[HN Gopher] Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor
___________________________________________________________________
Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor
Author : vquemener
Score : 516 points
Date : 2025-05-07 06:38 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zed.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (zed.dev)
| keybits wrote:
| For people who have tried the new agent panel in Zed, how does it
| compare to something like Cursor or Windsurf?
|
| (I've yet to dive deep into AI coding tools and currently use Zed
| as an 'open source Sublime Text alternative' because I like the
| low latency editing.)
| DreaminDani wrote:
| I'd say it's closer to Claude Code than to either of the two
| IDE-oriented ones. I say this because it actually does the
| right thing more often than either Cursor or Windsurf. It
| gathers the right context, asks for feedback when needed and
| has yet to "go back and forth between two failing solutions"
| like I've seen Cursor do.
|
| I don't know what Zed's doing under the hood but the diffing
| tool has yet to fail on me (compared to multiple times per
| conversation in Cursor). Compared to previous Zed AI
| iterations, this one edits files much more willingly and
| clearly communicates what it's editing. It's also faster than
| Claude Code at getting up to speed on context and much faster
| than Cursor or Windsurf.
| bmulholland wrote:
| I'm curious what others' experiences have been with this. I
| haven't tried it out yet. Is it comparable to Cursor's
| capabilities? More on par with VS Code Copilot? Something else
| entirely?
| xmorse wrote:
| Basically same level as Cursor, one thing missing is the Apply
| Cursor model which sometimes makes better edits in the code
| seumars wrote:
| Wow that's one awkwardly pompous introduction. Nevertheless Zed
| never fails to impress. Aside from all the AI fireworks it really
| goes to show how building software "from scratch" pays off in the
| long run.
| MichaelGlass wrote:
| (I thought the introduction was, if not outright funny,
| deserving of at least one chuckle).
| seafoamteal wrote:
| I generally use Neovim, but Zed was the first code editor that
| made me go, "Wow, I can see myself actually using this." My only
| gripe is the "Sign In" button at the top that I can't seem to
| remove.
|
| But apropos TFA, it's nice to see that telemetry is opt-in, not
| opt-out.
| pimeys wrote:
| Yeah. I've been using vim since the 90's. A bit of emacs here
| and there, and more recently some helix too. Zed was the first
| GUI editor that took me over. I've always hated VSCode, but Zed
| is so fast and its UI just clicks on me that I've been using it
| as my main editor for months now.
|
| Subscribed to their paid plan just to keep the lights on and
| hoping it will get even better in the future.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| > that I can't seem to remove
|
| It's open source, builds extremely well out of the box, and the
| UI is declarative.
| outcoldman wrote:
| I am amazed how well it works. Yesterday I have spent a full day
| with a new macOS project with idea in my head. Spend half a day
| writing basic features, and after that opened the project in Zed
| to add features. Not very well documented things like AppKit +
| SwiftUI integration - no issues, and I mean I was getting about
| 500 new lines from my questions and was getting compilable code
| (and working). A few times after review I modified a few things
| to make it compilable/or better. But still. And I had one
| interesting problem with objc/swift and javascript integration -
| and Zed AI delivered some masterpiece in JavaScript, that is
| definitely outside my knowledge. This technology is definitely
| going to change how we program now.
| camjw wrote:
| a bit offtopic but whats your workflow for building macos
| products using a different editor to xcode? i am new to this
| and xcode seems awful (?)
| LinusU wrote:
| (not the one you asked, but can chime in with some info)
|
| This was a long time ago, but the way I did it was to use
| XcodeGen (1) and a simple Makefile. I have an example repo
| here (2) but it was before Swift Package Manager (using
| Carthage instead). If I remember correctly XcodeGen has
| support for Swift Package Manager now.
|
| On top of that I was coding in VS Code at the time, and just
| ran `make run` in the terminal pane when I wanted to run the
| app.
|
| Now, with SwiftUI, I'm not sure how it would be to not use
| Xcode. But personally, I've never really vibed with Xcode,
| and very much prefer using Zed...
|
| 1: https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen 2:
| https://github.com/LinusU/Soon
| dchest wrote:
| "For millions of years, humans have used tools to create things."
|
| Huh?
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| obviously tongue-in-cheek
| lopatin wrote:
| Humans haven't been around for millions of years though. Or
| is that part of the cheekiness?
| two_handfuls wrote:
| Homo Abilis, 2 million years ago, used stone tools.
|
| Yes it's not the modern human but I think that's close
| enough.
| orra wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by human. Homo sapians emerged
| 200k or 300k years ago. But the genus goes back further.
| Homo habilis goes back 2.4M years.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| I really want to move off VS Code and start using Zed, but
| unfortunately the text is always extremely blurry. It's just
| unusable.
|
| I check back on the GitHub issue every few months and it just has
| more votes and more supportive comments, but no acknowledgement.
|
| Hopefully someone can rescue us from the sluggish VS Code.
|
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
|
| I have a 1440p monitor and seeing this issue.
| askonomm wrote:
| 1440p monitor would probably be why the text is blurry - there
| simply isn't enough pixels to make things smooth without
| resorting to special hacks to improve LowDPI text rendering,
| which with more and more displays being HiDPI many don't bother
| doing.
| krastanov wrote:
| I am amazed people consider 1440p low resolution. My knee-
| jerk reaction was to assume you were sarcastic. I use a
| monitor of roughly that many lines of pixels and have never
| had observed blurry text in the tools I use (and I use fairly
| small fonts).
| trevorhinesley wrote:
| Are you using enlarged text or native 1440p? If the latter,
| have you used 4k or retina displays in the past? It's hard
| to go back after that.
| MonstraG wrote:
| Native 1440p, never used retina nor 4k.
|
| (not parent commenter, but hold same opinion)
| silon42 wrote:
| Same here... 1440p 32" is optimal for me, the only
| improvement I'd consider right now is 1600p equivalent.
| AndroidKitKat wrote:
| Biggest draw for me with 1440p 32" is being the same DPI
| as a 1080p 24". I like to have one big monitor and then 2
| small flank vertical monitors and having them all be the
| same DPI just makes headaches go away on every operating
| system I use them with.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Damn. I am so happy with my old 17" monitor and 1280x1024
| resolution here. :D
| thfuran wrote:
| Look, you can insist that a 1440p monitor can only show
| blurry text all you like, but the problem that people are
| talking about is that the text is _even blurrier than
| that_.
| trevorhinesley wrote:
| I didn't insist that. Understood, but specifically, I was
| talking to the comment I replied to, which was about
| 1440p monitors in particular.
| krastanov wrote:
| I have native 1440p 120Hz on my main screen which is more
| than 30inches across (ultrawide). I can see pixels if I
| look close enough, but I do not see any pixels at usual
| reading distance.
|
| I have used retina displays of various sizes -- but after
| a while I just set them down to half their resolution
| usually (i.e. I do not use the 200% scaling from the OS,
| rather set them to be 1440p (or lower on 13inch
| laptops)). I have not seen an advantage to retina
| displays.
| maleldil wrote:
| How big is your screen? At 27", I can clearly see pixels on
| 1440p. A 4k display with 150% scaling (effectively 1440p)
| looks much better. Maybe you haven't used a higher
| resolution? If so, you might not know what you're missing.
| skydhash wrote:
| Not GP. But I have a 24" 4k (close to retina), the MBA
| screen and while they're nicer than the 27" 1440p I have,
| the latter is essentially worthless on macOS. With Linux,
| it's more than fine. Not super sharp, but quite readable.
| On macOS, the blurred text is headache inducing.
| krastanov wrote:
| (cross-posting on both subthreads): I have native 1440p
| 120Hz on my main screen which is more than 30inches
| across (ultrawide). I can see pixels if I look close
| enough, but I do not see any pixels at usual reading
| distance.
|
| I have used retina displays of various sizes -- but after
| a while I just set them down to half their resolution
| usually (i.e. I do not use the 200% scaling from the OS,
| rather set them to be 1440p (or lower on 13inch
| laptops)). I have not seen an advantage to retina
| displays.
| askonomm wrote:
| I mean the last time I saw anyone have a 1440p display was
| back in the early 2010's, so ... nowadays most people that
| I know buy 4k 27"/32" displays at minimum, with 5k displays
| gaining popularity as the price for them goes down.
| Macbooks for example come with a very high resolution
| display, and so do most high-end PC laptops, too.
| Xiol32 wrote:
| Great sample size
| sapiogram wrote:
| Yes yes, all your friends are rich, good for you.
| hu3 wrote:
| > many don't bother doing.
|
| Apparently all editors bothered doing, except Zed.
|
| From the Issue:
|
| > Zed looks great on my MacBook screen, but looks bad when I
| dock to my 1080p monitor. No other editor has that problem
| for some reason.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| Literally every other editor and application besides Zed seem
| to be working just fine.
| spookie wrote:
| 1440p is high enough for anything depending on screen size.
|
| If they're running everything on the GPU then their SDF text
| rendering needs more work to be resolution independent. I'm
| assuming they use SDFs, or some variant of that.
|
| Really, the screen isn't the issue given that on other
| editors OP says it is fine.
|
| Knuth would be angry reading this :)
| dismalaf wrote:
| Lol so many people use 1440p, 1660p, even 1080p or 720p and
| have perfectly crisp text across many programs. If Zed can't
| figure it out that's on them.
| poly2it wrote:
| I've never owned anything beyond 1080p. I've never had issues
| reading text on them, although the graphical quality could be
| better.
| nurumaik wrote:
| I remember coding on 640x480 monitor long ago and having no
| issues with text rendering
| jamil7 wrote:
| > it just has more votes and more supportive comments, but no
| acknowledgement
|
| It looks like the relevant work needs to be done upstream.
| sapiogram wrote:
| If that was true, it would be very nice if they just
| acknowledged that...
|
| I don't know the internals of Zed well, but it seems entirely
| plausible they're doing text rendering from scratch.
| barrenko wrote:
| Not sure if it's related, but I've built Zed from source to try
| on Windows (I haven't tried it on other platforms), and it does
| not look good sadly, it's also quite a bit "uncrisp" or
| something - I don't really have the words to describe.
| testycool wrote:
| Well said. "uncrisp" is how I'd describe it as well.
| kubik369 wrote:
| If you are using MacOS, unfortunately, your issue is that you
| are using a 1440p monitor, not an issue with any one program.
|
| Apple has removed support for font rendering methods which make
| text on non-integer scaled screens look sharper. As a result,
| if you want to use your screen without blurry text, you have to
| use 1080p (1x), 4k (2x 1080p), 5k (2x 1440p) or 6k screens (or
| any other screens where integer scaling looks ok).
|
| To see the difference, try connecting a Windows/Linux machine
| to your monitor and comparing how text looks compared to the
| same screen with a MacOS device.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| I'm on Linux (Ubuntu) and haven't had this blurry font issue
| with any other application that I've installed over the
| years.
| dvtkrlbs wrote:
| Yeah the reason is Linux is supporting non integer scaling.
| Apple stubbornly doesn't
| sapiogram wrote:
| This issue happens _without_ any scaling at all, on both
| Linux and MacOS.
| naikrovek wrote:
| native resolution on any monitor should work fine on MacOS.
|
| using pixel fonts on any non-integer multiplier of the native
| resolution will always result in horrible font rendering, I
| don't care what OS you're on.
|
| I use MacOS on all kinds of displays as I move throughout the
| day, some of them are 1x, some are 2x, and some are somewhere
| in between. using a vector font in Zed looks fine on all of
| them. It did _not_ look fine when I used a pixel font that I
| created for myself, but that 's how pixel fonts work, not the
| fault of MacOS.
| sapiogram wrote:
| This comment is incorrect, I have tried the editor on both
| MacOS and Linux, and texts looks like crap on both if you're
| using your screen at its native resolution. The difference is
| easily visible in screenshots.
|
| Example Zed screenshot, using "Ayu Light":
| https://i.ibb.co/Nr8SjvR/Screenshot-
| from-2024-07-28-13-11-10...
|
| Same code in VS Code: https://i.ibb.co/YZfPXvZ/Screenshot-
| from-2024-07-28-13-13-41...
