[HN Gopher] You can now disable all AI features in Zed
___________________________________________________________________
You can now disable all AI features in Zed
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 464 points
Date : 2025-07-23 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zed.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (zed.dev)
| palata wrote:
| It should be like it should be with JavaScript: it should work
| without it by default.
|
| But the reality is like for JavaScript: it's required by default
| :D.
|
| Good that Zed fixes this!
| bionhoward wrote:
| This is great, My 2 cents since I see a Boolean:
|
| what if that setting were an enum every operator started with
| AiMode::Off so we can consciously opt-in, plus then Zed could
| have more AI Mode levels besides just on or off?
|
| Maybe there could be a level for experienced programmers and
| another level for vibe coders, and prompts / permissions could be
| set accordingly?
| mikeocool wrote:
| That's basically the case when you have AI mode on in Zed
| today.
|
| The four AI features in Zed (that I'm aware of) are:
|
| * autocomplete -- this can be turned on and off separately from
| the AI features toggle, and can be put into 'subtle' mode,
| where you have to hold a key to see the completions.
|
| * inline AI editing -- only activated by hitting ctrl-enter,
| otherwise you'll never see it.
|
| * agent/chat editing -- you can disable the right-side chat
| panel, and you'll never see/use this.
|
| * AI generated commit messages -- there's a button you hit in
| the commit message panel to activate this.
| crooked-v wrote:
| What I'd really like is an option to disable the automatic multi-
| buffer behavior for things like git diffs. It just doesn't work
| for me, and the Zed UX seems to not even realize that not
| everyone will love it.
| jchw wrote:
| Honestly, this is a weak point of Zed IMO. I just find it a bit
| confusing to deal with. I don't know exactly how to get it to
| jump to the location of a specific block in the multi-buffer
| view, e.g. a Find in Files view. I double click various places
| in the UI until it goes to the file and sometimes I have to
| scroll to where I was at in the multi-buffer view. It's very
| frustrating.
|
| I think it could be made to work better, but as it is now, it
| feels cumbersome to work with.
| Latty wrote:
| I believe what you want to do is click on the line numbers,
| which should take you to that exact point in the file.
| jchw wrote:
| Could it really be that simple?!
|
| Holy shit. It really _is_ that simple.
|
| Thank you.
| gwking wrote:
| Even after figuring this out for myself I still struggle
| to do it fluently.
| sisk wrote:
| There's a setting that will allow you to double-click to
| open a file from the multibuffer which I find more
| natural: { "double_click_in_multibuffer":
| "open" }
| throw324678 wrote:
| you can also use alt+enter while the cursor is inside of
| a multi-buffer, and it will open at that point in the
| file.
| throwaway240403 wrote:
| Took me a bit to find this, but you can click on a line
| number in multi-buffer to open that file at that location. I
| think their default assumption is for you to not use the
| mouse much. If you're using vim mode g+[space] will open the
| file where your cursor is. I think it's alt+return in normal
| mode but either way there's a shortcut hint on the right side
| of the header for the file your cursor is currently in.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| It also tell you that "alt-enter to jump to the file" in the
| "header".
| olejorgenb wrote:
| I think this is one of the best innovations in Zed, though it
| could use some more polish to work really great. Being able to
| edit the diff directly surely is a great thing?
| crooked-v wrote:
| The problem is that it insists on jamming together all files
| in the list, each with only a tiny bit of context, when I
| want to look at things one at a time with full context, and
| there's no way to change that behavior.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| "Alt-Enter" jumps directly to the selected entry in the git
| side panel. Ctrl-clicking works as well (granted it's not
| obvious)
| gherkinnn wrote:
| The multi buffer is the most amazing thing about Zed. AI be
| damned. It now feels wrong to use an editor that doesn't have
| it. It is so obvious in hindsight.
| jchw wrote:
| I am really, really starting to like Zed. I noticed recently that
| it now respects my EditorConfig files, which was one of my
| biggest gripes before recently. In general almost everything that
| I didn't love about Zed has been fixed.
|
| I have only tried it a couple of times, but Zed's AI assistant
| view indeed works as promised, doing about as well as Cursor
| does.
|
| Now there's just one thing that is a bit annoying... It's kind of
| heavy on the GPU. I mean it looks and runs great, but it really
| loves to suck the battery out of a device that's running on
| battery. But frankly, I've been ready to ditch text editors based
| on web browsers basically since they became "in vogue" and have
| just been waiting for the right thing to show up. As time goes
| on, I think it becomes more and more obvious that Zed is "the
| right thing".
|
| I don't know if there's anything we can do to make sure Zed
| succeeds sustainably and doesn't eventually get enshittified, but
| I'm crossing my fingers that for once we _can_ have nice things.
| sisk wrote:
| Re GPU usage: noticed this myself a few months back and decided
| to poke around. Recommend turning off the minimap if you have
| it enabled. There seems to be some over-rendering that is
| exacerbated by it. It's actively being investigated and
| improved upon (0.192 was a great step in the right direction)
| but, even still, I've found it (currently) has a big positive
| impact once disabled.
| jchw wrote:
| It hasn't been a huge deal: I'm still getting a decent number
| of hours doing work on battery on my Framework 16, and
| usually I can plug into AC for a little bit if it gets too
| low. That said thanks for the information; I'll have to keep
| it in mind.
| xpe wrote:
| > I don't know if there's anything we can do to make sure Zed
| succeeds sustainably and doesn't eventually get enshittified,
| but I'm crossing my fingers that for once we can have nice
| things.
|
| This is a good conversation to have. We can start by pointing
| this out and encouraging broader interest. Zed has been my
| daily driver for over a year.
|
| I'll make a claim -- does anyone disagree (?) -- the incentives
| are not pointed in the right direction. Unless developers are
| paying directly for the functionality they want, that's
| misalignment. So enshittification seems probable, maybe
| inevitable, unless something structural changes.
|
| OTOH, because they charge for their editor, JetBrains has
| incentives that are better in line with customers.
| jchw wrote:
| > I'll make a claim -- does anyone disagree (?) -- the
| incentives are not pointed in the right direction. Unless
| developers are paying directly for the functionality they
| want, that's misalignment. So enshittification seems
| probable, maybe inevitable, unless something structural
| changes.
|
| Exactly.
|
| AI autocomplete I just don't care about. OK, but they _do_
| offer an AI subscription service. I 'm using LLMs almost not
| at all currently, but at least right now this does seem like
| a viable path to getting a lot of money. I worry, though,
| that in the long run, the margins will just get squeezed by
| competition here, especially when a lot of deep-pocketed
| competitors can charge nearly nothing and get away with it.
| Zed also very nicely offers the ability to drop in an API key
| for their AI agent features... which is awesome and the right
| thing to do, but not good for profitability.
|
| Obviously, the issue with simply charging money like
| Jetbrains is that Jetbrains already has built a world where
| they have a super complete IDE package and even then they
| only really charge a relatively small amount per month for
| the privilege. It works because for software the development
| costs for a given piece of software is relatively "fixed"
| (not entirely, but close enough) whereas the revenue you get
| grows as you acquire users. But now that the market is
| saturated, it's going to be hard for someone to jump in and
| try to be like Jetbrains in any way, and if you're charging
| money it's even _harder_ to compete with most of the other
| code editors that are ~free.
