Zed 1.0

https://zed.dev/blog/zed-1-0

by salkahfi • 3 months ago

2153 673 3 months ago

zed.dev

jore• 3 months ago

Does anybody have experience running Claude Code or Codex in Zed?

802e65bc-e259• 3 months ago

Works very well - whats your question?

edweis• 3 months ago

I just run it in the terminal, every time I tried their integration it was missing a feature or it was easier to read on a terminal

recov• 3 months ago

Yes - the Claude ACP is nice, as I like to have a view of the code while chatting. Using just the terminal for dense/long running work feels like a handicap imo. It would be great if it supported more commands though!

unshavedyak• 3 months ago

It would be great if it supported more commands though!

What does it not support? I want to try and figure out if its shortcomings in the ACP/Claude SDK or if it's just features that Zed has yet to support?

ramon156• 3 months ago

both support ACP. works really well!

bicepjai• 3 months ago

I used to run Claude code on terminal on zed. But the memory usage would balloon eating all my ram 128gb and have to kill the session every other day. I moved back to vscode. I don’t know if they addressed it

sodacanner2• 3 months ago

It works 'well' with Claude Code, but you're going to be missing a lot of features. There's no display for sub-agents/teams, no ability to clear the context without starting a whole new thread window, no ability to view the current context or usage, etc. There's also no built-in ability to view or change the model's current effort level, which I think is a current limitation with the SDK.

I tried it for a bit and it was definitely usable and I got a few features built out, but I eventually moved back to using CC in the terminal. I'm sure they're working on it, though.

NortySpock• 3 months ago

Does "local Ollama" or OpenRouter count? I fell into using Zed because there was zero sign-up friction when trying to set up a connection to a local Ollama LLM. Literally "drop-down, select the model you want"

Once I got that running on my machine it was also easy (literally a drop-down+ API key) to switch and explore using models on OpenRouter.

jeppester2• 3 months ago

I use it a lot with Claude Code.

It lacks a lot of features, but IMO feels less "busy" than the terminal version, which I like.

Very recently Zed also gained support for parallel sessions, which is nice. In general it's very obvious that a lot of effort goes into improving it, and it gets better with every release.

maherbeg2• 3 months ago

It works well but there are a lot of missing features * skill auto complete * custom agents * sub agents * background process management

tjek3• 3 months ago

They both work very well. My only complaint is that you can't use them to generate commit messages using the Git Panel (have to do it inside the Agent Thread instead), and /compact seems to have issues so you will often need to start a new thread (this wasn't an issue in the past so hopefully it will get fixed soon).

fishgoesblub2• 3 months ago

1.0 and still has the wrong colours when ran in Wayland and lacks bitmap font support.

toggio• 3 months ago

1.0 doesn't mean "done". It also doesn't mean "perfect"

Create issue in the Zed Github repository?

fishgoesblub2• 3 months ago

Don't need to create an issue, both have had issues for them for 2 years.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/9057 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12629

sevenseacat3• 3 months ago

The colour issue also affects MacOS - every time I open VSCode it strikes me just how more vibrant the exact same colours are, rendering there.

BewareTheYiga• 3 months ago

Bravo! I've enjoyed using Zed and seeing its progress. Still waiting on python notebook support.

superxpro12• 3 months ago

does this support plugins? How does it integrate with cmake projects?

dosshell• 3 months ago

i investigated this yesterday and there is one cmake extension. It gives basic support to cmake. Not as neat as vscode/jetbrains/qt/vs but it works. It is depends on CMakePresets.json and has no gui etc.

peterpanhead• 3 months ago

Congrats on reaching your first major

f311a4• 3 months ago

Too bad they did not include better search UI into this release.

When you search, Zed opens a new tab, which I hate. Sometimes I just want to have a quick glance at some code and close the search using escape.

Telescope style search in vim, helix or JetBrains tools is so much better.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/46478

chuckadams2• 3 months ago

Whereas I'm not a great fan of modals for anything where I'd like to refer back to what I'm working on. I guess I'd just prefer some tabs to open as a split by default and close with esc, maybe call them something like "ephemeral tabs"? Basically, steal some ideas from emacs.

f311a4• 3 months ago

Tabs will still be supported. Also, when you search for references, it also opens a new tab, even when all references are in the same file.

tensegrist• 3 months ago

in emacs with embark you can export the contents of an ephemeral buffer into a persistent one, which is the best of both worlds and more besides

for file search, edit in the persistent buffer can rename files

for grep, edits in the persistent buffer edit across files

and so on

whalesalad2• 3 months ago

That was og sublime/textmate behavior that I grew to miss with vscode, so was pleasantly surprised to see it exists in Zed.

cowboy_henk• 3 months ago

Agreed, this is the main reason why I keep switching back to other editors.

pastel87392• 3 months ago

Huh, I absolutely love Zed’s search UI. I just navigate back to my previous tab with ctrl-o when I’m done

zamalek2• 3 months ago

I love it too, but instantly knew it would be polarizing the first time I used it :)

WD-422• 3 months ago

Same, and then sometimes I navigate back to it again when I need it. The multi-cursor edit in the search results is a thing a beauty as well.

smashah• 3 months ago

yeah its quite silly they decided to mess around with this universally standard behaviour. The search is the reason why i always end up going back to other vs code based IDEs for real work. I open zed for perf reasons and something quick.

Also now they've introduced this "agent first" layout which i cannot undo. They're strength is in perf, idk why try to reinvent the wheel w.r.t DX.

cassianoleal• 3 months ago

Also now they've introduced this "agent first" layout which i cannot undo

You can just collapse the sidebar with the agentic stuff.

jeppester2• 3 months ago

I love the search in zed. If it was up to me it would open a new tab on every search rather than reusing the same tab, so that I didn't have to redo past searches.

The multibuffer result is so nice for "hands-on" search and replace.

frio3• 3 months ago

I also disliked that and discovered you can toggle it with config now :).

masklinn2• 3 months ago

When you search, Zed opens a new tab, which I hate.

You also have to validate the search, it doesn't start off immediately on its own, which annoys me a lot more.

Aldipower2• 3 months ago

This. I tried Zed for an entire month, but this "search thing" drove me nuts. It is also slow. If you work in a large project search is absolutely essential. Too bad.. Back to Visual Studio Code.

iknowstuff4• 3 months ago

They both use ripgrep, weird for it to be slower? Especially with the multibuffer it's more pleasant to use

gnufied• 3 months ago

I know not much about Zed and I am curious, can such changes be implemented via extensions?

moritzruth• 3 months ago

No, Zed's extension API is very limited at the moment. In particular, it does not allow adding any new GUI elements.

malcolmgreaves• 3 months ago

Sometimes I just want to have a quick glance at some code and close the search using escape.

How else are you going to have “a quick glance at code” *across* project files without using a new view for that? It sounds like you’re describing something impossible.

Zed’s across files search solves this in a similar way as other tools. Except that in zed you can also edit the code where your search results show up. Zed also has within file search.

f311a4• 3 months ago

Just look at the PR, it's shows how it will look like. It's modal instead of a persistent tab.

atombender2• 3 months ago

Look at how Jetbrains IDEs do it. It's a solved UX problem, as far as I'm concerned.

Jetbrains opens up a lightweight floating panel which can also be docked. So you can choose how to view the results. Like Zed, the results view is live editable, even when searching across multiple files.

The floating panel mode is good because you can do a quick search, look at it, and just whisk it away with one key. Opening results as a tab isn't terrible, but mixes one UI (search, very ephemeral) with another (editing, less ephemeral). (Zed also has this thing where search results also show in the right-hand side panel, which I've always found confusing.)

Another thing Jetbrains does better here is to remember your search settings. Your last search is always the default, whereas Zed forgets it every time. Jetbrains also has really nice file scoping via a dropdown, so it's very quick to search all non-test files, for example.

Zed keeps stealing great features from Jetbrains, so I'm sure it's just a matter of time before this gets better.

hackermanai6• 3 months ago

How else are you going to have “a quick glance at code” across project files without using a new view for that?

By showing the text around match inline with the search result in the tree. Especially useful if you do not expect to edit every search result. If you do expect to edit every search result, then Zed's multibuffer is arguably better/ faster.

leshenka• 3 months ago

I can’t relate to that, I’ve also struggled with this decision for quite some time, but I’ve gotten used to it. What I hate is that it doesn’t open several search tabs if I need to look for several things at once.

selfawareMammal• 3 months ago

I feel you. Same here.

frio3• 3 months ago

I use the television task described here (https://zed.dev/blog/hidden-gems-part-2) for that experience :)

trymas• 3 months ago

Personally I don't hate tab. Sometimes even it's more convenient to have a tab on the side with all the state, instead of reopening modal.

What I hate though is really unintuitive and "non-standard"[1] shortcuts in search tab.

For example "find in project": cmd+shift+f

Whereas for "find and replace in project" I'd expect: cmd+shift+r , but it's: first toggle find, then toggle find and replace. Ok, absolutely fine, but the keyboard shortcut to toggle is: cmd+shift+h - I never can remember it.

When already searching, for my "convenience", if I'd like to adjust my search or search for something new, I click cmd+shift+f and I am focused back to find input, but here's the kicker. Input have automatically changed to what word was under my cursor. So if I was looking for some long or weird string, I need to retype it again or find and copy/paste it again.

#first-world-problems though.

I got tired of babysitting vim/neovim and all it's plugins and use Zed for most of my editing. It has pretty good vim binding support and maybe I just need to remap some key bindings to have better search experience. Zed is much better at emulating vim than Cursor/VSCode.

