I switched from VSCode to Zed

https://tenthousandmeters.com/blog/i-switched-from-vscode-to-zed/

by r4victor • 7 months ago

453 421 7 months ago

tenthousandmeters.com

css_apologist2• 7 months ago

css syntax highlighting has been broken in vs code for years now.

how in the world is this possible in THE web dev editor?

adzm• 7 months ago

How is it broken? I'm looking at it working fine right now.

jazzyjackson• 7 months ago

Not OP but I remember working on a team that just put up with nonhighlighted nonintelligent CSS because it was embedded in a handlebars template. Of course there is an extension that's supposed to fix this but it was flaky and broke often. An easy fix was to move CSS to a separate file for import but that was a big change for these guys.

publicdebates• 7 months ago

Not GP, but he's absolutely right, it's been pissing me off for years now. Only thing I can remember off the top of my head is nested selectors still not highlighting properly. They partially fixed this a few months ago but that's it. I guess we're all waiting on GHCP to prioritize and fix it now?

replete2• 7 months ago

An easy switch for an individual, for an organization the ecosystem is typically too much to give up. Hopefully this changes in a few years.

jonkoops• 7 months ago

Organizations are composed of individuals, if your organization is tied to a specific IDE to be able to function, that seems like a huge problem.

replete2• 7 months ago

Ecosystem.

the__alchemist4• 7 months ago

Do some companies/orgs mandate which editor to use? Is this usually big companies? Which countries?

RamblingCTO• 7 months ago

Also made the same switch and very happy. Sometimes Zed (I guess due to claude code?) would hog my CPU, but that's fine by me. Works very well. Had one crash so far due to CC.

Surac3• 7 months ago

To bad I can not change away from vs code. Most chip manufacturers use the vscode + Addons approach today to give you a toolchain to Programm for your microcontroller. They (thank god) abandon there proprietary IDE attempts and concentrate on chips and compilers again. They found VSCode and now you are required to use this. I’m very unhappy with the situation and on the job hunt to get away from embedded to application programming

Neywiny• 7 months ago

Lol here I am moving them on my own when vendors won't or do it wrong. Sad to see a fellow embedded leaving. We certainly need all the help we can get

webdevver• 7 months ago

i think i might be brain damaged because i actually like the eclipse ides they put out, atleast the stm32 one

Surac3• 7 months ago

I very much recommend smt32cubeMX.

the__alchemist4• 7 months ago

Which microcontrollers? Of interest, I program STM32, ESP32 (Risc-V) and Nordic chips, and do everything in RustRover. The compiling is decoupled from the editor. (You do cargo run to build and flash with debugging, or click the Run IDE button; works just like any program) The editor is for the code structure, and should reflect that, vs the chip. There is Cube IDE which is useful for configuring clocks, memory layout data, and other periph info as a supplement to the RMs and User Manuals, but it's not required to write code.

sampullman• 7 months ago

Do you do this in a professional setting? I'm curious because I did some embedded/uC work about 10 years ago and considering the state of C/C++ SDKs (and IDE support) at the time, I would have expected it to take decades for Rust to get a foothold.

Surac3• 7 months ago

Mostly Arm systems using CMSIS from TI.

julik2• 7 months ago

I would have switched in a pinch if Zed had their low-DPI font rendering in order. At the moment it just looks bad.

veidr2• 7 months ago

This is interesting to me, because I see this kind of comment on almost every Zed post.

I haven't used a low-DPI monitor for like... not sure, but more than a decade, I'm pretty sure, so for me the weird blocker I have with Zed is the "OMG YOU HAVE NO GPU!!!! THIS WILL NOT END WELL!" warning (I run a lot of Incus containers via RDP, and they mostly have no GPU available).

But what kind of monitors are you low-DPI people using? Some kind of classic Sony Trinitron CRTs, or what? I'm actually curious. Or is it not the display itself, but some kind of OS thing?

Octoth0rpe7• 7 months ago

Depending on the definition I'm not a low DPI user myself, but in my friend group, I seem to be the only person who cares about >160 dpi, lots of people are using 1440p displays, or >34" 4k displays. In Apple's mind, high dpi (eg retina) is > 218 dpi, so my lowly 34" 5120x2160 doesn't count for them. But it is > 160 which is my personal threshold for hi dpi.

There aren't all that many >20" displays on the market that meet Apple's definition of high dpi, and not a ton more that meet my much looser definition.

burlesona• 7 months ago

I have a 4-5 year old ultra wide monitor which is a lot of pixels but low dpi. I really like the single monitor containing two screens worth of pixels, but I wish it was high dpi. At the time there weren’t really high dpi ultra wides available, and they’re still expensive enough that upgrading isn’t a high priority for me… but I’m sure I will at some point.

Gracana• 7 months ago

Regular HD LCD monitors are typical office fare.

landtuna• 7 months ago

I actually don't understand what I'm missing. I'm using two old monitors, a 27" at 2560x1440 and a 23.5" at 1920x1080 (in addition to my high DPI Framework 13 screen). How else can I get at least 4480 across (after scaling to a font size I can read - I'm 49) and still cover that many inches? My DPI right now is about 100, so to double that, wouldn't I need 8960 across 44 inches? I don't really want to pay $1500 for resolution my eyes are probably too old to notice.

jsheard4• 7 months ago

Typical DPIs are still all over the place depending on the demographic. Macs have been ~200dpi forever, while cheap PCs are still mostly ~100dpi, and decent PC setups tend to land somewhere in the middle with ~150dpi displays which are pretty dense but not up to Mac Retina standards. Gamers also strongly favor that middle-ground because the ultra-dense Mac-style panels tend to be limited to 60hz.

Zed started out as a Mac-only app, and that's reflected in the way their font rendering works.

julik2• 7 months ago

Mine is 2560x1440 which is a pretty nice "sweet spot" size. A comparable 5k to 6k display still commands a substantial price, and - given that I work at two locations - would need me to have two of them. The screen I use as my current (a 3x2 BenQ) also has some amount of subsampling going on, because running it at 2x ("Retina native HiDPI") all the UI controls are too damn big, and space is not enough. Running it at 1x (everything teeeny-tiny) is just not very good for my eyesight and not very workable - and, again, with Zed bumps into the same broken antialiasing rasterizer they have.

And it is not an OS thing. The OS renders subpixel antialiased fonts just fine. But Zed uses its own font rasterizer, and it completely falters when faced with a "standard passable resolution" screen - the letters become mushy, as if they have been blurred - and rather sloppily at that.

karmakaze• 7 months ago

My 42.5" 4k LG monitor is 104 DPI being Low by macOS conventions.

mr_toad• 7 months ago

But what kind of monitors are you low-DPI people using?

They’re still pretty common in enterprise. So cheap. At this point most desks probably cost more than the PCs on top of them.

TBF, enterprise probably still has to deal with ancient apps that can’t handle higher resolution well.

drcongo4• 7 months ago

Mind explaining how / why you have a low DPI monitor? I haven't even seen one in maybe a decade.

freehorse2• 7 months ago

Many people call 1080p/24" "low DPI" these days. Though no idea what OP actually has.

Octoth0rpe7• 7 months ago

Define low dpi. Apple's definition has been >218dpi, which is much higher than 4k@27", which is about the smallest 4k monitor one can buy (exluding 15" portable monitors)

gkbrk2• 7 months ago

1080p is the most popular screen resolution by far, and on regular monitors 1080p is "low DPI".

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

aldanor• 7 months ago

Perhaps you have a 49'' screen

r4victor6• 7 months ago

Is it on linux?

ed_blackburn• 7 months ago

Yes. And Windows.

https://zed.dev/docs/linux

EnPissant2• 7 months ago

I used to have the same complaint, and recently swapped to 4k monitors. I thought that would solve my zed font problems, but text presentation is still bad. In zed, it feels like there is significantly more spacing between each line compared to vscode (or any other text editor).

zmk52• 7 months ago

I really love Zed, but my only issue is the Emacs keybindings they ship doesn’t seem to work as well as the VSCode Emacs extensions. Hopefully they can fix this in newer updates.

xpe3• 7 months ago

This is high praise coming from an Emacs user :) I also formerly used Emacs with much joy, but I'm even happier with Zed now.

Zed has a lot of issues in flight; maybe these are useful to you? Here are the issues that have been filed under the label "area:parity/emacs". Some also have the label "state:needs repro" (needs reproduction). I wonder if any of them scratch your itch? Weighing in might help get your pain points resolved a bit faster?

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20...

zmk52• 7 months ago

Thank you! I’ll look into this!

necubi• 7 months ago

In the same boat, I try it every few months but give up because the emacs mode still isn't good enough. It's been getting slowly, slowly better though.

cpt_sobel2• 7 months ago

I have a similar issue with vim support, they have built-in support which I really appreciate but don't currently support pointing to my own .vimrc. This is unfortunately a dealbreaker for me.

koito17• 7 months ago

I used to be a daily Emacs user (both at work and for personal projects). Since trying out Zed a little over a year ago, now I only use Emacs for Magit and the occasional IRC message through the built-in ERC client.

For VS Code users, there's actually a special feature where a subset of VS Code settings can be migrated to Zed settings. Cannot vouch for its stability, but the functionality is there.

