The Zed Debugger Is Here

502 197 1 year ago

tdhz77• 1 year ago

Love zed, wish it would work with Claude max. It’s amazing

Is this not doable with its MCP configuration? Today I tried this and wrote it down after it worked well for me if Zed allows similar usage and config https://www.bobbby.online/post/a-clever-hack-claude-code-as-...

ChrisArchitect• 1 year ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44311958

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs• 1 year ago

I havent's keep up with Zed, how's the Windows version coming along? Is anyone here using it?

sathyabhat• 1 year ago

There’s no build available yet but there is a doc on how to build it https://zed.dev/docs/development/windows

que-encrypt• 1 year ago

zed remote ssh on windows would push me to it instantly, unfortunately it relies upon this pr being merged (I think, would love more input): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/29145

It is finally at the review stage, I really hope it can get merged soon!

fancy_pantser• 1 year ago

I've been using the unofficial builds via scoop for the last two months. It's working great so far. I use it on a Macbook as well and I haven't found any features that are missing or buggier on Win11. Really enjoying the new agent version of the AI assistant, which I use with both Claude API and devstral locally via Ollama.

https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds

lordofgibbons• 1 year ago

I've gone full-time with Zed for the past month or so and really like it. Love the fast start times. There was a blurry font issue on linux, but that seems to have been fixed for me. Not sure what caused it.

candrewlee• 1 year ago

Zed is fantastic. I've been making the leap from neovim to zed lately, and it's been an great experience. Everything feels snappy, and I love how well they've integrated Vim bindings. Their agent mode is nice as well. It's clearly an underdog to VSCode, so the extension ecosystem isn't quite there yet... but for a lot of the things I've used it for, it's sufficient. The debugger has been the big missing feature for me and I'm really glad they've built it out now - awesome work.

echelon2• 1 year ago

How is Zed with auto-completing Rust code?

I love how fast Windsurf and Cursor are with the "tab-tab-tab" code auto-completion, where nearly everything suggested is spot-on and the suggestions keep on rolling, almost automating the entire task of refactoring for you. This form of autocomplete works really well with TypeScript and other scripting languages.

IntelliJ / RustRover never got anywhere close to that level of behavior you can get in Cursor and Windsurf, neither in conjunction with JetBrains own models or with Co-pilot. I chalked it up as an IDE / model / language mismatch thing. That Rust just wasn't amenable to this.

A few questions:

1) Are we to that magical tab-tab-tab and everything autocompletes fluently with Rust yet? (And does this work in Zed?)

2) How does Zed compare to Cursor and Windsurf? How does it compare to RustRover, and in particular, JetBrains' command of the Rust AST?

lionkor• 1 year ago

It's fantastic for Rust, it's my main IDE which I've written e.g. voltlane.net in. Fantastic software, and the LLM integration is everything you need IMO (in a good way).

WD-423• 1 year ago

Zed is written in Rust by a bunch of Rust lovers so it's really got first class support for it.

csomar• 1 year ago

How is Zed with auto-completing Rust code?

I think they all use LSP, so whether you use neovim or Zed there shouldn't be a difference? (not 100% sure, but that's my basic understanding of LSP).

timeinput• 1 year ago

I'm curious about how vimmy the vim bindings are?

Every time I've encountered a vim emulator I've found it is just close enough that my fingers are doing the wrong things so often it's frustrating. Almost to the point where I would prefer a non-vimmy editor since at least then my fingers always do the wrong thing.

esamatti• 1 year ago

To me it has been the best "vim" that is not a real Vim. Way way better than the vscode plugin. I have used Vim and later Neovim since 2008 or so. Zed is the first non-vim I am truly happy with.

tomjuggler2• 1 year ago

Not Zed's fault but I'm still stuck with VSCode because Zed doesn't support PLatformIO (or rather PlatformIO doesn't support Zed).