[1] there's no standard obviously, but some things are the same/similar across most programs.

f311a4• 3 months ago

They have presets from other IDEs and editors. I use a weird combination of Jetbrains and helix shortcuts with helix mode. Because I used them the most.

j1elo• 3 months ago

I was like: "it should be Ctrl+Shift+H, of course, right?"

So different tastes :-)

What you describe later is "Auto-populate the find dialog with current text under cursor". VSCode has a setting for that; I guess Zed will eventually end upnadeing one too.

bikelang• 3 months ago

Huge congratulations to the Zed team!

simonask2• 3 months ago

Congratulations! I’ve been very happy with Zed for the past year or so.

I’m hoping the roadmap contains support for even more things that extensions can do, such as rendering images or Markdown in-editor.

xpe10• 3 months ago

If the idea of hiding extra Markdown elements or making it more WYSIWYG appeals to you, maybe we can put more eyes on some kind of feature request. I've seeing several comments come at this from different angles: ?id=47950471 ?id=47950748

tjek3• 3 months ago

Generating images inside the agent threads would be huge. I always feel sad when I have to open ChatGPT to generate my images.

comandillos2• 3 months ago

Such a pity remote dev containers are critical for me. I guess some SSH tunneling could help with it...

numbsafari• 3 months ago

Umm… zed supports remote dev over ssh… what’s your concern?

CraftThatBlock• 3 months ago

And Zed even supports Dev Container

jcgrillo2• 3 months ago

How is their emacs keymap support? I tried VSCode for a while but switched back to emacs because it was so slow and the keymap was not very good. I've been intending to try Zed but emacs is working well enough so the motivation isn't really there yet..

RMarcus• 3 months ago

I've got emacs keybinds in my muscle memory and Zed works well for me, although there's no kill ring and the macro system is nothing like emacs. The former will be added at some point (there's an open PR), but I do not expect the latter will ever be comparable.

jcgrillo2• 3 months ago

Thanks for the info. Kill ring support is definitely a must for me, I care a lot less about macros. I'll keep an eye out for it!

alternatex2• 3 months ago

The only thing that bothers me about Zed is the theme. It's so bland it actually gives me reading difficulties. I'd be surprised if some of the color combinations don't pose an accessibility issue. Grey text on grey background is quite the choice.

Enpece• 3 months ago

I do agree that Zed's default themes aren't great. They look too 'plain' for my taste. Bit more contrast can't hurt either.

BUT: It's very easy to just choose a different theme and there are plenty to choose from by now. It's even possible to make your own theme and they even have a first-party theme editor (https://zed.dev/theme-builder) which works great. They should maybe include some descriptions for each color instead of just the name but that's the only negative thing I can say right now.

I'd even say that it's easier to theme Zed than VSCode because there are fewer variables.

alternatex2• 3 months ago

Thank you for the tips. I didn't know it was possible to install other themes as extensions.

tfrancisl• 3 months ago

As far as I can tell you can theme nearly everything in the app. I've got custom colors for diffs and some syntax, and my base theme is ripped from Monokai.

watt• 3 months ago

And the icons are too small. It's vaguely a mystery meat navigation.

dmix4• 3 months ago

Cursor has the best default dark theme IMO

It also has a much better edit prediction model than Zed

yard2010• 3 months ago

Personally Cursor feels like a vibe coded slop these days, I canceled the subscription and went back to vscode with AI features off. Claude Code is my third hand and that's it. I need to try Zed though, I remember Atom changed the way I use text editors, I'm certain Zed will provide the same experience.

marton78• 3 months ago

I really like the jetbrains theme you can install in Zed. Give it a shot!

taosx• 3 months ago

Congratz to the team. I really like zed and started using it quite early, loved the text threads and was using them a lot as I don't think llms fit in a box of only agents, they were a nice way to manage conversations, work through them, edit responses to lead the agent better, copy-paste full text, sad to see them go (text threads).

I'm trying right now the ACP with my own agent and I'm of mixed opinions but that's maybe because I care how my agent works. I believe that for the agent view a plain buffer with small ui elements would be the best ui for an agent conversation but I may have been spoiled by their text threads. I may spin a personal fork but the thought of tens of mins of compile time isn't that attractive.

Edit: I realized I started moving to terminal based editors like helix due to agents: claude -> codex -> custom pi, with the open sourcing of warp I was considering making a native integration for warp + pi but now I'm thinking zed's text threads (~17k lines) + pi might be a better way, any thoughts or ideas?

swiftcoder5• 3 months ago

Good for them, but I wish they'd hurry up and catch up on some of the big missing features. Really hoping they'll accept my PR to add the missing call hierarchy feature before the GitHub issue turns 2 years old :)

akho• 3 months ago

Shortcuts still don't work on non-Latin keyboard layouts on Linux. For people who use languages with non-Latin writing systems, this is a show-stopper.

(there is, of course, a rich tradition of text editors with the same issue, including Vim and Emacs. They 1) have an excuse; 2) provide both workarounds and their own input method systems. Having this in a new program is nuts.)

ideasman42• 3 months ago

This was reported for Blender/Wayland, they might be able to use a fix like this: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/eaf63a35...

Orygin• 3 months ago

Yes that was the primary issue I had when testing Zed in the past. Keyboard layout not working properly, shortcuts being unusable or un-remappable. Sad to see it's still the case for 1.0

evilmonkey19• 3 months ago

Congrats to the Zed team! I really like your editor and it works surprisingly well, althought there are a few rough edges still with the python experience.

The debugger in Python FastAPI and mainly Django is not working as expected. Hopefully soon will be fixed.

JnnydevDude• 3 months ago

Congrats guys! I've been using zed since a few months ago, I would consider myself a "light" user but I do enjoy the experience. My only sour point would be the not so smooth integration with claude code. But I've learmt to live with it for now

LucasOe2• 3 months ago

Feature-wise, Zed is still far from VS Code, but for me, the change has been worth it for the performance increase alone. I'm really happy with Zed, and I think it has a bright future ahead. Congratulations on the 1.0 release!

mfontani• 3 months ago

Why does signing up through Github require the "act on behalf" permission?

That seems risky.

gpm4• 3 months ago

Still absolutely no support for screen readers?

Despite promising it for years and every comparable product having it.

luca-ctx• 3 months ago

Congrats Zed! GPUI has been a huge inspiration.

Whenever I think to myself “yikes that sounds too hard”, my next thought is “well, Zed team could probably do it”.

jryio3• 3 months ago

Zed is a durable piece of software, rather than the current trend of cheap disposable software. Regardless of whether humans or agents use a tool like this, durability is a benefit for both.

Congrats to the team

Pay084• 3 months ago

It has only been around for a few years.

jryio3• 3 months ago

They've been in development longer than the product has been public.

1-3 in stealth if I remember correctly

kevinfiol• 3 months ago

Congrats to the Zed team! I've been using a combination of Zed + Gram [1] (which I predict may lag behind this 1.0 release in features/fixes). They are both nice, fast editors. However, I switched to Sublime Text 4 again recently and... I'm surprised to see how much clunkier Zed feels than Sublime. I can't put my finger on it, but Sublime, although lacking in features, feels considerably more polished and performant.

[1] https://gram.liten.app/

dsego• 3 months ago

It's all in the details, eg. in sublime if you use the goto panel and highlight a file it will immediately show a preview, in zed you have to click on it, so you lose the snappy feeling.

Meekro5• 3 months ago

I really want to like Zed because they've clearly put so much work into it, but so far I've been sticking with Sublime. I have several large PHP projects that were started in the 2010-2020 era, and Zed will highlight and complain about all sorts of minor things that were standard PHP fare at the time: functions without return types, for example. My code (which works fine) looks like an ocean of red when I view it with Zed, and turning all those warnings off is not trivial.

For each kind of warning, I wish there was a button that said "don't warn me again about issues like this one in this project." Then I could keep the interesting warnings (like undeclared variable) and ditch the ridiculous ones.

WD-422• 3 months ago

You should be able to just turn off the language server. Go to the lightning bolt icon in the bottom bar, "Stop all servers" or just the PHP one lighting up your source code.

thinkingtoilet• 3 months ago

If you're using zed, couldn't you use AI to fix something like that? Those copy and paste type changes over a code base is something AI assistants are really good at.

Meekro5• 3 months ago

I could! I'd probably have to take it piece by piece, rather than telling an AI to edit hundreds of files in one epic session and hoping for the best. Even just reviewing a commit that large feels like it would be a bad use of time. Also, giving every variable a type (or using "mixed" everywhere), and giving every function a return type (more "mixed" or "void") would just make the code more verbose without any justification that I can see.

With Zed, I feel like I'm being dragged into a modern style guide that I never agreed to. It would be nicer if I could make it my own by turning off those parts that I disagree with and keeping the rest. I know this is technically possible, but they've certainly not made it easy.

giancarlostoro7• 3 months ago

I love Sublime, but I don't want to pay to upgrade from 3 to whatever version it is now, Zed is everything I wanted Sublime to be. Honestly, I wanted VS Code but fully native, and I feel like that's what I'm getting from Zed.

I feel like some people will be put off by all the "AI" mentioned by Zed, but you're sleeping on a top tier editor where you can just ignore the AI stuff if you don't want it. It's very high quality, and probably the reason I wont be renewing next year for JetBrains, unless JetBrains does something impressive, I thought by now they'd have a more native feeling IDE that handles most / any language instead of so many separate ones.