Sorely missing a REPL for Lisp languages, but for statically-typed languages like Rust and TypeScript, Zed works pretty well. I appreciate that Zed works smoothly with Nix and Direnv, even through remote projects. I do wish the collaboration features would receive a bit more attention, though. It feels like that functionality has slowly been bitrotting, and it's always unfortunate when my friends on Linux cannot share their screen. Then there's other little regressions, like the audio bit depth being incorrect on MacBooks connected to external monitors -- they did fix this with the experimental Rodio backend, but I am not sure if that is stabilized yet.

However, AI-related features are fairly stable and it's amazing how far it has come in less than a year. That and things like the debugger UI.

insane_dreamer2• 7 months ago

now I only use Emacs for Magit

have you tried lazygit? that's my go-to. Can even run in in a panel inside Zed.

bestest• 7 months ago

Switched to Zed from Webstorm. Only issue is Zed has no vertical tab support. Did create a PR but it got rejected as it does not align with their milestones. Well, using it by monkeypatching the dev build after every upstream sync.

xpe3• 7 months ago

I must admit I'm rather ignorant of the vertical tab workflow. I'm curious: when did it click for you? Was VS Code your gateway drug? A web browser?

adhamsalama2• 7 months ago

This is the first time I've seen someone talk about vertical tabs in an editor, but I used to make fun of people using vertical tabs in browsers until I tried it and got used to it, so maybe I should try vertical editor tabs...

gdotdesign• 7 months ago

I'm still waiting to evaluate Zed because I work with/on my programming language which has LSP Semantic Highlighting, but Zed doesn't https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/39539 once it's merged I'll give it a go because it looks like a modern Sublime Text (which I still use). I just wish they would focus on basic editor features instead of adding AI and other non-related features.

tortilla• 7 months ago

I switched from Sublime Text (still keep for navigating huge files).

But I love the thought put into Zed and it looks great (this is important to me).

I don't use their AI features but it does come in handy when I need an quick alternate answer or perspective. I use Claude Code in a separate terminal.

drcongo4• 7 months ago

I love Zed. I switched full time from Sublime about 8 months ago, using the preview builds, and every release has been solid. The UI design is perfect and the attention to detail is top notch - it feels comfortable, like a really ergonomic pair of slippers.

traceroute662• 7 months ago

Does Zed have something similar to VSCode Dev Containers ?

That is one of the few things keeping me going on VSCode.

For example, I frequently write Ansible playbooks. And with VSCode you can just fire up the Ansible-provided Dev Container with all the dependencies. Which means you don't have to clutter up your local system with them.

pacha3000• 7 months ago

DevContainers support in coming in the following weeks, it's actually in beta

crabmusket• 7 months ago

They seem to be working on it, but so far it's only available in preview builds? https://zed.dev/docs/dev-containers

traceroute662• 7 months ago

Thanks for the link, looks promising, even if "no separate extensions" under Known Limitations for the initial release is perhaps a little unfortunate.

stusmall• 7 months ago

This falls under the "something similar" category but it's direnv support is great https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#direnv-integration

It isn't 1:1 since there probably won't be ansible provided configs, but I find writing nix devshells per project to be low effort and high reward. It'll only be a couple lines if all you need is a specific version of ansible

verdverm6• 7 months ago

People want containers, not nix, ansible, or devenv

Why don't they do the real portable thing and use OCI?

ddoolin• 7 months ago

Zed is the only editor I've been using for maybe two months or so. But I find the extensions still sorely lacking and the API not extensive enough yet either. Still, I really love the design as well as how AI was builtin, and some more of the niche differences.

giancarlostoro• 7 months ago

This yeah I'm switching from JetBrains to Zed after being with them nearly 10 years now. I just can't justify my yearly subscription now that they've bundled AI that I can't justify paying for if I can just use Claude Code directly. At least Zed has richer Claude Code integration than JetBrains. If I even bother to renew it will be only if they announce something worth my while.

sabareesh2• 7 months ago

I have switched to terminal

vegabook• 7 months ago

am I the only one who is just fine with neovim?

bluecalm2• 7 months ago

I love it. I have 40 files open in it right now - most of them .c source files with LSP and Treesitter running and it uses 250MB of RAM. Everything works instantly, Telescope is imo the new standard for file navigation (and navigation in general: grep, symbols even neovim shortcuts). Git integration is fantastic as well.

I have spent some time configuring it and probably will spend more when I start including more languages but imo it's worth it. You can configure everything but you can also find very nice defaults by running Kickstarter (or some heavier neovim "distro").

Microsoft has done great work with LSPs - I can now get great navigation/autocompletion/formatting/inline errors/warning combined with neovim navigation, light weight and fantastic tools/extensions.

One thing I haven't integrated yet is a debugger (gdb from the terminal is good enough for me), maybe that's something people are missing in neovim?

xpe3• 7 months ago

Do you mean a terminal-based editor, like emacs, vim, neovim, or helix? (I quite like the latter, after having used all the former to some degree.)

Or do you mean line-editors? They have gotten impressively good. See rustyline (based on linenoise) and reedline (not a typo; developed by the Nushell team) for example. Way better than one might expect!

[1] https://github.com/kkawakam/rustyline

[2] https://github.com/antirez/linenoise

[3] https://github.com/nushell/reedline

sabareesh2• 7 months ago

Sorry to disappoint. But purely codex and claude code

the__alchemist4• 7 months ago

Concur that it's a great VSCode replacement! Also note on the Author's observation of it using similar keybinds: You can, easily, swap the keybinds for other common editors too; this is a big deal for transitions. Also, I love how they're doing things the right way using a fast language... and it shows in the consistently low latency.

It is not, IMO, a replacement for Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm, Rustrover, for example). I do substitute it on my tablet sometimes, where those IDEs can be too sluggish. Unless I'm missing something with plugins I should be installing, it is not on the same level for introspection, refactoring, import adding and moving, real-time error checking, and generally understanding the code base holistically.

So, I've settled into this: Jetbrains if on a sufficiently powerful PC. (It can still bring a 9950x to its knees though...) Zed for lower-power ones.

Sublime for editing one-off files, as both JB and Zed are project-oriented.

dgllghr3• 7 months ago

I would love to switch but the battery draw on my mac is just too much! I like to move around to different places in my home as I work so being able to be on battery for a while is a must for me (not to mention that I do travel occasionally)

r4victor6• 7 months ago

Hmm, I found Zed to consume battery less than VScode on my M1 MBP. It's ~100 vs ~200 12h power consumption on average according to Activity Monitor. Do you compare it to VSCode?

dgllghr3• 7 months ago

Yes VSCode uses far less power than Zed on my machine. I believe it is probably related to these issues:

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/21146 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/8043

japhyr3• 7 months ago

I've been frustrated by the constant nudges to use specific AI tools from within VS Code, but I made a different change. Rather than moving to a different editor altogether, I started using VS Codium. If you're unfamiliar, it's the open core of VS Code, without the Microsoft-branded features that make up VS Code.

I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium, and then adding in their own branded features, including all the AI pushes. If you like VS Code except for the Microsoft bits, consider VS Codium alongside other modern choices.

https://vscodium.com

r4victor6• 7 months ago

That's a good idea. I considered VSCodium but the issue is that I used VSCode's proprietary extensions such as Pylance. So it would require to switch to OSS replacements at which point I decided why wouldn't give Zed a try – it has a better feeling by not being an Electron app.

I think VSCodium is a good option if you need extensions not available in Zed.

krabizzwainch• 7 months ago

If you are good with a slightly jank option, I have had success with just moving the extension directory from VSCode to the VSCodium directory. Works for the Oracle SQL Developer plugin I use often. It might go against the terms in the extension, but I don’t care about that.

bobajeff• 7 months ago

I've been using vscodium with basedpyright as I've thought it was supposed to be a open source version of pylance. I've got to say it's annoying about type errors and after changing it's setting to be less strict it still annoys me and I've even started littering my code with the their # ignore _____ .

I'm really glad the article mentioned ty as I'm going to try that today.

On zed I tried it but the font rendering hurt my eyes and UI seems to be glitchy and also doesn't support the drag and drop to insert links in markdown feature * I use all the time.

* https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages/markdown#_inser...

seabrookmx• 7 months ago

Basedpyright and ty should both work under vscodium.

weikju• 7 months ago

I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium

Isnt vscodium a specific product built strictly from open-source VS Code source code? It's not affiliated with Microsoft, they simply build from the same base then tweak it in different ways.

This is somewhat unlike my understanding of Chromium/Chrome which is similar to what you described.

japhyr3• 7 months ago

The clearest explanation I've seen is on VSCodium's Why page:

https://vscodium.com/#why

aspbee555• 7 months ago

I have been using vscodium for years, hasn't disappointed until recently (rust analyzer wont pickup changes, not sure if rust or vscode issue). I tried zed once, but just didn't do the basics I needed at the time. I'll have to give it a try again

edit: zed is working much better for me now and does not have the issue vscodioum was having (not recognizing changes/checking some code till I triggered rebuild)

ErroneousBosh• 7 months ago

I can't say I've noticed any "nudges" to use AI tools in VS Code. I saw a prompt for Copilot but I closed it, and it hasn't been back.

I'm probably barely scratching the surface of what I can do with it, but as a code editor it works well and it's the first time I've ever actually found code completion that seems to work well with the way I think. There aren't any formatters for a couple of the languages I use on a daily basis but that's a Me Problem - the overlap between IDE users of any sort and assembly programmers is probably quite small.