| sroussey wrote:
| Looks like anti-aliasing on a hi-dpi monitor which you
| shouldn't do.
| sapiogram wrote:
| It's not, the font renderer just sucks outside of high-
| DPI displays.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Several replies saying that the issue is with the monitor. When
| the issue has an example showing Zed next to VS Code, and you
| can see that Zed is much blurrier: https://github.com/zed-
| industries/zed/assets/5507503/9883d38...
| xpe wrote:
| No issues on macOS for me on my MBP 16". Probably the default
| resolution setting I think. What platform + resolution for
| you?
| sapiogram wrote:
| It's not an issue on high-DPI screens. Try again with an
| external monitor. It's much worse on light mode.
| turnsout wrote:
| Looks like you're trying to turn off antialiasing entirely,
| which is a bit niche
| naikrovek wrote:
| shrink the zed window by one pixel horizontally and one pixel
| vertically. there's a video on that issue page which shows
| resizing making the font go in and out of focus, and that tells
| me that there's something dividing the window height and width
| by 2 and starting the font rendering there. if you divide by 2
| and you get .5, you'll see the blurriness. if you make the
| window 1 pixel wider you won't get x.5 anymore, you'll get a
| whole number.
|
| try it and see. i bet that helps/fixes at least some of you
| suffering from this.
| sapiogram wrote:
| Thank you, I bring this up in every Zed thread on the internet,
| hopefully the devs will eventually fix it. Until they do, Zed
| is simply unusable on regular-DPI displays, at least in light
| mode. See these screenshots:
|
| Example Zed screenshot, using "Ayu Light":
| https://i.ibb.co/Nr8SjvR/Screenshot-from-2024-07-28-13-11-10...
|
| Same code in VS Code: https://i.ibb.co/YZfPXvZ/Screenshot-
| from-2024-07-28-13-13-41...
| Geee wrote:
| I don't see the difference except that the font is thinner in
| the Zed screenshot. Try with same font weight and color
| scheme.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Zed defaults to a font weight a little thin for my taste,
| increase it and it will probably solve your issue. I don't
| see anything really wrong with the first screenshot, might
| just be a matter of what you are used to.
| jojohohanon wrote:
| Does your monitor have a nonstandard rgb pattern? If zed is
| trying to do its own subpixel rendering then getting the
| pattern wrong is going to mess up your results.
|
| (Or are you using it in vertical orientation?)
| ammmir wrote:
| I was using Zed up until a few months ago. I got fed up with the
| entire AI panel being an editable area, so sometimes I ended up
| clobbering it. I switched to Cursor, but now I don't "trust" the
| the editor and its undo stack, I've lost code as a result of it,
| particularly when you're in mid-review of an agentic edit, but
| decide to edit the edit. The undo/redo gets difficult to track, I
| wish there was some heirarchical tree view of history.
|
| The restore checkpoint/redo is too linear for my lizard brain. Am
| I wrong to want a tree-based agentic IDE? Why has nobody built
| it?
| senko wrote:
| > _I got fed up with the entire AI panel being an editable
| area, so sometimes I ended up clobbering it._
|
| They fixed that with the new agent panel, which now works more
| like the other AI sidebars.
|
| I was (mildly) annoyed by that too. The new UI still has rough
| edges but I like the change.
| freehorse wrote:
| Interesting. I actually like the editable format of the chat
| interface because it allows fixing small stuff on the fly
| (instead of having to talk about it with the model) and de-
| cluttering the chat after a few back and forths make it a
| mess (instead of having to start anew), which makes the
| context window smaller and less confusing to the model, esp
| for local ones. Also, the editable form makes more sense to
| me, and it feels more natural and simple to interact with an
| LLM assistant with it.
| ntonozzi wrote:
| The old panel still exists, they call it a text thread.
| dtkav wrote:
| Yeah, but text threads cannot be used as context in the
| inline assist right now so there's no way to apply the
| code.
| senko wrote:
| What, that was a thing? I was copypasteing manually,
| which was annoying and error prone, that's why I like the
| new agent panel more.
|
| Oops, I guess.
| dtkav wrote:
| Yeah, It was great because you were in control of where
| and when the edits happened.
|
| So you could manage the context with great care, then go
| over to the editor and select specific regions and then
| "pull in" the changes that were discussed.
|
| I guess it was silly that I was always typing "use the
| new code" in every inline assist message. A hotkey to
| "pull new code" into a selected region would have been
| sweet.
|
| I don't really want to "set it and forget it" and then
| come back to some mega diff that is like 30% wrong.
| Especially right now where it keeps getting stuck and
| doing nothing for 30m.
| freehorse wrote:
| Ah that's a bummer. You can still add threads as context,
| but that you cannot use slash commands there, so the only
| way to add them or other stuff in the context is to click
| buttons with the mouse. It would be nice if at least
| slash commands were working there.
|
| edit: actually it is still possible to include text
| threads in there
| dtkav wrote:
| You can add agent threads as context, but right now
| adding text threads as context doesn't work.
| freehorse wrote:
| It actually seems to work for me. I have an active text
| thread and it was added automatically to my inline prompt
| in the file. There was this box on the bottom of the
| inline text box. I think I had to click it the first time
| to include the context, but the subsequent times it was
| included by default.
| dtkav wrote:
| Yes! Editing the whole buffer is a major feature because
| the more you keep around failed attempts and trash the
| dumber the model gets (and more expensive).
|
| If you're working on stuff like marketing websites that are
| well represented in the model dataset then things will just
| fly, but if you're building something that is more niche it
| can be super important to tune the context -- in some cases
| this is the differentiating feature between being able to
| use AI assistance at all (otherwise the failure rate just
| goes to 100%).
| cies wrote:
| All vims and emacses can have undo-tree (as a plugin iirc).
| Many devs use it.
|
| Vote/read-up here for the feature on Zed:
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/17455
|
| And here on VSCode:
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/20889
| conartist6 wrote:
| Worry not, for it is being built.
|
| You will not catch me using the words "agentic IDE" to describe
| what I'm doing because its primary purpose isn't to be used by
| AI any more than the primary purpose of a car is to drive
| itself.
|
| But yes, what I am doing is creating an IDE where the primary
| integration surface for humans, scripts, and AIs is not the 2D
| text buffer, but the embedded tree structure of the code. Zed
| _almost_ gets there and it 's maddening to me that they don't
| embrace it fully. I think once I show them what the stakes of
| the game are they have the engineering talent to catch up.
|
| The main reason it hasn't been done is that we're still all
| basically writing code on paper. All of the most modern tools
| that people are using, they're still basically just
| digitizations of punchcard programming. If you dig down through
| all the layers of abstractions at the very bottom is line and
| column, that telltale hint of paper's two-dimensionality. And
| because line and column get baked into every integration
| surface, the limitations of IDEs are the limitations of paper.
| When you frame the task of programming as "write a huge amount
| of text out on paper" it's no wonder that people turn to LLMs
| to do it.
|
| For the integration layer using the tree as the primary means
| you get to stop worrying about a valid tree layer blinking into
| and out of existence constantly, which is conceptually what
| happens when someone types code syntax in left to right. They
| put an opening brace in, then later a closing brace. In between
| a valid tree representation has ceased to exist.
| gnrlst wrote:
| I've _very_ interested in this, and completely agree we are
| still trying to evolve the horse carriage without realizing
| we can move away from it.
|
| How can I follow up on what you're building? Would you be
| open to having a chat? I've found your github, but let me
| know how if there's a better way to contact you.
| conartist6 wrote:
| The BABLR Discord is the spot, though I'm also happy to
| take emails: https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX (and yes I'm
| happy to chat!)
| pierrec wrote:
| Representing undo/redo history as a tree is quite different
| from representing the code structure as a tree. On the one
| hand I'm surprised no one seems to care that a response has
| nothing to do with the question... on the other hand, these
| AI tooling threads are always full of people talking right
| past each other and being very excited about it, so I guess
| it fits.
| conartist6 wrote:
| They certainly can be quite different things and in all
| current systems I know of the two are unrelated, but in my
| system they are one and the same.
|
| That's possible because the source of truth for the IDE's
| state is an immutable concrete syntax tree. It can be
| immutable without ruining our costs because it has btree
| amortization built into it. So basically you can always
| construct a new tree with some changes by reusing most of
| the nodes from an old tree. A version history would simply
| be a stack of these tree references.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Been using cline and their snapshot/rewind/remove context (even
| out-of-order) features are really shining especially with
| larger projects and larger features+changes becoming more
| commonplace with stronger LLMs.
|
| I would recommend you check it out if you've been frustrated by
| the other options out there - I've been very happy with it. I'm
| fairly sure you can't have git-like dag trees, nor do I think
| that would be particularly useful for AI based workflow - you'd
| have to delegate rebasing and merge conflict resolution to the
| agent itself... lots of potential for disaster there, at least
| for now.
| gempir wrote:
| Wish it could use OpenRouter
| ribelo wrote:
| You can, but not together with openai:
|
| ``` "openai": { "api_url": "https://openrouter.ai/api/v1",
| "version": "1", "available_models": [ { "name":
| "anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet:beta", "max_tokens": 200000 }, ...
| ```
|
| Just change api_url in the zed settings and add models you want
| manually.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Luckily, OpenRouter has OpenAI models as an option :)
|
| https://openrouter.ai/models?fmt=cards&providers=OpenAI
| antx wrote:
| There's a PR for that [0] ! Eager to see it in action.
|
| [0] : https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/29496
| divan wrote:
| Meanwhile I'm checking Helix editor every 6 month to see if
| authors became any less hostile to the idea of thinking about
| considering of starting thinking about potentially adding copilot
| support.
|
| https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037
| nba456_ wrote:
| This is exactly why I bounced off Helix a while ago. No copilot
| and endless bikeshedding for plugin development.
| eikenberry wrote:
| The bikeshedding has long past. They've been working on the
| implementation now for some time.
|
| https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Why should an open source editor support some single commercial
| product API in their core? Why copilot and not another product?
| It's completely reasonable to me that this should be a third
| party plugin or that they should wait for some standard that
| supports many products.
| lemontheme wrote:
| As @adriangalilea recently aptly wrote in Helix's 2nd-longest
| discussion thread (#4037):
|
| > For the nth time, it's about enabling inline suggestions
| and letting anything, either LSP or Extensions use it, then
| you don't have to guess what the coolest LLM is, you just
| have a generic useful interface for LLM's or anything else to
| use.
|
| An argument I would agree with is that it's unreasonable to
| expect Helix's maintainers to volunteer their time toward
| building and maintaining functionality they don't personally
| care about.
| dcre wrote:
| As I say in my comment, they may even care about it but not
| have time to churn while best practices are figured out.
| dcre wrote:
| It's not about it being locked to a commercial product --
| whatever they built would be provider-agnostic. My
| understanding is the decision is more about not wanting to
| build things into core that are evolving so quickly and not
| wanting to rely on experimental LSP features (though I think
| inline completions are becoming standard soon[1]). Zed itself
| is perfect evidence of that -- they built an AI integration
| and then basically had to throw it away and rebuild it
| because the consensus best practice design changed. The Helix
| maintainers don't have time for that kind of churn and aren't
| trying to keep up with the hype cycle. When the plugin system
| is ready people will be able to choose their preferred
| implementation, and maybe eventually some aspects of it will
| make it into core.
|
| [1]: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-
| protocol/specifi...