VS Code has gotten so bloated over the years. The gold standard of ST has spoiled me with simpler editors. Zed is the first time I felt like someone finally built an editor that is modern and has a rich set of features.

frizlab2• 3 months ago

Given the price and the fact it’s a WinRAR-style model, I really don’t mind ST being paid.

nicoburns3• 3 months ago

I love Sublime, but I don't want to pay to upgrade from 3 to whatever version it is now

I don't know what your financial situation is, but given that the upgrade is an $80 one off payment (a new license is $99), that it's a per-user license (not per-machine), and that there were 8 years between Sublime Text 3 (2013) and Sublime Text 4 (2021) (only major versions require a new license), I personally think it's very reasonably priced.

vunderba2• 3 months ago

I finally moved off Sublime a few months ago because I wanted something open source and stumbled on KDE/kate. It's been a perfect substitute.

https://github.com/kde/kate

Cthulhu_3• 3 months ago

The AI stuff was a lot more prominent in an earlier version, but they tweaked it a bit. It's the same with Warp forcing a login at first.

Jetbrains is a heavyweight IDE, but I'm not sure if the weight is worth the features it offers anymore, at least for the things I work on.

VS Code is also an IDE, but it's a bit easier on resources depending on what plugins you use and what you allow them to do. I've had combinations of plugins that caused my whole system to freeze up with too much memory usage because it spawned several Node processes each taking up multiple GBs of memory :/.

Cthulhu_3• 3 months ago

I also loved / want to love ST but it seems its ecosystem has collapsed, a lot of plugins haven't had an update in over 5 years.

nh26• 3 months ago

I tried Zed last month but found that it uses high CPU usage even when idle (up to 50% of 1 core of my i7-7500U).

This is even higher CPU usage than my vscode causes.

Sublime does not do that; in fact it has 0% CPU usage when idle:

    sudo strace -fyp "$(pidof sublime_text)"

shows that Sublime issues no syscalls when idle, as it should be.

(Note, you need to either unfocus it so that the caret stops flashing, or switch from fading caret to fixed / non-fading caret, otherwise it necessarily has to do syscalls to draw itself.)

Zed spams syscalls even when its screen is entirely still:

    strace -fyp "$(pidof zed-editor)"

In fact Zed makes 800 syscalls per second when completely idle and unfocused.

rolymath• 3 months ago

How much did you pay for doordash last month?

daemin4• 3 months ago

With Zed touting itself as an AI first editor, is it possible to completely disable all AI features so that you never have to look at the equivalent of a copilot icon ever again? I don't want to have to spend energy to actively ignore these things.

netcoyote• 3 months ago

I've tried a lot of editors, including Zed, and always come back to Sublime Text.

I use it every day. The #1 reason is because it never loses unsaved files (though I'm still working on breaking the habit of typing a few characters and pressing Ctrl-S). Column editing! Macros! Record/Playback! Configuration! Plugins! Responsiveness! Low resource utilization! Etc!

Why wouldn't I pay for it? I've bought all four versions. The author deserves to be paid.

I guess the question is: why don't you want to pay for it? Assuming here that you're a professional coder being paid a reasonable, US-equivalent salary. I understand not everyone fits that situation; plenty of us pirated software as starving college students / interns, folks in other countries don't get the same pay for the same work, etc.

We should all want to pay the authors of great software. We're on HN, which is a celebration of creating great code and awesome businesses.

"Pay him. Pay that man his money" - Teddy KGB

pjmlp2• 3 months ago

Eventually Zed devs will need to get money that isn't coming out of VCs...

hakunin3• 3 months ago

I'm also sticking with Sublime for many years, and at this point it feels like it is some kind of old man stubbornness (like George R.R. Martin using WordStar 4.0 type thing). I don't know why its ergonomics for me have been just unbeatable. I gave others (VSCode and Zed) good weeks and months of configuring them to my liking and using them exlusively, and always returned to Sublime. All the AI stuff just runs on the side in the terminal (iTerm2 for me, but checking in on Ghostty sometimes too, waiting on them to figure out their minimal text brightness feature).

maratc2• 3 months ago

As you mentioned iTerm, you should also check out TextMate, the thing that Sublime Text was inspired by.

frizlab2• 3 months ago

Interesting! I tried Zed too, and not knowing Sublime, I switched to it instead after a while…

I’m not sure why though. I do not have the issue you do, but Sublime feels better.

masklinn2• 3 months ago

My code (which works fine) looks like an ocean of red when I view it with Zed, and turning all those warnings off is not trivial.

Isn't it just the default configuration of whatever LSP zed defaults to for PHP?

So you should be able to either configure the LSP to avoid that or disable the LSP server entirely.

Meekro5• 3 months ago

Coming from Sublime, I'd never even heard of a Language Server when I first tried Zed. As I recall, disabling particular kinds of warnings required copy-pasting some pretty exotic incantations into my project config. All of it was poorly documented, and it felt like I was doing something nobody expected me to do. Instead, I should have been able to mouse over a particular warning and say "don't warn me again about things like this", at which point Zed should edit the project config for me.

Lalabadie• 3 months ago

IIRC, Zed uses PHPactor by default. It's a mess for Kirby projects as well.

Edit for clarity: I want to fully switch to Zed, I really like it and their vision for the editor. PHP issues are a hurdle, not a turnoff to me.

levkk• 3 months ago

This is just a language server problem. I'm sure you can configure whatever language server PHP is using to disable specific warnings, etc.

swiftcoder5• 3 months ago

I'm sure you can configure whatever language server PHP is using to disable specific warnings, etc

You may be able to do this by editing a language server-specific config file in whatever arcane syntax they decided to offer. But there isn't any editor support for configuring languages servers, so it's a bit of a lift for a newcomer who just wants to turn off some warnings

charcircuit• 3 months ago

Editors should take full responsibility of the user experience. The user should not have to care about the existence of language servers.

Meekro5• 3 months ago

I think the application should own its dependencies and its default config. In this case, it felt to me like no one had really looked at them.

Perz1val• 3 months ago

We use intelphense with vscode and it's only mildly red (zf1 mutant project). It also understands stubs from phpstorm. Default lsp for Zed is phpactor and it was just an inferior experience compared to intelephense (free) in vs code last time I tried. Now there's even a guide for adding intelephense to zed, but I'm yet to try it out.

sixtyj4• 3 months ago

Sidenote: Sublime remembers all tabs even those unsaved. (Software update deletes this memory.)

ben-schaaf• 3 months ago

Software update deletes this memory.

While there was a bug where the session was lost when updating, this was fixed years ago.

askedrelic• 3 months ago

I use Sublime as a scratchpad and never save anything, so this is an important feature for me. It's worked flawlessly for years.

I've tried Zed several times like this and it continues to lose data.

nh26• 3 months ago

Software update deletes this memory.

Are you sure? I believe Sublime preserves all your unsaved tabs even on update.

lthi747• 3 months ago

It just doesn’t play bice with PHP, I always wanted to uniform my stack before with vscode, now with zed. But PHPStorm always win.

It really there is no realy good ide or tools for php

dmix4• 3 months ago

Had the same experience with a rails project, it injected an LSP+linter we don't use in our project and it has really annoying to figure out how to disable it in a settings. Having to debug an editor's settings JSON the first time you use it is not a good UX, it should be optional to enable it instead of assuming we want aggressive on-save linting/autoformatting (that the repo doesn't even have configuration files).

sieve3• 3 months ago

I was using JetBrains for more than a decade. Then I got into Python as well and so was juggling between WebStorm, PyCharm, CLion and Intellij Idea. Zed has replaced the first three completely. Put the appropriate config file in project root for whichever LSP/linter/tool is running, and most of these warnings disappear.

Writing C in Zed is a wonderful experience. The LSPs surface errors in an manner that is very easy to view and edit.

My main issues with Zed are:

- Word-wrap: I prefer on-demand, and I haven't been able to figure out which setting triggers that. Of if it is even possible.

- Support for Devanagari and other scripts: I use it as a markdown editor to proofread old texts and it is inadequate for that purpose. Kate/Featherpad offers a superior experience for this, including the ability to zoom to see those visually difficult to parse conjunct consonants.

mosdl• 3 months ago

A bit confused - Idea supports pythong and ts/js, why the need for three?

renticulous• 3 months ago

Going forward there will be one version of Jetbrains IDE and clion, webstorm, etc will be all just plugins.

excusable• 3 months ago

For your fist point, is the command `editor: toggle soft wrap` what you want?

ibejoeb2• 3 months ago

I love Zed, but I hear you. It's a very fast and capable editor with lots of IDE features, but it's lacking comfortable ways of tuning it for specific projects. (This is a problem with every general purpose, everything-to-everyone kind of IDE versus stack "native" IDEs that are geared toward the one true way of developing for particular target.) The configuration file structure is arcane, and it certainly not clear what the boundaries are between language feature configuration, LSPs, built-in and third-party code quality tools, etc.

I eat the cost of configuring it manually when I start up something new because it's just not that big of deal, even when you're like me, working across myriad languages and frameworks and organization with varying standards. It's not ideal, but it's not deal-breaker.

I do wish that there was a better way to definitively set it up a particular way and know that it is doing what you want it to do. I want something like presets/profiles. If I'm working with typescript, I want to be able to set it up to use a specific version of tsc, eslint, prettier; I also want to be able to create a different one with biome; I want it to work correctly whether I have my source in the project root or in a sub directory or in a monorepo tree.