Are there any MS-branded features I should care about positively or negatively?

japhyr3• 7 months ago

I'm a teacher, so I help people get started setting up a programming environment on a regular basis. If you take a new system that hasn't been configured for programming work at all, and install a fresh copy of VS Code, you'll see a number of calls to action regarding AI usage. I don't want to walk people through installing an editor only to then tell them they have to disable a bunch of "features".

This isn't an anti-AI stance; I use AI tools on a daily basis. I put "features" in quotes because some of these aren't really features, they're pushes to pay for subscriptions to specific Microsoft AI services. I want to choose when to incorporate AI tools, which tools to incorporate, and not have them popping up like a mobile news site without an ad blocker.

tuwtuwtuwtuw• 7 months ago

What are those constant nudges to use AI tools? Sounds a bit strange.

r4victor6• 7 months ago

Hi, I'm the author of the post. I hope it resonates with many who got tired of VSCode and found Zed.

I'd also like to add there are many small features I miss in Zed that I don't go over in the post, e.g. autodetect and respect file's indentation (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4681). But I see Zed is actively shipping the missing features, so I believe they'll improve significantly over the next year.

delichon• 7 months ago

Your blog appears to have been hugged to death. I look forward to reading it someday.

e12e• 7 months ago

https://archive.is/aaJh4

SnowingXIV2• 7 months ago

Have you tried using vim? Or rather nvim? If tinkering is your thing, feel free to completely do your own setup but out of the box lazyvim is pretty sane and you may not need much to get it to your liking.

But it’s very nice to easily able to extend or modify to fit your workflow. I’m just curious what people are getting out of zed that seems like vim has available.

oneeyedpigeon3• 7 months ago

I use both zed and vim, but the former for 'big' work because of:

a) file tree - I really like being able to 'root' the view at a directory, explore the hierarchy, and easily open any file within it

b) LSP - Zed's auto-formatting is it's best feature, for me

I generally like a whole bunch of things the gui gives me, but I would probably drop zed if I could get these two features working as well (or, at least, almost as well) in vi.

benji8000• 7 months ago

+1 for lazyvim. I tried multiple times to switch to nvim from vscode, but lazyvim finally made it painless. love lazygit too. debugging in nvim also works like a charm.

gigatexal• 7 months ago

Same. I did long time ago and won’t go back.

xutopia• 7 months ago

Zed feels way snappier to me than VSCode and I love the vim mode too.

lifetimerubyist• 7 months ago

I switched from VSCode to Zed and clicked the "disable AI" button so gd fast. Bliss.

wseqyrku• 7 months ago

To do this, I had to switch to Rust first which means I had to change my entire career. I love to switch to linux desktop now but before that I'm gonna need to clear some time. Which probably means I have to retire?

globalnode• 7 months ago

vscode's become a laggy mess (admittedly only when i have 2 games open in the background, but c'mon!). i'll give zed a try.

wateralien• 7 months ago

I also switched my editor to Zed recently, from Cursor, and brought my custom theme along too: https://zed-themes.com/themes/ldw3jOWS7edS-gifHtZg9?name=Dar...

coopykins• 7 months ago

Vs code became unusable on a not so big monorepo on a MacBook Pro M4, which is concerning. Zed has been much smoother, even there are a couple of extensions or features that I miss.

dmix2• 7 months ago

Sounds like an extension issue. Why would the codebase size matter otherwise.

mark_l_watson• 7 months ago

This article struck a personal chord with me: I bought a new MacBook a week ago and installed minimal software on it, specifically I did not install VSCode and I don’t miss it.

I use Emacs exclusively on my new laptop. I have about 40 years experience with Emacs and except for a treemacs automations, I am using my regular setup.

VSCode is a great project but I just didn’t feel “happy” while I was using it. I feel happy using Emacs and I only use very minimal LLM integrations with Emacs, preferring to separately running gemini-cli occasionally, or using a variety of LLMs (especially strong local models) with one-shot prompting.

dbacar• 7 months ago

Emacs what?? Let's start an editor flame war, under a completely different editor wars :)) Yes i am a VI man.

Just joking, I really mis the org-mode.

dleslie• 7 months ago

Likewise, I feel happy when using Emacs in a way that other editors do not. Emacs was made for a different era of development, with different views on what productive programming looked like. Rider, VSCode, and etc are all post-NetBeans editors and it shows. Editing text buffers isn't the focus so much as refactoring projects is; and agentic AI development slots easily into that refactoring process. With Emacs, it _feels_ purposeful, manual, and dare I say it, artisanal.

onehair4• 7 months ago

We don't all have

- 40 years experience with Emacs

- the ability to predict that 20 years from when we started we would fall in love with Emacs

- the fortitude of will to overcome the mountainous project that it is to turn Emacs, The text editor "toolkit", into the perfect text editor for you.

justinhj• 7 months ago

You may be surprised how short a path it is to the perfect emacs config for you.

Robdel12• 7 months ago

I’ve fallen in love with emacs again now that I can have an LLM tune up my config. I love emacs, I don’t love lisp. Maybe LLMs are helping me with that, too.

But I so happy with my config now. Simplified and modern.

alfiedotwtf• 7 months ago

Ha! My elisp is almost non existent, and so I’ve been using ChatGPT and Claude to help me rewrite my perfect setup - and it’s glorious!

Trattue• 7 months ago

I‘ve been happily using Doom Emacs on Linux as VSCode replacement. When I switched to macOS, I found the experience to be rather slow with significant input lag, though. (And yes, I did use native compilation.) Has something changed in that regard, or did you just accept it?

hallmason17• 7 months ago

I had the same issues. I mainly use Doom on my linux machine, but on mac it is distractingly slow. d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus seemed to reduce the lag, but I've had other issues with it, so have gone back to vim.

bitwize2• 7 months ago

Many Emacs functions are sluggish on my work Mac, but I found out that this is because the Cisco endpoint security software stops and checks every binary that runs, every single Goddamn time, which means that things which shell out, like M-x compile and anything in magit, are noticeably slower.

tacker2000• 7 months ago

Also started using emacs (doom) a couple of months ago, after realizing that jetbrains and vscode are going to be AI-shittified, and there is no turning back.

At this point, I would recommend to every coder worth his salt to just jump to vim/neovim or emacs, these editors will be around for the next 1000 years and you wont need to fight against some BS features and you wont need to switch ever egain. The 1-2 month learning curve is worth it!

ericyd• 7 months ago

I set a calendar appointment for 1000 years in the future to fact check this claim

oefrha• 7 months ago

I was a long time Emacs user, spent way too much of my life in ~/.emacs.d/init.el. I don't use it for anything other than magit any more. I just tried it again, first by upgrading my packages in package.el. Of course, everything is still locked up when I `package-menu-execute` to upgrade packages. I guess in a thousand years it will still be mostly single-threaded, with almost every action locking up the UI thread.

bitwize2• 7 months ago

I knew I was right to stick it out with Emacs, despite the world telling me literally everyone was using VS Code now. Emacs bros unite!

cmrdporcupine• 7 months ago

I've been Emacsing for 30+ years at this point, but I'm frustrated at its performance in the 21st century.

By which I mean both startup time (yes, I know real Emacs people never leave the editor. I'm Not That Guy) but its single-threadedness leading to painful blocking pauses when using eglot + rust-analyzer, etc.

barrenko3• 7 months ago

I bought a new basic laptop last year, with enough RAM, and little do you know, the VS Code did not feel faster on the new device. So last week, when I noticed that Zed for Windows is "stable" now, I've uninstalled VSC.

VS Code is still the better tool (imho) but I can't stand it.

_sinelaw_3• 7 months ago

I'm also a long time emacs user (>15 years) but got tired of the endless config fiddling, with some packages breaking over emacs versions, other packages which were cool at the time slowly getting stale and need to switch to yet another similar incarnation of the same idea. And most of all having to recover the config every time I use a new computer or just connect to a new VM.

I'm building an alternative, and I haven't opened emacs for a month now

Matl• 7 months ago

I want to switch to Zed from JetBrains but I am too used to [1] and it seems no other editor besides JetBrains IDEs seem too interested in implementing it the way JetBrains does.

1 - https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7721

jasonjmcghee2• 7 months ago

JetBrains is well thought out in terms of capabilities.

There are some core features that work so much better out of the box than with the best plugins in others.

Local History (or even for a selection) with search, stacked clipboard, recent locations, how good search is in general (text, symbols, actions etc), how in-modal buffers work, debugging experience, version control merging experience, etc etc

Old now fixed complaints:

- making plugins used to be awful

- used to have no lsp support

(Was pleasantly surprised when I built ron-lsp [1] plugin)

Long standing complaints:

- it's heavy and slow

- has weird failure modes

All that being said, still my main IDE, with neovim (well configured) used frequently.

---

[1] https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/ron-lsp/tree/main/jetbrains-...

rrgok• 7 months ago

Yep, when these new editors-wanna-be ide will focus on delivering JetBrains level debugger, global search (really global through files, actions, whatever you can imagine) then maybe I will switch.