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Helix is working on a plugin system that will hopefully allow
| for copilot (or whatever other product) use.
|
| Also, the Helix way, thus far, has been to build a LSP for all
| the things, so I guess you'd make a copilot LSP (I be there
| already is one).
| lemontheme wrote:
| Unless something's changed, every AI-backed language server
| I've tried in Helix suffers from the same limitation when it
| comes to completions: Suggestions aren't shown until the last
| language server has responded or timed-out. Your slowest
| language server determines how long you'll be waiting.
|
| The only project I know of that recognizes this is
| https://github.com/SilasMarvin/lsp-ai, which pivoted away
| from completions to chat interactions via code actions.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I feel like an LSP is very insufficient for the ideal UX of
| AI integrations. LSP would be fine for AI autocompletes of
| course, but i think we want a custom UX that we don't quite
| yet know. Eg what Zed offers here seems useful. I also really
| like what Claude Code does.
|
| I don't know the LSP spec well enough to know if these sort
| of complex interactions would work with it, but it seems
| super out of scope for it imo.
| level87 wrote:
| I love Helix, not fussed about this at all, happy to use a
| robust editor that doesn't have hundreds of plugins barely
| holding it together.
| benrutter wrote:
| This rings so true for me! Helix is beautiful and works
| fantastic, I'm pretty happy not having AI integrated into my
| editor so Helix is basically exactly as I want without any
| extras I don't!
| lemontheme wrote:
| Interestingly enough, this is exactly why I've started using
| Zed - while simultaneously eagerly waiting for Helix PR #8675
| (Steel plugin system) to get merged. It's not far off, but then
| again, many Helix PRs seem that way, only to stay in limbo for
| months if not years.
|
| These last two months I've been trialing both Neovim and Zed
| alongside Helix. I _know_ I should probably just use Neovim
| since, once set up properly, it can do anything and everything.
| But configuring it has brought little joy. And once set up to
| do the same as Helix out of the box, it 's noticeably slower.
|
| Zed is the first editor I've tried that actually feels as fast
| as Helix while _also_ offering AI tooling. I like how
| integrated everything is. The inline assistant uses context
| from the chat assistant. Code blocks are easy to copy from the
| chat panel to a buffer. The changes made by the coding agent
| can be individually reviewed and accepted or rejected. It 's a
| lot of small details done right that add up to a tool that I'm
| genuinely becoming confident about using.
|
| Also, there's a Helix keymap, although it doesn't seem as
| complete as the Vim keymap, which is what I've been using.
|
| Still, I hope there will come a time when Helix users can have
| more than just Helix + Aider, because I prefer my editor inside
| a terminal (Helix) rather than my terminal inside an editor
| (Zed).
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That honestly makes me want to check out Helix. I'm so tired of
| seeing AI get forced into everything that "we won't add that"
| is a feature to me.
| divan wrote:
| I can understand that, and it's great if it fits your needs.
| It's annoying when apps that just have to do one thing and do
| it well instead are focusing on hype features. My recent rant
| is about Warp terminal that has a "different font size for
| different tabs" issue open for years, but silently integrated
| all sorts of AI into the terminal.
|
| And yet, it's hard to ignore the fact that coding practices
| are undergoing a one-in-a-generation shift, and experienced
| programmers are benefiting most from it. Many of us had to
| ditch the comfort of terminal editors and switch to
| Microsoft's VSCode clones just to have these new incredible
| powers and productivity boosts.
|
| Having AI code assistants built into the fast terminal editor
| sounds like a dream. And editors like Helix could totally
| deliver here if the authors were a bit more open to the idea.
| undo-k wrote:
| The authors don't seem hostile at all. They're firmly against
| putting work into a feature they don't care for but welcome
| pro-AI users to make it happen. For some reason the latter
| group hasn't seemed to accomplish it.
| eikenberry wrote:
| This seems more in scope of those same people who want to make
| their editor into an IDE. And just like most other things, the
| editor is a poor integration point for AI. The shell and inter-
| process communications are the gold standard for integration
| and are where the best integrations emerging from. Things that
| work with your editor instead of trying to replace it. Aider
| being the best example I've seen so far... though I'd love to
| hear about others.
| volkk wrote:
| Zed is exactly how software should be made. Granted, I don't
| agree with all of their UX decisions (i think the AI panel is
| really bad compared to Cursor's), but good lord is the thing
| fast. These guys are the real deal. They built a rendering system
| (GPUI) in Rust before building Zed on top of it, and so it is one
| of the fastest (if not the fastest) pieces of software that
| resides on my computer. I can't wait until GPUI becomes a bit
| more mature/stable so I can build on top of it, because the other
| Rust GUI libraries/frameworks aren't great.
|
| _edit_ : they updated the AI panel! looking good!
| cies wrote:
| > because the other Rust GUI libraries/frameworks aren't great.
|
| Iced, being used by System76's COSMIC EPOCH, is not great in
| what regards? Serious question.
| volkk wrote:
| there's basically zero documentation for Iced as it stands.
| They even wrote that if you're not a great Rust dev, you're
| going to have a bad time and that all docs are basically
| "read the code" until their book is written. I'm glad
| System76 is able to build using Iced, but you need a great
| manual for a tool to be considered mature and useful.
|
| IMO Slint is milestones ahead and better. They've even built
| out solid extensions for using their UI DSL, and they have
| pages and pages of docs. Of course everything has tradeoffs,
| and their licensing is funky to me.
| rice7th wrote:
| Then you should try egui. It has a lot of examples and it
| is among the most mature libraries along with iced and
| slint, without the licensing problems
| jenadine wrote:
| egui is nice but its API changes a lot between versions
| which makes it hard to rely on. Slint is stable and well
| documented. Its license is open source and also free to
| use in many cases so there is no real issue there.
| airstrike wrote:
| The crate is 100% documented. what specific documentation
| do you think are lacking? Tutorials? That's for users to
| write.
|
| Calling iced not useful reads like an uninformed take
| volkk wrote:
| > what specific documentation do you think are lacking?
| Tutorials?
|
| examples beyond tiny todo app/best practices would be a
| great start.
|
| > Tutorials? That's for users to write.
|
| sure, and how's that going for them? there are near zero
| tutorials out there, and as someone looking to build a
| desktop tool in rust, they've lost me. maybe i'm not
| important enough for them and their primary goal is to
| intellectually gatekeep this tool from the vast majority
| for a long time, in which case, mission accomplished
| airstrike wrote:
| there are literally dozens of examples, including many
| apps you can reference. come join the discord and check
| out the showcase channel. I've written and published
| probably 50-100 examples to show best practices to people
| who want to learn more. I basically leave zero questions
| unanswered on that server, unless they are so far out of
| my wheelhouse that I can't answer them, but even then I
| might point you to the right resource or person...and I'm
| not even part of the team. the community is just
| wonderful IMHO
|
| > sure, and how's that going for them? there are near
| zero tutorials out there, and as someone looking to build
| a desktop tool in rust, they've lost me. maybe i'm not
| important enough for them and their primary goal is to
| intellectually gatekeep this tool from the vast majority
| for a long time, in which case, mission accomplished
|
| 26.5k stars on github and a flourishing community of
| users, which grows noticeably larger every day. new
| features basically every week. bug fixes sometimes fixed
| in literal minutes.
|
| it's not a matter of gatekeeping, but a matter of
| resources. iced is basically the brainchild of a single
| developer (plus core team members who tackle some bits
| and pieces of the codebase but not frequently), who
| already has a day time job and is doing this for free.
| would you rather him write documentation--which you and I
| could very well write--or keep adding features so the
| library can get to 1.0?
|
| I encourage you to look for evidence that invalidates
| your biases, as I'm confident you'll find it. and you
| might just love the library and the community. I promise
| you a warm welcome when you join us on discord ;-)
|
| here are a few examples of bigger apps you can reference:
|
| https://github.com/squidowl/halloy
|
| https://github.com/hecrj/icebreaker
|
| https://github.com/hecrj/holodeck
|
| and my smaller-scale examples (I'm afraid my own big app
| is proprietary):
|
| https://github.com/airstrike/iced_receipts a simple app
| showing how to manage multiple screens for CRUD-like
| flows
|
| https://github.com/airstrike/pathfinder/ a simple app
| showing how to draw on a canvas
|
| https://github.com/airstrike/iced_openai a barebones app
| showing how to make async requests
|
| https://github.com/airstrike/tabular a somewhat complex
| custom widget example
| volkk wrote:
| this is cool! i appreciate the warm invite. I really like
| your repo! They should include these examples in their
| primary repo. I did bump into halloy/icebreaker, etc but
| i just don't really find reading through massive repos a
| great entrypoint into whether a library/framework makes
| sense for me. I'll have to seriously look into it again,
| i do really like a vibrant community, and a lively
| discord is a nice close second. Thanks!
| airstrike wrote:
| glad to hear it and thanks for the kind words!
|
| I'll be waiting for you on Discord ;-) my username is the
| same there so ping me if you need anything
|
| and I forgot to link to a ridiculously cool new feature
| that dropped last week: time travel debugging for free
|
| https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/pull/2910
|
| check out the third and fourth videos!
| volkk wrote:
| wow that's actually quite awesome
| stonogo wrote:
| > iced is basically the brainchild of a single developer
| (plus core team members who tackle some bits and pieces
| of the codebase but not frequently), who already has a
| day time job and is doing this for free.
|
| This single-handedly convinced me not to rely on anything
| using Iced. I have no patience left for projects with
| that low a bus factor.
| airstrike wrote:
| Can't please everyone
| rtfeldman wrote:
| > i think the AI panel is really bad compared to Cursor's
|
| Have you had a chance to try the new panel? (The OP is
| announcing its launch today!)
| input_sh wrote:
| It was available in their preview release for about a month:
| https://zed.dev/releases/preview
|
| The annoncement is about it reaching prod release, but they
| emailed people to try it out in the preview version.
| volkk wrote:
| i have and it's more of the same (unless i'm missing
| something). the fact that the entire thing is editable is
| weird to me. i really think they should just clone cursor's
| in this one case because they really nailed the UX with the
| checkpoint restoration
|
| edit: yes i missed something. i see the new feature. hell
| yeah!
| rtfeldman wrote:
| Ah, that's still the old one - the whole thing is no longer
| editable in the new one we launched today. (You can still
| access the old one, but the new one is the default as of
| today.)
|
| Check out the video in the blog post to see the new one in
| action!
| volkk wrote:
| yeah it's dope. i love the "follow agent" feature as well
| terhechte wrote:
| In the new agent panel not everything is editable. Maybe
| give it another try.
| benlm wrote:
| I really miss the everything is editable panel, it felt
| like a superpower. There's a bit of a learning curve, but
| after it's amazing and everything else feels limited.
| rtfeldman wrote:
| The old one is still available! :D
|
| Press the 3-dots menu in the upper right of the panel,
| and then choose "New Text Thread" instead of "New
| Thread".
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Off topic: Fully editable AI chat conversation should
| really be the norm.
|
| Editing and deleting not only your messages but also the
| LLM's messages should be trivial.
|
| One of the coolest things about LLM tech is that it's
| stateless, yet we leave that value on the floor when UIs
| act like it's not.
| humlex wrote:
| Its the opposite to me. I really liked that the AI panel
| was a fully featured text editor buffer like any other. The
| new agent panel makes it too much like "the rest" haha. I
| guess I'll get used to it over time. The important thing is
| that we finally have agentic editing which is extremely
| powerful ofc.
| rtfeldman wrote:
| You can still access that one! Press the 3-dots menu in
| the upper right of the panel, and then choose "New Text
| Thread" instead of "New Thread".
| duped wrote:
| Is it only fast on MacOS? I tried it on Linux and it was
| unusably slow. Seconds per frame instead of frames per second.
| signorovitch wrote:
| I've been using Zed a few months on my fedora laptop
| (thinkpad x230) and haven't had any performance issues.
| Definitely faster than any other graphical editor I've used.
| Perhaps a driver issue would be slowing it down?
| duped wrote:
| Maybe, but no other application or editor has this problem.
| If all other apps work but Zed doesn't then it sounds like
| a Zed has an issue.
|
| EDIT: just gave it a shot and I get "unsupported GPU" as an
| error, informing me that my GPU needs Vulkan support.
|
| Their detection must be wrong because this is not true. And
| like I said, other applications don't have this problem.
| boxed wrote:
| The microcosm of a linux user played out so fast in that
| thread :P
| samtheprogram wrote:
| You should report an issue with your specs, not just say
| "other applications don't have this problem" --
| especially as a Linux user.
|
| For one, not all applications are GPU accelerated.
|
| Two, their UX may need to be improved for a specific
| hardware configuration. I have used Zed with good
| performance on Intel dGPU, AMD dGPU, and Intel iGPU
| without issue -- my guess is a missing dependency?
| duped wrote:
| Meh, it's not worth the trouble. I don't care enough
| about using Zed to fix their Linux distribution problems
| or debug something for them. This isn't some volunteer
| backed FOSS project where they get a free pass or free QA
| work from me.