Fairness to Zed: it is difficult to support all of these permutations, but I do think that they ought to be able to do something better to abstract these things and make the reusable.

pverheggen2• 3 months ago

The standard approach these days is to have all of those declared in a config file somewhere in your project. That way, other contributors (and the CI) can lint/format consistently.

Even if it's for solo projects, it's nice that you don't have to update them in lockstep. As in, you revisit an older repo, you don't get bombarded with squiggly lines from your latest user profile, instead you can upgrade it at your leisure.

Nesco• 3 months ago

Same, I really want to like Zed but LazyVim covers my every need

throwatdem12311• 3 months ago

I still stick with Sublime because when I give them money they haven’t given me reason to believe they’re going to waste that money putting in AI slop features I don’t want.

progmetaldev• 3 months ago

I've worked with mostly PHP from this era, or at least developers that are from this era. The code still runs fine, and not having things like return types don't make the code less able to run (just not as easy to catch bugs).

I haven't used Zed, but can you choose the PHP version, or point to a PHP executable for warnings/errors? I know in VS Code, you point to the PHP executable for the version you are using, to catch errors. I haven't created a new PHP project in quite some time, but I did work on many older PHP projects, and never had this issue with VS Code. I suspect even if you don't go about it this way, there has to be configuration to specify what is and isn't an error vs. warning.

bigstrat20034• 3 months ago

Zed felt it had the right to download, install, and run node.js without any permission just to run some LSP (which I don't even use). When I mentioned it here, the devs said that they felt that was fine because their priority was to make things seamless for users such that they don't have to install the LSP manually. Sublime Text, on the other hand, has never installed anything I haven't explicitly asked it to.

I'm sticking with Sublime Text, as its developers actually respect boundaries on my computer.

hackermanai6• 3 months ago

Zed felt it had the right to download, install, and run node.js without any permission just to run some LSP (which I don't even use).

Yes. This is bad. Zed keeps installing and running all sorts of random background stuff. This should be an opt-in.

throwa3562622• 3 months ago

Zed seems to have many fans on HN.

But it is not for me. Multiple issues on Linux and high memory usage makes it a worse alternative to vscode and jetbrains.

Maybe it's better on OSX, but I dont use that anymore and why use an editor that treats your platform as a second class citizen?

dmix4• 3 months ago

On MacOS I never really felt there was a noticeable performance difference to using Zed vs VSCode. I still like the idea of it being Rust/GPU based but just like those GPU optimized terminals (Kitty, Alacritty, etc) the difference is usually pretty marginal for day to day stuff.

The only time VSCode gets slow is if you use a bunch of poorly written plugins, which hasn't been an issue for me in years. It's just like Chrome, chrome is extremely fast as a base but you can mess it up by not being careful with what you add to it.

I still plan to revisit Zed in another year or so once it progresses further, as I find it's still behind Cursor in many ways.

veber-alex• 3 months ago

This is exactly how I feel.

Cursor works just fine for me. I just don't have the incentive to learn a new tool even though I think Zed is cool.

sodacanner2• 3 months ago

I've personally found it uses significantly less memory on large projects than VSCode. VSCode has historically been nigh-unusable for me on Linux, it gets incredibly sluggish.

rstat12• 3 months ago

So I'm not so sure how you arrived at your conclusion of Zed having higher memory use than VSCODE but in testing just now that's not at all close to true.

Zed for me on my Linux machine opened to a massive C++ project (the Ladybird browser if you were curious) is (not including LSP or extension processes) using around 480MB of memory.

VSCode on the other hand with nothing open but a 20 line JSON file is (again not including any LSP or extension processes) using around 920MB of memory as reported by its own builtin task manager thing.

I suppose 480MB for a text editor might be a tad high but calling it worse than VSCode is a massive stretch.

throwa3562622• 3 months ago

If editors own memory usage is your main concern then you should use emacs or even better mg or vi.

The editor + its plugins + it's LSP server is what counts. I dont care if zed is written in rust and uses 400MB when it spawns a multi GB nodejs process when I work on my tiny golang project.

miguelraz6• 3 months ago

Hey, support engineer at Zed here.

If you have a reproducible setup for a bug we don't know about, we'd love to get a proper report of it.

You can schedule 15mins with me here: https://calendar.app.google/fyLQkqvne7EdvR8XA

Alex-Aachen• 3 months ago

Congratulations from me too — it quickly became my go-to editor (sorry, VSCode)

napolux• 3 months ago

Zed is one of my fav. piece of software of the last years :)

the__alchemist5• 3 months ago

I am posting this because I want to like and use Zed because it's so fast and responsive (Especially on my tablet, which JB turns into a space heater), and has neat functionality like being able to switch to whatever set of hotkeys you use. And I greatly respect the small binary/download size and fast install. From experimenting in Python and rust:

  - Doesn't highlight typos in variable, functions, class/struct names etc. Doesn't highlight rust borrow-check, invalid method etc errors.
  - Doesn't seem to understand either language beyond superficial syntax
  - "Go to definition" (Ctrl + B) Doesn't do anything
  - Doesn't show which versions are valid in Cargo.toml and pyproject.toml
  - No ability to move functions/classes/structs etc to different modules
  - Doesn't seem to understand rust feature gates
  - Doesn't seem to understand what fields a struct has, or params a function has, let a lone what types are valid in them.
  - Rename seems naive

Overall: It is taking a superficial view of the code base, and treating it more as text than a cohesive structure.

edit: Thank you very much for those who have pointed out I needed to disable restricted mode. This has added some introspection and in-line error handling. Some of my concerns are partially-mitigated. It seems when introspection and in-line editing/complete/data appears is inconsistent (But working in many cases), and I do not yet know what rules define this. Refactoring tools like moving are still absent. I will continue to use Zed on my tablet with the LSPs enabled, and observe.

TiredOfLife3• 3 months ago

Overall: It is taking a superficial view of the code base, and treating it more as text than a cohesive structure.

That is the part that makes the space heater

pastel87392• 3 months ago

It sounds like LSP isn’t working for you for some reason. Have you installed the extensions for those languages? These things are definitely supported via LSP

bouh• 3 months ago

Did you market the project as trusted? Récent update (à few month) requises the trust to reenable the analyses feature It took me a while to understand lol At Somme point I though that the parker were broken in my codebase xD

the__alchemist5• 3 months ago

I did not. Ty. I will look into doing this.

ForceBru• 3 months ago

I thought Zed was using tree-sitter: https://zed.dev/blog/syntax-aware-editing? Shouldn't it address all of these issues? Does tree-sitter not understand Python (basically the most popular language out there) and Rust "beyond superficial syntax"? I thought its whole point was that it understands everything about a language's syntax because it builds a concrete syntax tree?

arijun4• 3 months ago

TreeSitter is an amazing tool but is (purposefully) quite limited compared to an IDE--it doesn't even cross file boundaries, so go to definition is a non-starter. Zed uses LSPs like Rust Analyzer to fill that role.

dmit• 3 months ago

And I greatly respect the small binary/download size

The latest x86_64 Linux build is 136MB. (https://zed.dev/docs/linux#downloading-manually)

As for your list of grievances, they all seem to boil down to the respective LSPs not doing their job? Does Ctrl-Alt-l (lowercase L, not Shift+i) include the language's server in the context menu, and are there any errors reported for it if it does?

the__alchemist5• 3 months ago

Ctrl + alt + l in Zed is not causing any observable effect.

arijun4• 3 months ago

I suspect you may be operating in "Restricted mode," aka it doesn't know if it can trust the directory. In that mode, the main tools like Rust analyzer are quite restricted. All of your complaints should be resolved once Rust Analyzer/basedpyrite are up and running.

I do think they should have a more obvious warning that the current directory is untrusted, right now the little green warning in the corner is way too unobtrusive and will result in many people having the same issue as you.

the__alchemist5• 3 months ago

Nailed it! I will do some more experiments and report back.

nzoschke3• 3 months ago

Congrats!

My daily driver is Zed developing on SSH remote servers on exe.dev.

It's crazy to think of all the dev tools I've churned through over the last 18 months but these two feel sticky.

Zed has everything I need in a unified pane. File editor, terminal, agents, SSH remotes. And it's fast and intuitive

exe.dev is the first "dev container" I've ever *loved*. The remote sandbox means `dangerously-skip-permissions` is safe. Being on the internet with good private / shared / public access saves so much time.

I also use https://conductor.build/ and GitHub but this is starting to feel clunky compared hacking directly against online live reloading apps.

tikotus2• 3 months ago

I'm glad to hear the SSH remote editing is working well.

A lot of the time I'm developing on a remote server using VSCode Remote-SSH. I mostly love it. But! It consumes a lot of memory. And not only that. At times it gets stuck in some infinite loop or such, and ends up consuming all memory on the machine, preventing all traffic. Takes a few minutes for the OS to finally kill it, so I can get back in. I'm pretty this is happening due to large collections of symlinks (the subprocess eating up the memory is rg). But also just JavaScript editing at times launches up a bunch of ts-servers consuming everything and more.

This is super scary, if I'm poking around on the prod server.

Looking for alternatives. Zed is on my list.

