SSH Remoting

https://zed.dev/blog/remote-development

by ingve • 2 years ago

279 215 2 years ago

zed.dev

KingOfCoders• 2 years ago

"the language server is continually out of memory"

"8gb is enough for everybody"

jiri• 2 years ago

Is somewhere a comparison of Zed to Visual Studio Code?

wiz21c• 2 years ago

for a start, zed doesn't work on Windows. I'm not exactly a fan of MSFT but at work, I must use Windows...

Flex247A• 2 years ago

It does work.

Automated builds are here: https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds

timeon• 2 years ago

Memory footprint, startup times, overall responsiveness. At the end of the day VSCode is still Electron app.

speedgoose2• 2 years ago

In my experience, the electron overhead is relatively negligible compared to the ressource usage of the language servers. And zed seems to use the same language servers.

zazaulola• 2 years ago

VSCode does not necessarily require Electron.

Unlike Zed, VSCode can actually run on a server, and Google Chrome can be used as a client.

You can even take advantage of all VSCode features and plugins using Google Chrome Mobile.

m3nu• 2 years ago

Also works well in vscode. Just wish the remote instance would keep running forever. Currently it's only a few hours it seems. Then one needs to reopen the workspace window.

TZubiri2• 2 years ago

I don't use code editors, but when we had an issue with ssh sessions hanging, it was always coworkers that were using vscode and connecting something up with that.

Man, just ssh through the terminal like a normal person and transfer files with git.

uniqueuid• 2 years ago

"Man, just put it on tape and walk over to that machine to load it there".

Sorry, I know such low-effort puns are shunned on HN, but once in a decade I grant myself the permission to not resist.

lifthrasiir6• 2 years ago

Given my experience with the vscode remote instance, that actually sounds terrible as it can get bloated very quickly. The instance state can and should be retained without running the instance indefinitely.

Hamuko3• 2 years ago

I tried to use Zed but the text rendering on macOS was so painful that I didn't get far. Hopefully they'll address so I can give it another go in the future.

stanmancan• 2 years ago

What’s the issue exactly? I’ve been using it on macOS for a few months now and while it has its issues, text rendering hasn’t been one of them.

Hamuko3• 2 years ago

Text looks very blurry when compared to Sublime Text with the same font family and size. There's an active issue about it on GitHub with screenshots.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

neurostimulant• 2 years ago

Such is life using macos on low dpi screen. A lot of apps render blurry texts :(

Hamuko3• 2 years ago

It was definitely a lot worse than any other application I use on a 1440p 27-inch screen.

iveqy• 2 years ago

I also switch between a lot of computers (work computer at home/work computer at work) but have to develop on "big powerful machine at work". My current solution is tmux + nvim and it works really good. I can just pickup a session from whatever computer I'm in front of at the moment.

Am I correct in that neither Zed nor VS Code support this usecase yet?

teruakohatu• 2 years ago

Not persistent sessions, but VS Code can run the GUI locally and connect to a remote server. When you reconnect it opens all your tabs, workspace settings etc.

senko3• 2 years ago

I use VSCode + SSH remote for this and works great. The only nitpick I have is needing to manually reconnect when I suspend my laptop and ssh connection breaks. It's a separate session though, which doesn't matter to me but may be a deal breaker for you.

I use Tailscale for a personal VPN so the beefy workstation is always securely available from my laptop, even when across the pond).

hu39• 2 years ago

Thank you both for sharing the experience.

I'm tempted to go lightweight laptop + beef server.

Do you get used to the the input delay? I guess coding is not a FPS game so it's fine. Just a flow of words being edited.

nrvn• 2 years ago

10 years ago I was using https://mosh.org/ to sutomatically reconnect ssh sessions.

p-e-w• 2 years ago

Caveat emptor: "Zed downloads NodeJS binary and npm packages from Internet without user’s consent"[1]

This has been an open issue for 5 months. When I noticed it, I couldn't believe my eyes and it was the last time I've run Zed so far. Judge for yourself whether this is a deal-breaker for you; I wish I had known about it earlier.