|
| Worse, it's hard to charge money and remain completely open
| source. Linux users will mostly not even realize you're doing
| it because the packages will just keep working for free since
| the software is open source. And Zed _really does_ benefit
| from being open source, maybe more than many other open
| source offerings; it really seems like the community did a
| lot of work on making Zed work well on Linux. (By the way, if
| any of you who worked on the Wayland support for GPUI happens
| to read this, thank you very much for the excellent work.) So
| it 's hard to say "just go closed source!"
|
| I hope Zed Industries got a good deal on whatever funding
| they received and are being somewhat conservative with their
| funding too. Even though it's hard to compete in this market,
| they've built something that is very hard to build and
| basically not paralleled as far as I'm concerned. There's
| clearly something here and finding a less shitty path to
| monetizing it would be very, very good for us all.
|
| (And I _am_ willing to pay, though I know they need to find
| something that will make _a lot_ of people want to pay, not
| just people like me.)
| vishalmullur wrote:
| Maybe a year ago (or couple of months ago, I can't recall)
| but I found out about Zed and since I was learning Rust, I
| wanted to contribute. But then I saw that they have a CLA.
| So while it won't be easy to go closed source and not upset
| their users, it definitely is possible. Any contributions,
| no matter how important, are already covered by the CLA.
|
| I did not contribute anymore after seeing the CLA
| jchw wrote:
| Ah yeah, they have a CLA that forces you to give them a
| carte blanche copyright license to contributions and they
| also restrict dependencies to be ones with permissive
| licensing too.
|
| Pretty obvious what's going on here. I hate seeing it
| happen, though.
| mikaylamaki wrote:
| FWIW, we plan to sell "enterprise" builds of Zed with
| SSO, centralized plugin repositories, business-hosted
| infra, etc. etc. The sorts of features developers don't
| care about but businesses do. To do that, we have to be
| able to re-license the codebase and apply these changes.
| We have a lot of other ideas for business sustainability
| but the core, offline code editing experience will always
| be freely available and open source though :)
| grinich wrote:
| Hey - I'm the founder of WorkOS. Happy to chat about the
| playbook we see with OSS projects spinning-off a
| commercial offering. It's pretty common and we work with
| a lot of these businesses, enabling them to continue
| investment in the ecosystem too. mg@workos.com
| whinvik wrote:
| This is great. I just hope that they continue to make money. We
| really need someone to invest in making a Fast, modal editor.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Why? Neovim exists.
| f311a wrote:
| I don't want to install 5-10 plugins with a hundreds of
| config lines just to make it usable. I prefer zed with 0
| extensions and vim motions which are built in.
| t_mahmood wrote:
| LazyVim makes it trivial, actually. I would take nvim/vim
| over VSCode any day.
| f311a wrote:
| Not really, it installs even more plugins. Some of them
| are unnecessary. Ideally, every time you update or
| install a plugin, it must be reviewed. I just don't wanna
| deal with it and trust plugin developers.
|
| I already got bitten by an infected Python library (that
| used to be legit). I treat plugins the same since they
| can be used in supply chain attacks.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I switched to Helix for the same reason. Though I'm
| thinking of re-trying with one of the lighter weight pre-
| configured versions. Astronvim seems like the best one
| after a bit of weekend research.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Zed is not a great modal editor, modality is a strapped on
| afterthought. At least that the impression the vim keybinding
| give me. IMO the best chance I see for a fast modal editor that
| works out of the box is Helix.
| dkersten wrote:
| When did you last try Zed? If it was recently then that
| hasn't quite matched my experience, for me vim keybindings
| work quite well. But I did think the same when I first used
| Zed over a year ago.
| cess11 wrote:
| Is it now possible to import .vimrc, or otherwise configure
| e.g. the sequence j k to execute Escape?
| eikenberry wrote:
| I tried it a couple days ago. Lost me right off with the
| poor `:e` experience; popup box with no completion, fuzzy-
| matching, sub-directory support. Vim is a file oriented
| editor, not a project oriented one, so good file operations
| are table stakes.
| eproxus wrote:
| I don't quite get what Zed's emulation of :e has to do
| with being a modal editor. It's a completely different
| editor so of course the interface to interact with files
| is going to be different, but in my experience Zed's
| implementation of modality when it comes to its Vim mode
| is extremely good. Even better than the already excellent
| NeoVintageous for Sublime Text.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Fair point. I guess the problem is with their (Neo)Vim
| keybindings, not so much with the modal-editing part. I
| included it as vim is the most popular modal editor and
| its keybindings are what are lacking.
|
| Are there any modal editors that are not file-based?
| Maybe it would be better to say this is a problem with
| its file-based editor emulation?
| weakfish wrote:
| I at least really like that ctrl-w allows switching between
| panels as well as editors, something VS code doesn't do (or
| at least, you can switch to the explorer but not back?) and
| is a major papercut IMO
| rscrawfo wrote:
| Does Helix fit that bill for you? It's fast, modal and very
| little config required.
|
| I think there's also a fork if you can't let go of the VIM
| bindings.
| spiderice wrote:
| Helix is a non-starter until it has plugins. Which is taking
| YEARS longer than it should to get implemented.
|
| The fuck-off-if-you-don't-agree-with-me dictator of the
| project doesn't help either.
| bachittle wrote:
| This is why I still use VS Code with AI features off and none of
| the AI integrated IDEs. It's not that I don't use AI. It's just
| that having the AI de-coupled from editor makes it much easier to
| separate concerns. Some days I don't feel like using AI and just
| need to edit one line. Other days I want to do a major sprint and
| test the latest AI and see if it will accomplish the task.
| aitacobell wrote:
| I find it more effective (for me) to keep my AI tools separate
| from VS code. It helps me control when I actually apply AI
| ricokatayama wrote:
| Do you know what I like more than AI in my IDE (which I adore, by
| the way)? It's an IDE that respects the developer.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Yep, fwiw there's often live coding interviews done in the
| editor of your choice that require AI to be off.
|
| As in even if you love AI and use it a lot you should have the
| ability to turn it off.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Aw shucks, I guess that rules out Notepad on Win11 then.
| everforward wrote:
| The ones I've done (as of late last year), they were okay
| with AI autocomplete but not a full prompting/agentic
| workflow.
|
| They wanted me to architect the solution, but were okay with
| it filling in basic for loops.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I would actually start interviewing with AI as well. How well
| they prompt and how good they are at reviewing AI slop?
| taude wrote:
| Yeup, this exactly. If they're going to be allowed to use
| claude-code/copilot day to day, how well they review the
| ai-generated code is going to be huge signal, as well as
| they could explain what happened. Also, if they're jsut
| blind vibe-coding something, without creating a nice quick
| spec for the LLM, that would also be a signal. Also, makes
| for very easy follow on questions during the interview.
| frainfreeze wrote:
| > It's an IDE that respects the developer
|
| Mind elaborating?
| crims0n wrote:
| I assumed they meant having the option to turn AI off was
| them respecting the developer.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Which is why I still code and write with Sublime Text!
| guluarte wrote:
| i use nvim and arch btw
| cookiengineer wrote:
| > i use nvim and arch btw
|
| ^ Has C# projects on github. Don't think that statement is
| true.
|
| I use vim, kitty, and arch btw
| S04dKHzrKT wrote:
| > ^ Has C# projects on github. Don't think that statement
| is true.
|
| Why?
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I hand write all my code directly in binary.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I do that too, and then execute it by hand as well,
| looking up every instruction on paper and changing the
| registers on paper as needed.
| shafyy wrote:
| I fucking love Sublime!