Pyrodogg• 3 months ago

Do you happen to use the AutoImport extension? rg subprocess explosion seems related.

https://github.com/soates/Auto-Import/issues/127

eknkc• 3 months ago

I've been using the SSH remote editing on Zed too and it works great. No issues whatsoever.

apitman• 3 months ago

The VSCode remote ssh implementation is a bit concerning:

https://fly.io/blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/

Any idea if zed does things differently?

whalesalad2• 3 months ago

The only reason I remained on vscode for so long was the remote ssh editing as I also use a dev box (M2 air + dev box = multi-day battery life) but recently got sick and tired of the vscode instability and frequent need to blow away state / reinstall plugins after updates. When I saw Zed had an ssh dev equivalent I jumped ship and haven't looked back. Here is my theme if anyone is interested, https://github.com/whalesalad/dotfiles/blob/master/zed/whale...

tikotus2• 3 months ago

Actually, inspired by this, I went ahead and installed Zed to try it out. After a couple of hours of working remotely using Zed, I'm impressed. It actually works, and the experience feels great. Only little issue was that when I first opened the remote folder, I was greeted with a blank window. I thought it was stuck loading and was about to give up, but turns out I had to open the project panel myself to see the files. Otherwise, working fine so far! Memory-wise it's practically free.

EDIT: Scrap that. After a while it starts running at 100% CPU on my macbook. I'm editing a small, simple PHP remotely over SSH. I haven't yet tested if it only happens with remote editing. Too bad... Well, at least it didn't trash the server like VSCode.

EDIT: Logs showed it was trying to do some auto suggestions every few seconds, but failed due to missing credentials. Didn't seem like something that would eat up 100%, but after disabling all AI features (I'm glad there was an option for this), the problem disappeared, and I'm happy with Zed again.

mark_l_watson• 3 months ago

Using Zed with ssh is an interesting idea. I spend a lot of time mosh/ssh to VPSs, then running 'emacs -nw' locally on the server. This is a great setup since I love Emacs, but I will give Zed/ssh a try. Thanks.

davidw• 3 months ago

Emacs has had this feature forever, and it works pretty well.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Re...

chrisweekly• 3 months ago

Thank you for this comment! exe.dev is what I've been seeking without quite knowing it. excited to dig into it.

c-hendricks• 3 months ago

I'll have to check it out again. Last time I tried, the got integration didn't work when connecting to a remote SSH server, and ports couldn't be mapped at runtime.

Had to shut everything down, list the port, and then reconnect. A big pain when other tools just automatically figure out what needs to be forwarded, or just let you specify arbitrary ports at runtime.

nate• 3 months ago

"online live reloading apps" => trying to get my head around this workflow. so the disk is shared across these? so do you still have the problem of say running a "main" version of an app, and it's weird experimental version of that same app? because they still have to live in different folders/worktrees? that's where I get stuck a little trying to enable things like this for others. right now, I've got people a system we can spin up N "vms". but it's not persistent storage if the vm goes away. it's whatever version exists in their GitHub branch. hopefully if they hack the vm app they commit and push back to the repo.

nzoschke3• 3 months ago

Yes I’m trusting exe.dev disks and persistence.

For many apps the weird experimental version is all there is. Call it vibe coding or experiments or non-critical tools. These may not even have a GitHub repo. I trust local git and the exe.dev disks.

Then for serious apps the above is the same shape for development branches. Spin up a VM in a few seconds with the code checked out and running online and editable over an SSH mount is the magic.

Then that turns into a PR on GitHub and a normal review then CI/CD to staging and prod takes over.

huijzer• 3 months ago

How does exe.dev differ from VPS + Caddy + some subdomain on a domain you already own?

For auth one can use Caddy and basic auth. Yes it takes a bit of work but it isn’t that bad. Plus zero subscription costs if your VPS is a Raspberry

fowlie• 3 months ago

Yes it takes a bit of work but it isn’t that bad.

Agreed, it takes a few hours to set up everything. But just did it with Claude the other day, and I was up and running in no time! :-)

nzoschke3• 3 months ago

I have a Hetzner box with Caddy too.

The difference with exe.dev is multiple VMs. I have over 20 now with isolated apps, branches of the same app, etc.

mrklol• 3 months ago

Personally the main advantage is to simply spin up new ones with the same setup. You can also do that by yourself but imo it includes way more managing and time compared to exe

user3939382• 3 months ago

What you really want is to build a Docker container and wait for ECS deployments between iterations.

vaishnavsm• 3 months ago

ECS really isn't scalable. imo a multi-account EKS cluster is a bare minimum. It's what I use for my todo list app, and it works great!

Biganon• 3 months ago

I wish it had a built-in SQL browser, in PyCharm and PHPStorm I find that very convenient. I find standalone ones disappointing.

kettlez• 3 months ago

Congrats on 1.0!

Though it's a pretty big bummer to see that extension improvements were removed from the roadmap.

shevy-java• 3 months ago

Zed is also an AI-native editor.

My editor is dumb. No AI anywhere.

The only unusual thing is that I use ruby as primary glue language to everything, so in a way that editor (no longer maintained, similar to Linus' editor) is just a wrapper over ruby as such, and functionality in these scripts.

I have also found that it is not the editor that slows me down, but the need to have to think. This is also one reason why I try to make the specification as useful as possible. For instance, in one project that I use to compile everything from source, I use a ton of simple, mostly smallish .yml files that describe everything - allowed keys, allowed values, settings that are mostly just a pointer to where to fetch the source, how, how to compile it then and so forth. The ruby code then is mostly just a glue over that data. And that approach, while very simple, works quite well. Users can also modify settings, by modifying the .yml file or via commandline flags. And if need be, I could also use and populate a SQL database with that data (but for the most part, yaml actually suffices; I don't understand why people are so upset about yaml, and then only point at use cases where folks use mega-nested yaml files. These guys don't understand why simplicity is a benefit; admittedly yaml is not a perfect format either, I notice this when I have a long .yml file and then some forgotten ":" or "," due to manual copy/paste error, then it takes me a few seconds to notice what's wrong).

maherbeg2• 3 months ago

Zed has a "turn off all AI features" checkbox if you want to use that

post-it2• 3 months ago

recreates makefiles from scratch
"These guys don't understand why simplicity is a benefit"

I'm not really criticizing, clearly your system works for you. Ironically, as I've been using AI more, I've been rolling more systems that work for me instead of relying on existing ones. It's very freeing.

egonschiele• 3 months ago

Congrats to the Zed team! Great to see people continuing to work on important tooling like editors these days.

arpadav• 3 months ago

daily driver has been zed ever since they introduced helix more. still super excited to see how far it can go. congrats to them

chamomeal4• 3 months ago

They added "gw" (amp jump) in 1.1.2 preview! It's just amazing. It was the last thing I needed before totally switching over lol

Fervicus2• 3 months ago

Sorry, I am not going to use and get attached to a code editor that is VC funded. You know the enshittification will happen sooner or later.

0123456789ABCDE• 3 months ago

it's also gpl v3 licensed, you can just take a copy, won't cost you shit

Fervicus2• 3 months ago

No thanks.

stuaxo• 3 months ago

I use zed as a quick editor for stuff using usaved files.

I don't like how it loses the session when I reopen it randomly (and not randomly every upgrade).

burnto• 3 months ago

Thank you, Zed team, for creating Zed. It’s clearly a labor of love, and I really want Zed to work for me. It seems like a quality project, it’s fast, and the base editor is easy to use.

I gave it weeks though, and the surrounding UI just never clicked for me. The various AI panels are confusing, the global search is awkward, and something about the type rendering just didn’t ever look right (maybe I’m hallucinating this?). I use VS Code only grudgingly, but I do think its ergonomics are actually pretty reasonable. I came from Sublime before that. I’ll keep trying Zed, and I hope you succeed.

giancarlostoro7• 3 months ago

Congrats to the Zed team for building the best modern editor I have ever used. I subscribe to the monthly plan just to give you guys the funding you need, even if my funding is a tiny drop in the bucket. I always wanted a feature rich alternative to Sublime Text that can run anywhere and do basically anything I need from it. I've use JetBrains IDEs for years (been subscribed annually since 2017), but since Zed I havent really opened any of those IDEs in a long time, other than maybe Rider but that's due to C# nuances I needed to work with.

sudb• 3 months ago

it's now my go-to for when I need to wrangle basically any text file manually - has handled everything I can throw at it (some of which has crashed other editors -looking at you Cursor/VSCode)

asyncze2• 3 months ago

Zed and VSCode can handle about the same file sizes afaik, with Zed just slightly better. Sublime Text etal still beats both.

joefitzgerald• 3 months ago

Zed really is delightful to use. I haven't had any need to open VSCode in over a year. Extending it has been relatively simple, even as someone who doesn't know Rust well.

The Zed team seem to have really learned their lesson on performance from the Atom days, because it's very performant. @nathansobo, @maxbrunsfeld, @as-cii and the team, congrats!

foxylad• 3 months ago

I only open VSCode when I need to resolve a conflicted merge. The Zed interface is basically diff2, and doesn't show character-level differences.

Apparently Zed was working on a better diff viewer, but that seems to have been shelved.

k_bx2• 3 months ago

Never thought of Zed as Sublime replacement, but now that you've mentioned – why not? I use Sublime only as blazingly fast temp note taking that doesn't lose them on exit, but I see Zed fits the job perfectly. One less close product hopefully!

giancarlostoro7• 3 months ago

Sadly this is how I use Sublime as well, though not anymore, on work systems the new Notepad app has tabs finally, and can do exactly that...