[1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589

lifthrasiir6• 2 years ago

Oops indeed. (Downloading can be fine in many---but not all---cases, but the lack of authentication is not really justifiable!) The latest comment does hint that it will change in the near future, as the change is required for remote development anyway:

Status update: We are still working on this! The major blocker is that extensions have not been setup to interact with setting. However, we also need to change this API to support our upcoming remote development feature. So we're going to roll both of these breaking changes into a larger extension update, coming this November or December :)

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

I don't see how this is different from having all these pre-bundled with a new version of Zed? Either way I'm going to download all of them again.

lifthrasiir6• 2 years ago

By bundling, Zed guarantees or at least claims that those bundled executables can be trusted. The same level of trust is possible with on-demand downloading only when some sort of authentication is used [1] but Zed currently doesn't actually authenticate any downloads to my knowledge.

[1] Either by embedding cryptographic hashes to the distribution, or by having some means to distribute publicly signed hashes (e.g. minisign via HTTPS).

_hyn36• 2 years ago

What I might trust on my laptop is TOTALLY different from what my company might allow on a remote server.

lionkor3• 2 years ago

I switched to Zed for C, C++, Rust, Angular, and am extremely happy with it. I use it with it's vim mode, which is very good.

For the record, I've tried the JetBrains suite for at least a year, vscode, vim, neovim, visual studio (windows), qtcreator, and at least one more I dont remember. Zed is superior for everyday coding, for me.

The only thing it lacks is debugging, so I can't use it for C#, but I also can't use vscode for C# so that's understandable.

And man, its so snappy.

b4ckup2• 2 years ago

I use vscode (with omnisharp not c# devkit) for c# every day. Did you try it out?

leosanchez• 2 years ago

Is devkit better than Rider ?

lionkor3• 2 years ago

I did not! Rider is extremely satisfying to use.

pimeys3• 2 years ago

I've been using vim since the 90's, then emacs and helix. Never a GUI editor, always terminal. This year I just tried Zed and I'm super happy about it. It's open source, they offer a flake in their repo for me to get the latest version compiled to my NixOS installations if I want. It's fast, their LLM features are tasteful and they come with the open source version of the editor. It's written in Rust which is my main programming language.

This SSH feature is great, I can just remotely turn on my workstation at home and use it with Zed over tailscale.

I'm also waiting for a good debugger story, especially for Rust. It will come...

OptionOfT• 2 years ago

Wait? How do you debug C, C++ and Rust then?

lionkor3• 2 years ago

gdb! I got used to it and now it's more than enough :)

klemola2• 2 years ago

How's Zed with WSL (now)? I've liked the ability to run the VS Code back-end in WSL and front-end in Windows, is this possible with Zed?

TZubiri2• 2 years ago

I wouldn't go there. These things are supposed to be helpful, any bug or chance of a bug will be detrimental to their stated purpose, just imagine scenarios were zed tells git to download a repo and you have to make sure it downloads to a linux directory and not a windows directory, otherwise you lose all of the access bits, and it's slow af.

Asking for trouble.

klemola2• 2 years ago

I appreciate your concern and I will consider this.

The [VS Code] WSL back-end has access to things in WSL PATH, like compilers and language servers. I don't duplicate them in Windows, and would like to avoid having double installs. It's also nice to be able to open integrated terminal and use `fish` and other unix-only CLI utilities.

TiredOfLife6• 2 years ago

Zed still doesn't have Windows version (but someone is working on it), so currently no.

ceving• 2 years ago

Someone reinvented tramp-mode.

pineapple_sauce• 2 years ago

This appears to be a significantly better implementation. Tramp mode is god awful slow and does not maintain a persistent connection.

noufalibrahim2• 2 years ago

The default setup is pretty crappy but with some tweaking of the ssh connection setup, It does a decent job and I used it for actual work for several years.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs2• 2 years ago

I suggest you try it and compare it to tramp-mode and see for yourself how different it is(and just how much better it is to tramp-mode)

unsnap_biceps• 2 years ago

Just a FYI, this feature will install a binary on the remote host and run it.