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Yeah! Fast, good looking, no AI integration, ability to
| turn off blinking cursor and customize, and paying for it
| supports a small company in Australia rather than a huge,
| soulless megacorp.
| jwpapi wrote:
| I mean all good but I still wonder if building an editor is
| really sustainable you basically only fight for new coders
| everybody else will just stay with vs or IntelliJ because of
| muscle memory
|
| I know you can share keymaps but it never works 100%
|
| Like I must've been tremendously more disappointed with my
| current ide to even consider switching
| pzmarzly wrote:
| Counterexample: I went Sublime Text 2 -> ST3 -> Atom -> VSCode
| -> Zed, and every time barely noticed a difference in editing
| experience. The keymaps were >95% compatible after each of
| these switches. But I guess that was the happy path given these
| editors share lineage.
|
| OTOH I was never able to switch to Jetbrains IDEs for long,
| because everything was too different, even after installing
| compat keymaps.
| neoden wrote:
| Sadly, I came back to using VS Code recently. There's a lot to
| like in Zed but imo that decision to write their own rendering
| framework is unfortunate, because of ridiculous problems in Linux
| still not resolved like poor font rendering, especially on low-
| DPI screens, or visible lags of UI which is being developed to be
| blazingly fast. So far, VS Code is faster for me.
| cgag wrote:
| Doing their own rendering is one of the most attractive things
| about it imo. I am on macos though.
| mosura wrote:
| Even on a mac the text rendering is wonky though, like it
| isn't processing the metrics correctly or something.
|
| At least it is noticeably fast.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Text rendering is awful on macOS too. I can't even consider
| switching from Sublime Text because of it.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| +1 I've explored Atom when it was the hot thing, and more
| recently, an IDE called Lapce, which is built in Rust and
| doesn't use Electron. They've been great, but the lack of an
| ecosystem stares glaringly right at your face. I don't like
| Electron apps but VSCode gets the job done.
|
| I have my entire set of plugins and things installed here and
| now the productivity that I get off this setup even exceeded my
| long-loved Jetbrains IDEs. I hope that will be temporary
| though, seriously. The only thing that I strictly dislike about
| VSCode is the number of high quality themes available - and
| there are not that many.
|
| Recently stumbled upon VSCodium which is a clean VSCode fork
| that can work with any VSCode plugin, but I am yet to try it
| out.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I miss Atom. I loved it. I loved all the crazy plugins people
| would make to do all sorts of things. It was a fun time.
|
| These days I'm stuck on QTCreator most of the time. It's OK
| for core editing functionality but there's a lot that I miss,
| and some things like the generic Language Server support just
| aren't fleshed out much.
|
| I'm tempted to use another editor whenever I'm not working on
| UI files but it adds some friction.
| xrisk wrote:
| Was atom functionally ever any different from vscode today?
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| I only remember Atom being painfully slow. It was using
| Electron too btw.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| At the time it was actually called "atom shell" iirc.
| Electron came from Atom.
| debugnik wrote:
| > VSCode fork that can work with any VSCode plugin
|
| Technically yes, but if you care about _legally_ , you can't
| use extensions from Microsoft's marketplace, which excludes
| Microsoft's own closed extensions such as
| WSL/SSH/devcontainer remoting and Pylance. It ships with Open
| VSX instead.
| keb_ wrote:
| Wondering if you've tried rxi/lite or the community fork, Lite-
| XL [1] and how you've found the font rendering to be there?
|
| FWIW, I've yet to find a better text editor than Sublime Text.
|
| [1] https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl
| paraboul wrote:
| Remember that Zed hasn't reached 1.0. On other platform, _it
| is_ much faster and consume much less battery. Just like
| ghostty, to me the most attracting feature is knowing my editor
| /term is not backed by a browser engine.
| christophilus wrote:
| Ghostty is an apt comparison, because it is a slow-launching
| memory hog compared to foot on Linux.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Zed's still pretty beta on linux.
|
| It will improve. I'm glad they are at least targeting it as
| well.
| thefaux wrote:
| I listened to a podcast interview with one of the cofounders of
| zed. One of the revealing things is that he went on and on
| about how important latency was and how they had to do their
| own rendering because of the problems they ran into with
| electron. He also admits that he never used vim, which already
| has imperceptible latency relative to the terminal emulator,
| which has already largely solved the text rendering problem.
|
| I understand that there are advantages to being a native app
| from their perspective, but for me, it is even better for my
| editor to be integrated into my terminal editor. And because
| they built it the opposite way though, they have to also build
| a terminal emulator into their editor.
|
| There is a real cost to building zed this way. If they were an
| embedded terminal app, they would get full terminal support for
| free and would not have to implement 2d text rendering. They
| could even have made a bundled package with an oss terminal
| emulator like kitty. Then they could have focused strictly on
| their editing features and value adds. Every engineer hour
| spent fixing bugs/adding features to the rendering framework is
| an hour that could have been spent on value adds.
|
| Personally, there is no way that latency itself can be that
| value add for me because I use neovim and don't use any
| language plugins so every keystroke already renders instantly.
| Clearly then you can do everything zed does in a terminal app
| within at worst tens of milliseconds of latency.
|
| Of course their target market uses vscode and not vim and
| either doesn't know or care that you do not need to write your
| own rendering engine to make a low latency, featureful text
| editor. I am admittedly very much not the target consumer for
| zed though.
| dkersten wrote:
| Not everyone wants to use a terminal editor and of those
| people, not everyone wants to use vscode.
| vlod wrote:
| Learning a terminal editor will save your ass at 3am when
| production goes down. No joke.
| nurumaik wrote:
| Learning a client-server editor will save your nerves
| when developing on a remote machine with 200ms ping
| JackYoustra wrote:
| learning both is fun!
| opan wrote:
| Vim and emacs both also support editing remote files.
| senko wrote:
| Learning and wanting to use as a daily driver are very
| different things.
|
| I use vim on my servers and for writing git commit
| messages. For everything else, I use another editor (used
| to be Sublime Text, then Vs code, now Zed).
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Thats why nano exists.
|
| At 3am i am not in the mood trying to remember where my
| 714 page how to save a file and exit vim manial is
| vlod wrote:
| I seem to hear this a lot, but there's probably like 10
| commands (maybe a few more if you want to be fancy with
| copy-paste). Note: great if you like nano however!
|
| For those that are interested, this will get you 90%
| there:
|
| exit without saving> :q!
|
| exit with saving> :wq
|
| beginning of line> 0
|
| end of line and edit (enter insert mode)> shift-a
|
| delete line> dd
|
| insert mode> i
|
| stop insert mode> ESC
|
| undo> u
|
| show line numbers> :set number
|
| go to line number (e.g line 5)> :5
| andoando wrote:
| Why does a text editor of all things need faster rendering, I
| have never seen this to be an issue
| codedokode wrote:
| VS Code also lags and become buggy if there are incompatible
| drivers and it cannot enable hardware acceleration.
| michaelg7x wrote:
| I use it on Linux and think it's great. My laptop has a screen
| with some crazy-high DPI and a monitor which doesn't. Changing
| the font sizes in settings to suit has never left me with a
| poorly rendered view.
| jahewson wrote:
| Something tells me that disabling AI is going to age about as
| well as disabling JavaScript. Even so, I like what Zed is doing
| here.
| mr90210 wrote:
| Do Zed AI features require interacting with third-party
| providers such as OpenAI? If so, I don't think your comparison
| applies.
|
| I use Golang from JetBrains, and disabling all AI features is
| only two clicks away. No fuss no muss.