I'm guessing that this extension support problem will continue to be a barrier to uptake for a while.

zamalek• 1 year ago

Not Zed's fault

Zed only supports language extensions, so it is in part responsible. If you're using embedded rust then PlatformIO isn't really needed; probe-rs is extremely capable and straightforward.

tomjuggler2• 1 year ago

I'm going to go ask the Zed AI now if it can port my massive 10 year old C++ project to Rust and see what happens. Gotta keep moving forward

Otherwise maybe the platformio cli might be enough

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

This is becoming a recurring issue; plenty of innovation being put in new and faster tooling to replace the JS-based daily drivers we've had for the past decade+, but there's a huge ecosystem of 3rd party addons to those now which is slowing adoption down; I'm also thinking of Prettier/ESLint vs Biome, the only thing stopping us from going full Biome is that we need some ESLint plugins.

That said, it's getting better; as another commenter pointed out, LSP is one of the best things to happen to this space. There should be a standard for editor plugins, too.

rvz• 1 year ago

I think competent software engineers should actually read the "Under the hood" section, before they lose the core understanding on how debuggers work and are integrated into editors.

Upon reading the Rust code implementing the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) in Zed, some very junior SWEs will quickly point out that they would prefer only "self-documenting code" and would go as far as to removing all comments or even believe that "If it has comments, its probably bad code".

For sophisticated software that implements a defined protocol that is architected to be scalable in any piece of complex software, I prefer these comments that explains why a particular interface is designed the way it is and how it fits into the software (Zed) in this case if it were to be widely re-used like a plugin system.

This blog post is excellent in explaining this debugger integration in the editor and it makes me want to consider using Zed; it just needs an improved extension ecosystem.

[0] https://zed.dev/blog/debugger#under-the-hood

neurostimulant• 1 year ago

If be surprised if Zed aren't dogfooding their own AI agents to help writing some of the Zed code. The AI often put a lot of comments on the generated code, and sometimes needs a lot of comments to produce the right code.

haiku207711• 1 year ago

They literally do this in their AI Agent demo - they add a feature to Zed using Zed's agent.

eddythompson803• 1 year ago

Ever since Linux support came out (2 years ago?), I go to check if they, finally, support “non-retina” “LoDPi” (a.k.a: a regular screen) yet, and sadly no :/

marton78• 1 year ago

It's an ugly workaround, but if you install BetterDisplay (it's a free tool) and set your LoDPI screen to HiDPI, text rendering looks good.

girvo2• 1 year ago

Oh I'll have to try that. Zed looks woeful on my 1440p monitor when I was trying it at work, which is a shame because I quite like it otherwise.

jaoane• 1 year ago

They don’t support windows, they don’t support regular screens on Linux… are they a Mac shop basically?

sien• 1 year ago

The unofficial builds for Windows are good.

https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds

Installing the 'stable' build with scoop works a treat.

avarun• 1 year ago

Most startups are

senko4• 1 year ago

Using it with regular screen in Linux, works just fine.

LoganDark• 1 year ago

Yes. Originally they were Mac-only, then they went open-source and the community added support for Linux and Windows, but AFAICT they've never invested in anything but Mac

lsllc• 1 year ago

Via Scoop:

  scoop bucket add extras
  scoop install extras/zed

It works really well on Windows, haven't had any problems, nor with any extensions.

senko4• 1 year ago

Using it daily on my 1920x1200 laptop screen in Linux and works just fine.

sapiogram3• 1 year ago

Are you using dark mode? To me, text looks absolutely awful in light mode, but okay in dark mode. Still noticeably worse than any other editors, though.

gkbrk• 1 year ago

Zed developers themselves acknowledge the blurry font issue [1], so either you just don't notice blurry fonts or 1920x1200 on a small laptop screen is HiDPI-enough to kinda hide the blurriness.

My desktop monitor is 1920x1080. On my computer and display; Vim, Emacs and VSCode are all able to render their fonts crisply while Zed is a blurry mess.