Your local machine will attempt to connect to the remote server using the ssh binary on your path. Assuming the connection is successful, Zed will download the server on the remote host and start it.

https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development

echoangle2• 2 years ago

That's what VS Code does too, BTW.

frankjr3• 2 years ago

..and is not even open source (EDIT: I'm wrong, see below). Zed's remote server on the other hand seems to be OSS. One could probably install it themselves without relying on the automatic download.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/633b665379c18a069...

yencabulator2• 2 years ago

Microsoft is not the bar for what's a good solution for open source Linux operating systems.

szundi• 2 years ago

What a perfect attack vector even if Zed and Vscode people are completely honest

eddythompson805• 2 years ago

What’s the attack vector? Someone with ssh access to your machine can run code on your machine? That’s part of ssh.

shark1• 2 years ago

Intellij IDEA does that too, and the installer is a very big file. I suspect an entire headless IDE is installed in the remote host.

Aaron2222• 2 years ago

That's how most of these remoting features work, by running the IDE backend on the remote host.

I'm not sure if IntelliJ IDEA has an equivalent, but CLion has an option to just do the build and run/debug on the remote host without running the whole IDE on it.

sakjur• 2 years ago

Jetbrains provide an option to use their lightweight remote development gateway[1] and not have the IDE installed on the local machine at all.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/

lifthrasiir6• 2 years ago

As long as that is notified and correctly authenticated, it is a reasonable approach because the remote process can progress without having to send the whole workspace through SSH. I also expect most language servers would have to be on remote for the same reason.

otabdeveloper43• 2 years ago

It's not a reasonable approach because these binary blobs they're installing are guaranteed to be non-functional unless the target OS somehow happens to be the exact distribution and version the binary blob developers are testing for.

(You could theoretically make a truly portable and hermetic binary blob with something like WASM, but I guarantee you this black magic is not accessible to IDE developers.)

BostonFern• 2 years ago

What’s the resource footprint of that binary?

The VS Code equivalent has been unsuitable for resource-constrained servers in my experience.

yencabulator2• 2 years ago

Executing random binaries off the internet is such an annoying "modern" thing. I do not want that, I want to build things from (open source) source.

You can whack Zed in the head by putting in ~/.config/zed/settings.json

      "server_url": "https://disable-stupid-crap.zed.invalid",

And that stops it from doing a lot of this unwanted stuff. (Haven't tested this binary download bit yet.)

It also manages to break the `zed: extensions` page even for already-installed extensions. I sure feel like I'm being the product..

Protostome3• 2 years ago

with a little bit of work, vi/emacs works great as an IDE for most setups... The learning curve is steep but once you get the gist, you never go back to those bloated IDEs.

(Disclaimer: I haven't tried zed, but have been working throughout my career with Eclipse, Visual C/C++/Basic (!), Atom)

jebarker3• 2 years ago

Unless you need a graphical debugger, then vi/vim/nvim/emacs all start to get creaky. That single requirement keeps me on vscode. I'd love a terminal based alternative.

frou_dh• 2 years ago

Graphical as in integrated with the normal editing view? There's a new very nicely done one for Emacs: https://github.com/svaante/dape . The documentation about using it is currently a bit terse though.

_hyn36• 2 years ago

just don't write buggy code ;) (or have to work on anyone else's)

nurumaik• 2 years ago

Try remote development with vim over 200ms ping ssh connection

Protostome3• 2 years ago

I've tried that, but in this case i would just NFS/sshfs share the directory and work with vim locally.

Vim can also read and write files across networks (while running locally): vim scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt should work.

If you want to run builds and such on a terminal, just have a tmux window with an active ssh connection.

There's a solution to most issues out there.

snvzz• 2 years ago

Try remote development with vim over 200ms ping ssh connection

Isn't such a scenario (high latency dialup) what vi was originally designed for?

_hyn36• 2 years ago

I have frequently done full vim editing on primary development boxes across cross-Atlantic pipes, which are usually 150ms from where I am in the states. Not really a bad experience in any way, tbh. I'm sure my tolerance level would decrease dramatically at 300ms though.

eviks2• 2 years ago

The learning curve is steep

So it's not "a little bit of work"

Protostome3• 2 years ago

Compared to mastering C++, vim is a piece of cake. For me it was a major productivity boost.

mike_d• 2 years ago

I recently tried to use SSH remote editing with VSCode on a plane. It is so incredibly chatty that the in-flight wifi system thought I was trying to tunnel traffic via SSH and kept killing the connection.