| gkbrk wrote:
| Disabling JS is incredibly beneficial for browser performance,
| battery life, privacy/tracking protection. As an added bonus,
| it protects you from malware from all the vulnerabilities in
| Javascript engines.
| frollogaston wrote:
| It also makes a lot of basic features on websites unusable.
| Just an HN vote uses JS. They deliberately added a fallback
| to work without it too, which most websites won't do, but it
| still has to reload the page.
| autoexec wrote:
| Because of my job I end up browsing the web with JS
| disabled by default and 90% of the time I don't need JS at
| all. Most of the time there are features of websites that
| break/don't work (menus, search, videos, ads, etc) but the
| actual thing I went to the website to get works just fine.
| In fact, pages load much faster and look much cleaner!
|
| There are some annoying websites that can't manage to
| display simple text or even a basic image without JS (which
| is just bad web designers doing bad web design) and some
| instances where the content I need is obscured by something
| that doesn't behave without JS (like an expanding menu
| spewed out all over the place because JS isn't there to
| hide what hasn't been selected/hovered over) but in those
| cases it's usually just 2 clicks to solve the issue (either
| for just that visit or for every visit to that domain in
| the future as well) so it's not really a big deal. I'm
| currently using HN without JS and it's great.
| theblazehen wrote:
| Which vulnerabilities in the past few years were actually
| used as a way to propagate malware (Not targeted 0-days)?
| Even with a JS engine vulnerability, you'd still need a
| sandbox escape to do something useful with it
| autoexec wrote:
| Most of the vulnerabilities I've seen that could infect
| your machine from a website require JS to work and most of
| those had nothing to do with the engine itself. Sandbox
| escapes are extremely common. Chrome patched one that'd
| been being actively exploited just last week
| Eggpants wrote:
| Disagree. The tab completion is very annoying when you're
| trying to type. I know, I know, AI hipsters think typing code
| is so 15 minutes ago. Get off my lawn/keyboard.
|
| Its agent AI assistant isn't bad but sadly the restore points
| button in the AI panel seemed to be broken.
|
| The fact it reminds me of sublime text is a big plus for me.
|
| The rust evangelism is annoying. Really. No one cares what
| language a program is written it.
| anon7000 wrote:
| I mean, good AI tab completion feels like a super power.
| Zed's is not that good. It's slow and normally not at all
| what I want. In cursor, it's at least 80% of the time jumping
| to the next thing I was going to do anyways. (Example: I add
| a function call, and tab recommend jumping to the top of the
| file, importing the function from the right spot, and then
| jumping back to the call site. Example2: I change a function
| signature and update one call site. It then correctly auto-
| completes the 5 other call sites to match the new format.)
| rileymichael wrote:
| both of those examples (auto imports + refactoring) 'just
| work' in Jetbrains editors, and have for a decade, without
| any AI at all! and you have the added benefit of no
| hallucinations when doing a refactor across hundreds of
| KLOC
| frollogaston wrote:
| Also even if you want AI, the AI is a lot more powerful
| if it can use those features instead of constantly
| getting stuck on wrong imports.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > The tab completion is very annoying when you're trying to
| type.
|
| I think it is annoying if it completes it by itself, but tab
| completion can be helpful if you have to push the tab key (or
| whatever other key is mapped to autocompletion) to make the
| completion to work (although I don't need LLM to do tab
| completion).
| MattSayar wrote:
| A friend of mine created some business plans to help
| organizations migrate from cloud infrastructures back to on-
| prem solutions. Like AI features, the sweet spot is somewhere
| in the middle: hybrid has its place instead of cloud-only, and
| AI features have their place instead of "everywhere."
| lvl155 wrote:
| I tried Zed many times. In fact I try to use it at least once a
| month because it is indeed fast. However, I just think it's a
| half-baked product and I don't want to invest too much time into
| it. Wish they didn't get distracted by AI and focused on making a
| viable VSCode replacement as an IDE/Editor.
| free_bip wrote:
| What do you think is half baked about it? I've found the
| experience quite good myself.
| k_bx wrote:
| Zed is the best editor until someone finally adds a perfect
| agentic mode for Emacs so I can go back 100%
| lbrito wrote:
| Has anyone got Zed to work consistently on Ubuntu, specifically
| with nvidia optimus laptops?
| gwking wrote:
| I went from VS Code to Cursor, then got frustrated with Cursor
| breaking keybindings and other things, tried to go back to VS
| Code but missed the superior tab completion. Then I gave Zed a
| long hard try, but after over a month of daily usage I went back
| to Cursor again, just for the tab completion quality.
|
| I don't use any of the chat or agent features, but for me
| Cursor's tab completion is a step forward in work efficiency that
| Zeta and Copilot were not. Sometimes it's subtle, and sometimes
| it is very obvious. Cursor seems to have sources of context that
| the others don't, like file names from the directory tree, and
| maybe even the relevant .pyi type annotations and docs for python
| modules. It also jumps to the next relevant problem site very
| effectively. It feels like the Cursor devs have done a ton of
| practical work that will be hard to match with anything other
| than a full-on competitive effort.
|
| I want to see Zed succeed. I think it's very important that VS
| Code and its ultra-funded derivatives not dominate the modern
| editor landscape too thoroughly. Tab completion used to seem like
| a straightforward thing, but if the state of the art requires a
| very elaborate, whole-workspace-as-context environment to operate
| in, then I wonder if it's going to become a go big or go home
| kind of feature.
|
| I can't help wonder what the actual internal API for this kind of
| thing is going to look like in the future. It used to be
| something like, what's the current token behind the cursor, and
| look in a big prefix tree of indexed words. Then maybe it got
| more elaborate with things like tree-sitter, like what's the
| incomplete parse tree up to this point. Then when editors started
| using AI, I stopped having any idea of what the actual inputs
| are. I'd love to hear about real implementation experience at any
| stage of this evolution.
| macawfish wrote:
| What kind of configuration did you use for tab completion? Did
| you try hooking up different LLMs?
| gwking wrote:
| I paid for a subscription to both cursor and zed, without
| configuring any different LLMs or other options as far as I
| recall.
| singhrac wrote:
| I think we don't talk enough about tab completion model
| quality. Recently Copilot's model got a lot better (probably
| trying to catch up to Cursor) but I feel like there's still so
| much room here (and I assume Zeds is worse from your
| description).
|
| Smart context / big context is a really interesting question,
| I'm kind of surprised Google isn't building here given how much
| effort they've put into big context (they have Jules and Gemini
| CLI but no tab completion UX).
|
| On further thought I think one of the big 3 (OpenAI, Google,
| Anthropic) should partner (ideally not buy) with Zed to get a
| foothold.
| the_duke wrote:
| I have the opposite experience, tab completion by Copilot
| just got significantly worse for me recently (the last week
| or so), both for Rust and Python code.
| dgunay wrote:
| For Copilot the quality of the tab complete is less of an
| issue for me than the fact that it is often very slow, or
| doesn't trigger at all when I would expect it to. I'll sit
| there feeling like an idiot for 10 seconds and then glance at
| the bottom bar to discover that it's not even doing
| inference, and have to randomly move the cursor, or delete
| and retype code until it finally works.
| atonse wrote:
| I'm in the exact same situation. Prefer Zed's snappiness
| overall but the tab completion in cursor is the only reason I
| keep coming back.
|
| But at the same time, I'm also doing more vibe coding instead
| of manual coding as time goes on, so Zed might eventually win
| out.
| dkersten wrote:
| I went slightly differently:
|
| I used Zed for about a year and a half exclusively, without
| using any AI features, and then switched to cursor to try AI
| features out. When Zed released its agent mode, I switched back
| to Zed.
|
| I absolutely agree that Cursor's tab completion is far superior
| to Zeds. The difference is night and day. Cursor's really is
| that good. But the Zed agent mode works very well for me and
| Zed is, IMHO just so much better than an editor. I really hate
| having to use vscode or a vscode-based editor after using Zed
| so much (I used vscode exclusively before switching to Zed).
| And that's enough for me to give up on the superior tab
| completion.
|
| I hope Zed eventually improve theirs to a similar experience to
| cursor, but regardless, I love Zed.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| I've been working on a better tab completion model that stays
| as an extension: https://ninetyfive.gg/
|
| The main feature I really care about is low latency, which is
| my main gripe about Copilot. There's still a ways to go to
| match Cursor's quality but I'm chipping away at it!