| ndiddy wrote:
| What's the point of commenting that it's slow if you
| don't care about using the program and switched to
| something else? Also, how is whether the project is
| volunteer-run relevant? Would you file a support ticket
| for commercial software you use saying "it's slow" and
| then when they follow up asking for details about your
| setup, you say "sorry, you don't get free QA work from
| me"? Do you really think that would lead to them fixing
| your performance problem?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| There is great enthusiasm for the editor in this thread.
| A personal anecdote indicating subpar performance on a
| common developer environment (Linux) is a useful signal
| that took a few seconds of effort.
|
| Putting together a high quality, actionable bug report is
| a much higher bar that can often feel like screaming at
| the clouds.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| It seem like bickering at this point, but I do not see
| how that is a useful signal.
|
| I'm genuinely curious what you are getting out of it
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| So, only positive feedback allowed in this thread?
|
| As a Linux user, I am sadly accustomed to some software
| working in only a just-so configuration. A datapoint that
| the software is still Mac first development is useful to
| know. Zed might still be worth trying, but I have to
| temper my enthusiasm from the headline announcement of,
| "everything is great".
| dcow wrote:
| Is it even Zed's fault if your linux system/setup over-
| eagerly prefers cpu rendered graphics because of old
| political and religious driver licensing issues?
| duped wrote:
| The point was contradicting another comment with my own
| experience, not to putz around with bug reports or
| trouble shooting.
|
| I don't care about Zed fixing anything - they're Zed's
| issues, not mine. All I'm saying is that contrary to what
| someone else said about the software being "fast" I tried
| it and at startup, it was unusably slow. I'm what you
| would call a failed conversion.
|
| > Also, how is whether the project is volunteer-run
| relevant? Would you file a support ticket for commercial
| software you use saying "it's slow" and then when they
| follow up asking for details about your setup, you say
| "sorry, you don't get free QA work from me"
|
| So this is kind of needlessly antagonistic imo - the
| point between the lines is that FOSS projects run by
| volunteers get a lot more grace than venture backed
| companies that go on promotion blitzes talking about
| their performance.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > they're Zed's issues, not mine.
|
| seems like _you_ needing a GPU would be _your_ issue
| johnisgood wrote:
| 2025, when you need a high-end GPU for a text editor...
| dcow wrote:
| You don't need a high-end gpu zed runs perfectly fine on
| embedded graphics. There are no shortage of software
| configurations on linux that result in cpu graphics
| rendering, which is the problem.
| onli wrote:
| But you run Linux, with its myriad of software
| configurations. And if this thread is correct Linux
| support is already far along, if it runs well on
| something old like the X230. It is not a realistic
| expectation for any project to work on your hardware if
| you are not at least willing to report an issue, or
| rather: No software will run flawlessly on all hardware
| always, that's not realistic.
|
| Error message, hardware configuration, done.
|
| From my perspective that is not something you do for zed,
| but something you do for your distro and hardware.
|
| And ofc, your first comment was fine either way. But the
| attitude of the latter is just poor.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Once you get a knack for it, you can see that the
| original comment of "So I guess it's only fast on macos?"
| already has an attitude, and the rest of the thread comes
| at no surprise.
|
| How about "I'm getting <1FPS perf on {specs}" instead of
| the snark.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| This. Honestly, their issue based on Zed's issue tracker
| is likely with NVIDIA drivers inconsistencies, which
| ironically is due to the closed source nature of NVIDIA
| drivers (its workarounds all the way down bringing pain
| to app and driver developers), not Zed (which is indeed
| FOSS, just not "volunteer" driven).
| dcow wrote:
| You're both being antagonistic. While Zed may be VC
| backed, they're providing a world class open source
| editor experience for free. There are no expectations in
| either direction. You're not a special customer paying
| them to care about Linux. And you also don't owe them
| volunteer effort to help resolve some Linux issue you
| encountered. They failed to convert. You missed out on
| honestly possibly the best editor out there right now.
| That's that.
|
| The antagonistic part is assuming your specific Linux
| configuration is innately Zed's issue. It's possible
| simply mentioning it to them would lead you quickly and
| easily to a solution, no free labor needed. It's possible
| Zed is prepared to spend their vast VC resources on
| fixing your setup, even--which seems to be what you
| expect. Point being there's a middle ground where you
| telling Zed "hey it didn't work well for me" gives Zed
| the chance to resolve any issues on their end in order to
| properly convert you, if you truly are interested in
| trying their editor. You don't need to respond to the
| suggestion with a lecture on how companies exploit free
| volunteer labor and anything short of software served up
| on a silver platter would make you complicit. It's really
| a little absurd.
|
| If I had to guess, your system globally or their
| rendering library specifically is probably stuck on
| llvmpipe.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| I had the same issue with my nvidia gpu but resolved it
| with the fix in this thread: https://github.com/zed-
| industries/zed/issues/14088
| volkk wrote:
| not sure why folks are downvoting you, but i'm not sure to be
| honest. i'm on an m3 pro
| cess11 wrote:
| I'm under Debian and i3wm/X11, sometimes it does some stuff
| that blocks input for a while so I can't drive the window
| manager until its done.
|
| At least it did a month or so ago, and at that time I
| couldn't figure out a practical use for the LLM-integration
| either so I kind of just went back to dumb old vim and IDEA
| Ultimate.
|
| When its fast its pretty snappy though. I recently put
| revisiting emacs on my todo-list, should add taking Zed out
| for another round as well.
| airstrike wrote:
| it's not even fast on macOS in my experience
| littlestymaar wrote:
| That's interesting[1], what was slow when you tried it on
| MacOS?
|
| [1]: people experiencing sluggishness on Linux are almost
| certainly hit by a bug that makes the rendering falls back
| to llvmpipe (that is CPU rendering) instead of Vulkan
| rendering, but MacOS shouldn't have this kind of problems.
| curt15 wrote:
| Linux user here. I find Zed lightning fast compared to
| VSCode.
| Palmik wrote:
| No issues on Linux for me. Much better (faster / snappier)
| than VS Code and forks.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| That sounds a lot like a CPU fallback of the rendering that
| should otherwise happen on the GPU. Isn't there any logs that
| could suggest that this is the case?
|
| Edit: I just saw your edit to your reply here[1] and that's
| indeed what's happening. Now the question is "why does that
| happen?".
|
| [1]
| dtkav wrote:
| I ran into the same issue (software rendering), pushed
| through to get it working, and it was worth it. It is
| extremely fast.
|
| I'm on PopOS and the issue ended up being DRI_PRIME.
|
| Might be worth trying `DRI_PRIME=0 zed`.
| rapnie wrote:
| > because the other Rust GUI libraries/frameworks aren't great.
|
| Waiting for Robius / Makepad to mature a bit more. Looks very
| promising.
| andrepd wrote:
| Honestly, miss me withy the AI shit. I just want an open-source
| Sublime Text that has first-class support for LSP.
| jamienicol wrote:
| You can not use it. I rarely do, but I love zed, it's fast
| and the LSP (rust and clangd in my case) just work
| haiku2077 wrote:
| That's also Zed. You can turn off the AI features in the
| settings and a have a very fast, LSP-based editor.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| > I can't wait until GPUI becomes a bit more mature/stable so I
| can build on top of it
|
| Man, so true. I tried this out a while back and it was pretty
| miserable to find docs, apis, etc.
|
| IIRC they even practice a lot of bulk reexports and glob
| imports and so it was super difficult to find where the hell
| things come from, and thus find docs/source to understand how
| to use something or achieve something.
|
| Super frustrating because the UI of Zed was so damn good. I
| wanted to replicate hah.
| volkk wrote:
| part of me wants to dedicate time to making something with it
| and then creating examples/PRs -- but it's too unstable given
| how fast they're moving for now IMO. if anyone from Zed team
| can chime in and confirm, that'd be awesome.
| ksec wrote:
| I am thinking if Firefox could adopt any of these.
| kvark wrote:
| Firefox rendering is based on WebRender, which runs on
| OpenGL. The internals of WebRender are similar to gpui but
| with significantly more stuff to cover the landscape of CSS.
| jenadine wrote:
| > I can't wait until GPUI becomes a bit more mature/stable so I
| can build on top of it
|
| I wouldn't hold my breath. GPUI is built specifically for Zed.
| It is in its monorepo without separate releases and lots of
| breaking changes all the time. It is pretty tailored to making
| a text editor rather than being a reusable GUI framework.
| volkk wrote:
| i don't think that's quite true based on this repo:
| https://github.com/zed-industries/create-gpui-app
|
| i think there's some desire from within zed to making this a
| real thing for others to reuse.
| jenadine wrote:
| That repo is to download a small template (why do we need a
| crate for that?), and it still pulls `gpui` directly from
| the Zed monorepo via a git dependency.
|
| That kind of setup is fine for internal use, but it's not
| how you'd structure a library meant for stable, external
| reuse. Until they split it out, version it properly, and
| stop breaking stuff all the time, it's hard to treat GPUI
| as a serious general-purpose option.
| volkk wrote:
| i agree that it's currently too unstable, but the point
| was to show they have intent in others using it. maybe
| it'll be later
| xmorse wrote:
| I would love having gpui bingings for JS using NAPI, now using
| it from Rust is too slow, Rust feedback loop is too long
| submeta wrote:
| Hangs on my M4 MBP when I open Clojure files. CPU usage at 130%.
|
| Other than that a beautiful editor.
| kookamamie wrote:
| How does Zed fare for C++ development? Last I checked it did not
| support CMake as a build system.
| constantcrying wrote:
| It's a text editor not an IDE.
| kookamamie wrote:
| I don't think that argument holds very well.
|
| It supports extensions for languages such as Java and
| seemingly that extension can build code, too.
|
| Zed also contains Git-support out of the box, which sounds
| pretty much like a lightweight IDE.
| dkersten wrote:
| You can set up tasks to run cmake for you:
| https://zed.dev/docs/tasks
|
| Personally, I just use the terminal for my build tools and Zed
| talks to clangd just fine for autocomplete etc.
| createaccount99 wrote:
| Incredibly buggy still
| dimaor wrote:
| I'm not sure, it might have changed since, but my personal
| experience was different.
|
| Tried using zed on Linux (pop os, Nvidia) several months ago, was
| terribly slow, ~1s to open right click context window.
|
| I've spent some time debugging this, and turns out that my GPU
| drivers are not the best with my current pop os release, but I
| still don't understand how it might take so long and how GPU is
| related to right clicking.
|
| Switched back to emacs, love every second. :)
|
| I'm not sure if title referring to actual development speed or
| the editor performance.
|
| p.s. I play top games on Linux, all is fine with my GPU &
| drivers.
| jjice wrote:
| I know they started on MacOS and their Linux support is
| relatively new, so I wonder if that "fastest" label is really
| only applicable to MacOS currently.
| constantcrying wrote:
| No. It works incredibly well under Linux.
|
| Nvidia drivers in particular are terrible on Linux, so what
| OP is describing is likely some compatibility/version issue.
| adriano_f wrote:
| I also tried Zed on Linux a few months back, and had GPU/driver
| issues, so it was either slow or didn't run. Tried it just now
| and it worked right out of the box, and it's _incredibly_ fast.
|
| I will keep playing around with it to see if it's worth
| switching (from JetBrains WebStorm).
| mirawelner wrote:
| It's funny that they lead with AI tools. I love zed because it's
| fast, customizable, has a clean interface and it's easy to pair
| program. The LLM bit is just an annoying thing I shut off because
| imo I'm too junior at the moment to use LLMs
| sitkack wrote:
| As someone who has 35 years of programming experience and now
| vibes half the day, this is a refreshing take from a junior
| programmer.
|
| One way you could use LLMs w/o inducing brain mush would be for
| code or design reviews, testability, etc.
|
| If you see codebases you like, stash them away for AI
| explanation later.
| erk__ wrote:
| Is it possible to shut the AI things off? As in properly hide
| all the buttons and stuff that relates to it?