I hope the Zed developers have taken bandwidth minimization into account.

mrklol• 2 years ago

Afaik the problem are big file directories, at least that what I noticed.

reubenmorais• 2 years ago

You were tunneling traffic through SSH :P

keybits2• 2 years ago

Zed with SSH Remoting and Orbstack is pretty much my dream setup for programming on a Mac.

I can now spin up a Linux machine in Orbstack[0] in a few seconds and then SSH into it from Zed for a fast Linux development environment with a fast macOS native editor. It feels a bit like the macOS version of WSL and VSCode. Just a whole lot nicer (subjective of course)!

A couple of years ago I was inspired by what Mitchell Hashimoto was doing[1]. He was running a GUI VM via VMware on macOS so that he could have the best of both worlds - macOS apps and ecosystem and a Linux dev environment with his preferred package managers and a more reliable NixOS. That route still felt a bit heavy to me, but I related to the desire for the best of macOS and the best of Linux.

I tried with VMware and Docker Desktop with VSCode but it always felt like a lot of overhead and a bit clunky to achieve a smooth fast dev environment.

With Zed and Orbstack it finally feels like the fast elegant system I'll stick with. Thank you to the developers for these excellent tools!

[0] https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture#linux-machines [1] https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1346136404682625024

rfoo• 2 years ago

I've always been running a headless Linux VM wherever I do any dev work, Windows or Mac. Works very well.

Glad to see that WSL2 and OrbStack promotes this workflow.

For now my only complaint is I prefer full-blown VMs instead of WSL-like setup (so that I can work with the same Linux kernel my code targets), but client virtualization support on Apple platforms are pretty meh, definitely not at Hyper-V level yet. OrbStack went out of their way to fix a lot of these but they are not interested in making a VM product.

mbreese2• 2 years ago

I’ve been using Colima to host docker containers and VSCode with devcontainers to do something similar. Being able to spin up a full stack environment on the fly for working is amazing. It may not be as fast as Zed, but it’s a well thought out workflow that’s very reproducible. It’s been a quick workflow to start using, but is still quite flexible.

Regardless of which stack you use, I think this is a great style of working. When you have a reproducible dev environment, everything is so much easier. (As vagrant users will probably attest to - it’s not a new method).

But having this feature of SSH remoting is also quite handy without the dev environment stack stuff. I also find it quite nice to work with a local client, but remote SSH environment when I’m doing data work (large genomic data files). In this case, instead of reproducibly, the main benefit is data locality. If my large dataset is on a different server, it’s far more convenient to write the analysis code on that remote server. This new Zed feature seems like it will also support this workflow, which is also a win in my book.

tiffanyh• 2 years ago

I understood Mitchell intent for his setup to be slightly different than what you described.

I understood it as him running Nixos/nix because it made having a reproducible development setup a breeze since it’s all just a config file.

How would his use of Nixos change as you imply with Zed/SSH?

keybits2• 2 years ago

I might have implied the wrong thing. I wasn't implying Mitchell should change his use of NixOS. I was relating to the desire for 'best of macOS and best of Linux'. If I was using NixOS I would do that from an Orbstack machine Linux cli, with Zed as my editor, rather than virtualisaing a full X GUI. Everyone will have their own choices of course.

zifpanachr23• 2 years ago

I'd really like a good remote editing solution that is genuinely portable. I don't think there's anything technical stopping that from happening (and I've tried some half baked solutions along those lines before).

For a variety of reasons relating to my line of work, this or vscode's solution are no gos since they require you to install a server on the remote, and that server is interpreted or compiled in a language that is absolutely not guaranteed to be present or stable on said remote (I'm saying my ideal extension, if a server is really necessary, would be in a reasonably widespread subset of C, perhaps ISO c99, which I'm sure I'll catch some flack for saying).

That is an underserved (although perhaps not large, but probably they would be enthusiastic) market given that remote editing is perhaps the most useful in situations where the remote environment is different to such an extent you can't easily copy a project over and expect it to just work. If I'm deploying to an x86_ 64 Linux box, I can totally just develop locally and do a lot of testing locally deploy to the remote after all of that, and so I tend not to get too excited about remote editing features for a platform like a normal x86_64 Linux distro.