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| The tab completion is the only thing that keeps me on Cursor.
|
| I never cared for the LLM sidebar.
|
| But the tab completion is basically mind-reading.
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| Same. I wish there was an option for enabling just tab
| completion and disable everything else
| tripplyons wrote:
| I'm in a very similar position, using Cursor just for their Tab
| model. My ideal choice would be Neovim, but I can't replicate
| the productivity I have with Cursor Tab.
| babuloseo wrote:
| FINALLY was waiting for this. This is a great feature it was
| annoying af.
| johnfn wrote:
| Zed seems really nice, and the usability has come a really long
| way in the last couple of months. That being said, I have one
| issue, and I hesitate to even bring it up because it seems so
| shallow: I hate all the themes! They all look so ugly and
| amateur. I know this is a really trivial thing, it's like
| complaining I don't like Python because it uses whitespace for
| indent or something, but I just can't get over it. VSCode/Cursor
| is beautiful in comparison.
|
| I recently found Github Dark Default, which is probably the okay-
| est of the 10-15 I tried, but there is so much that still looks
| bad. The autocomplete popover looks far worse than VSCode, the
| file tree looks much worse, tabs look ugly, etc.
|
| Does anyone have any suggestions here?
| singhrac wrote:
| I use the Night Owl theme in all my editors (and terminal),
| including Zed, and the consistency is nice. It looks good, but
| if there's a Zed-specific issue I haven't used Zed in a while.
| cuu508 wrote:
| I spent a couple hours recreating the theme I was using
| previously in Sublime Text. The end result was not identical
| but close enough to feel OK.
| alternatex wrote:
| You're not alone. The only reason I struggle to onboard to Zed
| is the design. They're doing an incredible job with the editor,
| but I have never seen a more bland design in any IDE. It's
| genuinely so bad that it affects my productivity in it. I'm a
| fan of Visual Studio and VS Code dark themes, I don't need
| anything special.
| int_19h wrote:
| Isn't "bland" design precisely what you'd want from an IDE?
| To help you focus on the code and all that?
|
| It's been a while since I last looked at Zed, so I just
| started it again, and it ... looks like your average macOS
| app? Which to me sounds pretty much ideal.
| echelon wrote:
| I program mostly in Rust, so in theory Zed should be the
| perfect IDE for me. But I couldn't get past the design. It
| just put me in the wrong mind space.
|
| As a data point for the Zed folks: JetBrains' RustRover
| with vim key bindings is still my go-to. It just "looks and
| feels" right to me.
|
| I'm sure that they'll get there in time. They're playing
| the slow, careful, methodical game. Writing it in Rust was
| the right choice and it'll pay dividends.
| yard2010 wrote:
| In 2007 I had the best actionscript IDE that looked awesome
| and made the whole actionscript development magical.
| FlashDevelop iirc. It made a huge difference and inspired
| me every time.
| johnfn wrote:
| Nothing wrong with bland, but a well-designed IDE does a
| good job using the UI to allow you to parse information as
| fast as possible. For instance, compare the autocomplete
| popover in Zed to VSCode. The VSCode popover:
|
| - Has icons. These are so useful for parsing information
| quickly!!
|
| - Shows the type information in a different color than the
| field name. There is spacing between the type name, and the
| type is smaller.
|
| The Zed autocomplete popover is a solid wall of (almost
| entirely) monochrome text, all the same size. It is
| significantly harder to parse. I use the autocomplete
| popover probably thousands of times a day. These subtle
| things make a big difference.
|
| Is the Zed popover bland? Yes. Is the VSCode popover
| flashy? Not really, it's just utilitarian - clearly
| designed by someone who understood how important every
| detail is.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| I like the Tokyo Night themes, maybe take one of those for a
| spin
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| There's a forum thread [0] where users share their custom
| themes.
|
| There's also an importer tool [1] that lets you convert any VS
| Code theme to a Zed theme. You might still need to compile the
| importer yourself, but it's all pretty straightforward.
|
| 0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/7337
|
| 1: https://zed.dev/blog/user-themes-now-in-preview#using-a-
| vs-c...
| criticalfault wrote:
| Push through it. You get used to it. Then start to like
| simplicity of it.
|
| And then, due to speed, there is no going back to the lag
| infested chromium derivative made by Microsoft.
| johnfn wrote:
| Believe me, I am trying! I have Zed open and I try frequently
| to get used to it, but it drives me nuts - the autocomplete
| in particular.
| itsafarqueue wrote:
| Yup, this and a few other things. But I expect that Zed is
| going to be a lovely editor in a few more years.
| Demiurge wrote:
| I agree. I couldn't get over any of the existing themes, they
| just seem so low contrast... So I spent a bunch of hours
| porting then favorite theme I've been using in Sublime Text, to
| Zed, named iPlastic. Sublime Text has a theme back of classic
| TextMate themes, and it came in that pack. I have to say, the
| porting process was not very easy, but it was worth it. Now, I
| prefer Zed to ST and VSCode because of the theme, not just the
| UI and other features :)
| bGl2YW5j wrote:
| I like Nord Dark because it uses only 3 colours. It's available
| as an extension.
| odiroot wrote:
| Wish I could just import my ST4 settings and theme into Zed.
| That'd help a lot. For now I consider it too much hassle and
| ST4 with LSP is good enough.
| i-zu wrote:
| I feel you. I still haven't found the light theme that would
| work for me. In VSCode I use Better Selenized. Even tried to
| import it to Zed but experience was a bit subpar.
| kbdiaz wrote:
| My problem with AI in Zed is not that it's there, but that it
| feels like it's always behind in AI code editor paradigms. They
| were pretty late to the party to add edit predictions, and their
| agent UX is pretty behind the game. Recently, Cursor added
| background agents which I feel is a game changer and I now feel
| it's a deal breaker when choosing an editor. It makes me wonder
| if choosing to build their own GUI framework in Rust was the
| right move. Zed is a great code editor, but for me, it's not a
| great AI code editor.
| Sxubas wrote:
| I haven't used background tasks/agents in cursor. Could you
| provide an example for stuff that you use it for?
| kbdiaz wrote:
| This week, I remember giving it these tasks:
|
| - Upgrade our NodeJS version because it just got deprecated
|
| - Upgrade our linter to the newest version, add a new rule,
| and fix all instances of that rule in our code
|
| - Make minor changes to our UI
|
| - Fix small bugs that I know how to fix, and can tell it
| exactly what to do
|
| The main pain point they're solving for me is that I have
| many small tasks I need to do. Coding them isn't the main
| bottleneck, but creating a new branch and then creating a new
| PR is the main bottleneck for me. With cursor specifically, I
| don't even have to check out the branch locally to verify the
| code.