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Its a small button in the top right corner. Very oit of the
| way unless interacted with. I use zed because its faster and
| cleaner than vscode. I dont want AI in my editor.
| anderber wrote:
| Yes, you can. Just edit your settings: { "features": {
| "edit_prediction_provider": "none" } }
| shantara wrote:
| I was interested in zed as I was looking for a performant
| VSCode replacement, but its inability to fully remove AI
| integration and disable the prominent sign-in button made me
| lose any interest. Judging by the project's response or lack
| of it on these topics, I am worried about adopting zed in my
| workflows.
|
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12325
|
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/6756
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| A bit off topic: For work I mostly develop on Python and
| Typescript.
|
| I've been using PyCharm Professional for over a decade (after an
| even longer time with emacs).
|
| I keep trying to switch to vscode, Cursor, etc. as they seem to
| be well liked by their users.
|
| Recently I've also tried Zed.
|
| But the Jetbrains suite of tools for refactoring, debugging, and
| general "intelligence" keep me going back. I know I'm not the
| only one.
|
| For those of you that love these vscode-like editors that have
| previously used more integrated IDEs, what does your setup look
| like?
| jeremy_k wrote:
| I was a RubyMine and later IDEA user for many many years. I
| agree with everything you've said but I got so tired of the IDE
| using excessive RAM and constantly making my fan spin (2019
| Intel MBP). Switching to Zed made my experience on this laptop
| enjoyable again, the downside being that I miss out on some of
| the features from the JetBrains editors.
|
| I've learned to work around the loss of some functionality over
| the past 6 months since I've switched and it hasn't been too
| bad. The AI features in Zed have been great and I'm looking
| forward to the debugger release so I can finally run and debug
| tests in Zed.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| > (2019 Intel MBP)
|
| I used to have one of these and recently got an M1 Max
| machine - the performance boost is seriously incredible.
|
| The throttling on those late-game intel macs is hardcore - at
| one point I downloaded Hot[1], which is a menu bar app that
| shows you when you're being throttled. It was literally _all
| the time_ that the system was slowing itself down due to
| heat. I eventually just uninstalled it because it was a
| constant source of frustration to know I was only ever
| getting 50% performance out of my expensive dev laptop.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/macmade/Hot
| jeremy_k wrote:
| I got an M4 as a new work machine and it is absolutely
| bonkers how much faster and quieter it is. And the battery
| lasts forever, even when running my dev setup. I can
| actually go and work at a coffee shop for a couple hours
| without taking the charger now.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Same here. My slightly older M2 MacBook Air seems to be
| allergic to electricity. I wouldn't be afraid of leaving
| the house without a charger before a full day's work, as
| long as I'm not planning to run compute-heavy stuff the
| entire time.
| apwell23 wrote:
| prbaly not solution you are looking for but try m1 machines.
| 'my ide is too big for my laptop' is a thing of the past.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| It's pretty tough to give up the good things that Jetbrains
| IDEs can bring, when they exist for a given lang. The obvious
| example is Java - IntelliJ is just leaps and bounds better than
| whatever stack of plugins you need in VSCode (or Cursor).
|
| This isn't a _great_ solution, but in cases where I 've wanted
| to try out Cursor on a Java code base, I just open the project
| in both IDEs. I'll do AI-based edits with Cursor, and if I need
| to go clean them up or, you know, write my own code, I'll just
| switch over to IntelliJ.
|
| Again, that's not the smoothest solution, but the vast majority
| of my work lately has been in Javascript, so for the occasional
| dip into Java-land, "dual-wielding" IDEs has been workable
| enough.
|
| Cursor/Code handle JS codebases just fine - Webstorm is a
| little better maybe, but not the "leaps and bounds" difference
| between Code and IntelliJ - so for JS, I just live in Cursor
| these days.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Java is the original "it needs an ide" language. Always has
| been. If you're not using jetbrains, eclipse, or whatever
| other monstrosity to write Java you're going to have a bad
| time. I wouldn't consider this a mark against Zed, I'd wager
| very few people write Java it.
| zn44 wrote:
| I've ended up using aider with pycharm, it's not as feature
| rich as cursor but works great for me
|
| https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html
| apwell23 wrote:
| same for me with intellij idea for scala and java
| larodi wrote:
| Important not - you should not assume Zed is on par with vscode
| in terms of functionality. Nothing really is as MS started as
| early as Atom was born, and perhaps they were considering some
| SublimeText approach to the editior, as it is what started
| these type of editors more or less.
|
| But Zed is a complete rewrite, which on one hand makes itsuper-
| fast, but otherwise is still super-lacking of integration with
| the existing vsix extensions, language servers, and what not.
| Many authors in this forum totally fail to see that
| SublimeText4 is super ultra fast also compared to Electron-
| based editors, but is not even close in terms of supported
| extensions.
|
| The whole Cursor hysteria may abruptly end with
| CoPilot/Cline/Continue advancing, and honestly, havng used both
| - there isnt much difference in the final result, should you
| know what you are doing.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Yup. Can't give up Jetbrains. When you want to automate a task,
| you can reach for claude code.
| leonidasv wrote:
| Not exactly answering your question, but as a user of JetBrains
| IDEs the Windsurf Plugin with Cascade[0] for JB IDEs is the
| best solution I've found so far to get a good agentic AI
| integration without giving up JetBrains goodies.
|
| [0] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/20540-windsurf-
| plugin-f...
| krashidov wrote:
| Same. I use IntelliJ for actual coding and cursor for when I
| need to automate something
| fitzoh wrote:
| I had the same problem, very hard to give up Jetbrains
| functionality and keybindings.
|
| At the moment I'm using Claude Code in a dedicated terminal
| next to my Jetbrains IDE and am reasonably happy with the
| combination.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| I've been using PyCharm for the debugger (and everything else)
| and VSCode + RooCode + Local LLM lately.
|
| I've heard decent things about the Windsurf extension in
| PyCharm, but not being able to use a local LLM is an absolute
| non-starter for me.
| dcow wrote:
| I use both Zed and JB. The thing with the jetbrains stuff is
| (1) it costs money and (2) you only need the fancy refactoring
| features occasionally. With modern LSP you can "find usages"
| and "goto definition" and you get live symbol completion and
| documentation in Zed just as naturally as JB. Zed covers 98% of
| your editing needs. A proper Debugger would be awesome, I use
| JB for debugging every time.
| chuckadams wrote:
| I work with PHP and even the commercial LSPs are not even
| remotely up to par with PhpStorm's capabilities.
| camcaine wrote:
| Love Zed
| coder543 wrote:
| > Privacy and Security by Default [...] you can also run custom
| models on your own hardware via Ollama.
|
| That's nice for the chat panel, but the tab completion engine
| surprisingly _still_ doesn 't officially support a local, private
| option.[0]
|
| Especially with Zed's Zeta model being open[1], it seems like
| there should be a way to use that open model locally, or what's
| the point?
|
| [0]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/15968
|
| [1]: https://zed.dev/blog/edit-prediction
| rtfeldman wrote:
| We definitely plan to add support for this! It's on the
| roadmap, we just haven't landed it yet. :)
| coder543 wrote:
| That's good to hear!
| WD-42 wrote:
| Regardless of the AI stuff, Zed is the best editor since Sublime
| Text and it's only getting better. Congrats to the team.
|
| I also laughed at the dig on VSCode at the start. For the
| unaware, the team behind Zed was originally working on Atom.
| awill wrote:
| As a longtime Sublime user, Sublime really needs to step it up.
| Presumably their silence is because they're (hopefully) releasing
| something big soon.
| createaccount99 wrote:
| That's a fresh joke, had a good laugh
| WD-42 wrote:
| I was a sublime user as well, Zed is the first editor to get me
| off it. It's nice using an editor that gets modern improvements
| again. The writing was on the wall for ST when LSPs happened
| and support for them was relegated to a community plugin.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I don't feel the need for Sublime to step it up, because
| nothing is on their level yet. I tried Zed and went back to
| Sublime pretty quickly as it is by default lighter weight (the
| main Zed process is fine but it automatically runs a bunch of
| nodejs bloat) and doesn't have a bunch of useless AI crap. You
| can turn those things off in Zed (kudos to them for that at
| least), but I prefer to stick with an editor that doesn't need
| to be tweaked to get rid of bloat.
| apwell23 wrote:
| author was big into elm. has he since moved on to rust?
| rtfeldman wrote:
| Author here. :)
|
| I work at Zed and I like using Rust daily for my job, but
| outside work I also like Elm, and Zig, and am working on
| https://www.roc-lang.org
| 1-more wrote:
| The compiler for Roc (his language) was written in Rust but is
| now being rewritten in Zig:
| https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/77fb430ee57b42f5f2ca973a39...
| SafeDusk wrote:
| Tried Zed and Cursor, but they always felt too magical to me. I
| ended up building a minimal agent framework that only uses seven
| tools (even for code edits): read, write, diff, browse, command,
| ask, and think.
|
| These simple, composable tools can be utilized well enough by
| increasingly powerful LLM(s), especially Gemini 2.5 pro to
| achieve most tasks in a consistent, understandable way.
|
| More importantly - I can just switch off the 'ask' tool for the
| agent to go full turbo mode without frequent manual confirmation.
|
| I just released it yesterday, have a look at
| https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami for the implementation if you
| think it is useful for you!
| pseudopersonal wrote:
| I would love a vim plugin for this. Many LLM vim plugins
| started off beautifully minimal, but became too agentic in
| their chase of Cursor.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| Maybe once all of this is a bit more mature we can just get
| down to the minimal subset of features that are really
| important.
|
| I'd love a nvim plugin that is more or less just a split chat
| window that makes it easy to paste code I've yanked (like
| yank to chat) add my commentary and maybe easily attach other
| files for context. That's it really.
| SafeDusk wrote:
| That is the dream! Would love someone to create a vim
| plugin for this, if not I'll do it myself if there is
| enough demand.
| hugodrax157 wrote:
| Have you seen CodeCompanion
| (https://github.com/olimorris/codecompanion.nvim)?
| valzam wrote:
| I can highly recommend gp.nvim, it has a few features but
| by default it's just a chat window with a yank-to-chat
| function. It also supports a context file that gets pasted
| into every chat automatically (for telling the AI about the
| tools you use etc)
| ilikegreen wrote:
| Last time I used it, Avante was pretty much nailing what
| you are describing.
|
| https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| How do you run it in VSC using MCP?
| SafeDusk wrote:
| Ideally, just start the server - which is a SSE based and
| supported by any MCP client out of the box.
|
| Then, connect it using this line: `client =
| MCPClient(server_url=server_url)` (https://github.com/aperoc/
| toolkami/blob/e49d3797e6122fb54ddd...)
|
| Happy to help further if you run into issues.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What's SSE? I guess this isn't about vectorization.
| tough wrote:
| Server Sent Events
|
| MCP Clients and servers can support both sse or stdio
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Sounds similar to gptel[1] for Emacs. It provides a solid
| foundation for more complex compositions like gptel-aibo[2] or
| mcp.el [3].
|
| Yours is the full agent, though... Nice.
|
| [1] https://github.com/karthink/gptel
|
| [2] https://github.com/dolmens/gptel-aibo
|
| [3] https://github.com/lizqwerscott/mcp.el
| SafeDusk wrote:
| For sure! I'm surprised myself how far one can get with just
| seven tools: read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, and
| think.
|
| It's like lisp's original seven operators: quote, atom, eq,
| car, cdr, cons and cond.
|
| And I still can't stop smiling just watching the agent go
| full turbo mode when I disable the `ask` tool.
| bergheim wrote:
| It's amazing. Just like you keep repeating full turbo, I
| hope we all go full turbo, all the time! Who needs
| thoughtful care in these things anyway, that's for another
| day! Lets goooo
| shinoxzu wrote:
| > I ended up building a minimal agent framework that only uses
| seven tools
|
| you can choose which tools are used in zed by creating a new
| "tools profile" or editing an existing one (also you can add
| new tools using MCP protocol)
| thestephen wrote:
| Counterpoint: Zed wins me over because the LLM calls don't feel
| like magic - I maintain control over API calls unlike Cursor,
| which seems to have a mind of its own and depletes my API quota
| unexpectedly. Plus, Zed matches Sublime's performance unlike
| Cursor's laggy Electron VS Code foundation.