It amazes me they all put debugging as a second class citizen. Are these people the ones who debug with printfs?

emilecantin• 7 months ago

I switched to Zed from a tmux/nvim setup. I think Zed is the first editor I've tried that has a good enough Vim mode for me to switch and keep my built-up muscle memory.

cpt_sobel2• 7 months ago

I tried switching to Zed from vim / Idea Suite with IdeaVim, and I was disappointed that I could not just use my .vimrc, have they fixed it yet? It's currently the only blocker for me.

aitchnyu• 7 months ago

I use Zed only for million line json log dumps. Everything else stuggles to scroll or ctrl+f but those are instant in Zed.

stellalo2• 7 months ago

This is the same reason I switched to it. It’s just lightweight and fast, I don’t see why a text editor should not be like this

dmix2• 7 months ago

I tried moving from Cursor to Zed but the LLM integration still seems very early. Cursor is very far ahead in terms of DX and the various models/tokens you get is very reasonable price wise. Zed would be a good half-way point for the people using terminal LLM CLIs and prefer the more structured approach rather than a deep IDE integration.

throwfaraway135• 7 months ago

I tried switching from VScode to Zed but unfortunately it doesn't have Jupyter notebooks and image/video preview which are deal brakers for me.

Other pain points:

- Format on save by default: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/29395

- VSCode Debugger UX seams to be much better

r4victor6• 7 months ago

Yes! I also got bitten by format_on_save when working with legacy projects with inconsistent formatting. Given another discussion I saw, the maintainers didn't think about this use case much, i.e. "why don't you want to have a proper formatting?". It can be turned off now, so not sure if they'll change the default.

bluecalm2• 7 months ago

It's like Excel changing .csv files after opening them so a simple load/save cycle can corrupt the file and your original copy is nowhere to be found. I imagine the damage is smaller in case of auto-formatter but still - not something I would expect a program to do to my file in a simple "open file - close the program" cycle.

ahurmazda• 7 months ago

I had a miserable experience with it. It could not do as simple task as discovering my python interpreter! IDEs are a dime a dozen these days — most are fast enough. But common workflows need to be air tight.

dcchuck• 7 months ago

I find myself using VS Code for "things like this" (its visual extension ecosystem).

I've grown attached to the git diff view, so I use it for reviewing PRs mostly (especially larger ones as github UI has been struggling with them as of late).

The rest of my code is written in Vim or by Claude.

Cthulhu_4• 7 months ago

The issue there is what you expect; when Sublime Text came out and later VS Code, they intentionally didn't have the same features as IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA had. The ecosystem of those is very impressive and feature rich, but for a lot of tasks that was overkill and the performance cost was too big.

X years later and VS Code is the one with the biggest ecosystem and therefore also has the largest and most complex addons.

Zed is starting from scratch again, relying on developers to create extensions. However, I'll argue that because Zed is Rust based instead of web tech based like Code, it'll be harder to get as big an ecosystem as Code has. Same with IDEs, some of the biggest plugins have corporate backers who pay people to develop and maintain them.

emilbratt• 7 months ago

Woah, slow down there. One of your requirements to a code editor is video preview? I didnt even know this existed. Gonna spin up VSCode at home and find out.

stellalo2• 7 months ago

I was also disappointed by the lack of Jupyter notebooks support: I ended up not using Jupyter notebooks that much anymore, and when I do, well, I run them in Jupyter

fnordlord• 7 months ago

The VSCode Debugger is the only thing that keeps it installed on my work machine. Lately I've been doing all my editing in Helix and switching over to Xcode for debugging though. It's even more consistent than VSCode, which occasionally leaks memory and blows itself up. I haven't had time to really learn lldb at the command line but it may have to be the next step. The only other thing I miss is VSCode's Find-All/Replace-All because it maintains the include/exclude paths and Helix doesn't (that I know of)

NSPG911• 7 months ago

Doesn't Helix support debuggers via the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP)?

ThisNameIsTaken• 7 months ago

Zed has built in REPL for several languages, which does have image preview [0]

It uses the Jupytext format [1], for Python at least. Which frankly, is much more friendly to VCS than notebooks.

I agree on the 'format on save' as undesirable default, but disabling that was as easy as flicking a switch.

[0] https://zed.dev/docs/repl [1]: https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

earthnail• 6 months ago

Unfortunately, Jupyter notebooks can do a lot more than images. You can play audio (important in my domain), video, etc.

Audio playback support is missing in Zed as well. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14409

I really like Zed, and I want to use it but I keep going back to VSCode when I need to be productive on my code instead of messing with my editor. I use both at the same time because Zed feels so much nicer, but so far, VSCode's features are quite a bit head.

mostlyk• 7 months ago

I have added Jupyter support and Panning/Zooming for Zed, waiting for them to merge. But I have a version that I use, you can build it if ya want! The PRs: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/43553, https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/43944

My-Zed branch with both the features: https://github.com/MostlyKIGuess/zed/tree/my-zed

bargainbin• 7 months ago

I switched to Helix and ZelliJ, ZelliJ really allows you to setup some IDE features and helix is like the surface layer of Vi.

Combined it becomes a very powerful setup!

nbf_1995• 7 months ago

Can you expand on how you use Zellij? I tried it and I understand you can use it for splits, and tabs similar to tmux. But I might revisit it if it allows an IDE like workflow with Helix.

a-dub• 7 months ago

i never understood why people like vscode. visual studio used to be great back in the day because it was really thoughtfully designed and everything was nicely integrated. vscode always felt like a hodgepodge of random features and extensions that don't really fit together all that well at all.

CuriouslyC4• 7 months ago

If you're a typescript developer the VS Code experience is great. It also has a lot of useful plugins. For other languages JetBrains products are mostly still better.

Octoth0rpe7• 7 months ago

I'm a very early Zed adopter, and have gotten much more confident in it in the last 6 months mainly because of their AI plans. Note that my strongly positive opinion on this actually has very little to due with the _utility_ of their ai functionality, but rather in that it appears to be a sustainable funding model.

My biggest worry with Zed since I started using it (again, early adopter) was that it would eventually need to be monetized, and likely enshittified. I'm not at all a fan of subscription software, but probably would've happily handed over $20-$50 for a one time purchase (or, maybe $20 for a 1 time purchase of a major version, with another $20 at least 3+ years out or something).

In the last year, Zed has become a sort of AI reseller. You can buy their 'pro' plan, get so many openai/anthropic/gemini tokens, and set a max budget.

For me, this is probably as good of a business model gets in terms of staving off enshittiffication. Zed can happily take a cut, I can preview a bunch of different services, and if you don't care about ai at all, well the core editor is still free. My only worry about this model is that I think I'd have a hard time getting my employer to pay for a Zed pro plan over copilot, so I think they may have trouble monetizing enterprise users with this plan.

In any case, seeing an obvious/relatively innocuous method of sustainable dev has been a tremendous relief to me (and I'm sure the Zed devs as well).

Its biggest remaining flaws IMO remain its small extension ecosystem which hopefully is simply a matter of momentum. I'm sure they could do something like provide richer examples of how to port an extension from vscode, so it's not an intractable problem.

I also continue to have concerns re: the security of their chat/cooperative editing system as it's currently difficult (impossible?) to self host, but perhaps that will also be improved.

CuriouslyC4• 7 months ago

Agents are going to kill IDEs. A good editor is all you need.

Gimpei• 7 months ago

I like zed. I just wish they’d support running multiple agents at once + chat history. If they did, I’d pay for zed just to support them.

tigerlily• 7 months ago

I just love how Zed is used to develop Zed. For this reason I'm thinking it could emerge as the Rust editor of choice.

jackhuman• 7 months ago

One of my favorite features with zed is the really nice keyboard and window management shortcuts. I can have my terminal just be another tab, easily switch between em and the file explorer

But to the authors note, one might find a single behavior in zed really annoying. Mine is how zed appends a new line at the end of files on save. Used to be able to disable this in settings but an update broke that long ago. Maybe some can tell me its fixed but seems like I’ll need to journey down git hub issue fix but did not find one while back.

alimbada• 7 months ago

Obligatory Zed takes money from bigots: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604

spiderice2• 7 months ago

Nice. Just signed up for their pro plan.

duskdozer• 7 months ago

Thanks for pointing it out. Ignore the vice signalers.

KnlnKS• 7 months ago

I also recently made the jump from VSCode to Zed on my personal laptop. I've never thought VSCode to be slow, but I have appreciated the responsiveness of Zed.

adonese• 7 months ago

Sublime is quite good. I have always been using sublime for quick edits, dumping notes etc. But lately I came to appreciate it more as a lightweight IDE. I use go (lsp and some plugins) and ST (sqltools) in addition to package manager and project manager. I like how fast it is, how well polished the editor is. And generally all plug-ins i use work nicely. Also claude helped a lot (eg writing some shortcuts for specific scenarios that I tend to use a lot).

Not to say anything against Zed though. But sublime with one session of claude can help you build your very own customized ide.

butz• 7 months ago

I do love how Sublime Text doesn't even blink after getting huge file, where most other editors struggle. And overall speed and responsiveness is unbelievable. I would really like to see any other editor trying to overtake Sublime Text on those metrics.

fdg4t• 7 months ago

You can compare speed of ST with CudaText.

IshKebab2• 7 months ago

VSCode is actually one of the best for large files. Not as good as Sublime Text, but it can happily edit million line files, and you'd be surprised how many other editors can't do that. Zed couldn't until recently (not sure if it can now; I haven't checked recently).

Once you get into the GB range there are very very few editors that can edit those files unfortunately.

Cthulhu_4• 7 months ago

I love(d) Sublime and it's still getting updates from time to time, but unfortunately its ecosystem died five ish years ago, its package repository is a lot of "last updated 10 years ago". It's still a viable editor, but without community support it's not going to be good enough long term.

