plugins and customization you can look st chadvim or lazyvim plugins for it
Emacs!!!
Should work with embedded webkit widgets for the preview.
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!
Neovim. No other editor comes close to it.
I also second this!
Looks like sublime text. How does it differ?
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?
Thank you! Noted!
I don’t know about VSCodium specifically since I use VSCode, but it does allow you to disable all AI features. Don’t know about telemetry.
I use VSCodium. I happen to like it pretty well, since it supports a niche language I use to mod games. I really like that it disables so many annoying features that Microsoft seems to think essential. But I wouldn’t be opposed to switching to a new IDE if it seems more workable.
Not sure about preview, but Kate?
Kate’s dope for everything, small notes, code.
Kate rules.
I’m always surprised by its sheer power
I got markdown previews somehow so it can probably do HTML too!
It does have preview, the plugin has to be enabled/may need some libraries installed.
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/
I was going to mention the same. Zed has a single global “Disable AI” option which works well.
Have you tried disabling the AI in Zed? There’s a toggle in the settings to disable all AI features. I’ve disabled the AI and it’s actually a really nice, responsive, clean editor. Just one toggle, and it doesn’t re-enable itself. The whole “AI-native” marketing really put me off trying it, but it’s now become my go-to IDE for when I’m working on a project where I want a more fully-featured IDE than Vim (my go-to for just editing text files eg standalone scripts, small projects).
If you don’t want to do that, or if you try it and still don’t like Zed, maybe Kate?
Geany is quite a nice, simple editor. Very lightweight, open-source, and no AI.
The line break system is weird and should be opt-in, not opt-out, but yes, otherwise, Geany is great! I’ve otherwise simply been using Xed on Linux Mint.