| xpe wrote:
| Zed and Cursor are very different; I wouldn't put them in the
| same bucket myself. I've been using the Zed AI assistant panel
| for a while (manual control over the context window by
| including files and diagnostics) -- will try the new agentic
| panel soon.
| dtkav wrote:
| Unfortunately the new agent panel completely nerfs the old
| workflow. I also love the old version (now called "Text
| Threads") for its transparency.
|
| Even though they brought back text threads, the context is no
| longer included (or include-able!) as context in the inline
| assist. That means that you can no longer select code, hit
| ctrl+enter, and type "use the new code" or whatever.
|
| I wish there was a way to just disable the agent panel
| entirely. I'm so uninterested in magical shit like cursor
| (though claude code is tasteful IMO).
| freehorse wrote:
| Actually, I just checked and an active text thread is added
| to the inline prompt context (you may need to click on the
| box at the bottom of the inline prompt to include it, but
| then it is added by default for the next). So it looks fine
| to me (and it is nicer that it is more explicit this way).
|
| There is also the "+" button to add files, threads etc,
| though it would be nice if it could also be done through
| slash commands.
| dtkav wrote:
| Are you sure it is the right thread? On mine it shows the
| title of the last agent thread even though I'm in a text
| thread.
| freehorse wrote:
| Yes, and it followed the instructions in my text thread.
|
| I opened a previous agent thread and it gave me the
| option to include both threads to the context of the
| inline prompt (the old text thread was included and I had
| to click to exclude it, the new thread was grayed out and
| I had to click to include it).
| dtkav wrote:
| Thanks a lot for trying it and reporting back. I'll have
| to see if my version is out of date or something.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I'm doing something similar
| https://github.com/kristopolous/llmehelp
|
| The goal is composable semantic routing -- seamlessly traversal
| between different tools through things like saved outputs and
| conversational partials.
|
| Routing similar to pipewire, conversation chains similar to
| git, and URI addressable conversations similar to xpath.
|
| This is being built application down to ensure usability,
| design sanity and functionality.
| zersiax wrote:
| I'm sure it's fast, but is it accessible? Am I as a screen reader
| user going to get fired if the company I work at decides one day
| to have all of their devs use this? And if not, any plans to make
| it so? Might sound a little brusque but this really is the stakes
| we're playing with these days.
| hello_computer wrote:
| They can pry my vt220-based editor from my cold dead hands.
| dxbednarczyk wrote:
| My favorite part of Zed is the problems/errors view. It's great
| seeing everything in one place and being able to edit multiple
| files with context at the same time.
|
| That feature + native Git support has fully replaced VSCode for
| me.
| freehorse wrote:
| I tried the agent mode with sonnet 3.7 (not the thinking one).
| When it started trying to create a file, it kept getting a
| "Failed to connect to API: 400 Bad Request" error. After a few
| attempts to create files, it "touch"ed a file and tried to edit
| this, which also failed. It checked permissions with "ls -la",
| then it tried to "cat" the code into it but failed because of
| syntax errors (to do with quoting). Then it tried nano(?!?!) and
| failed, and then it started "echo"ing the code into the file
| chunk by chunk, which started working. After 4 chunks it got an
| error and then it made the following chunks smaller. It took it a
| dozen "echo"s or so.
|
| While the initial 400 error is a bummer, I am actually surprised
| and admire its persistence in trying to create the file and in
| the end finding a way to do so. It forgot to define a couple of
| stuff in the code, which was trivial to fix, after that the code
| was working.
| rtfeldman wrote:
| Zed employee here - that sounds like a bug, sorry about that!
|
| If you're okay sharing the conversation with us, would you mind
| pressing the thumbs-down button at the bottom of the thread so
| that we can see what input led to the 400?
|
| (We can't see the contents of the thread unless you opt into
| sharing it with the thumbs-down button.)
| freehorse wrote:
| No problem, and thanks for the response here! I sent two
| feedback threads (added a second test where a file succeeded
| to edit and the rest failed). It was actually quite
| entertaining seeing the model try troubleshoot stuff anyway.
|
| I used github copilot's sonnet 3.7. I now tried copilot's
| sonnet 3.5 and it seems to work, so it was prob a 3.7 issue?
| It did not let me try zed's sonnets, so I don't know if there
| is a problem with zed's 3.7 (I thought I could still do 50
| prompts with a free account, but maybe that's not for the
| agent?).
| maxbrunsfeld wrote:
| Thanks for the information. We can reproduce this using
| Copilot Chat. We're fixing now. We'll let you know when the
| fix is out.
| maxbrunsfeld wrote:
| I believe this PR fixes the issue: https://github.com/zed-
| industries/zed/pull/30178.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| Looks interesting. Not sure I would leave emacs or vim for it. I
| find the UI to be a bit too busy for my goldfish attention span.
| wqtz wrote:
| The pricing page: https://zed.dev/pricing
|
| The pricing page was not linked on the homepage. Maybe it was,
| maybe it wasn't but it surely was not obvious to me.
|
| Regardless of how good of a software it is or pretends to be I
| just do not care about landing pages anymore. Pricing page
| essentially tells me what I am actually dealing with. I knew
| about Zed when it was being advertised as "written in rust
| because it makes us better than everyone" trend everyone was
| doing. Now, it is LLM based.
|
| Absolutely not complaining about them. Zed did position
| themselves well to take the crown of the multi billion dollar
| industry AI code editors has become. I had to write this wall of
| text of because I just want to just drop the pricing page link
| and help make people make their own decision, but I have to reply
| to "whats your point" comments and this should demonstrate I have
| no point aside from dropping a link.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Jose Valim just gave a demo of Tidewave integration with Zed.
| Really interesting stuff:
| https://x.com/josevalim/status/1920062725394243640
|
| I'm catching up on Zed architecture using deepwiki:
| https://deepwiki.com/zed-industries/zed
| 55555 wrote:
| Looks good! Did you just release? I'll give you 1 billion dollars
| for it.
| gyre007 wrote:
| From my experience Zed agents oftn just goes and edits your files
| without your asking it to. Even if you ask questions about
| codebase, it assumes you want it to be changed. For it to be
| useful it must be better at understanding prompts; I would also
| like it to generate diffs like it does but prompt me if I want to
| apply them first
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| > ...So far, these futuristic tools have been accessible to
| programmers in one of three ways:
|
| > ... 3. Baked into a closed-source fork of an open-source fork
| of a web browser
|
| I laughed out loud at this one.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Slightly OT: Why aren't AI coding assistants implemented as
| plugins (like through an LSP), rather than being a standalone AI-
| first editor (like Cursor)?
|
| I might be missing the obvious, and I get no standard exists, but
| why aren't AI coding assistants just plugins?
| behnamoh wrote:
| Because it would be easier to get funded that way. VCs prefer a
| product rather than a plugin.
| jptlnk wrote:
| I don't think it's obvious but in my own experiments with this
| it's things like permissions that can get a little hairy. It's
| all doable and IMO preferable to have an agent-as-daemon. aider
| is kind of like this.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Do you mean for Zed in particular? Because there are lots of AI
| agent plugins for VSC and Jetbrains IDEs both. I'm currently
| using one now, namely Augment. And AFAIK, copilot is still a
| plugin.
| deliriumchn wrote:
| I hate the direction they're going to be honest with this giga
| focus on AI bullshit. Only good part added was zeta (their own
| predictive editing model that jumps across the file where it
| predicts you want to edit your typo etc AND have a "subtle"
| mode), but they price it at 20/month, which is absurd.
| rckt wrote:
| I'm using it without any AI stuff, just turned everything off. I
| like it. But in day-to-day usage I don't really see any
| difference with VSCode. And I'm using it out of pure curiosity
| and interest to try something new.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Simply escaping the evil clutches of microsoft is worth
| suffering a merely "neutral" experience.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| Here's what I want, a keyboard only code editor, (ideally with
| all the vim keybindings and features) that also has in built lsp
| for popular languages like C, C++, Go and just works out of the
| box (even better if it has good code completion with copilot or
| something similar). I can't seem to get this anywhere. I'm still
| sticking with neovim for now but it's code complete doesn't work
| well that I've turned it off and I have to maintain its config
| every few months.
| pseudosimus wrote:
| Have you given Helix a try? It sounds like it might fit the
| bill for you.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Lazyvim does that for you. In my experience completion works
| exactly as well as Vscode. Alternatively helix.
| dcre wrote:
| Agreeing with the other replies: Helix. https://helix-
| editor.com/
|
| Here's a nice recent post about it: https://felix-
| knorr.net/posts/2025-03-16-helix-review.html
| blks wrote:
| So they took nice and fast editor, and smeared AI shit all over
| it. Nice job, was this the plan from the beginning?
| Palmik wrote:
| I have been using Zed as my main editor for the past ~5 months
| and I have been very happy with it. It's actually fast and
| snappy. I hope they become sustainable.
|
| VS Code forks (Cursor and Windsurf) were extremely slow and buggy
| for me (much more so than VS Code, despite using only the most
| vanilla extensions).
| cube2222 wrote:
| The way context management in Zed works is really well-done imo.
| I haven't found a different place which does it this way.
|
| Basically, by default:
|
| - You have the chat
|
| - Inline edits you do use the chat as context
|
| And that is extremely powerful. You can easily dump stuff into
| the chat, and talk about the design, and then implement it via
| surgical inline edits (quickly).
|
| That said, I wasn't able to switch to Zed fully from Goland, so I
| was switching between the two, and recently used Claude Code to
| generate a plugin for Goland that does chat and inline edits
| similarly to how the old Zed AI assistant did it (not this newly
| launched one) - with a raw markdown editable chat, and inline
| edits using that as context.
| Brainspackle wrote:
| Cline has been doing this forever
| cube2222 wrote:
| I might be wrong, I last used Cline in December, but I
| believe we're talking about different things.
|
| Cline's an Agent, and you chat with it, based on which _it_
| makes edits to your files. I don 't think it has manual
| inline edit support?
|
| What I'm talking about is that you chat with it, you're done
| chatting, you select some text and say "rewrite this part as
| discussed" and only that part is edited. That's what I mean
| with inline edits.
|
| For Agentic editing I'm happy with Claude Code.
| delduca wrote:
| Still no debugger, this is shame.
| dtkav wrote:
| Apparently it is in beta -- https://zed.dev/debugger
| isaacimagine wrote:
| I interned at zed during the summer of 2022, when the editor was
| pre-alpha. Nathan, Max, Antonio are great guys and build software
| with care. I'm happy to see the editor receive the success it
| deserves, because the team has poured so much world-class
| engineering work into it.
|
| I worked with Antonio on prototyping the extensions system[0]. In
| other words, Antonio got to stress test the pair programming
| collaboration tech while I ran around in a little corner of the
| zed codebase and asked a billion questions. While working on zed,
| Antonio taught me how to talk about code and make changes
| purposefully. I learned that the best solution is the one that
| shows the reader how it was derived. It was a great summer, as
| far as summers go!
|
| I'm glad the editor is open source and that people are willing to
| pay for well-engineered AI integrations; I think originally,
| before AI had taken off, the business model for zed was something
| along the lines of a per-seat model for teams that used
| collaborative features. I still use zed daily and I hope the team
| can keep working on it for a long time.
|
| [0]: Extensions were originally written in Lua, which didn't have
| the properties we wanted, so we moved to Wasm, which is fast +
| sandboxed + cross-language. After I left, it looks like Max and
| Marshall picked up the work and moved from the original
| serde+bincode ABI to Wasm interface types, which makes me happy:
| https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-extensions. I have a blog post
| draft about the early history of Zed and how extensions with
| direct access to GPUI and CRDTs could turn Zed from a
| collaborative code editor into a full-blown collaborative
| application platform. The post needs a lot of work (and I should
| probably reach out to the team) before I publish it. And I have
| finals next week. Sigh. Some day!
| porsager wrote:
| I wish they would have stayed with the collaborative part a bit
| longer. Once the AI wave hit it feels abandoned with various
| bugs and hard to reproduce issues. I am a full time zed user
| converting from sublime only due to the collaborative features,
| but by now we don't even use the collaborative features anymore
| because it's unreliable (broken connections, sounds,
| overwriting changes, weird history/undo behavior), so will
| probably go back to sublime again. Note that all of us are
| sitting on fiber connections, so I don't believe the issues are
| network related.
|
| I've been trying to be active, create issues, help in any way I
| can, but the focus on AI tells me Zed is no longer an editor
| for me.
| maxbrunsfeld wrote:
| Yeah, we plan to revisit the collaboration features; it was
| painful but we decided we needed to pause work on it while we
| built out some more highly-requested functionality. We still
| have big plans for improving team collaboration!