That said, ST (and its predecessor, forgot the name) set the standard for "lightweight" (lighter than IDEs) editors - Atom, VS Code, now Zed, can all trace their common patterns back to ST.

xvector• 7 months ago

Atom, VS Code, now Zed, can all trace their common patterns back to ST.

True, but Zed is the only spiritual successor IMO, Atom and VSCode do not care about speed or snappiness, which is the nicest thing about Sublime Text (for me.)

debugnik• 7 months ago

and its predecessor, forgot the name

TextMate? It's been surprisingly influential for an editor I've never seen anyone use; maybe in the US, where people actually buy Mac, it was different.

bigstrat20032• 7 months ago

Eh, I don't think it's really a problem. The much-vaunted VSCode ecosystem isn't actually all that useful imo, so it doesn't bother me that people aren't making lots of Sublime plugins. There's an LSP plugin which is basically all one needs.

sgc3• 7 months ago

I still love notepad++. Basically one of only a handful of apps I miss from when I used Windows. First release about a year before textmate, so for me it's the real og.

RadiozRadioz• 7 months ago

last updated 10 years ago

Only a problem if the software has broken in that time period

kevinfiol• 7 months ago

Same, I'm still using Sublime with SublimeLSP, and it works for 95% of my use cases because I tend to rely on the terminal for everything else. Although I do hope to switch to Zed eventually because of it's built-in debugger and ability to select-copy text in popups (I can't believe Sublime still doesn't allow this in 2026) -- Zed still had some rough edges last time I tried it, and Sublime still seemed to perform better.

james2doyle2• 7 months ago

I don’t think people realize how easy it is to make Sublime plugins. They can be as simple as a single .py file. No dependencies install step, no meta files, no rituals to go through. Just drop the .py file in the right directory. I’ve used Gemini to build about 3-4 plugins of various complexity and they all work great

oneeyedpigeon3• 7 months ago

Just drop the .py file in the right directory.

Can I drop it in the 'wrong' directory and have ST pick it up from there? I like apps that are as flexible as possible when it comes to file organization.

baby• 7 months ago

I use emacs as my "lightweight" IDE in the terminal and it's not light at all. Always a big install on a new server and takes ages to start up. I wish I had learned vim instead.

lexoj• 7 months ago

Can you share the plugins name/configuration for Go in Sublime. There are so many options and configurations published so its hard to find a configuration that works as good as Vscode.

sixothree• 7 months ago

How do you refactor code?

bborud• 7 months ago

Microsoft trying to push copilot on me is just the kind of thing that would drive me to investigate alternatives. This is the same kind of annoying as all those cookie pop-ups which more and more often lead me to think "fuck it, I'm not actually that interested in this content" and close the browser.

I wish Microsoft would make software that just respects that I do not want to use copilot rather than enshittifying VSCode.

Cthulhu_4• 7 months ago

Zed also pushed their AI features hard though. When it first came out it was like "your editor, but Rust / not Electron based, so fast", but two years or so ago they were pivoting hard to being an AI editor. Nowadays, thankfully, it's there but it's not intrusive.

The author also mentions missing the sidebar with files but it's one of the icons at the bottom left.

honeycrispy• 7 months ago

You can disable all ai features with "disable_ai": true in the config.

Cthulhu_4• 7 months ago

I think they added that due to some backlash... or I'm confusing this with Warp, the (also Rust based) superfast terminal application that first required a login, then pushed AI stuff.

mrgoldenbrown• 7 months ago

Visual Studio Code has a similar global AI opt out option.

jrm4• 7 months ago

I am finding that AI assisted coding is greatly reducing my interest and reliance on "IDE" type features.

A back and forth "conversation" with Gemini with extreme amounts of copying/pasting/executing in Geany (a relatively simple editor) is now faster than whatever I was trying to do before, hopping between emacs and vim and IDES, etc.

onehair4• 7 months ago

I just don't turn on those features Thanks for making me look! You can actually also `Disable AI` altogether!

patrickmcnamara2• 7 months ago

I wish AI had more access IDE-type features such as renaming or moving methods to another class. Claude often makes mistakes here because it doesn't have all the fancy tooling and indexing that IntelliJ has.

phito• 7 months ago

Claude recently got LSP plugins

jeorb• 7 months ago

Zed is great and close to being my favorite text editor over Vim but there are constant rough edges.

I spent a fair bit of time this weekend tracking down bugs in a project caused by format on save in Zed occasionally deleting the first line of Python classes.

I turned off format on save and life is good now but data loss bugs like that are pretty annoying in a text editor.

btbuildem• 7 months ago

Zed is great and lightweight, one thing that stops me from it becoming my daily driver is the weak git integration (specifically, the lack of a history tree). From what I understand, eventually those features will get there.

onehair4• 7 months ago

Before getting into Zed, I had fallen in love with Helix. that one doesn't even have plugins xD Getting used to splitting my Wezterm and launching lazygit on a second pane kind of made me forget about my dependence on JetBrains git integration prior to helix :P

WA• 7 months ago

I find Zed's inline git diff confusing. I want a side-by-side comparison of the entire file. That's currently a dealbreaker for me.

putna• 7 months ago

same for me. i can not understand zed git diff

insane_dreamer2• 7 months ago

same here. pycharm is still miles ahead in this regard. I use lazygit which plugs the holes (though pycharm is still the best that I have used).

whalesalad• 7 months ago

The only thing keeping me on VSCode these days is the remote SSH development. All of my development takes place on a beefy Linux workstation in my home office. When I am not at my desk (on couch, backyard, coffee shop, traveling) I still remote-in to that box for all of my development using Tailscale + VSCode SSH. Unfortunately the open flavors like vscodium do not support this. It's a "privileged" extension like Copilot.

VSCode has really become such a nightmare to use recently I am strongly looking for a way out. Recently I had some odd corruption take place where I had to blow away essenitally my entire VSCode install on my Mac. Going from zero to hero and bootstrapping back to good state should have been trivial with a single conf file that could be used to rehydrate state (like a lockfile for bundler or node) but - particularly with the remote ssh stuff - it becomes a mess. This extension is installed locally but not remotely, this is remote but not local, ... like dude figure it out and just make it all consistent.

I should expect this from Microsoft, though. I did this to myself.

Revisiting Zed... I am glad to see they have SSH support! Going to give it the old college try today. It's absolutely insane to me that they do not have a first-class Debian/Ubuntu apt repo, though. This has been an issue for quite some time.

andreldm• 7 months ago

This weekend I gave Zed another chance, this time it didn’t make me uninstall it after one hour or so. It’s much more polished, there are a few wrinkles but overall it’s finally pleasant to use. I’m actually surprised how my muscle memory from VSCode is of use, kudos to devs for making the transition easier instead of reinventing the wheel. I hope to eventually get rid of VSCode, this AI everywhere at all costs is turning the editor (that wanted to be an IDE) into something (most?) users don’t want or need.

bpasero• 7 months ago

We maintain a single VS Code setting that allows you to opt out of the AI features provided in VS Code: "chat.disableAIFeatures" (see also: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_104#_hide-and-disab...). If you can still find AI features appearing after you have configured this setting, then please report an issue at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode and we are happy to take a look.

It is possible that from time to time a new AI related feature slips in that does not respect that setting, but we try our best to push fixes as soon as possible.

Thanks! Ben (VS Code Team)

kyrofa• 7 months ago

Thanks Ben, I wasn't aware of that.

g947o3• 7 months ago

Make it opt-in only at welcome page, and we have a deal.

(Of course, I know that's never going to happen.)

illiac786• 7 months ago

I really don’t get this attitude. What deal do you mean? You using VS Code? Why not change the setting simply?

kgwxd• 7 months ago

Make it a separate build that doesn't even have any of the AI code in it because a flag can't be trusted. Especially when there's a history of resetting flags after updates.

joshAg• 7 months ago

just wanted to let you know that this comment is the only reason why i'm using vs code again after about 9 months of not using it at all.

lioeters• 7 months ago

Bravo, I respect that VS Code has added a single setting to disable all AI features. It prioritizes user choice and agency. Considering there was a recent rebranding as "the open source AI code editor", it means a lot to new and existing users that there's a choice to not use AI.

For many companies and products it's apparently hard to do these days when LLM integration is the hot new thing pushed by management and investors. Developers, users, and citizens deserve the respect and right to opt-out from AI features as it permeates other areas of work, life, computing, commerce and governance.

echelon• 7 months ago

I'd like to attach to this comment to say that we should support smaller companies. It doesn't matter how responsive a big company is if it controls too much surface area of the important technological salients.

Large company hegemony of our industry is bad. VSCode, Google Search + Chrome, mobile phone duopoly, Amazon/AWS/MGM/WholeFoods/TeleDoc conglomeration and cross promotion... It doesn't matter. We need more distribution of power.

blks3• 7 months ago

When they brand themselves like that, it’s a clear sign for people who dislike “AI” not to use it. Zed having some opt-out “AI” features now was one of the reasons for me to stop even considering properly trying it again.

Emacs it is, still.

pmarreck4• 7 months ago

Having spent years doing software dev myself and now months with the latest frontier models, I don't see a path forward in any software-development capacity that values productivity where AI is not featured.