NamlchakKhandro2• 3 months ago

yep that lycra wearing bike rider from North Sydney doesn't need more of your money

baggachipz• 3 months ago

Ever thought about Heynote? https://heynote.com/ I love it.

for1nner• 3 months ago

I was downloading it "just to see," but your comment is roughly a carbon copy of my own IDE/editor usage history, so 1) ooo spooky deja vu and 2) here's hoping I feel the same way you do.

bbor• 3 months ago

Can you speak to your feelings on Zed's customizability/extensibility? Zed is shiny and impressive, but Sublime's rich ecosystem of python plugins is hard to beat...

EDIT: Tho if sublime wasn't already "doing everything [you] need", maybe you aren't familiar with the plugin ecosystem!

giancarlostoro7• 3 months ago

I used Sublime Text since ST2, and bought into ST3. It just felt stale compared to Visual Studio or any JetBrains IDE. I loved the speed, but at least back when I was using it, LSP wasn't as big and so I didn't have that at my fingertips.

With Zed all the high quality features are OOTB. For example, with Python they run some high quality linters out of the box, I don't even have to think about setting anything up, I don't even thing I have installed a single plugin for Zed outside of themes. It's a very batteries included text editor.

nsm2• 3 months ago

Not the OP, but for me ST can't be beat in terms of how easy it is to write a plugin. It uses Python (Zed is Rust). Plugins generally auto-reloads. If extensibility is important to you, ST is still the way to go.

NamlchakKhandro2• 3 months ago

sublime text is a joke with regards to LSP

It doesn't even respect local project dependencies

Plus the whole "holy than thou" attitude of python devs in general just sucks tbh

Python isn't as great as you think it is.

chrysoprace2• 3 months ago

I've always thought of Zed as a good Sublime Text alternative. I can tinker with and potentially break my Neovim config, but I'll have Zed as a backup for when I need to do a quick edit. Their Vim mode is the best I've used outside of JetBrains (or Vim itself).

TonyStr• 3 months ago

If you break your Neovim config, you can always just run `nvim --clean`

sev_verso2• 3 months ago

I've been using the editor since the early days and have always been a fan of its visual look and feel, so I was pretty happy to see its UI library open sourced.

I wish GPUI could become the go-to Rust UI library and not just an editor backend.

For that, a couple of changes would be highly desirable: being able to switch the GPU backend from Metal to wgpu (so it could be mixed with vello, for instance), and the ability to integrate into an existing event loop like egui allows you to. If this were easy to do, I would switch from egui in a heartbeat.

jenadine• 3 months ago

What's so good about GPUI?

foresto2• 3 months ago

I haven't used it, but it caught my attention when I read the Text Rendering section of this post:

https://zed.dev/blog/videogame#text-rendering

It looks like their approach could nicely solve a problem that's shared by almost every new GUI toolkit I've tried: text looks terrible, or at least out of place when surrounded by applications built with the desktop's native toolkit.

sev_verso2• 3 months ago

Clean and polished design, concise Tailwind-style API, and last but not least sustained 120 FPS across complex UI.

airstrike• 3 months ago

There's never going to be one GUI library to rule them all, but I find iced the best Rust library at the moment and likely for the foreseeable future.

foresto2• 3 months ago

I wish GPUI could become the go-to Rust UI library and not just an editor backend.

In case you find it useful, I recently stumbled upon this project:

https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component

"UI components for building fantastic desktop applications using GPUI."

bayesnet2• 3 months ago

I took a look at gpui-component a while ago when assessing GPUI for a project I was working on. IANAL but was dissuaded because it's almost certainly not compliant with the Zed license--gpui-component "borrows" gpui code patterns lifted straight from the main zed repo, which therefore must be AGPL/GPL (unlike the gpui-only which is Apache IIRC). Caveat emptor (caveat user?).

bayesnet2• 3 months ago

I'm beating a dead horse here but the challenge is a11y. Chromium wrappers get a11y for free; bespoke UI frameworks must implement accesskit (or something) which is a lot of work and something that (imo sadly) many small teams decide is not worth the investment.

combyn8tor• 3 months ago

They seem to have stopped developing GPUI (or maybe just the public version)?

One of the staff forked it into a community edition https://github.com/gpui-ce/gpui-ce

Does anyone have more details about the state of it?

pier25• 3 months ago

I'm loving it.

Just opened my current TS/TSX project and everything is working as expected.

Performance is fantastic. I used Sublime for a decade and always missed its native performance after switching to VSCode due to needing first class Svelte, Vue, or Astro support.

The only thing that bothered me is that it enabled the Tailwind LSP even though I'm not using TW and I couldn't stop it. Had to disable that LSP completely in the settings:

    "language_servers": [
      "...",
      "!tailwindcss-language-server"
    ]

mikepurvis• 3 months ago

I'm trying it out, looks pretty decent.

For better or worse, my current workflow is to do most things through WSL on Windows 11. VSCode supports running the editor natively on Windows, but then having an agent or something inside WSL that lets me remote control what's going on there. Does Zed do anything similar?

Currently I'm just access the workspace in Zed via Windows Explorer, but I wonder if that's going to kneecap some of the integrations.

EDIT: nm, Zed supports exactly the same kind of remote editor session, via hamburger -> File -> Open Remote

johnfn2• 3 months ago

I hate to dismiss Zed for such a stupid reason, but I have tried to use Zed seriously many times and every time I stop because I can't get over the theme. I've tried basically every single theme I can find that is reasonably popular and they are all equally poor. VSCode and Cursor have vastly better default themes.

Does anyone have any suggestions here? I would love to use Zed more.

mixmastamyk• 3 months ago

Does it really not let you change the colors? Am very unhappy at the modern trend to allow only canned themes.

KomoD3• 3 months ago

It does, you can make custom themes or use ones made by the community. https://zed.dev/extensions?filter=themes

xpe10• 3 months ago

What's your favorite theme, maybe we can point you to something close? If you have any special needs or usability issues (colorblindness is common), that's probably relevant too.

I use the default theme + the Catppuccin Icon Theme : https://github.com/catppuccin/zed-icons

johnfn2• 3 months ago

I really like the default Cursor theme - One Dark is also OK.

jordyjor• 3 months ago

I use "Melange Light". Feels simple and clean, if you like light themes at all.

matternous• 3 months ago

You could just use the VSCode theme in Zed.

Torlan2• 3 months ago

I’ve tried it multiple times, but the performance issues on different Macs are too significant to ignore. I appreciate responsive UI, but I also prioritize sufficient battery life.

iknowstuff4• 3 months ago

Interesting because it tripled my mac’s battery life vs cursor

xpe10• 3 months ago

Which Macs, hardware, OS's? What's your baseline comparison?

Torlan2• 3 months ago

Air M2, MBP 16 2019 on Intel. Created bug report where I can’t even use it on Intel sometimes because of 100% GPU usage. On M2 it’s not so bad, but still see 50% GPU usage where other editors with also smooth scrolling are much less GPU hungry, even PyCharm. Just search “CPU” or “GPU” in their issues on GH, there are a lot of them.

iainctduncan• 3 months ago

Serious question, is there any advantage to Zed if one does not use LLM assisted coding?

swiftcoder5• 3 months ago

It is somewhat faster and a fair bit less memory hungry than vscode?

TeddyDD• 3 months ago

It's normal text editor like VSCode or Sublime. It's fast. The out of the box experience is good (auto configured LSP, tree sitter etc.)

XiS• 3 months ago

Strange, I'm on 2.4.1 already. Oh wait...this isn't about ZFS.

Sorry, can't help it, every time I see Zed i think of the ZFS Event Daemon

obeavs• 3 months ago

What an abysmal series of top comments. These guys created a phenomenal product using novel technology, which will only continue to improve. Great work to the Zed team.

rtaylorgarlock• 3 months ago

^^the #1 reason I limit my daily time allowance for HN

xvedejas• 3 months ago

Maybe this wasn't true an hour ago, but all the top 3 comments right now look supportive (if I am to count yours), and the next few are just mildly critical.

electroly• 3 months ago

FWIW, the top comments at the time of my comment (one hour after yours, two hours after the article was posted) are all complimentary. You commented one hour after the article was posted; it's worth waiting a bit for the comment voting to shake out.

dooglius• 3 months ago

Further discussion from dang on the "contrarian dynamic": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601

john_strinlai• 3 months ago

yeah, all forms of criticism, all feature suggestions, any comparisons to other products/solutions, etc. should be outright banned by HN. if you aren't praising the thing, get out!

(do you comment this same type of thing on github, microsoft, apple, etc. posts? all of these comments seem absolutely tame compared to the vitriol in those threads. most top comments here are supportive. most of the negative ones are constructive.)

shimman3• 3 months ago

Did Zed ever answer their code of conduct violation?

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604

wslh• 3 months ago

I think the Zed team's enthusiasm adds a lot of momentum to the product, on top of their indisputable engineering capabilities.

madibo3156• 3 months ago

I haven't read them because they're now buried, but whatever those top comments said can't be bad enough to warrant your vitriol. Abysmal means bad, not pessimistic. It's inappropriate for the (currently) top comment to be casting such judgment in its preface.

I don't think overly-opinionated meta-comments are inherently bad, but I don't come to this site for them. I don't even think your comment is bad; I'm mad that this is what the people of HN have decided is the most important remark on the matter. It tells me something unfortunate.

EGreg2• 3 months ago

I hope HN can appreciate what a game changer (and paradigm shift) Zed can be.

To the Zed developers: CONGRATULATIONS! I have been following your project with great interest since your speed demo years ago. And since it’s AI-first, I’m interested to see how we can integrate it with https://safebots.ai (Safebots, Safebox, and Safecloud).