|
| For any significant work, I'd rather manually do it in
| editor.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I did 4 months of Cursor. Figured I'd try 4 months of Zed, and
| see from there. I'm about 3 months in and so far might stick with
| it. I've generally been pleased with it. My only issues really
| have been
|
| a) all the settings are just in a file, not even a commented
| skeleton, and with a decent change rate, hard to invest in
| learning them; I'd love something like the jetbrains settings
| dialog
|
| b) the stupid placement of the burn mode button; it's so easy to
| accidentally turn this on and not realize (done it twice now).
| Would love an option to just remove said button
|
| c) I wish there was more panel control; I'd like to place outline
| and project views BOTH in a panel, but you only get two full
| height tools in the left/right panels.
| metadaemon wrote:
| Also wish they would put more emphasis on autocompletions,
| that's like 99% of what I use AI for is basically a better
| Intellisense
| nailer wrote:
| { "disable_ai": true }
|
| That creates a system with a potential double negative (disable
| is false) which is unclear.
|
| It's cleaner to do:
|
| { "enable_ai": false }
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Zed has everything I want out of an editor, the AI stuff wasn't
| really a concern to me since its always been optional, but I
| fully appreciate where they're coming from. I think Zed is one of
| the good gems of our time. I have been looking for a decent
| spiritual successor to Sublime, and Zed to me is really good at
| it.
| porsager wrote:
| This gives me hope they might fix collaboration too.
| Unfortunately had to switch to VSCode Liveshare (which has its
| own problems) a few times because Zeds collaboration was so
| broken.
| har777 wrote:
| I moved to Zed last week and its been amazing so far! Something
| about using it feels a lot more crisp and fast compared to
| vscode. Their AI integration is pretty decent too. But I am very
| glad I can disable AI now. I find AI sometimes takes me out of
| the flow because I am constantly reviewing its code.
| microflash wrote:
| I appreciate this option since I use Zed without AI. However,
| their overwhelming focus on cramming AI in the editor just
| disappoints me. The core experience is still very raw and there
| are small things that build over to make it annoying.
|
| I still have Sublime Text as the backup editor. It's lack of a
| powerful sidebar and search are the only things that stopped me
| from using it regularly.
|
| I do use VSCode at times and the CoPilor powered tab completion
| (which mostly hallucinates and spits out nonsense) is just
| obnoxious. I've found JetBrains' implementation of full line
| completion and block completions a lot more thoughtful and
| reliable.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I want this in Warp. It's a solid terminal, but Claude Code is so
| good that I don't need my terminal trying to do something similar
| without me asking it to.
| bitwize wrote:
| If you want this for Warp, you know where to find xterm,
| iTerm2, Kitty, etc.
| opan wrote:
| Have you tried foot?
| yewenjie wrote:
| I loved foot but now I gotta use a macbook :(
| 3836293648 wrote:
| What is the point of this? Surely anyone who (correctly) has
| moral objections would require a fork getting rid of the code to
| support it entirely, not just a runtime toggle?
| zamadatix wrote:
| There are more reasons than moral objections one might not want
| to use the AI features in Zed. The post gives a few concrete
| examples but I think this sums up the general situation best:
|
| > Zed is built for engineers who care about their tools. That
| means giving you control over your development environment,
| including the choice to work without AI if that's what works
| best for you.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| If you have a moral objection of enabling that feature, you
| might or might not also have a moral objection of the program
| having that feature, so I think not everyone does.
| max-privatevoid wrote:
| That's true for this and many other features of Zed. For
| example, telemetry can be disabled with a simple switch.
| However, I feel deeply uncomfortable knowing that my editor is
| ready to report every file I open, commit I make, code action I
| perform, etc. at a moment's notice, held back only by that one
| line in my config file.
| senbrow wrote:
| Total nitpick, but:
|
| Why would you name an option "disable_ai" with a default value of
| false instead of calling it "enable_ai" with a default value of
| true?
|
| Are there some mechanical semantics I'm missing here that make
| this beneficial?
|
| Negative booleans (ie that remove or suppress something when
| true) are generally a source of confusion and bugs and should be
| avoided like the plague in my experience.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| I concur. Same thing in many UI frameworks where you'll have a
| Boolean "isHidden" to control visibility. Makes it so hard to
| reason about.
| Rexxar wrote:
| IMHO, in this case it should not even be a boolean but an
| enum {Visible, Hidden}.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Even with working with an existing framework, we can define
| a constant `HIDDEN=true`
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Technically, "enable_ai" doesn't imply that all AI features are
| really turned off. Without context, it might imply that some
| basic AI features exist and "enable_ai" just enables further
| features. "disable_ai" is unambiguous.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| Enable/disable are the only two dichotomies in the whole of
| all possible states regarding this AI feature, so I'll have
| to bite: What's your "Technically," referring to here?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| First of all, enable/disable is a dichotomy, and is not a
| set of two dichotomies.
|
| Second, imagine an editor that has AI running in the
| background, scanning your files. "Enable_AI" could just
| mean enable the visibility of the feature to actually use
| the results. On the other hand, it would sound more
| suspicious if there were some background AI tasks running,
| even for training purposes, if "disable_AI" were "True" as
| compared to "Enable_AI" to be false.
|
| In other words, Enable_AI COULD have the connotation (to
| some) of just enabling the visibility of the feature,
| whereas Disable_AI gives more of a sense of shutting it
| off.
|
| Imagine for example you're in a court of law. Which one
| sounds more damning?
|
| ======= Prosecutor: You still have AI tasks running in the
| background but AI_Enable is set to false?
|
| Defendent: But Enable_AI just means enabling the use of the
| output! ====
|
| ==== Prosecutor: You still have AI tasks running in the
| background, but AI_Disable is TRUE?
|
| Defendent: Uh.... ====
| criddell wrote:
| I don't buy your argument.
|
| > ==== Prosecutor: You still have AI tasks running in the
| background, but AI_Disable is TRUE?
|
| Defendent: But Disable_AI just means disabling the use of
| the output
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Well, I guess we'll see then. Or not.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > Enable_AI COULD have the connotation (to some) of just
| enabling the visibility of the feature, whereas
| Disable_AI gives more of a sense of shutting it off.
|
| Personally, I don't feel much difference between the two.
| I doubt that an average reasonable person would either.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Well, I do feel a distinct connotational difference, but
| then again, I could be the only one I suppose. And if the
| average person doesn't care, then why argue about it at
| all? And how many average people will be using Zed
| anyway?