So I hope for your sake that you and others like you are pure hobbyists. Because anyone paying you to do this job is going to be firing you pretty soon in favor of those who lean on frontier LLMs, otherwise.

fingerlocks2• 7 months ago

Would love to know what happens in perf review for MSFT employees that flip this switch.

intern4tional4• 7 months ago

Nothing. This isn't something that is even tracked. AI usage is obviously encouraged but HR has far better things to do than go gather this kind of data.

Internally, depending on what product is being worked on teams will have different development flows and different usage points of AI. For things like VSCode, teams have freedom on how they use it completely.

colbythrowaway3• 7 months ago

Hey, Ben.

I recently (less than 2 months ago) did an in-depth analysis in the area of license compliance that suggests that Microsoft and many other companies that are shipping Electron apps aren't in compliance with the LGPL. (By all signs, it looks like the Electron project might not even be aware that Electron is subject to the LGPL, though they are. Even Slack, which isn't violating the license appears to be in compliance only incidentally—because they're shipping other LGPL components that they know are LGPL.)

I was set to leave the company I was at a couple weeks later (end of November), and I did, so there haven't been any developments with my investigation/findings since I departed. I haven't prepared or published a formal write-up, and I've only brought it up in a semi-public setting once. It's a pretty big deal, though. Could you raise this with Microsoft legal (not Electron/GitHub) and suggest they look into this?

intern4tional4• 7 months ago

Assuming this is real and you have the authority to share your work from previous location; you should reach out and contact Microsoft Legal directly.

A random engineer on Hacker News is not the proper channel.

Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/compliance/sbc/report-...

mort96• 7 months ago

I'm just so extremely uninterested in a text editor whose main selling point is that it's an "AI code editor".

artdigital2• 7 months ago

Btw, Zed has a similar setting to turn off all AI features :)

NordSteve• 7 months ago

And I'm sure they'll never forget to connect an AI feature to it.

vbezhenar3• 7 months ago

Thanks for that setting! TBH I'd prefer for vscode not to ship any AI features and let user install them from extensions, but managers probably will not be happy, so at least that setting helps to stay sane.

Abishek_Muthian2• 7 months ago

I actually moved to Zed for AI, Claude integration is seamless and the IDE is so fast and crisp. I can use what ever agent I want, when I need them instead of being asked to use Copilot.

Except for few language related extensions, I don't have any other extensions on Zed. Which means I worry less about which of those extensions will be sold off to a malware developer.

I had more issues with official extensions on VSCode (looking at you flutter) than not having any extension on Zed and having to rely on the terminal (which feels much closer to the system than it did on VSCode).

barrenko3• 7 months ago

Could you provide some detail on how you use it (the AI features)?

kneath• 7 months ago

I appreciate this intent. I do wonder: do any of your team use this setting? I, too left VS Code after having to disable Copilot for the umpteenth time in a fit of frustration. I was aware of this setting and had it to disable all AI, alas.

The frustration for me is that it turned my editor into a 2000s-era popup extravaganza (not necessarily anti-AI). Every line of my editor was constantly throwing a new popup or text to the side of my cursor. I know that VS Code's design philosophy has moved toward trying to make the editor have as many pop-ups as possible, but there are still a lot of us that don't think that's a good way to focus on the work. It is beyond frustrating when every week or so your editor decides you're wrong about that.

nottorp3• 7 months ago

It is possible that from time to time a new AI related feature slips in that does not respect that setting

You mean marketing forces you to "accidentally" slip it in? Just in case it sticks this time?

compounding_it• 7 months ago

I don't know about marketing but if code reviews are done right I would love to know how something like 'AI feature' just slips in.

ustad2• 7 months ago

VS Code is a flagship product from Microsoft. Relying on “we try our best to push fixes as soon as possible” for a global opt-out setting feels below the engineering standards we’d expect. This should be fail-safe by design, not best-effort.

scotty79• 7 months ago

Everything in the world is best-effort at best. People who tell you otherwise about their pridhct are just lying to you. Do you prefer being lied to? Criticizing people for being honest about it is a good way to be lied to more.

madbbb• 7 months ago

I see a lot of AI features hate towards VS Code. Want to say that there are other people like me who really love these features, just want to thank you as a Copilot pro user!

egorfine• 7 months ago

Could you perhaps one day make "chat.disableAIFeaturesMadeForShareholdersOnly"?

So that we can have the actual good stuff (copilot, chat) and leave out the mountain of features that were clearly created to force induced demand for the sake of metrics inflation?

never_inline• 7 months ago

You can probably phrase this question as

* Can we enable the only features we want by toggling chat.disableAIfeatures and only selectively enabling copilot and chat?

jdejean• 7 months ago

Whoops!! Pesky mistake. An AI feature bypassed the AI opt-out setting yet again. What are we gonna do with all this data now??

brianzelip• 7 months ago

Here's a good, 1.5 year old podcast interview with the Zed founder, https://shows.acast.com/software-unscripted/episodes/664fde4....

guiambros2• 7 months ago

Slashdotted :)

Here's a copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260105144155/https://tenthousa...

cube004• 7 months ago

Weird it's a static site that still got hugged to death.

cube004• 7 months ago

Something is going on, it's still timing out for me 20 hours later.

  curl https://tenthousandmeters.com
  curl: (35) TLS connect error: error:0A000126:SSL routines::unexpected eof while reading

r4victor6• 7 months ago

Working now? It's a 1cpu/1gb VPS – maybe too small to handle hn hugs.

The website repo is public, so it's also available on github: https://github.com/r4victor/tenthousandmeters/blob/master/we...

joelthelion• 7 months ago

I've been using vim for 20 years. It's gotten me through all the evolutions of programming, from ctags, to language servers, to AI with copilot.

There's something extremely satisfying about having a dependable free software editor, available on all systems, and not having to change every time a new fad comes in, or a VC decides it's time to make money.

keyle• 7 months ago

I went from intellij to emacs, to zed / vscode to vim... Even neovim was getting on my nerves.

For some reason I'm happy in vim. I feel I understand most of what's happening. Not sure what It is.

I still use vscode for debugging (breakpoints etc.) as it's just the easiest. Maybe there is a workflow with lldb that I could use to debug within vim...

the_duke• 7 months ago

The more advanced AI related workflows are the reason I finally switched away from neovim as my main coding IDE - for now.

The existing AI plugins for neovim aren't great.

plqbfbv• 7 months ago

I'm happily using Zed for a few weeks now. What prompted me to evaluate it was it being written (mostly) in rust, so expected better performance and stability and I got that (UI redraws are stupid fast compared to VSCode), but I wanted to migrate my agentic code flow too.

I was pleasantly surprised to basically configure-and-use the AI part: GitHub Copilot login and use, MCP servers, custom MCP servers. VSCode made this part really annoying: Copilot would blow up every now and then, MCP server auto-starting is not there yet and you need an extension (which works for 8 things out of 10), I haven't even tried adding a custom server because I was already annoyed. In Zed I just copy-pasted the suggested custom server start-up command into the small JSON array it presents to add a custom server, and it just started the MCP server in a custom thread, no fuss. Autostart works reliably every time the editor is re-opened.

babu_mick• 7 months ago

me 2 brother

awfulneutral2• 7 months ago

I am ahead of this curve, my trajectory was VSCode -> Zed -> Helix. Helix doubles my battery life from 4 to 8 hours compared to Zed. Zed is also on a bad trajectory IMO with the huge amount of updates being pushed constantly.

theappsecguy• 7 months ago

What is bad exactly about the trajectory? They are constantly adding features and none of feels like bloat, it just happens to be a much younger editor so iteration is rapid. I welcome it compared to the monstrosity that Jetbrains has become.

awfulneutral2• 7 months ago

Yeah, it just reminds me of the early days of VS Code, where features were constantly added and it was fun at first, but they didn't stop and eventually it did feel more sluggish and bloated. Sometimes I'd have to spend time fixing or re-configuring something just because I opened the editor and the daily auto-update did something annoying. It might not happen with Zed, but it seems like a very similar approach to development.

drannex• 7 months ago

Zed is basically the new Sublime.

bigstrat20032• 7 months ago

Sublime is the new Sublime. It's still just as great as it ever was.

tlhunter• 7 months ago

Sadly momentum scrolling doesn't work on Zed for Linux. This is a big reason I haven't jumped ship.

It's also a reason I still use Firefox based browsers instead of chromium based browsers.

rcleveng3• 7 months ago

I'd love to try Zed, but it's unusable on MacOS (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/20806 seems to be the issue).

If that ever gets fixed then I'd look at replacing Sublime (which is still my go-to for quick editing) and then see if it can handle more advanced coding (which one the rotating list of various vscode forks handle today)

Shywim• 7 months ago

So, it's been one year since I use Zed daily, and I didn't encounter this issue, or any other issue for instance, everything is smooth and I never encountered a failure or a crash.

I work on large (everything is relative, though) monorepos, that would probably qualify for this limit, and I remember already did the kind of "workaround" discussed in this issue years ago on this device. I think it's hard to blame the software when the default file limit is so low depending on the languages you work with.