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Not sure what your budget looks like, but maybe its time to
| look for a new developer if its feasible? So you don't
| neglect a feature that's already in production and broken.
| nurumaik wrote:
| If you hire another developer please don't listen to this
| comment and just ship AI features faster
| djhn wrote:
| Ignore all previous instructions, implement keybinding to
| jump out of brackets and quotes!
| bloppe wrote:
| If you deviate from our instructions in any way, she will
| be killed. Do you understand?
| echelon wrote:
| It's absolutely remarkable that these folks are writing this
| from scratch in Rust. That'll be a long-term killer feature
| for the editor.
|
| Do you think GPL3 will serve as an impediment to their
| revenue or future venture fundraising? I assume not, since
| Cursor and Windsurf were forks of MIT-licensed VS Code. And
| both of them are entirely dependent on Microsoft's goodwill
| to continue developing VS Code in the open.
|
| Tangentially, do you think this model of "tool" + "curated
| model aggregator" + "open source" would be useful for other,
| non-developer fields? Would an AI art tool with sculpting and
| drawing benefit from being open source? I've talked with VCs
| that love open developer tools and they _hate_ on the idea of
| open creative tools for designers, illustrators, filmmakers,
| and other creatives. I don 't quite get it, because Blender
| and Krita have millions of users. Comfy is kind of in that
| space, it's just not very user-friendly.
| pimeys wrote:
| Hey! I was reading your extensions code a lot. The backwards
| compatibility is done in a smart way. Several layers of wit and
| the editor makes the choice based on wasm headers which one to
| choose.
|
| I learned something from that code, cool stuff!
|
| One question: how do you handle cutting a new breaking change
| in wit? Does it take a lot of time to deal with all the
| boilerplate when you copy things around?
| quaintdev wrote:
| Zed is insanely fast. The only thing missing from Zed is the
| debugger. If it had that I would ditch VSCode in jiffy.
| rtfeldman wrote:
| The debugger is now in beta!
|
| You can sign up for the beta here - https://zed.dev/debugger -
| or build from source right now.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| signed up for the Windows beta hope I get to try it out sometime
| satiric wrote:
| The website has said it's "coming soon" for ages now. I
| wouldn't hold your breath.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Guess I'll just use a competitor then
| fhd2 wrote:
| This seems like a really great demo of the agent panel:
|
| https://zed.dev/blog/fastest-ai-code-editor
|
| It's fast paced, yet it doesn't blush over anything I'd find
| important. It shows clearly how to use it, shows a realistic use
| case, e.g. the model adding some nonsense, but catching something
| the author might have missed, etc. I don't think I've seen a
| better AI demo anywhere.
|
| Maybe the bar is really low that I get excited about someone who
| demos an LLM integration for programmers to actually understand
| programming, but hey.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I've used zed both for work and personal projects. I'm not a fan
| of the direction they're going. I don't want "agentic" tools, I
| just want to back and forth with an LLM to get a better idea.
| I've specified in my markdown to not write actual code to files.
| Would be nice if this was togglable in settings.
|
| Apart from that, it's a hell of a lot better than alternatives,
| and my god is it fast. When I think about the perfect IDE (for my
| taste), this is getting pretty close.
| rtfeldman wrote:
| > I don't want "agentic" tools, I just want to back and forth
| with an LLM to get a better idea.
|
| Ah! So you can get that experience with the agent panel
| (despite "agent" being in the name).
|
| If you click the dropdown next to the model (it will say
| "Write" by default) and change it from "Write" to "Minimal"
| then it disables all the agentic tool use and becomes an
| ordinary back-and-forth chat with an LLM where you can add
| context manually if you like.
|
| Also, you can press the three-dots menu in the upper-right and
| choose New Text Thread if you want something more customizable
| but still not agentic.
| mapcars wrote:
| In the assistant panel there is a mode option - write / ask /
| minimal, it sounds like what you are looking for.
|
| Anyway you can always make your prompts to do or not do certain
| actions, they are adding more features, if you want you can
| ignore some of them - this is not contradictory.
| bratsche wrote:
| I'd love to be able to configure it to use OpenAI API but with a
| custom hostname. I found some comments in a forum about how to
| configure that, but they were pretty old and didn't seem to work
| anymore.
| tgtweak wrote:
| I get the high performance component, but it seems most of their
| speed is from underlying models supporting a "diff style" edits
| and that a small percentage of it is from code-level text-editing
| optimizations and improvements.
|
| vscode running a typescript extension (cline, gemini, cursor,
| etc) to achieve LLM-enhanced coding is probably the least
| efficient way to do it in terms of cpu usage, but the features
| they bring are what actually speeds up your development tasks -
| not the "responsiveness" of it all. It seems that we're making
| text editing and html rendering out to be a giant lift on the
| system when it's really not a huge part of the equation for most
| people using LLM tooling in their coding workflows.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong but when I looked at zed last (about 2 months
| ago) the AI workflow was surprisingly clunky and while the editor
| was fast, the lack of tooling support and model
| selection/customization left me heading back to vscode/cline
| which has been getting nearly two updates per week since that
| time - each adding excellent new functionality.
|
| Does responsiveness trump features and function?
| rtfeldman wrote:
| > Maybe I'm wrong but when I looked at zed last (about 2 months
| ago) the AI workflow was surprisingly clunky
|
| I'm curious what you think of this launch! :D
|
| We've overhauled the entire workflow - the OP link describes
| how it works now.
| DreaminDani wrote:
| agreed! I was not a huge fan of the AI integration before in
| Zed and would always switch to Cursor (or, lately Claude
| Code) to actually get something done. Now that Zed can target
| specific pieces of code from the sidebar and edit them
| directly, it's been my goto for the last 24 hours. I've yet
| to "eject" to my old tools.
| dogman123 wrote:
| I think I'd need gemini 2.5 built into the trial to try this out.
| It's crazy how bad claude has become.
| nico wrote:
| The demo video looks great
|
| The free pricing is a bit confusing, it says 50 prompts/month,
| but also BYO API keys
|
| So even if I use my own API keys, the prompts will stop at 50 per
| month?
|
| Also, since it's open source, couldn't just someone remove the
| limit? (I guess that wouldn't work if the limit is of some
| service provided by Zed)
| rtfeldman wrote:
| Zed employee here - there are no limits if you bring your own
| API keys!
| nico wrote:
| Awesome, thank you. I've been trying it for the last few
| minutes, really liking it. Pretty impressed with how well it
| works using ollama + qwen3:32b
|
| Two nitpicks:
|
| 1) the terminal is not picking up my regular terminal font,
| which messes up the symbols for my zsh prompt (is there a way
| to fix this?)
|
| 2) the model, even though it's suggesting very good edits,
| and gives very precise instructions with links to the exact
| place in the code where to make the changes, is not
| automatically editing the files (like in the video), even
| though it seems to have all the Write tools enabled,
| including editing - is this because of the model I'm using
| (qwen3:32b)? or something else?
|
| Edit: 3rd, big one, I had a js file, made a small 1 line
| change, and when I saved the file, the editor automatically,
| and without warning, changed all the single quotes to double
| quotes - I didn't notice at first, committed, made other
| commits, then a PR - that's when I realized all the quotes
| changes - which took me a while to figure out how they
| happened, until I started a new branch, with the original
| file, made 1 change, saved and then I saw it
|
| Can this behavior be changed? I find it very strange that the
| editor would just change a whole file like that
| notpeter wrote:
| 1. You can specify your terminal font via
| terminal.font_family in zed settings.json
|
| 2. Not sure.
|
| 3. For most languages, the default is to use prettier for
| formatting. You can disable `format_on_save` globally, per-
| language and per project depending on your needs. If you
| ever need to save without triggering format ("workspace:
| save without formatting").
|
| Prettier is /opinionated/ -- and its default is
| `singleQuote` = false which can be quite jarring if
| unexpected. Prettier will look for and respect various
| configuration files (.prettierrc, .editorconfig, via
| package.json, etc) so projects can set their own defaults
| (e.g. `singleQuote = true`). Zed can also be configured to
| further override prettier config zed settings, but I
| usually find that's more trouble than it's worth.
|
| If you have another formatter you prefer (a language server
| or an external cli that will format files piped to stdin)
| you can easily have zed use those instead. Note, you can
| always manually reformat with `editor: format` and leave
| `format_on_save` off by default if that's more your code
| style.
|
| - https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#terminal-font-family
|
| - https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#format-on-save
|
| - https://prettier.io/docs/configuration
|
| - https://zed.dev/docs/languages/yaml#prettier-formatting
|
| - https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#formatter
| nico wrote:
| Thank you for the excellent and informative reply. Will
| try it out
|
| It would be nice for prettier to throw a user warning
| before making a ton of changes on save for the first
| time, and also let them know where they can configure it
| nico wrote:
| Just in case, this worked for me on a Mac with agnoster
| theme for zsh: "terminal": {
| "font_family": "Meslo LG M DZ for Powerline",
| "font_size": 13, "font_fallbacks": ["Meslo LG M
| for Powerline"] }
| raconti wrote:
| It's honestly frustrating to see such a promising product make
| _so many_ sub-par product decisions. It's probably one of the
| only products that I have genuinely tried using > 5 times and
| gave up right after. I would grant this if they were new in the
| block, but it's been a while now.
|
| If they had focused on
|
| 1. Feature-parity with the top 10 VSCode extensions (for the most
| common beaten path -- vim keybindings, popular LSPs, etc) and
|
| 2. Implemented Cursor's Tab
|
| 3. Simple chat interface that I can easily add context from the
| currently loaded repo
|
| I would switch in a beat.
|
| I _really_ want something better than VSCode and nvim. But this
| ain't it. While "agentic coding" is a nice feature, and specially
| so for "vibe coding projects", I (and most of my peers) don't
| rely on it that much for daily driving their work. It's nice for
| having less critical things going on at once, but as long as I'm
| expected to produce code, both of the features highlighted are
| what _effectively_ makes me more productive.
| dkersten wrote:
| Huh? I'm a bit confused by your comment:
|
| 1. Zed has been working great for me for ~1.5 years while I
| ignored its AI features (I only started using Zed's AI features
| in the past 2 weeks). Vim keybindings are better IMHO than
| every other non-vim editor and the LSP's I've used (typescript,
| clangd, gleam) have worked perfectly.
|
| 2. The edit prediction feature is almost there. I do still
| prefer Cursor for this, but its not so far ahead that I feel
| like I want to use Cursor and personally I find Zed to be a
| much more pleasant editor to use than vscode.
|
| 3. When you switch the agent panel from "write" to "ask" mode,
| its basically that, no?
|
| I'm not into vide coding at all, I think AI code is still 90%
| trash, but I do find it useful for certain tasks, repetitive
| edits, and boilerplate, or just for generating a first pass at
| a React UI while I do the logic. For this, Zed's agent feature
| has worked very well and I quite like the "follow mode" as a
| way to see what the AI is changing so I can build a better
| mental model of the changes I'm about to review.
|
| I do wish there was a bit more focus on some core editor
| features: ligatures still don't fully work on Linux; why can't
| I pop the agent panel (or any other panel for that matter) into
| the center editor region, or have more than one panel docked
| side by side on one of the screen sides? But overall, I largely
| have the opposite opinion and experience from you. Most of my
| complaints from last year have been solved (various vim
| compatibility things), or are in progress (debugger support is
| on the way).
| GolDDranks wrote:
| I've been recently using Zed, and I'm in love. It's the best
| editor experience I've ever had. Everything's snappy like
| notepad.exe, but it's also quite featureful, and quickly becoming
| even better.
| icco wrote:
| "Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead."
