zed on jwogrady

Two config directories, and I would have edited the wrong one

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:52:00 -0500

I sat down to add the editor settings I’d written up in JRN 26-008 and found ~/.config/zed/ sitting there — existing, correctly named, and completely empty.

Zero files on the Linux side. Everything on the Windows side.Screenshot

Zero files. Meanwhile AppData/Roaming/Zed/ has the settings.json I’ve apparently been editing all along, and AppData/Local/Zed/extensions/installed has five extensions I don’t remember installing individually.

Four editor defaults that are right for code and wrong for prose

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:33:00 -0500

Zed’s defaults are tuned for code, which is the right call and leaves four of them wrong for what I’m actually doing in here.

Autosave, for reasons recorded an entry ago and not worth reliving.

Soft wrap to editor_width — markdown has no line length, and a horizontal scrollbar inside a paragraph is a problem I inflicted on myself.

The third one is the one I’d never have guessed. Turn trailing-whitespace stripping off for markdown. Two trailing spaces is a hard line break; strip them on save and the editor silently rewrites your text, and the diff shows nothing wrong because whitespace is invisible. A formatter that is correct for every other filetype quietly corrupts this one.

An editor and a filesystem can hold two different documents

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:18:00 -0500

Here’s something I didn’t know this morning: an editor and a filesystem can hold two different documents under one name, and neither is obliged to mention it.

I found out the slow way. Four rounds of “it’s not there” / “but I can see it” before I checked the only thing that settles an argument like that:

$ stat -c '%y %s bytes' content/first-try.md
2026-09-20 16:04:13 -0500  186 bytes

The editor said thirteen lines. The disk said 186 bytes.

Day one: the stack, and why each piece earns its place

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:40:00 -0500

I’m writing this one before I’ve built anything, which is deliberate. The things that are about to cost me an hour will be obvious and unmemorable in a week, and obvious-and-unmemorable is exactly the knowledge I keep having to buy twice.

So: notes while I’m inside it, not a tidy retrospective afterwards.

The stack

Hugo, because the build is one binary. No Node toolchain underneath it, nothing to npm install, nothing to rot in six months when I come back to this.