I would love to see how we might be able to increase the safety of agents in Zed, use local models like Qwen/Deepseek and we also have Grokers which can turn any codebase into a graph with tree-sitter and help your agents far more than RAG and similarity search (https://grokers.ai/deck.pdf)

What’s the best way of getting in touch? (If you want, my profile has a way of emailing me).

SEJeff• 3 months ago

https://graphify.net and trail of bits’s trail mark https://github.com/trailofbits/trailmark

Both use treesitter and create knowledge graphs for llm use. It results in way less tokens spent as well.

MoonWalk3• 3 months ago

Maybe they'd be better if the title were informative.

VerifiedReports2• 3 months ago

Yep. The intentionally obscure titles on here are just inexcusable.

coldtea7• 3 months ago

What exactly is phenomenal and novel about Zed? I've tried it a couple of times for a week or so, didn't see the point, and moved on every time.

And I'm not luddite swearing by vi or something, I use VSCode and Idea, and have used Sublime for many years, Xcode on/off for some Obj-C/Swift dev, Eclipse for 5-6 years in the 2000s, and vim for everything cli/lightweight since forever.

Is the GUI tech what's supposed to be novel? I couldn't care less about that backend in my everyday editor use as long as the editor is fast enough. Which on modern hardware, even Idea is.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good editor still.

ricardobeat2• 3 months ago

Currently on this machine: using 900MB of RAM, including all language servers, with nine open projects - that is pretty phenomenal. VSCode could barely keep one open with the same memory.

The perception of 'fast' is very subjective. To me having a smooth, jitter-free UI, low input latency, and instant startup, all matter a lot.

feelamee• 3 months ago

I heard that Zed has very impressive collaboration features. I tried them a little and they really look well (like discord, but directly in editor). But this was very superficial look

theteapot2• 3 months ago

VSCode extensions and the ecosystem is a security time-bomb. Zed looks to be doing things better.

OccamsMirror3• 3 months ago

Maybe they shouldn't be releasing it with anti-consumer terms of service? People's objections are legitimate. Where else should they be discussed?

neya• 3 months ago

From what I can see, one of the top comments (at the time of this comment) is worried about legalese claiming to have "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable" access to your source code. I think it is very fair criticism to not want to give away your source code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953501

otabdeveloper42• 3 months ago

I agree, the toxic trolls focusing on minor nitpicks like a license agreement that allows your text editor to steal all your source codes really harshes the vibes.

freehorse5• 3 months ago

There is this big recurrent misunderstanding with zed's ToS that produces some extreme, misinformed reactions. Zed (the ide) is open source ("GPL v3 with Apache 2.0 for certain components"). The ToS are only applicable for the services they provide when you subscribe for an account and use them [0]. Some people read the ToS, think they apply just for the editor, and think that zed is stealing your source code and whatnot, because it would indeed be weird to have these ToS for just editing stuff locally, without any of the additional services provided. However, if one actually reads the ToS instead of nitpicking a paragraph, it is very clear what it is about.

Any ToS for a company that you send data to process includes similar terms that just allow it to process the data as you are expecting them to in order to provide these services. Eg for the AI tab-completion, they process part of your source code on their servers and provide a tab-completion suggestion ("derivative data"). Some people are evidently either unfamiliar about how these things work or about the data-related legalese terms used (barring any bad intentions assumed). If anything, paragraph 4.2 [1] makes it clear that any data output is owned by the user (and not by zed). This whole discussion made me read the terms and (apart from the arbitration thing imo, though not uncommon), I couldn't see any kind of dark pattern or issue.

I like zed a lot, it works great, I am definitely cautious about the fact that they have received VC money which holds me from getting "all-in", but criticism that is based on misunderstandings or on obviously factually wrong arguments is not very useful.

[0] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/50568#issuecomm... (could be some better source than a github comment but it has been repeated many times)

[1] https://zed.dev/terms#42-customers-ownership-of-output

jrm4• 3 months ago

Looking at Zed (and Brave in another thread) I'm really firming up this idea that the "big funded private company model" for essential tech software is just most often idea. They don't know how to add features without also adding bloat and BS.

This is why I say Docker is the only real "success" story here. And note, I mean a success story for the users; Docker tries real hard to enshittify and fails, and that's good.

MichaelNolan• 3 months ago

I tried zed sometime ago, and the limiting factor was devcontainer support. It looks like they’ve made some progress there https://zed.dev/docs/dev-containers

oliverjanssen• 3 months ago

Yes, same. This feature is a must have - especially when running tools like Claude Code etc.

bachmeier• 3 months ago

Zed is a great editor. I think they have done an excellent job and hope they are successful. That said, I do not feel compelled to switch to it. For a pure text editing experience, I've always felt most comfortable with Geany. When I want to extend the editor, I reach for Emacs. AFAICT, extending Zed means using Rust, and that's never going to happen.

inickt3• 3 months ago

I'd love to see the Alacritty terminal backend swapped out with libghostty (or more likely libghostty-rs). The work Mitchell is doing with Ghostty and the approach Zed has taken seem super aligned.

And Mitchell definitely seems to want to make Alacritty an easy target for conversion, he was just talking about being open to help support Warp with it: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2049159764261925005

avarun• 3 months ago

Looks like Mitchell said he's already on it https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2049514540505964549

inickt3• 3 months ago

He gave me a quick response, should have checked back before posting here

arijun4• 3 months ago

What is Ghostty's advantage over Alacritty?

inickt3• 3 months ago

I think Mitchell outlined his vision for libghostty pretty well here: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming

Alacritty is already pretty performant (relative to a lot of the other terminal emulators), but my read is Ghostty has been going hard over performance/standards/protocols (like Kitty).

maxnoe• 3 months ago

One would be support for ligatures

iammrpayments• 3 months ago

The maintainer doesn’t have bad temper.

submeta• 3 months ago

Zed is a very polished and nice product. I tried hard to use it, especially when I decided to migrate away from Emacs. But NeoVim gives me everything I was looking for in Zed: Speed, a polished UI, quick startup, not overloaded. So between Zed and NeoVim I decided for the latter. I use Neovide in GUI and neovim in terminal. I don’t use AI alongside nvim, but claude code helps me configure my config file in lua. So my neovim has a 10k lines config spread of several files. It is my simple text editor with super fast movements, and it can become a full blown programmable interface for my Obsidian, for my journal writing, for coding, writing documentation. It can be as complex as I need it to be. And it’s super fast.

poetril• 3 months ago

I quite like Zed, I've consistently driven it for months at a time. But there are two things that add enough friction that over that month or so I end up bailing back to one of my other editors (vscode/neovim). The search experience being a new tab with no sidebar option and the diff viewer being a multibuffer view with no option to see the entire contents of a file you are diffing.

That being said, I love the software and will continue to check back on it with the hopes that it sticks one day. Congrats on the 1.0!!

tacitusarc• 3 months ago

These are also two of my primary gripes.

There has been substantial improvement, but the search and symbol follow UX is really bad. Hoping the fix that.

5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV• 3 months ago

Not trying to promote too much I don't even get anything out of it, but I've been using a slopfork for a while now and it's great. A few flaws obviously since slopped over the weekend, but it's good enough.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/26560#issuecomm...

kidsil• 3 months ago

Over the years I’ve tried plenty of fast, "snappy" code editors, but always found myself returning to Sublime.

Zed is the first one that got me to actually migrate. It does a great job of staying out of your way. Search and replace works seamlessly across multiple files with regex, and the extremely fast editing experience feels immediately familiar if you’re coming from Sublime. Being open source also gives confidence in its long-term viability.

Kudos to the team building Zed.

xpe10• 3 months ago

Here is a top-level comment for people who want to post the things they wish Zed had.

Request: please be sincere if you claim "the one thing that keeps me from using Zed is X" ... because let's face it, there is probably more than one thing. Editor ecosystems are complex beasts, and it is ok if people are slow to switch, but the "one thing" claims are rarely credible to me. Anyhow, such comments are rarely consistent with how human nature works. People find rationalizations, and that's fine. It would just be nice if people were a little more self-aware. Changing editors is harder for some people more than others.

My suggestion: if you want to make Zed better for your use case, please smart by explaining who you are as a developer, what you've used, what your expectations are. And be intellectually honest about the last time you've made a big change to your development workflow. End soapbox.

xpe10• 3 months ago

I wish Zed had built-in APIs for extension developers to allow for more customizable text transformations. In particular, I want to write tools that have more control over what a buffer displays. Imagine a Markdown extension that gives Zed something close to the WYSIWG experience of Obsidian. To make this happen, I think something like a customizable presentation layer to transform the buffer's contents and adjust cursor movement would be a great start. Vim has a 'conceal' feature that could serve as an inspiration or reference point. [1]

I have no affiliation with Zed, though I have applied to work there, so I'm hardly neutral. I've been an enthusiastic user for probably two years. I don't expect perfect alignment with what I want, and sometimes the team doesn't respond how I would like with particular issues. But man, in a pretty suboptimal world right now, Zed is an amazing thing to have: open source, regular updates, extensions, nice settings. In the past I've used BBEdit, Eclipse, TextEdit, Sublime, Emacs, VS Code, Jetbrains, Helix. Zed is my favorite by far, probably because of the latency. It is an intangible feeling that just clicked immediately for me.