I'm obviously being picky and demanding and people are free to ignore everything I just wrote. As far as Zed is concerned, the editor looks good and this functionality looks good and I'm happy to see it moving along. Please forgive me for indulging my personal pet peeve. It is a good thing by itself to have competition to vscode and so please don't interpret my post as being overly negative to Zed given it's main competitor has the same issue.

Also, I'm aware that a fair response to everything I just wrote would be "just use vi/vim/emacs"...which is actually really fair and does a lot to demolish my argument, at least as far as a remote editor being a necessity is concerned rather than just a nice to have.

prmoustache• 2 years ago

Although I don't understand why you would still want to do that with modern processes, configuration management, CICD tools and the decentralization of git, you can just mount the remote directory via ssh.

People have been doing that for decades already. Works with any editor/ide/tool.

gitaarik3• 2 years ago

I guess the reason to run the IDE on the server is so that the IDE can inspect the whole (potentially huge) codebase and provide LSP features like code completion & go-to definition, and AI assistance.

legobeet• 2 years ago

I'm going the container route. To get the full seamlessness you're alluding to (easily switch between multiple parallel environments; easy migrations) still requires some additional features but perhaps you can find some inspiration.

https://github.com/legobeat/l7-devenv

E.g.

https://github.com/legobeat/l7-devenv/pull/144

https://github.com/legobeat/l7-devenv/pull/153

pseudony• 2 years ago

Can someone explain. What is the catch ? Zed is worked on by paid employees. So who is the product, how is the money made and is it open source and if so, how much ? (Vscode has strings attached too)

Just interested since building my workflows around a company's products usually ends in tears (figuratively).

keyle2• 2 years ago

You are the product. The editor is free afaik, and is very good. It has a plugin system and many languages have been added. It's really, really close to be my replacement to intelliJ. Sadly many bugs are stopping that for now.

They'll charge for integrations later, collaboration etc. I'm not sure exactly where the money is going to come from but I value a quality native IDE.

I hope they don't stuff crap down our mouth in the future and simply charge a one time fee per version. But that of course is unlikely to happen.

Every new version of IntelliJ I gasp that they F'd with something, and usually I'm right.

TylerE• 2 years ago

I’ll have to give it a look. I’m an increasingly disenchanted IntelliJ customer also.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

It's really, really close to be my replacement to intelliJ

Isn't Zed just a text editor? The last time I checked it out it didn't have any debugging features which doesn't really make it a replacement for an IntelliJ IDE.

monooso• 2 years ago

You are the product.

As far as I can tell from the Zed FAQs and license, this is false.

Can you provide information to support this assertion?

blackoil• 2 years ago

Happy path is Open-Core where all enterprisesque features and plugins are part of a commercial pro model. Unhappy path involves switching licenses sometime later or project simply dying because of ROI.

pimeys3• 2 years ago

Yep. Maybe a good copilot written in Rust and tightly integrated into Zed. Offer a subscription model. I'd pay for that.

krelian• 2 years ago

This is answered in their FAQ: https://zed.dev/faq :

We envision Zed as a free-to-use editor, supplemented by subscription-based, optional network features, such as:

       Channels and calls
       Chat
       Channel notes

We plan to offer our collaboration features to open source teams, free of charge.

IshKebab• 2 years ago

This seems pretty optimistic to me. I can't imagine any company I've worked for paying for those things. Especially because they're only going to be useful if everyone uses Zed which is unlikely.

gigatexal2• 2 years ago

That’s the thing. Whatever editor I finally migrate from neovim to I’ll likely donate to.

I get so much insane value from open source and companies building for the platforms that I use that I’m happy to pay for them especially for small shops of really passionate hackers like the folks behind Zed.

shafyy4• 2 years ago

For a VC-backed company, this will never ever generate enough revenue growth. So, the real answer is: "If all goes well, we will keep raising VC money and get acquired and shutdown / butchered in 5-10 years".