Anyway, if you would encounter this problem, you would have already encountered it with other tools, or else this is fine.

rcleveng3• 7 months ago

I use other tools (sublime, vscode, cursor, antigravity, emacs) none have run into this out of the box.

presbyterian• 7 months ago

Have you tried BBEdit recently? It's incredibly configurable, AI features are entirely opt-in, and it supports LSPs now. It's my go-to for basically all text editing these days.

rcleveng3• 6 months ago

Not in like 20 years, I'll take a look again, it used to be my favorite back in os9 days

jaredcwhite• 7 months ago

I've been running "VSCode" via code-server as a self-hosted solution so I can fire up an IDE on any device including my iPad. I still use code-server, but increasingly when I'm at my Mac/Linux desktops (yes I have both!) I have been using Zed and it's gotten really good. The only major feature I miss is a visual Git Graph, but since I can still load code-server when I need that, no biggie.

I was genuinely surprised that I can use Zed to remote into my server and it works great with Ruby tooling like Solargraph LSP and Rubocop. Everything in the UI is refreshingly minimalist and quite snappy. Good stuff.

kneel25• 7 months ago

I adore Zed, started on the day of the windows release and never looked back. My theme is perfect, the team works super hard, and I get a nice bit of satisfaction installing their frequent updates in barely over a second.

_mrinalwadhwa_• 7 months ago

I love the minimalism and speed of Zed. The Zed Agent is exceptional!

It doesn't easily allow for parallel work like Claude Code in a Terminal but for a single session it is just as good plus it makes it really easy to switch between models. I also find it super useful when I'm working on our large monorepo, the minimal and fast ui makes it super easy to pull in the right context of folders, files, snippets etc to help the Agent.

delduca• 7 months ago

I switched Zed to neovim, I had a blast on speed and productivity.

shantara• 7 months ago

Does Zed still have an unremovable login button right in the window title? It’s been a constant eyesore for me last time I’ve tried it.

ChrisSD• 7 months ago

Huh, I've been using Zed for awhile now and never even noticed it until you mentioned it. Fortunately there's a setting to remove it.

TiredOfLife• 7 months ago

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

cjk• 7 months ago

Zed has been one of the most consequential changes to my dev tools in years. It's noticeably faster in day-to-day use than VS Code (launch time, input latency, etc.), is way less of a resource hog, and has the best Vim mode of any GUI editor I've ever used.

steve_adams_86• 7 months ago

I agree. It's a joy to use, and feels like it was built by people who care about it.

verdverm6• 7 months ago

Let's see if that holds up when it has better feature parity. Things always run faster when you have less to do

WD-42• 7 months ago

Zed doesn’t need to run a web browser so I kinda doubt it will ever have “as much to do”

kristianp2• 7 months ago

I haven't tried zed and vscode for a while, but I didn't like the amount of distractions from vscode, such as info about methods.

The problem I had with zed when I tried it is that I'm on linux with kde and zed had a hamburger menu on linux, whereas on Mac it has a proper application menu. It also didn't have keyboard shortcuts for menus that I expected, e.g. Alt-f to open file menu. This is a Windows specific convention that many applications bring to linux too. I still prefer Sublime Text for its user interface.

ashvardanian2• 7 months ago

I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code.

The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs. There’s an open discussion about it, though it hasn’t seen much activity recently: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770

Stronger support for GDB/LLDB and broader C/C++ tooling would also be a big win.

It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become. Huge thanks to the people behind Zed and Sublime for actively pushing in the opposite direction!

__jonas3• 7 months ago

I agree with that comment chain about the intelliJ diff view so much

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...

I don't even need that to be built into the editor – I would pay for a fast, standalone git UI that is as good as the IntelliJ one. I use Sublime Merge right now and it's kind of ok but definitely not on the same level

hoistbypetard• 7 months ago

I mostly use git from the terminal, but the goodness of the IntelliJ UI for cherry-picking changes is one of the things that has me maintaining my toolbox subscription. Also, IdeaVim is a really solid vim implementation, IMO.

sushisource• 7 months ago

I dunno if you are aware, but you can use the diff/merge standalone. My gift to you:

     [mergetool "intellij"]
     cmd = 'intellij-idea-ultimate-edition' merge "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE" "$BASE" "$MERGED"
     trustExitCode = true

criemen• 7 months ago

I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code.

Can you elaborate on when you use which editor? I'd have imagined that there's value in learning and using one editor in-depth, instead of switching around based on use-case, so I'd love to learn more about your approach.

ashvardanian2• 7 months ago

My workflow isn't very common. I typically have 3-5 projects open on the local machines and 2 cloud instances - x86 and Arm. Each project has files in many programming languages (primarily C/C++/CUDA, Python, and Rust), and the average file is easily over 1'000 LOC, sometimes over 10'000 LOC.

VS Code glitches all the time, even when I keep most extensions disabled. A few times a day, I need to restart the program, as it just starts blinking/flickering. Diff views are also painfully slow. Zed handles my typical source files with ease, but lacks functionality. Sublime comes into play when I open huge codebases and multi-gigabyte dataset files.

oneeyedpigeon3• 7 months ago

Different user, but I prefer to use different editors for:

- project work, i.e. GUI, multiple files, with LSP integration (zed)

- one-off/drive-by edits, i.e. terminal, small, fast, don't care much about features (vim)

- non-code writing, i. e. GUI, different theme (light), good markdown support (coteditor)

I don't like big complex software, so I stay away from IDEs; ideally, I'd like to drop zed for something simpler, without AI integration, but I haven't found anything that auto-formats as well.

tripflag• 7 months ago

in my case, I use zed for almost everything, and vscodium for three things:

search across all files; easier to navigate the results with the list of matching lines in the sidebar, and traversing the results with cursor up/down, giving full context

git; side-by-side diff, better handling of staging, and doesn't automatically word-wrap commit messages (I prefer doing that myself)

editing files which have a different type of indentation than what is configured in zed, since zed does not yet have autodetect

j1elo• 7 months ago

The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs.
It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become.

It's a bit ironic to see those two in the same message but I'd argue that right there is an example of why software becomes bloated. There is always someone who says "but it would be great to have X" that in spirit might be tangentially relevant, but it's a whole ordeal of its own.

Diffing text, for example, requires a very different set of tools and techniques than what just a plain text editor would already have. That's why there are standalone products like Meld and the very good Beyond Compare; and they tend to be much better than a jack of all trades editor (at least I was never able to like more the diff UI in e.g. VSCode than the UI of Meld or the customization features of BC).

Same for other tangential stuff like VCS integration; VSCode has something in there, but any special purpose app is miles ahead in ease of use and features.

In the end, the creators of an editor need to spend so much time adding what amounts to suplemental and peripheral features, instead of focusing on the best possible core product. Expectations are so high that the sky is the limit. Everyone wants their own pet sub-feature ("when will it integrate a Pomodoro timer?").

sabellito• 7 months ago

Fully agree.

People call "bloat" the features they don't need, and "deal breakers" the lack of features they want besides good text editing.

raffapen• 7 months ago

This is a sharp observation, and it goes even further: BeyondCompare easily allows one to hop into an editor at a specific location, while Total Commander, with its side-by-side view of the world, is n excellent trampoline into BeyondCompare. In this kind of ecosystem (where visual tools strive to achieve some Unix-like collaboration), the super power of editors (and IDEs) is their scripting language, and in this arena it is still hard to beat Emacs (with capabilities that were present maybe 40 years ago).

eviks• 7 months ago

Have you looked at the size of Zed binary lately? How is it pushing against bloat, especially compared to Sublime?

jtflynnz2• 7 months ago

It looks like the most recent thread has noted an early feature flag for testing that!

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...

jtflynnz2• 7 months ago

Specifically https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...

submeta• 7 months ago

NeoVim, Yazi, and Tmux are my go-to tools. When I need AI and Agents, I create multiple instances of Claude Code or Codex. However, I don’t let them interfere with my workflow if I don’t need them.

callumprentice3• 7 months ago

I tried Zed for a few months but just couldn't get the JavaScript/Python syntax checking and Prettier type reformatting to work reliably. I would poke at it for a few hours, get it working and then mysteriously, a few days later, it'd stop working again.

I switched to VSCode now and whilst that piece of it seems to be much more reliable, I think overall I prefer the "feel" of Zed.

I've bookmarked the article to see if that helps me figure out how to make the settings stick.

aratahikaru5• 7 months ago

I had the same issue a few months ago with TSX files and ended up going back to Sublime. I just found out (after reading your comment and doing some searching) that Zed has a setting to force Prettier globally.

Might be helpful:

  "prettier": {
    "allowed": true
  },

callumprentice3• 7 months ago

I'll try that - thank you.

dminik• 7 months ago

It's kind of funny, but I had the exact opposite experience. I couldn't get VSCode to reliably format Typescript/React code across several projects. Some would work and others would not. Sometimes it would format, but with wrong settings.

Frustrated, I switched to Zed and have not had that issue since.

callumprentice3• 7 months ago

Fascinating. Can you share your non-private Zed config? I still have mine from before the switch - I'd like to compare.

unethical_ban• 7 months ago

Does anyone else have issues wrapping their head around the UI and configuration of VSCode? Or is this a symptom of my losing touch with how IDEs work vs. my old habit of solo coding in Vim and running scripts?

Everything is monocolored, everything feels like it's an add-on, and settings are in weird different places rendered as json or a web page feel.

Last time I used a "real" IDE was 2008, so I may be the problem here.

verdverm6• 7 months ago

You can change the layout and theme so it makes sense for you. There are buttons in the title bar and you can drag panels around at will

Lramseyer• 7 months ago

As much as I love Zed, I am of the belief that VScode (and its derivatives) will remain the dominant build-your-own IDE for a really long time unless something like Zed can support web based extensions. I created a VScode extension for chip designers and I would love to port it to Zed, but I can't because it's a visualization extension with a custom webview.

