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Goodbye VS Code!

Published about 2 months ago • 3 min read

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Hello Reader,

I hope all of my American readers had a fantastic Thanksgiving, and everyone else is having a nice weekend 😊.

Every year, when we hit December (which is tomorrow!), I realize the end of the year is almost here and wonder how the heck it went so quickly!

It always feels like there's still so much to do, and while I’ll be doing a proper year-in-review once we actually hit 2026, taking a quick stock of what I’ve done this year, I can’t complain too much… It’s been a pretty good (and busy) year.

One of the most recent changes for me this year might be switching from VS Code to Zed! More on that just below.

🙋‍♂️ What I’ve been up to this week

Goodbye VS Code!

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When I learned that the Zed editor was available on Windows, I tried it out to see what all the fuss was about, and I ended up really liking it!

I’ve been using it instead of VS Code for over a month now.

It’s not as feature-rich as VS Code, so it might not be the right fit for you, but I've really been enjoying it.

​In this video, I take a look at getting set up with it.

You can get it here if you’re interested in trying it out as well 🙂.

One of the most common questions I’ve had about it so far has been how to get Live Server working with it. I will be putting out a quick video on it tomorrow, but in the meantime, you can use npx live-server and you’re good to go (as long as you have npm installed).

Turning a common UI pattern into a web component

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Last week, Michael Warren joined me to explore a web component that he created based on a form group I had made from one of my older videos, and this week he’s back to teach me how to create it myself.

You can find the final version of it here.

⚡ This selector targets external links

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There’s a lot that you can do with attribute selectors, including looking for links that start with http, which generally will mean they’re an external link.

As some commenters have mentioned, that's not a sure-fire way of knowing something is an external link. You could use it combination with :not() with your actual URL, or a few other tricks, if you'd like.

Either way, it might not be perfect for all situations, but it's still pretty neat!

🔗 Other awesome stuff from around the web

First up, both Josh Comeau and Piccallili have big roundups of Black Friday sales currently running.

Next, a handful of videos to share this week, and a great article.

📝 Quiz time!

A few weeks ago I had a tricky selector question that most people got wrong (only 14% got it correct!). This one's tricky too, but a bit different: Only one of these selectors is valid, which one is it?

  1. :is(> *)
  2. :has(> *)
  3. :not(> *)
  4. :where(> *)

As per usual, you'll have to head on over to YouTube to take a stab at the quiz, and once you answer, you'll see if you were right or not.

​

🏁

Two important notes/reminders to close things off this week:

Have a fantastic week!
Kevin

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Hi! I'm Kevin

Helping people fall in love with CSS

Weekly newsletter, where I talk about tangentially-related front-end development topics and share what I've been up to in the last week, plus any cool/fun/interesting/useful links I come across as well.

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