Like Bluesky, this monetization plan they present is just something to calm down the haters and sceptics. But if you think for two seconds, it does not make sense.

pimeys3• 2 years ago

I would be ready to pay money for Zed, but I'm happy it's all GPL including the dev server (AGPL). Even if this business does not work, we have the code and the community and all parts of the editor available. Thank you for the team for this.

uludag2• 2 years ago

Vscode has strings attached too

If software being FLOSS is in any way an important value of yours, the difference between Zed and Visual Studio Code is night and day:

Zed's GPL: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/LICENSE-GPL MS Visual Studio Code's license: https://code.visualstudio.com/license

I believe this alone shows much more good will towards developers and much less strings attached.

z33k• 2 years ago

For what it's worth; Visual Studio Code and VSCode are not the same. VSCode is MIT licensed: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

From vscodium.com:

Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking. According to this comment from a Visual Studio Code maintainer:

When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.

When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license

The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. [VSCodium] includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.

eddythompson805• 2 years ago

https://zed.dev/terms has the Zed Editor use license. That’s different from the Zed source code license.

bbminner• 2 years ago

I have been using code server over ssh for this purpose for years.

BossingAround2• 2 years ago

Personally, I need support for remote debuggers, e.g. debugpy on Python. Would this feature help me debug code that's already running on a remote server and I just need to connect to it?

jebarker3• 2 years ago

I really wish there was a good alternative to vscode for remote debugpy

BossingAround2• 2 years ago

Same. I don't like VSCode, but debugpy is, for me, a killer feature for which I'd pay if I had to.

reacharavindh• 2 years ago

A nice setup for Rust development where compile times are high. You can offload that to a beefy machine while using the editor on a MacBook Air :-)

jeeybee• 2 years ago

Used Zed for a week or so, loved it! But the lack of mypy / git integrations forced me back to VS-code :'(

drcongo2• 2 years ago

I switch between Sublime and Zed all day depending on what task I'm doing, some things it's still not quite as good at as Sublime. The Ruff integration is excellent though, and the good news there is that apparently they're working on a type checker for Ruff's language server.

uneekname2• 2 years ago

Yeah, while I'm pretty happy with git in the terminal, I'm eager to see what Zed's take on a git workflow will look like. The inline git blame info is nice, but a UI for committing and push/pulling the repo would be great.

greener_grass• 2 years ago

I wonder if image based screen sharing (e.g. Google Meet) is the "worse is better" here?

Zed collaboration sounds great, but what about all of the other apps I use?

Image based sharing supports everything (poorly) automatically.

teddyh2• 2 years ago

I can find no mention of Emacs (or Tramp) in any of the documentation or a sampling of blog posts. It’s as if the authors don’t even know it exists. This is concerning.

(As is their apparent 100% all-in on the AI hype train.)

globular-toast3• 2 years ago

Yep. Emacs had this 25 years ago. I find editing over SSH a last resort, though, as it introduces a lot of undesirable latency.

amszmidt2• 2 years ago

Emacs had this 40 years ago. ;-)

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs2• 2 years ago

I find editing over SSH a last resort, though, as it introduces a lot of undesirable latency.

I suggest you give Zed a try then or even VS Code remote, just to compare. They're much better engineered than Emacs tramp.

indulona• 2 years ago

why is there so much hype about yet another editor?

coldtea2• 2 years ago

"So much hype" being defined as "the ocassional release announcement HN post now and then", most of which could be submitted by Zed themselves?

And "yet another editor" as in implying that all editors edit, so Vim or Emacs or VSCode or Zed or whatever shouldn't matter, as none brings anything different/new to the table?

fredoliveira2• 2 years ago

If we all stuck to the first thing that worked and searched for no improvements whatsoever, we'd all be riding horses.

_hyn36• 2 years ago

I'm still riding text-mode vim over ssh, and it's very fast and suits me just fine. If I get frisky, I can always go check out the latest plugins.

gitaarik3• 2 years ago

A horse is still an excellent text editor

jeppester• 2 years ago

I wish I would be able to start a dedicated server that could then be joined by both myself and my co-workers to work together.

From reading the article, it seems that collaboration is a wholly different layer, just like in VS Code.

edweis• 2 years ago

Zed is great. But as long as they don’t support eslint properly, it’s a turn down for me and my organization.

ktosobcy• 2 years ago

I've tried zed again and it's kinda "meh" when it comes to Java development. It's kinda nice editor (but BBedit feels even faster) but nothing more and using it feels like an added friction...

