Zed’s killer feature IMO is the built-in journal. You run the
journal::NewJournalEntry command in the command palette (or map it to a
keyboard shortcut) and it dumps you in ~/journal/YYYY/MM/DD.md ready to make
a quick note about something. I recently became very excited indeed about Rex
from Superlogical but wanted to bring this piece of Zed magic with me.
In exchange for about five minutes of propting I cooked up
journal.lua
in my ~/.config.rex directory. Pressing ⌘^J opens a little text input
field
that stores your input in ~/journal/YYYY/MM/DD.md when you’re ready. This
actually felt like a UX improvemnent on Zed because it makes the operation feel
more append-only. In Zed’s journal I would become distracted by the sight of my
older entries when adding a new one whereas now I don’t even need to see them
until I want to.
Even better though was once Rex’s incredible API started to sink in for me and
it hit me that I can store “screenshots” to the journal too. So I hooked up
another shortcut at ⌘^3, which reads the full text of the currently active
pane and stores that as a journal entry in its own right. So I can grab the
full UI state of even a TUI program (which are often a pain in the ass to
copypaste from normally) and chuck it effortlessly into my permanent record.
Here’s a quick demo where I do a couple of placeholder command line operations, save the entire result as a screenshot, and then chuck in a quick journal entry about it as an afterthought.
Rex is the absolute dog’s bollocks and you should go sign up for the beta waitlist immediately.