[1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

sapiogram3• 1 year ago

It's so incredibly frustrating. Text rendering is the primary feature of a code editor, but no one on the Zed team seems to use a non-retina screen.

Github issue for context: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

jen202• 1 year ago

but no one on the Zed team seems to use a non-retina screen

This is not that surprising to me. Surely no-one wants to spend their day looking at the pixels?

sedatk• 1 year ago

Still waiting for a Windows build.

xboxnolifes2• 1 year ago

https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds

esperent2• 1 year ago

Is it usable?

sureglymop3• 1 year ago

It's a niche feature, but what's keeping me from switching yet is that they zed doesn't support ctrl+scroll to zoom/change font size yet.

Because I am accustomed to a non-US keyboard layout that doesn't make the regular key bindings for changing zoom easy, I got too used to doing it this way.

It's honestly looking to be a great modern IDE with almost everything I'm wishing for.

nlitened• 1 year ago

It is funny that accidental scroll while holding Ctrl changing font size is one of my most hated features in IDEs, like who the hell ever needs to change their optimal font size to any other value. It's fascinating to me that this is a dealbreakingly important feature for someone else.

7bit• 1 year ago

I often use it when sharing my screen. I like the feature quite a lot.

j16sdiz• 1 year ago

You use them in pair programming, when you peer sit a little bit further

dmit• 1 year ago

Live coding during a presentation or on stream is another use case in addition to the sibling comments.

jen202• 1 year ago

I constantly do this when navigating large files. Zoom out for context (better than a minimap), zoom in for detail. I use the trackpad for it though, not ctrl/cmd-+. I also do it constantly in web browsers, and am consistently amazed by the way that minor changes to font sizes break the layout of any website that has had a designer near it.

sureglymop3• 1 year ago

Well it seems quite expected doesn't it. Different people and groups of people have different customization needs. I change my font size if I sit back or in a different position or use my standing desks.

senko4• 1 year ago

May I ask which layout is that? On most that I have encountered (using hr daily), + and - don't require modifiers.

sureglymop3• 1 year ago

It's a swiss french layout and the problem is mainly +. But it's also that + and - are quite far apart so the mouse wheel is just easier.

throwaway290• 1 year ago

To simplify the setup process, we've introduced locators, a system that translates build configurations into debug configurations. Meaning that you can write a build task once in tasks.json and reference it from debug.json — or, even better, rely on Zed's automatic configuration.

Does that work if my build is Docker based?

haiku207711• 1 year ago

Sorta. IIRC you would need to make a version of your container that serves DAP on a port for the editor to connect to?

AbuAssar• 1 year ago

I’m thrilled to see Zed evolve into a featured, lightweight IDE.

IMHO Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) and Language Server Protocol (LSP) are the best things happened to programming tooling in the last decade.

(I wrote this comment in another thread about the same link but didn't hit the frontpage)

laserbeam4• 1 year ago

I'm very happy to see work on the debugger. This is the main feature preventing me from switching full time to zed.

Unfortunately, "here" is not accurate. Not having a watch window, a stack trace view, and no mention of data breakpoints in the announcement still keeps the "beta" tag. I know those features will arrive eventually, but what is described is definitely not sufficient for 97% of my debugging sessions.

I would also have liked to see more in the announcement of multiple simultaneous debug sessions, and on how multithreaded debugging is planned. There are really cool things that can be done with multithreaded debugging further down the line that I'd be interesting in hearing about (like how RemedyBG has a DAW-like UI for freezing certain threads, or hitting one button to "solo" a thread and freeze all others).

aequitas2• 1 year ago

I have to try out the debugger yet. However I share your sentiment but for the Git feature. The basics are there but it is just not complete yet to fully replace my current git workflow. Hope they keep focus on that as well.

koito17• 1 year ago

Nothing has been able to replace Magit for me, yet. Having a Zed UI for Git like Magit is my dream feature request.