I realize the irony here that Zed is fast because it's not web based, but I stand by my claim that being able to optionally display web UIs would be a really cool feature to have. It would open the door to a lot of extensions.

meander_water• 7 months ago

For those looking for a better language server for python, I would recommend ruff. As of v0.4.5 it's completely written in rust, and much faster than pylance.

If you've got the ruff plugin installed it should use it by default. Should be able to use it in zed as well.

capitanazo77• 7 months ago

I'd love to read articles like "I didn't switch editors because mine is perfect, neovim btw"

foxylad• 7 months ago

This article (and holiday spare time) made me update and check zed again. I really liked it when I tried it a few months ago, but it failed miserably when doing work on remote code. It would hang, and I couldn't find any diagnostics to debug it's fairly complex remote agent to find out what went wrong.

But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote git seems to work nicely. A very nice Christmas present - thanks, Zed!

Good job Zed!

roywiggins• 7 months ago

Funny, I switched to Zed after VS Code remotes kept hanging!

worik• 7 months ago

Golly

I have been using Emacs since 1989. I have seen so many editors come and go, and Emacs was never the best, but it was always good. And it has stuck to its (very broad) knitting.

There are AI tools I can incorporate into Emacs, and one day I might. But I have so much choice, it gets distressing

Articles like this remind me why I keep loyal....

Heidaradar• 7 months ago

do you use ANY AI tools like Claude Code etc? if not, why not?

habosa• 7 months ago

So did I. I was just curious if it would really be noticeable faster and … wow yes it is. It’s really nice to use.

VSCode is still more polished and I’m going to keep it installed, but I’ve been using Zed for a month now and loving it.

kopirgan• 7 months ago

I am not much of a programmer only fool around a bit for fun and occasional profit. I find Helix to be very good for coding. Compared to Neovim, I could get LSPs going for go, c without any effort. Only thing is I haven't figured out much of debugging which I guess is must have for a serious coder. My favorite is printf and is enough for me across go, awk, c , Excel VBA macros and JS!

astrea• 7 months ago

I like that this article paints VSCode as bogged down by too much AI tooling and the first thing I see on the Zed website is how create it is with Sonnet 4.5 and there’s a subscription plan for AI features.

hliyan• 7 months ago

Just tried this out for the first time and found their implementation of the "Outline Panel" (Ctrl+Shift+B) to be very useful, at least for the C++ code base I tried it with.

temporallobe• 7 months ago

I tried switching to Zed, and was even able to get it use identical themes and key mappings as my preferred ones in VSC, but ultimately I switched back due to lack of plugins that I’ve really come to depend on, not to mention some key feature differences. I didn’t notice that much of a performance boost over VSC (given that I was on an M4 with 32GB of memory), so in the end, the switch wasn’t worth it. I really want to like Zed, so I will be sure to occasionally check out any new releases. By the way, I did indeed notice that Zed was a heck of a lot faster than VSC on an old Intel-based MBP!

bjackman2• 7 months ago

Zed is faster and less annoying than VSCode, I hope to switch to it permanently sooner or later.

Annoyingly the only hard blocker I have right now is lack of a call-graph navigation widget. In VSCode you can bring up an expandable tree of callers for a function. Somehow I am completely dependent on this tiny little feature for reading complex code!

The annoying thing is: "can't you just use an extension for this?" No, Zed extensions are much more constrained, Zed is not a web browser. And I like it this way! But... My widget...

I also have some performance issues with searching large remote repos, but I'm pretty confident that will get fixed.

gabeidx• 7 months ago

Does "Find All References opt+shift+F12" function help mitigate this for you? It opens a buffer that you can use to navigate, and it's a built-in feature not an extension.

Or do you want a more graphical tree view?

bjackman2• 7 months ago

Yeah need a tree view. Find all references, and references to references and so on.

childintime• 7 months ago

Few people seem to recall that MS is making tsc, the typescript compiler, faster, and as a result VSCode: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/typescript-native-...

presentation• 7 months ago

If you are a TypeScript developer, this is typescript inference and compilation performance, not the compiled code at runtime.

throw-12-16• 7 months ago

VSCode's plugin architecture is a security nightmare and an extremely juicy target for supply chain attacks.

Does Zed address this in any meaningful way?

dv_dt• 7 months ago

I switched from VSCode back to Sublime Text lol. If I want AI involved I use claude-code or other cli in a terminal. Its been nicer and less distracting

hit8run• 7 months ago

Don’t tell bro about SublimeText

artur-gawlik3• 7 months ago

I'm using vscode for couple of years now. I have disabled all AI related features with "chat.disableAIFeatures" option and it worked really well in my case. But I was convinced by this article to checkout zed mainly tempted by the promise of much better performance because it is written in native language instead of javascript. So to test it out I've opened https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/src/compil... file and zed after "ctrl + o" command frizzed. Also when scrolling this file in zed there is noticeable drop in FPS, where in vscode scroll with checker.ts file opened is very smooth. So I guess I'm staying with vscode :)

artur-gawlik3• 7 months ago

additionally there is currently ongoing effort to make main editor to be rendered with WebGPU instead of DOM nodes, which I'm really waiting to happen.

artur-gawlik3• 7 months ago

this is the issue that tracks that effort https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/221145

lvl155• 7 months ago

For such an incomplete product, Zed sure is popular among devs. I guess they love to waste time working with a tool missing key features. I can forgive all that but Zed has one of the worst UIs I’ve experienced in a long time.

_sinelaw_3• 7 months ago

What specifically are you missing from Zed? (not a Zed user but curious to know)

HackerThemAll• 7 months ago

Good luck. It cannot even preserve unsaved files across restarts. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/15098

_sinelaw_3• 7 months ago

I also got tired of the bloat and also prefer working from the terminal.

I'm building Fresh [0] [1] as an alternative to VSCode that runs in your terminal, with the main goal being ease-of-use out of the box (not a vi-clone modal editor), for example supports mouse, menu, command palette, etc out of the box. LSP as well. I'm focused on making it easy to use with minimum or zero configuration.

[0] https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh [1] https://sinelaw.github.io/fresh/

reflog• 7 months ago

Just discovered Fresh recently. IT'S AMAZING. gives a real sublime+turbo pascal vibe. All shortcuts work perfectly. Thank you!

gethly• 7 months ago

My daily driver is JetBrains. I never liked VS Code, or rather VS Codium. I use it as text editor and only when i want to open a directory i do not care about(ie. some old or foreign code) or really need syntax highlighting. I had high hopes for Zed, despite that built-in AI crap, but after I tried it I still could not configure my syntax highlighting theme, like i can in jetbrains, and for some reason going to definitions in std libraries does not work(i tested with odin). I am not fan of JetBrains and their pricing policies or their new ui changes. So i am working on my own editor/ide right now and I just wanted to mention that zed was the final nudge for me to do it.

dejw• 7 months ago

Zed, VSCode, Antigravity, Sublime Text... They all have the same workflow. For writing the code by hand I recommend Helix, batteries included, fast and efficient. For AI-assisted development it doesn't matter and you'd have to switch the app every 4 months if you want to choose the best one.

heybales• 7 months ago

For terminal text editing I've switched everything over to helix, highly recommended. Basically no config other than I'll change the theme.

Unfortunately I'm still trying to figure out my AI workflow. Right now it's a mix of Cursor, Claude Code, and JetBrains Rider. I mainly use Cursor for the heavy AI lifting and then switch to Rider and Claude Code for tweaking and debugging. If Cursor didn't completely suck at .NET debug, I might just be able to use it alone.

rahen• 7 months ago

My only complaint regarding the Zed editor is the inability to display two panes of the sidebar one below the other. Not only is it impossible to display them together, but switching between them requires clicking a tiny button in the status bar. To make matters worse, performing a search hides the symbols and the tree view.

So right now I'm sticking to Emacs.

ach11235• 7 months ago

Zed is nice. I use neovim as my main code editor, but when I want a private respectful UI code editor for use AI then I go to Zed, also there is a vim mode that is not so bad.

achayala• 7 months ago

Zed is nice. When I need AI features I use it. Otherwise I am using Neovim.

mirawelner• 7 months ago

I really love Zed bc it’s fast and doesn’t try to run the code for you. I really dislike the “play” feature of IDEs. I learned Java in eclipse and for the linear time don’t know how to run it from the terminal. It has all the editing and highlighting features of a full ide but makes you run it from the terminal. And if you have Zellij or another muxer set up, it runs it in the Zed terminal automatically.

bovermyer• 7 months ago

What country is Zed based in?

avanwyk• 7 months ago

Others have echoed the same, but I also switched from VSCode to Zed, but then put in the effort to learn Neovim (Lazyvim) properly, and I haven't looked back. Writing code feels exciting again. I recommend something like https://github.com/adomokos/Vim-Katas to accelerate muscle memory. And also Vimium in the browser is great.

Koshkin• 7 months ago

No CMake support (VSCode, emacs, nvim all have it).

pmarreck4• 7 months ago

With Python, it wasn't so smooth, and I had to spent half a day to get it working. Next is boring details that I wish I knew from the start.

that's not unusual for python. in fact, that is why I avoid python.

I switched from VSCode to Zed

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