DrBazza2• 2 years ago

Has anyone tried this and ssh'd into a container?

IIRC VSCode struggled to correctly ssh into a container that's set up in your `.ssh` config file. Not sure if this fixed it: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/194879

uneekname2• 2 years ago

I'd really like to see this. I already run a bunch of containers on servers at home and work, and running a "Zed server" of some sort would be fabulous.

I also wonder (I haven't looked yet) how Zed communicates with its server process over SSH, and if this could be accomplished over some other protocol. Is it possible SSH could be a speed (or latency) bottleneck on high-speed networks?

TiredOfLife6• 2 years ago

I just connected from VS Code running on Windows to a devcontainer running on a Steam Deck

DrBazza2• 2 years ago

I'm not familiar with devcontainers. The situation I was curious about was a general container, for example singularity, rather than something more common like docker. When I've tried that with vscode, it didn't like the ssh config that allowed you to ssh into the container and wouldn't work, even though in a bash shell it worked exactly as advertised.

Dinux• 2 years ago

I cant wait to switch to something like Zed. VS Code can take up half of my memory and keeps crashing after updates. How much language support is there for Go?

gabeidx• 2 years ago

It has built-in support for Go: https://zed.dev/docs/languages/go

Instantnoodl2• 2 years ago

I switched from Goland to Zed. Works really well. Only missing debugger support... After that it would be perfect for my usage :)

meitham• 2 years ago

How’s this different from starting tmux session on a remote server and editing code with a text editor and running in that session? Is Zed not a terminal text editor?

dagw2• 2 years ago

Zed is a GUI code editor. Also the difference is where the UI runs. Running the UI locally gives much better response and lower latency than running the UI remote.

bert2002• 2 years ago

Any chance for a iPadOS release?

VeejayRampay• 2 years ago

I want to like Zed but two things are still an issue for me:

- Zed doesn't know how to highlight XML - I use a theme called FairyFloss which doesn't exist for Zed and Zed doesn't provide anything to import VSCode themes

xiaodai• 2 years ago

make windows here before doing ssh?

tracker1• 2 years ago

Glad to see this. It's probably one of the biggest features in vs code that I find indispensable along with the integrated terminal.

Will give Zed a try now.

rmrf100• 2 years ago

this is cool, love it.

vermon• 2 years ago

I would switch over to Zed for all my non-JVM needs if only it would have a debugger support. Currently it's filling a role of a text editor pretty well though.

evbogue• 2 years ago

How does this compare to vim over mosh?

Instantnoodl2• 2 years ago

I tried to use zeds SSH remoting for a work project. Typescript with big codebase and sadly the performance is a rollercoaster. Types sometimes load so slow that it's unusable. VSCode remote doesn't seem to have this problem, although I'm not sure yet if it's really just a zed problem. I would need to try it with some more isolated use-case. Still happy to see the progress! I switched to zed for a lot of my private dev work already

eadmund3• 2 years ago

Those who do not understand Emacs are doomed to repeat it. Poorly, in worse languages. —C.S. Santayana

Emacs TRAMP mode has been doing this for 26 years, since November 1998. Fashions come, and fashions go, and Emacs remains. Anyone remember Atom? Anyone remember TextMate?

Just use vi or Emacs.

amszmidt2• 2 years ago

Fun fact. Emacs was doing this even long before Tramp, in the 1980s it was already common to work with remote files. So more like 40 years …

thiht• 2 years ago

"Just" does quite a bit of heavy lifting here. VSCode and Zed are much easier to use than emacs or vim. To me as a user, emacs lisp (and lisp in general) is the worse language compared to TypeScript which I can work with.

otabdeveloper43• 2 years ago

VSCode and Zed are much easier to use than emacs or vim.

False. It's just that Emacs comes with fewer features out of the box.

emacs lisp (and lisp in general) is the worse language compared to TypeScript

Elisp is truly a piece of shit language, but TypeScript is not much better.

fallingsquirrel• 2 years ago

What's the point of this comment? Zed didn't exist in 1998, so I think it's forgivable that Zed didn't support remote editing in 1998.