With that said, Zed has effectively replaced all of Emacs for me, besides Magit. Additionally, typing in other editors feels noticeably higher latency than Zed :)

I've been daily driving Zed for almost a year now -- works best on TypeScript, Rust, and Go projects, in my opinion.

There's just so much functionality Zed has to build out to compete with modern editors (agentic coding, collaboration, debugging, edit prediction, task runners, version control). With that said, for pair-programming sessions with friends, Zed has been perfect since Linux gained screenshare support. However, there's a noticeable "pause in development" for collaboration in order to implement major features like Agentic Coding, and smaller-but-essential features like direnv integration, IME support (typing Japanese in the terminal used to be a clunky, error-prone task), dealing with the endless permutations of Python tooling so that Python files aren't a sea of red lines, etc.

keyle• 1 year ago

I agree but at the rate the Zed team is working at, we're not far off!

laserbeam4• 1 year ago

Oh yeah, of course :). My argument is they're just premature in declaring readiness.

odie5533• 1 year ago

100% of my debug sessions are with plain breakpoints and stepping. So it's here for me!

happy-dude• 1 year ago

The blog post mentions[1] that advanced views are in development. This initial release and announcement focuses on the underlying foundation they're building upon.

New views: While we support all the fundamental views, we're planning on adding more advanced views such as a watch list, memory view, disassembly view, and a stack trace view

[1] https://zed.dev/blog/debugger#whats-next

nixpulvis2• 1 year ago

Is there a tracking issue for watching variables and data breakpoints? I'd like to see that as well.

anthony-eid6• 1 year ago

Here's the PR for variable/expression watching: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/32743

I don't think there's an issue for data breakpoints, but you can make one for us

anthony-eid6• 1 year ago

Hey Laserbeam, I'm one of the devs that made the debugger and the one that wrote the article.

We do have a basic stack trace view that basically all debuggers support. What's coming out in the near future is a stack trace view in our multi buffer system. In fact, you can use the "show stack trace" action while in an active debug session to expand the call stack in a multi buffer, where each excerpt is a frame. It's just not up to the quality that I and several others expect from Zed, so I didn't advertise it.

There's also a PR for a watching variables/expression that is going to be merged in a couple of days. The functionality is done, but we didn't want to add a feature so close to launch that wasn't fully tested.

Support for data breakpoints will come in the near future. I can't say when because we're planning on focusing on automatic configuration for a while, but it is a priority.

We do support simultaneously debugging multiple sessions at the same time and multithreaded debugging too. There's still more to do with it, but the support is definitely there!

laserbeam4• 1 year ago

I am VERY confident you guys have everything I mentioned either half working or coming shortly, so I'm not worried. I just saw a "the debugger is here!" announcement, then read the announcement, and saw what's still under todo... My reaction is "well, it's not here, it'll be here in a few weeks". And that's ok ^.^

Am impressed by the under-the-hood discussion though. Keep up the great work!

mort9618• 1 year ago

I was interested in Zed, but lost all interest when they started integrating "AI". I'm tired of "AI" everywhere.

I'll just stick with Neovim until something better comes around. Which probably won't happen until after the "AI" bubble bursts.

reddalo• 1 year ago

Me too. I don't want AI, and if it's there, I want to be able to completely remove it. Zed is forcing it, so I'm staying on VSCodium.

nurumaik2• 1 year ago

What's forcing AI in Zed though?

agent.enabled = false and it's gone, no?

oneeyedpigeon• 1 year ago

I went to check out neovim and noticed it's currently sponsored by two AI products! Of course, that's one level removed from actually integrating AI in your product but, still—it's getting harder and harder to avoid altogether.

mort9618• 1 year ago

Oh wow, I hadn't noticed that.