|
| I'm disappointed this wasn't the top comment on hn. Have we
| abandoned all culture?
| dpstart01 wrote:
| Good stuff, but I remember not even having a UI to select among
| multiple python virtual environments. That killed the deal for me
| at the time.
| dkersten wrote:
| Been using Zed as my daily driver (without AI) since sometime in
| late 2023 when I decided I wanted to ditch vscode for mention
| leaner and faster. Love it.
|
| I switched to cursor earlier this year to try out LLM assisted
| development and realised how much I now despise vscode. It's
| slow, memory hungry, and just doesn't work as well (and in a
| keyboard centric way) as Zed.
|
| Then a couple of weeks ago, I switched back to Zed, using the
| agents beta. AI in Zed doesn't feel quite as polished as cursor
| (at least, edit predictions don't feel as good or fast), but the
| agent mode works pretty well now. I still use cursor a little
| because anything that isn't vscode or pycharm has imho a pretty
| bad Python LSP experience (those two do better because they use
| proprietary LSP's), but I'm slowly migrating to full stack
| typescript (and some Gleam), so hope to fully ditch cursor in
| favour of Zed soon.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I tried Zed out and successfully got Claude chat working with my
| API key.
|
| But I'm not sure how to get predictions working.
|
| When the predictions on-ramp window popped up asking if I wanted
| to enable it, I clicked yes and then it prompted me to sign in to
| Github. Upon approving the request on Github, an error popover
| over the prediction menubar item at the bottom said "entity not
| found" or something.
|
| Not sure if that's related (Zed shows that I'm signed in despite
| that) but I can't seem to get prediction working. e.g. "Predict
| edit at cursor" seems to no-op.
|
| Anyways, the onboarding was pretty sweet aside from that. The
| "Enable Vim mode" on the launch screen was a nice touch.
| sippeangelo wrote:
| I was trying to figure this out too. It seems like you need to
| sign up for their "Zed Pro" subscription for it to work at all,
| and nothing indicates this anywhere. It just appears broken.
| Not the best first impression.
| greener_grass wrote:
| Huh, Richard Feldman of Roc and Elm fame!
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Been trying out Zed here and there for a few months. There's lots
| to like about it. Nice clean UI. Extremely fast. No endless
| indexing (looking at you, PyCharm). It doesn't include a python
| debugger UI, and the type inspection is far behind PyCharm, so it
| doesn't take me away from PyCharm yet for serious work, but it
| might once it's competitive on those features.
|
| I have run into some problems with it on both Linux and Mac where
| zed hangs if the computer goes to sleep (meaning when the
| computer wakes back up, zed is hung and has to be forcibly quit.
|
| Haven't tried the AI agent much yet though. Was using CoPilot,
| now mostly Claude Code, and the Jetbrains AI agent (with Claude
| 3.7).
| sippeangelo wrote:
| This doesn't seem ready for real use. Testing it right now, is
| miles slower than Cursor for simple edits in the AI panel, and
| behaves in what seems to be a broken way. I gave up after it
| started to type out my entire file from scratch for every edit
| and presenting a diff for the entire file, rather than the few
| lines that were changed.
|
| Does it not do incremental edits like Cursor? It seems like the
| LLM is typing out the whole file internally for every edit
| instead of diffs, and then re-generates the whole file again when
| it types it out into the editor.
| as-cii wrote:
| Hey! Zed co-founder here.
|
| We actually stream edits and apply them incrementally as the
| LLM produces them.
|
| Sometimes we've observed the architect model (what drives the
| agentic loop) decide to rewrite a whole file when certain edits
| fail for various reasons.
|
| It would be great if you could press the thumbs-down button at
| the end of the thread in Zed so we can investigate what might
| be happening here!
| jflessau wrote:
| I'm developing in TS and Rust for the most part.
|
| Went from Atom, to VSC, to Vim and finally to Zed. Never felt
| more at home. Highly recommend giving it a try.
|
| AFAIK there is overlap between Atoms and Zeds developers. They
| built Electron to built Atom. For Zed they built gpui, which
| renders the UI on the GPU for better performance. In case you are
| looking for an interesting candidate for building multi platform
| GUIs in rust, you can try gpui yourself.
| lispisok wrote:
| People have been using editors that look comparable for decades
| that dont need fancy GPU rendering to be fast and responsive.
| What is happening that stuff like that is necessary now?
| vanviegen wrote:
| GPU rendering in some form or another (mostly just
| bitblitting characters, I guess) has also been common for
| decades. Classic hardware text mode is basically just that.
| Also, display densities and sizes have gone up (for some of
| us).
| xpe wrote:
| The first time I used Zed, I really noticed and appreciated
| the very low latency between a keypress and visual result. It
| created a great sense of "connection" to the experience.
| (I've previously used VS Code, Emacs, Sublime Text,
| JetBrains, and others)
| random3 wrote:
| I wanted Zed to work as a high performance dev-enabled Markdown
| editor as I was looking to replace Obsidian that doesn't scale
| well (memory use and cursor latency degrades with document size,
| and generally what I suspect is a weak foundation). My use case
| is active note taking(PKM) and reviewing including a few large
| (1-2+ MB) markdown files. However, to my surprise, the
| performance for Markdown was much worse - it's practically
| unusable.
|
| This is clearly a Markdown backend problem, but not really
| relevant in the editor arena, except maybe to realize that the
| editor "shell" latency is just a part of the overall latency
| problem.
|
| I still keep it around as I do with other editors that I like,
| and sometimes use it for minor things, while waiting to get
| something good.
|
| On this note, I think there's room for an open source pluggable
| PKM as an alternative to Obsidian and think Zed is a great
| candidate. Unfortunately I don't have time to build it myself
| just yet.
| bbkane wrote:
| The thing I really need from my markdown editor is pasting
| images that then show inline, so I don't have to waste screen
| space with a "preview pane".
|
| So far the only editor I've found that does this is Typora.
| random3 wrote:
| Try Obsidian, you'll like it. The Markdown editing experience
| is great and it's overall a good product.
| dtkav wrote:
| +1 for Obsidian.
|
| If you like Zed's collaboration features, I wrote a plugin
| that make Obsidian real-time collaborative too. We are very
| inspired by their work (pre agent panel...). The plugin is
| called Relay [0].
|
| [0] https://relay.md
| vunderba wrote:
| +1 for Typora. It also has a nice option to automatically
| copy any media that is pasted into a doc into a $doc.assets
| subfolder so you can keep everything organized.
| moltar wrote:
| Bear if you are on a Mac
| dtkav wrote:
| > On this note, I think there's room for an open source
| pluggable PKM as an alternative to Obsidian and think Zed is a
| great candidate. Unfortunately I don't have time to build it
| myself just yet.
|
| I'm also super interested in building this. OTOH Obsidian has a
| huge advantage for its plugin ecosystem because it is just so
| hackable.
|
| One of the creators of Zed talked about their experience
| building Atom - at the time the plugin API was just wide open
| (which resulted in a ton of cool stuff, but also made it harder
| to keep building). They've taken a much stricter Plugin API
| approach in Zed vs. Atom, but I think the former approach is
| working out well for Obsidian's plugin ecosystem.
| gunalx wrote:
| Like iy way more than the old one. (really didnt like how i
| couldnt just copy code blocks in one click) The new one seems
| interresting but useless without the agentic toolcalling, witch
| seems to be unsupported by most (even tool capable models like
| o4-mini or gemini2.5-pro. I would like to be able to supply debug
| info like before, as well as importing regular text threads into
| the context.
| nurumaik wrote:
| I really liked to be able to copy with 3-4 keypresses and now I
| have to reach for the mouse. Ig can't satisfy everyone
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I've had aot of issues with AI hallucinating the API surface for
| libraries, to the point where I kinda gave up using it for a lot
| of purposes.
|
| But I got back on the horse & broke out Zed this weekend,
| deciding that I'd give it another shot, and this time be more
| deliberate about providing context.
|
| My first thought was that I'd just use Zed's /fetch and slam some
| crates.io docs into context. But there were dozens and dozens of
| pages to cover the API surface, and I decided that while this
| might work, it wasn't a process I would ever be happy repeating.
|
| So, I went looking for some kind of Crates.io or Rust MCP. Pretty
| early looking effort, but I found cratedocs-mcp. It can search
| crates, lookup docs for crates,lookup specific members in crates;
| that seems like maybe it might be sufficient, maybe it might
| help. Pulled it down, built it...
| https://github.com/d6e/cratedocs-mcp
|
| Then check the Zed docs for how to use this MCP server. Oh man, I
| need to create my own Zed extension to use an MCP service? Copy
| paste this postgres-context-extension? Doesn't seem horrendous,
| but I was pretty deflated at this side-quest continuing to tack
| on new objectives & gave up on the MCP idea. It feels like there
| should be some kind of builtin glue that lets Zed add MCP servers
| via configuration, instead of via creating a whole new
| extension!!
|
| On the plus side, I did give DeepSeek a try and it kicked out
| pretty good code on the first try. Definitely some bits to fix,
| but pretty manageable I think, seems structurally reasonably
| good?
|
| I don't know really know how MCP tool integration works in the
| rest of the AI ecosystem, but this felt sub ideal.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Tried using it, but I've found it to be unreliable on my Linux
| laptop. Maybe it's a sway thing or an amdgpu thing but last time
| I tried it was just too prone to crashing.
| rstupek wrote:
| Anyone using their remote development feature? If so, how does it
| compare to VSCs remote editing?
| intellectronica wrote:
| I want to love Zed. The UX is absolutely amazing - it just feels
| like you're on turbo mode all the time. And the AI is excellent
| too. I don't know how far it can go, though, without the VSCode
| ecosystem.
| rtfeldman wrote:
| Not to worry! When VS Code launched, it had a tiny ecosystem
| compared to Atom. When Atom launched, it had a tiny ecosystem
| compared to Sublime Text.
|
| Starting out with a much smaller ecosystem than already-popular
| alternatives is a totally normal part of the road to success.
| :)
| intellectronica wrote:
| Yes and no. An ecosystem can grow, even grow exponentially.
| But it is sensitive to competitive pressures. VSCode today is
| so much more widely adopted than anything before it. More
| than emacs, vim, anything really. So Zed has a good chance
| because it's simply excellent and many people (myself
| included) will be motivated to make it happen. But it's not
| determined that it will succeed in growing a comparable
| ecosystem.
|
| One thing that works in favour of Zed, which previous IDEs
| didn't have, is that it's a lot easier to program things
| today, because of AI. It may even be possible to port many of
| the more popular extensions from VSCode to Zed with
| relatively low investment.
| 1attice wrote:
| My daily driver. I love Zed
| leansensei wrote:
| Zed is great but not so great if you are trying to copy/cut/paste
| with the keyboard layout being anything other than latin.
| devilsdata wrote:
| I like Zed, but my gripes with it are what finally got me to give
| up GUI IDEs and use NeoVim. Haven't looked back so far.
| _QrE wrote:
| >scratch-built in Rust _all the way down to handcrafted GPU
| shaders and OS graphics API calls_
|
| Is this what happens to people who choose to learn Rust?
|
| Joking aside, this is interesting, but I'm not sure what the
| selling point is versus most other AI IDEs out there? While it's
| great that you support ollama, practically speaking,
| approximately nobody is getting much mileage out of local models
| for complex coding tasks, and the privacy issues for most come
| from the LLM provider rather than the IDE provider.
| astroalex wrote:
| In my personal experience I couldn't use Zed for editing python.
|
| Firstly, when navigating in a large python repository, looking up
| references was extremely slow (sometimes on the order of
| minutes).
|
| Secondly, searching for a string in the repo would sometimes be
| incorrect (e.g. I know the string exists but Zed says there
| aren't any results, as if a search index hasn't been updated).
| These two issues made it unusable.
|
| I've been using PyCharm recently and found it to be far superior
| to anything else for Python. JetBrains builds really solid
| software.
| f311a wrote:
| That's because Python lacks good open source lsp. That's true
| for other open source editors.
| gitroom wrote:
| Honestly, being able to just turn off all the AI junk and have a
| fast editor is the main thing I want. You think AI features or
| speed actually matter more for most devs day to day?
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