It's pretty funny you'd comment this at the same time there's a thread on the front page with people complaining about emacs bugs/performance issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41954030

Is that really the best we can do? Should we have frozen tech in 1998 with our 28.8kbps modems and stopped trying to improve anything ever again? Why did you switch to this emacs fad when you could have stuck with ed(1)?

I think it's great that people are advancing the state of the art. Good for Zed.

eadmund3• 2 years ago

What's the point of this comment?

To encourage people to use Emacs (or vi).

Should we have frozen tech in 1998 with our 28.8kbps modems

We had Ethernet and high-speed networks in 1998. The rest of the world has just caught up, that’s all.

Why did you switch to this emacs fad when you could have stuck with ed(1)?

Emacs is an improvement over and above vi & ed. No other current editor is an improvement over and above Emacs. The only improvement Emacs is lacking is Common Lisp extensibility.

I think it's great that people are advancing the state of the art.

But they’re not — they’re reimplementing the decades-old art. Why waste time using worse technologies to extend worse editors when one can invest one’s time using better technology to extend a better editor?

hollerith• 2 years ago

Don't many editors have the feature of allowing remote editing through ssh?

There was discussion here a few days ago for example of an Acme clone named Anvil, which has the feature, as does Acme.

VSCode has it.

Also, TRAMP is a poor (unreliable, fragile) implementation of the feature. Or at least it was the last time I used it regularly about 10 years ago.

Finally, if you have to resort to quoting a slogan then it is probably better not to comment at all.

eadmund3• 2 years ago

Addendum: in retrospect, I do regret my dismissive tone. It wasn’t terribly nice. I’m sure that the developers of the feature are very proud of it, and justifiably so. All the best to them.

I still maintain that it’s a pity they don’t invest their efforts in Emacs, but … it’s a free world!

mardifoufs• 2 years ago

Vscode's remote SSH is much better than tramp mode imo. They are not really on the same level.

trollied• 2 years ago

Jetbrains Gateway also does this.

stephenr• 2 years ago

There was discussion about Zed over at Lobste.rs ~9 months ago when it went open source. I tried it then (as it was compared a lot to VSCode or Visual Studio code, which according to comments here are two separate things, to my surprise?) and I just updated and tried it again, and my initial feeling about it is unchanged:

Something about the UI is just... off. I don't know what it is exactly, but it feels like one of those "web page trying to mimic a desktop environment" demos that were all the rage 15-20 years ago.

It's bizarre to think that IntelliJ, which is a JVM app, feels way more 'native' on macOS than Zed.

Alifatisk2• 2 years ago

How are people so happy with Zed? I've tried it, it's fast sure, but it lacks some very essential features like inline error highlighting and button for running code like how Intellij has it, there is no extensions that cover this either.

At the moment, the Zed IDE is more like an lightweight ai-assisted text editor for me.

fordsmith• 2 years ago

I think that is precisely why people, and myself, ate happy with Zed. I don't, personally, care for those kinds of features. I want something that is snappy, and bloat free. I beloved extensions are planned so that will come in time. I'm terms of inline error highlighting, it absolutely has that. is your LSP just not working correctly?

Alifatisk2• 2 years ago

is your LSP just not working correctly?

I don't know, I can't tell, but I would guess it does not. I just got the one and only Java extension there is (the other has has something to do with Eclipse). Yet, no error highlighting.

_hyn36• 2 years ago

Running an unknown app on a trusted remote server under your local user account - not a good idea! Just keep it local on your own machine.

Your editor can handle everything way faster locally, plus it can grab files with SSH’s built-in (and mature to the point of being ancient!) capabilities: caching, compression, and instant text file downloads over an open connection. You can even check for remote file changes using stat.

Even better, use sshfs or another FUSE option.

There’s a ton you can do with plain SSH alone. This whole running-a-remote-server idea is, frankly, puzzling.

gitaarik3• 2 years ago

caeril• 2 years ago

Wow, this is some incredible technology. It's not like tmux and neovim have been available for a decade now. This is like space-age alien technology with which, for the first time ever, we can develop over ssh!

What a world we live in, what a time to be alive!

prinny_• 2 years ago

Is that similar to webstorm's remote development?

SSH Remoting

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