I guess it's always possible to return to Vim if Neovim starts showing signs of being steered by its sponsors.

norir• 1 year ago

Thankfully for me, I guess, neovim broke my config about a year ago by changing the default color scheme in a way that I could not fix easily with confug. So I forked and built my own and will likely never update it.

aequitas2• 1 year ago

I find it very easy to avoid the AI feature in every day Zed usage. Sometimes they do come in handy though. But nog often.

mort9618• 1 year ago

I don't want an editor where I have to avoid the AI features, I want an editor without AI features

Just like I want a terminal without AI features, which is why I'm no longer using iTerm2

laserbeam4• 1 year ago

Zed was the first editor that tempted me into using AI features. It felt solid in general and AI feels mostly like autocomplete in other editors (in terms of how much it's in your face). There's definitely a place for AI models and agents in code editors, and Zed makes me feel like it's not built around them, which is great! Zed feel like "Come to us, we are making a good fast editor that also has AI." while competition feel like "Come to us, we want AI that has an editor".

mort9618• 1 year ago

I'm genuinely happy it works for you. I just don't want AI in my text editor, even if you're happy with it.

norman7842• 1 year ago

I didn't tried Zed in a while, are really intrusive the AI features? Can't it be just disabled with some configuration?

mort9618• 1 year ago

I don't know, I just uninstalled Zed when I read those features got added

deliriumchn2• 1 year ago

they are not intrusive but their entire focus changed on that instead of other features. Entire Git view feels abandoned in half done state yet they spent entire month working on AI chats, AI agents, their own AI edit (that's priced 20 per month yet they boast how light and performant it is -- why isn't it free local model then and why its priced worse than copilot?)

They're moving from "making awesome code editor" into yet another "buy our ai" product

nsonha2• 1 year ago

I think you're referring to autocomplete? It's much better than, say, 2 years ago when it was indeed annoying as hell. Having said I always turn it off and use agentic coding, which is not intrusive, only activate if you ask for it. This applies to all coding tools these days, autocomplete is no longer their focus.

foldr• 1 year ago

The AI features in Zed are very easy to turn off / ignore. I agree that the AI features are probably taking development time away from other features that might be more useful.

rckt2• 1 year ago

I just disabled everything AI related. It's a nice editor. But I still have to jump into VSCode to resolve merge conflicts.

Nezteb2• 1 year ago

Recently the Zed team added some tools to help with merge conflicts: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4964#issuecomme...

ramon1562• 1 year ago

You can disable AI.

Furthermore, Zed Agents are currently my favorite way of using LLM's during programming

seabass• 1 year ago

It's trivial to disable it. I wouldn't let that hold you back from using an amazing editor!

mort9618• 1 year ago

I just tried it out again. It seems like you can disable the chat bot integration by adding this to the config:

    "agent": {
        "enabled": false
    }

However from the documentation[1] I can't see a way to disable the "AI" predictions button (which asks you to sign in to their online "AI" service with your GitHub account). Am I missing something?

[1] https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#edit-predictions

Nezteb2• 1 year ago

Relevant GH issue: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/6756

NooneAtAll3• 1 year ago

how does editor neovim connect to debugger in the post?

yangcheng• 1 year ago

I wish Zed can better support claude code, like offering native IDE integration. with Claude code SDK this seems doable?

writebetterc3• 1 year ago

It's surprisingly slow. Switching files in the tab list has a noticeable delay. Typing is higher latency than both Emacs (lsp-mode activated) and my web browser. Also uses approximately 60MiB more than my Emacs. It starts fast though!

I wouldn't complain about this stuff if it wasn't for their tagline being 'it's fast' and they're losing to Emacs Lisp (not a language amenable to being very fast) with a highly optimized C core.

I looked at their plugins, they're compiled into WASM and run in some VM. Maybe that's part of it?

GrayShade2• 1 year ago

I looked at their plugins, they're compiled into WASM and run in some VM. Maybe that's part of it?

No. The ones I've looked just set up stuff, like launching a language server. They shouldn't be involved in typing.