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| ======= Prosecutor: You still have AI tasks running in
| the background but AI_Disable is set to true?
|
| Defendent: But Disable_AI just means disabling the use of
| the output! ====
|
| ==== Prosecutor: You still have AI tasks running in the
| background, but AI_Enable is FALSE?
|
| Defendent: Uh.... ====
|
| ...it cuts both ways, sorry.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Perhaps. I could be the only one that senses a
| difference, but for those that hate AI like I do,
| "disable" sounds better than "enable".
| anttiharju wrote:
| My pet peeve is CGO_ENABLED compiler option in Go. It's set
| to 0 or 1 to enable/disable (can never remember which mapa to
| which)
|
| If it was just CGO=true or CGO=false I think so much
| confusion could have been avoided.
|
| I think similar thinking applies here. It's convoluted to
| disable something by setting ai_disable=true because I read
| it like: setting false true instead of just setting boolean.
| scbrg wrote:
| This follows a convention that was well established and
| felt pretty ancient when I learned about environment
| variables in the nineties (i.e. 30 years ago). Variables
| that are flags enabling/disabling something use 1 to
| enable, and 0 to disable. I'd not be surprised if this has
| been pretty much standard behavior since the seventies.
|
| This is not unique to Go.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| I always thought that an unset boolean env var should
| define the default behavior for a production environment
| and any of these set with a value of length>0 will flip
| it (AUTH_ _DIS_ ABLED, MOCK_ _EN_ ABLED, etc.). I thought
| env vars are always considered optional by convention.
| oreilles wrote:
| > It's set to 0 or 1 to enable/disable (can never remember
| which mapa to which)
|
| That's crazy. Boolean logic is the most fundamental notion
| of computer science, I can still remember learning that in
| my very first course on my very first year.
| elicash wrote:
| They are trying to communicate that disabling AI is a product
| feature to some customers.
|
| I think it's reasonable to, for example, have a field that is
| labeled "Do Not Track".
| kjksf wrote:
| It makes sense, historically.
|
| They had AI features that were always on.
|
| Some people complained so they introduced a flag to, wait for
| it, disable the ai features.
|
| So they didn't think too deeply about it and named the flag
| "disable_ai" because it mapped into how they were thinking
| about it.
|
| You overstate the problem with negative booleans. It's trivial
| for them to add a function: fn isAiEnabled() {
| return !disable_ai }
|
| and just use that.
| andoando wrote:
| I mean you may equally want
|
| if(disable_ai) { //disable shit }
| echelon wrote:
| I think AI-enabled is going to be the default for all future
| code development. Autocomplete is just so good, and I never
| want to go back.
|
| I spent 20 years without it. That's enough for one lifetime.
| cardanome wrote:
| How long did it take for you to get used to the autocomplete?
|
| I completely hated it when I tried it out. It breaks my flow.
| Those weird pauses are so painful. Feels like someone
| grabbing the steering wheel while I am driving.
|
| I heavily use the agent mode but I don't understand the
| appeal of the autocomplete feature but maybe I am missing
| something.
| roguecoder wrote:
| You spent 20 years without autocomplete? I started using
| Eclipse's autocomplete & shortcut macros in 2002.
|
| It is fascinating to me how much of the enthusiasm around AI
| seems to be the result of people not knowing about/using the
| deterministic tools that already exist.
| nlitened wrote:
| It's good and predictable that all boolean settings to be false
| by default (when not set). And the default behavior is the one
| that is compatible with older version -- changing the defaults
| is a breaking change that should usually be avoided.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Yes, this is especially useful if the boolean settings are
| stored in a bit field, in my opinion. In the case of Zed,
| according to the article, it uses JSON, but if a program uses
| a bit field instead then it would make sense.
| comprev wrote:
| The wording implies that disabling a default feature is used by
| a handful of edge cases and Zed has done their best to
| accommodate these users.
|
| From a business perspective, investors want to hear that AI is
| indeed part of the shipped product.
|
| It's all about optics.
|
| "disable_user_tracking: false" vs "enable_user_tracking: true"
|
| "disable_adverts: false" vs "enable_adverts: true"
|
| Fewer people would actively _enable_ user tracking or adverts
| compared to those who would take extra steps to _disable_ them.
| jeffbee wrote:
| IMHO flags like this should always reflect the planned steady
| state. If you plan for a feature to be on in general, then the
| flag should be a disabling flag that eventually goes away.
| leafmeal wrote:
| The thing that's so sticky for me with JetBrains IDEs is their
| run configurations. Being able to configure all of the
| environment variables etc. for the actual code that I need to
| run, especially when connecting to a debugger or tests integrated
| with the IDE.
|
| I haven't seen anyone else complain about this so I figure I must
| be missing something. Does Zed let you set up run configurations
| like this? If not, how do users actually _run_ their code? Just
| in the terminal? It seems backwards to me to use a fancy IDE, but
| then run all your code in the terminal. I love IDE features like
| clicking on the test I 'm editing to run it, and setting
| breakpoints in the IDE.
|
| Does anyone else have this problem?
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| For personal projects I just use npm scripts or make
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I love these too. I have a run config checked into my repo that
| runs three run configs, for `fastapi dev`, npm start, and
| launching a JavaScript debugger, with one click. I also like
| clicking on a test or script and just hitting "ctrl+shift+d" to
| launch that particular code with the debugger.
|
| VS Code can launch a fleet of dev containers but it's just not
| as good of an experience to restart and debug.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I think I'm never going to get another software job because I
| cannot stand the word "agentic".
|
| Of course the software industry will probably make any desire I
| might have a moot point anyway.
| Havoc wrote:
| Love this. Prefer deciding feature by feature basis, but in a
| world where everyone is ramming AI down your throat with a
| jackhammer and compulsory ToS this mindset is welcome
| _heimdall wrote:
| Maybe this is a pedantic nitpick, but I do wish the feature was
| "disable_llm" or similar.
|
| The term AI is so poorly specified today, and while I don't want
| my editor using LLMs to predict my next keystroke I do still like
| the more basic auto complete features.
| koito17 wrote:
| Started using Zed about a year ago and, besides Magit, it has
| managed to completely replace Emacs for me. I was missing a good
| debugger for a long time, but that also went GA a month ago or
| so.
|
| One thing that goes underappreciated is the input latency and how
| light on resources the editor is overall. Whenever I switch tabs
| to a web browser (or any web app), I can feel the lag in typing
| now, despite the fact I use an M3 Max MacBook Pro. Zed's built-in
| terminal used to feel high-latency too, but they recently shipped
| a bunch of performance improvements, and it's just amazing how
| clunky inputs feel in web apps feel after using Zed for a long
| time.
|
| Two things I find interesting about this development.
|
| 1. This is a long-standing feature request ever since Zed added
| _any_ AI capability. Adding AI-related functionality at all was a
| very controversial move at the time. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41302782
|
| 2. Text threads in Zed came out only 11 months ago. At the time,
| it felt revolutionary being able to effortlessly paste terminal
| output and entire folders into context. Additionally, being able
| to stop the LLM, correct part of its output, and have it continue
| code generation. Around 4 months ago, agentic coding released,
| and now this once-revolutionary workflow feels quite primitive.
| In the meantime, Zed also added screensharing, Linux support for
| collaboration, a Git UI, a debugger, and performance improvements
| to the editor.
| anamexis wrote:
| I use Zed too, and as a longtime magit devotee, I've really
| been enjoying using gitu [0] in Zed. gitu doesn't have
| everything magit does, but there's not much I find myself
| missing.
|
| I have it nicely integrated with Zed by defining the following
| task, which you can then add a keybinding for if you want:
| { "label": "gitu", "command": "gitu",
| "reveal_target": "center", "hide": "always",
| "env": { "VISUAL": "zed",
| "GIT_EDITOR": "vim" } }
|
| [0] https://github.com/altsem/gitu
| taude wrote:
| These were the comments I came looking for. What existing users
| of Zed migrated from. I'm pretty curious to try it, but lacking
| some time to tool yak-shave at the moment.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Not currently using Zed but low input latency is one of the
| things that's kept me on Sublime Text over the years. Might
| give Zed a shot and see how it stacks up.