I think it's related to the GPU usage. It's easy to introduce delays when you do GPU compositing, and the OS will already be doing its own.

As for emacs, IIRC they did some ugly things to update the UI directly instead of going through the normal event loop, which was causing compatibility issues later on.

frou_dh• 1 year ago

Talking of Emacs, there is a very well designed DAP-based debugger available as the 'dape' package.

https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/dape.html

The way it's designed (incl. having no dependencies) suggests that they will be angling for it to be included with stock Emacs at some point.

nurumaik2• 1 year ago

How did you manage to make zed slower than emacs? From my experience, latency in zed sometimes even feels negative. Everything is instant: editing, lsp commands, file switching

In contrast, all my attempts at emacs ended up in dropping it due to latency issues (mostly because I work on remote machines)

writebetterc3• 1 year ago

I think you answered how you managed to induce latency in Emacs :).

sapiogram3• 1 year ago

It's probably something in the rendering pipeline. What operating system?

writebetterc3• 1 year ago

Fedora 41, KDE Plasma 6.3.5, kernel 6.14.5, Wayland, Mesa Intel Iris Xe Graphics.

Rucadi• 1 year ago

Until zed doesn't work on windows (publicly) unfortunately can't use it in my working computer

wiz21c• 1 year ago

Non official builds for Windows:

https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds/releases

The opengl one fails on my PC but the "regular one" (?) zed.exe seems to work. Didn't test much as I have discovered that today :-)

taminka• 1 year ago

dear zed ppl, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE configure your language detection properly wrt C and C++! every single editor on earth makes this exact same mistake where they think all C is valid C++ (it's not, at all), and mistakenly recognises C files as C++, even when there's an accompanying compile_commands.json file that specifies a C standard and even when files contain invalid C++ (but valid C)

it's a delightful little editor if it weren't for this thing...

haiku207711• 1 year ago

You can customize the rules for detecting a language by file name/path in your settings. The problem is in cases like creating a new file the editor has to guess.

Andrew_nenakhov• 1 year ago

I tried using Zed for a few months, but somehow ended up with a conclusion, that VSCode serves my needs better. Just a sum of small issues, like the need to manually re-apply coloring schemes to some files.

90s_dev2• 1 year ago

For some reason I've found myself wanting a "lighter VS Code" lateley, which is ironic considering I used VS Code for the past 10 years because it is so lightweight. So I've wanted to try out Zed, but it's just ... weird to go back to a closed source editor, especially one that's so focused on imitating copilot, which seems like an odd feature to shift most focus on.

trostaft• 1 year ago

Am I missing someone, or didn't they go open source last year?

https://zed.dev/blog/zed-is-now-open-source

90s_dev2• 1 year ago

Ah right, you're right.

It's that it doesn't have an installer for Windows. That's what I was stuck on.

I could just build it... I guess.

haiku207711• 1 year ago

Zed is FOSS: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed

superlopuh• 1 year ago

I really want to switch to Zed from Cursor but the battery usage for my Python project with Pyright is unjustifiable. There are issues for this on GitHub and I'm just sad that the team isn't prioritising this more.

vinnymac• 1 year ago

It’s funny you mention this because I have an issue with Cursor where if I leave it open for more than a few hours my M3 Max starts to melt, the fans spin up, and it turns out to be using most of my CPU when it should be idling.

Zed on the other hand works perfectly fine for me. Goes to show how a slightly different stack can completely change one’s experiences with a tool.

desireco42• 1 year ago

Turbo Pascal as ideal IDE...

karunamurti• 1 year ago

Funny thing is I created the Turbo Pascal blue yellow colorsxcheme for Zed and have been using it for the past 6 months or so.

bitbasher• 1 year ago

I can't get past the fact that an IDE has a "login" button on it.

haiku207711• 1 year ago

Jetbrains and Visual Studio Code also have login buttons.

In Zed, login is only required for internet features like some of the commercially hosted LLMs, and the multiplayer editing feature.

mixmastamyk6• 1 year ago

How prominent? Can you remove it from main window?

haiku207711• 1 year ago

Not in the official builds.

tall9732• 1 year ago

Yes, add to your settings.json:

  "title_bar": {
    "show_sign_in": false
  },

ramon1562• 1 year ago

Zed feels like what Lapce, Helix and Neovim couldn't achieve in the time they spent.

I started using Helix back around 2021-2022 and just couldn't get over the bugs and lack of integration. It was good, but PHP support (I was working at an older company) was bad.

Neovim felt closest to a nice editor but there were some popular community-driven plugins that were very stubborn, and alternatives were just very slow. I was also just overwhelmed by the choices I needed to make for something stable.

Lapce just felt like a VSCode clone that didn't do anything special. Looked cool, but I did not feel like it was ready for a daily driver (And it still doesn't).

Zed became a favorite in a short amount of time, and I'm extremely grateful for it every day. The debugger is a nice addition.

user3939382• 1 year ago

PHP support (I was working at an older company)

Not sure why PHP needs a qualifier like this.

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

People keep forgetting the UNIX tools they love sooo much predate PHP, follow the same worse is better mentally, and trace back to 1969, but for some strange time travel reason, they are considered modern.

hu32• 1 year ago

...like a VSCode clone that didn't do anything special.

Interesting way to qualify the most popular editor of human history.

quietbritishjim• 1 year ago

They said that Lapce didn't do anything special (over VSCode). Not that VSCode is nothing special, as you seem to have interpreted it.

rbits• 1 year ago

This might be off-topic, but I really want to use Helix. I've been using Vim keybindings for a few years now but it's so unintuitive, there's still so many things I can't do efficiently in Vim. Helix just makes so much more sense for my brain. But I don't use Vim/Neovim by itself, I always use an integration with an editor like VSCode or Obsidian (Obsidian's Vim emulation isn't great, but it's good enough). Helix just isn't there yet with VSCode or Obsidian.

I wish more "Vim successors" would focus more on integrating with existing IDEs, rather than becoming one themselves. I don't want to have to set up an entirely new workflow when I change how I edit text.

That's also why I haven't tried using Neovim as a standalone IDE. It looks like I'd really like it, but I don't want to be locked in to using Vim.

haiku207711• 1 year ago

FWIW Zed has the best Vim mode I've used outside of Vim. I do miss a few of my Vim plugins but the core is all there.

einpoklum2• 1 year ago

I did not know the Zed editor before.

Now, seeing that it's a GUI application, why would I use it, given that it seems to:

1. have no menus,

2. have no toolbars,

3. be AI-focused?

thoroughburro• 1 year ago

It has menus, a toolbar, and the AI integration is opt-in.

nixpulvis2• 1 year ago

I'm tempted to invest in switching to Zed full time, but there are enough small bugs with toolbars or dialog popups not working the first time that it makes me wary.

DrBenCarson• 1 year ago

Zed is what real product development looks like.

So nice to have an option that doesn’t repackage the whole damn chromium engine (again)

59nadir• 1 year ago

I like some of their choices, but I wouldn't say that releasing your product for a minority operating system only, then following up with yet another minority operating system much later, then stuffing AI features in there when you don't even have debugger support... The list goes on; one man's "real product development" is another's list of mistakes.

They got the baseline feature set right, IMO, but probably could've spent some more time looking at the actual, real demographics of development (and who is most likely to appreciate performance as a feature and share those ideals).

culebron21• 1 year ago

I wonder if they advertize the editor as the most AI-enabled, how much do they vibecode the editor themselves? /s

Jokes aside, after SublimeText as the main tool, and VSCode for Rust debugging, I'm trying this one. Now with more themes and plugins than a year ago, it can be set up to look and function a lot better.

The Zed Debugger Is Here

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