|
| The other two editors I use a lot are Xcode and Android Studio,
| and while the first is usually fine, Android Studio (IntelliJ)
| feels servicable but a touch sluggish in comparison. Given the
| popularity of JetBrains IDEs I'm a bit surprised that there's
| not more demand from customers to make it more responsive.
| Aurornis wrote:
| JetBrains IDEs with their zero-latency typing mode are
| actually some of the most responsive editors for typing
| performance: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
|
| They can definitely feel a bit sluggish navigating around
| once you have a giant codebase and you're using a lot of
| features, but code editing has been very responsive for me.
| Alupis wrote:
| I took Zed for a test drive about a year ago, and absolutely
| loved how _butter smooth_ it felt to use. It 's impossible to
| describe to others... you must experience it to understand what
| you're missing.
|
| However, at least at the time, Zed's extension/plugin ecosystem
| prevented me from making the jump off vscode. Just like it took
| me a long while to ween myself off JetBrains and their
| workflow/plugins, it'll take a long while to do the same here -
| that's if an equivalent plugin exists (yet).
|
| It seems to me, it would be a killer feature for new IDE's to
| just embrace vscode's extensions and make them "just work". It
| would remove a lot of the barriers people have with switching
| IDE's.
|
| Maybe that's an impossible ask... I have no idea, but it would
| be pretty sweet.
| jaredcwhite wrote:
| Why is a code editor negging me?
|
| "Even if you're skeptical [of genAI], these tools are quickly
| becoming part of how software gets built."
|
| Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
|
| I _am_ thankful Zed added this feature and most of the post seems
| reasonable, but it 's still the height of weird that they feel
| compelled to say this-- _obviously_ it 's _not_ how software gets
| built by the people who are avoiding these tools intentionally
| and for good reason!
| roguecoder wrote:
| Especially given the recent study that found people felt more
| productive while objectively getting less done.
|
| It's like saying, "marijuana is rapidly becoming a part of how
| people get through their day, but we understand not everyone
| wants to spend their day high."
| ajkjk wrote:
| "Some developers have fundamental objections to AI in their
| coding process--whether it's concerns about training data,
| environmental impact, or philosophical reasons about machine-
| generated code."
|
| not only that, there's the " _jesus christ fuck off_ " angle.
| Stop bullying me into using AI when it serves you, not me. Every
| goddamn surface wants me to click on their "write your email like
| a fake idiot" button because they get to report X% WAU uptick
| which is supposed to vaguely correlate with revenue/growth
| somehow according to some stupid metric. But no matter how much
| you can twist reality to justify it financially the fact remains
| that shoving features in your users' face is not the best user
| experience you could have made, because you could have not done
| it. _Good_ designers (...picture your platonic ideal of Jobs-era
| Apple, not that it was actually perfect but it was better than
| this shit...) would never do that. If only we lived in a world
| where there was enough market pressure to annihilate a company
| for designing things badly---unfortunately no one is competing on
| that angle yet (big opportunity, imo). In the meantime we just
| have to ask, nicely and then angrily: please, god, fuck off. It
| should not take angrily asking, or finding leverage, in order to
| get you to be respectful. You should be respectful by default.
| max_ wrote:
| What an amazing selling point!
|
| It requires lots of independent thinking (which I value) from
| founders to refrain from something everyone else is hitting the
| gas pedal on.
| swyx wrote:
| refrain? they're going full steam on it. they're just not
| forcing all their users into it, which reflects taste and
| empathy few other founders have.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Taste and empathy maybe, but their choice of licenses,
| technologies and priorities can still be juvenile to the
| point of sinking their company.
|
| Just look at the amount of excitement in their industry right
| now. New IDEs are springing up practically by the week. Are
| any of these new IDEs based on Zed?
|
| No, of course not. GPL closes the door on that, and who would
| want to own a fork of a tool that's so painful to develop?
| Developers working on VSCode can probably do an average dev-
| test cycle in 1-5 seconds. I've no idea how long the Zed dev-
| test cycle is, but I hear Rust builds are notoriously slow so
| I assume it's more like 1-5 minutes.
| riigess wrote:
| Other than zed.dev being down for the first time since I started
| using it, I've been manually disallowing AI connections from the
| get-go. What's different? What wasn't I disabling originally? Is
| this just a shortcut to other options?
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| > Our goal at Zed has always been to build the world's best code
| editor.
|
| Not true, Zed goal is
|
| > code editor [with] high-performance collaboration with humans
| and AI
| comprev wrote:
| > code editor [with] high-performance collaboration with humans
| and AI
|
| When investors are involved this immediately changes to:
|
| > Our goal is to build a product which will hopefully return
| more than our financial investment.
|
| I get the feeling many HN contributors to this discussion
| forget that Zed is not a software project like Neovim, Nano or
| Emacs (etc.) which rely on donations and/or sponsors to either
| pay developers or cover required infrastructure costs.
|
| It's a product backed by investors who - one day - will demand
| their pound of flesh, and "features" like AI are added to
| market the product to _more_ investors.
|
| Perhaps the use of AI itself inside the product will also be
| tracked to steer potential opportunities for the investors
| themselves.
|
| Like many fellow HN'ers, I use Zed on a daily basis, and it's
| no different than Google search or Facebook - "If a product
| from investors is free, YOU are the product"
| bobajeff wrote:
| I'm glad they decided to add this. I still want the ability to
| disable all the account login stuff part of the UI. So i hope
| they make that as an option too. Since, I don't like signing into
| my software.
| loeg wrote:
| Weird that it wasn't optional before, right? Not sure if this is
| related to the recent stories of AI agents nuking people's code,
| but that's just one more reason to make it optional.
| serbuvlad wrote:
| The one thing I love about VSCode is how trivially I can fire it
| up on a container or on a remote machine via SSH. If Zed had this
| I would switch tomorrow.
|
| So my question for Zed users is: does it?
|
| The UI is a tad idiosyncratic on Linux (can't speak for Macs) but
| DAMN is it fast, I love the generality of tasks.json (haven't
| played with debug.json yet), by far the best system I've ever
| used, and everything just works well out the gate.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| Zed has SSH editing. But when I tried it a couple of weeks ago,
| their in-ui git didn't detect a repo in a folder that very much
| used git, and ports you want mapped have to be specified ahead
| of time, there's no way to do it at runtime like in
| neovim/vscode
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| I've been using Zed for half a year. Love the simple interface. I
| wanted a glorified notepad. Zed does well for me.
| daft_pink wrote:
| For what it's worth, I would really like to have an iPad version
| of Zed that I could use the remote function into my Mac and
| homeserver via Tailscale and be able to code on my iPad.
|
| Please make this!
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| > Even if you're skeptical, these tools are quickly becoming part
| of how software gets built. Understanding them helps you make
| informed decisions about when and how to use them--or not use
| them.
|
| What? Blockchains and Web3 again? Oh no wait... AI
| beefnugs wrote:
| Damn where is the "stochastic interwoven unpredictable" graphic
| of how they can use a webpage to pin my firefox to 100%cpu and
| start blasting fans
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Just wanted to say thank you to the Zed team for listening to
| this bit of feedback! I'm very much of the opinion that AI is not
| a value-add, so I appreciate the ability to disable it.
| tiltowait wrote:
| I used Zed a decent amount before it started being too in-your-
| face with AI features. Glad to see an option to disable it all,
| but at this point, I've become so much more efficient with Helix
| than I am with any graphical IDE. I wouldn't love to go back.
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