Personally, as a mostly independent developer/researcher, I go through bursts of re-evaluating my tools. To give some context about my newer tools over the last few years: Ghostty, Nushell, Podman, Nix, Mochi, Monodraw, Swish (window manager for macOS), Base (macOS SQLite editor by Menial), LM Studio, (probably obviously) Claude Code. So for a "seasoned" developer, I'm probably more open to new tools than most? Oh, totally off-topic but I think some of the lesser appreciated new open source tools / formats / conventions are: KDL (https://kdl.dev), Typst, and (evaluating) Djot, Cocogitto (Conventional Commits, took me long enough).

[1] https://alok.github.io/2018/04/26/using-vim-s-conceal-to-mak...

8note4• 3 months ago

alternatively:

what do i actually need from a text editor that i dont already have? Sublime's killer feature was column editing, and vscode's was kinda typescript and kinda language servers.

... and why do i want an actual text editor as the primary view, vs a side view to agent TUI? from what Ive experienced, the editor is now a secondary interface to the text, rather than the primary one

if i am picking up a new editor, i think i want it to be focused on how to better understand llm outputs, and how to give really structured feedback without having to write a ton of imprecise text.

how does zed make it easy to have agents build several proposals for a solution, and help me choose which one is actually the best?

light_cone• 3 months ago

I use two text manipulation plugins in sublime text all the time. I did not manage to have the functionality in zed, which made be renounce to use it:

- Evaluate, a plugin that evaluates the selections as python expressions and replaces them by their respective results. I added "iota" as a variable in the evaluation context, that gives me the current selection index (like iota in go). With that, so many math or text manipulations can be done in bulk.

- Alignment, to align all my cursor into a vertical column by adding spaces.

aranw• 3 months ago

I really like Zed but it's most recent big changes to Git integration and Parallel Agents has forced me to disable both of those features as the way they work just didn't suit me and my workflow

carlcortright• 3 months ago

Tried it yesterday. HUGE fan of how the agents work and how the editor feels.

insane_dreamer• 3 months ago

Well done. I've been using Zed pretty much full-time for about 6 months now, and am happy with the experience.

There are still a few things PyCharm does better (debugging, for one), but overall Zed is very good and I haven't used PyCharm in months.

I still use CC in the terminal instead of inside Zed, and lazygit for reviewing git changes and other git actions (though Zed now does a decent job of the basics).

bishabosha• 3 months ago

I like Zed but as a user of Scala it is not open-enough of a platform to be useful beyond small projects.

e.g. its "run" gutter icons rely on context free grammar queries, but of course Scala allows to define main methods via inheritance from a class. Zed's extension api should let the extension report entry points via whatever internal mechanism it needs.

This also goes for the various testing libraries in Scala that because only tree-sitter queries are supported therefore need a custom pattern match for each library as they have their own mechanisms, rather than letting the extension provide its own test harness (easily handled by build tools automatically) - Zed should provide something similar to VS Code's Test Explorer and Testing API interface.

Also extensions can't add new UI, so you are stuck fitting to the recipe Zed team provides for you to plug into, and often enough this is not satisfactory.

xpe10• 3 months ago

Also extensions can't add new UI, so you are stuck fitting to the recipe Zed team provides for you to plug into, and often enough this is not satisfactory.

What did you have in mind for "new UI"? I'm hoping to see basic text transformation myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950471

nu11ptr• 3 months ago

Have they made a way to move those tiny icons in the lower left (aka "activity bar") to larger icons on the upper left like VsCode? As it stands, I can barely see them on my 4K screen and selecting them with a mouse cursor is like a pixel hunting contest. No go for me until they offer a way to change that. Beyond that it seems like a decent editor, but if I can't switch modes back and forth, that is a deal breaker.

UPDATE: Looks like they haven't yet, bummer, and doesn't seem to have much traction either. They redirect to discord, but AFAIK that doesn't have a way to make a feature request directly?

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/47593

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/48098

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/47626

roryokane• 3 months ago

While larger icons might be ideal, note that (according to those linked discussions) those icons also have associated keyboard shortcuts, which are displayed when you hover over each icon. If you memorized those shortcuts, you would no longer have to “pixel hunt” to switch modes.

travisgriggs• 3 months ago

I'm rather happy with Zed.

I use it for Elixir and ansible stuff. I may eventually be open to using it instead of PyCharm for python and/or Nova for C.

If there's one area I still feel that Zed lets me down is in pane management. Maybe I need to just learn more key shortcuts. But I spend a bit of time "managing" the secondary panes and having to switch back and forth between outline, files, search. I'm not sure what the solution is. Just wish the secondary panes weren't a scarce resource that had to be mux'ed betwixt.

I really like(d) the agent integration, but we're currently experimenting with Claude Code Desktop, and I really miss not having the tight integration. My guess is that I'm going to switch back to using the Pro subsidized version. I was getting by with ~$40-$50 a month. Now the company is paying $125 for Claude Team premium seat, and it's a lesser experience.

molf• 3 months ago

Just tried it out and it works great and is really fast! It's a breath of fresh air compared to VS Code. Lots of other editors are fast, but this seems feature complete as well as fast.

Migrating from VS Code was also super simple and integrations with AI assistant seem to just work.

I can definitely appreciate the engineering work that went into it. Loving it so far! Thanks!

exographicskip• 3 months ago

Been following zed for at least a year now.

Tried switching multiple times from vscode but it's just not feature complete for my use cases. Off top:

- no expanding tabs to fill the window until another one is clicked

- file picker hides .gitignored files

- vertical terminal tabs would be nice

- restart doesn't automatically load the previous window (most recent project)

- while faster/more responsive than vscode on large codebases, still pretty heavy compared to its AI-averse fork, gram; thus I can't use it on the macbook neo

Until some/all of that is improved, it's just uncanny valley territory with no particular killer feature to migrate. Appreciate all the work they've put into it (especially remote ssh parity!) though and like what they're doing in broad strokes

athorax• 3 months ago

1. I'm pretty sure setting "Maximum Tabs" does what you want, but not positive.

2. Uncheck "Hide .gitignore" setting and it won't do this.

3. Agreed

4. This is configured in the "Restore on Startup" setting (I think you want "Last Session")

tuzemec• 3 months ago

3. There's "workspace: new center terminal" command that opens terminal as a normal tab.

ryanmcbride• 3 months ago

I feel like the last time I looked at Zed it didn't support windows, looks like it does now but it sure scared windows defender.

outlore• 3 months ago

Great product! Would love to see some search (tree view) and git (staged vs unstaged diffs) improvements in the future!

wxw• 3 months ago

Congrats! I just started playing with Zed last week. Changelog notes, for the curious: https://zed.dev/releases/stable/1.0.0.

computerbuster• 3 months ago

Congratulations to the team, I've been on Zed exclusively for a couple of years and it has been nothing but great on macOS and Linux.

teekert• 3 months ago

I like Zed, I had only a few issues switching from VSCode. And I love the responsiveness of the crew in the repo! Keep it up, you're my default!

chwzr• 3 months ago

I would really love to see an iOS remote control app for zed. I am using it on throw away microvms via ssh. Would love to have the zed server running there, control agents via phone and occasionally use my Mac to connect to the server and use the desktop app as normal for review and hand coding

rsanek• 3 months ago

Ever since agents came out I had been lost trying to figure out what I should replace my heavy IntelliJ with. I switched fully over to Zed once they shipped the git graph in stable [0] and couldn't be happier. Congrats on 1.0!

[0] https://zed.dev/releases/stable/0.231.1

ethin• 3 months ago

This editor sounds awesome, but it's sad they didn't make the UI accessible.

prinny_• 3 months ago

I have been following zed for quite some time and I use it daily alongside nvim (haven’t yet tried zed vim mode, planning to). I really like the performance and control zed provides, as well as the reduced UI clutter compared to alternatives. The collaborator functionality is not talked enough by the community but I believe it’s an ambitious idea worth pursuing. Wishing the team all the best.

cgg1• 3 months ago

I haven’t booted up an editor in a long time but I’ve written lots of software recently (mostly with codex).

Interesting times…

daniel_grady• 3 months ago

Congratulations to the Zed team! What a great project.

The newer layout that came along with the parallel agents feature is very nice; even without using parallel agents regularly, this is a breath of fresh air.

saltyoldman• 3 months ago

I try Zed every few months. I does not yet have everything I need yet, but at some point I think it's going to be the best code editor out there.

JokerDan• 3 months ago

I was an early adopter of Zed (private alpha mid-2022) and it's crazy how far they have come in a relatively short space of time. Sadly I stopped using Zed when the push of AI features started to happen (same with Warp terminal) and have since used Gram more. I may have to give Zed another run as I believe you can turn all the AI features off now?

Congrats to the team on 1.0!

laszlokorte2• 3 months ago

yes there is a single toggle to disable all AI

megalomanu• 3 months ago

Congrats to the team! Fantastic editor, it really brought me joy after years of VSCode/Cursor. I love how it's crafted, you can feel the soul behind each decision.

What I love:

- the speed, of course

- the high consistency between features, tabs, and panes, while Cursor looks like a crumbly assemblage of plugins. At first I was worried about the lack of plugins, but Zed made me realize you don't need many

- the visual elegance: the padding, the proportions... It reminds me of the best of JetBrains (though I haven't used their products in years). It feels closer to the IDEs I used in the past (for Java or C#), in the sense that it seems to encompass everything you need, without the heaviness.

- the numerous keyboard shortcuts, often displayed visibly, which makes them easier to remember

- the transparency of their roadmap and their velocity: now that we finally have the vertical git diff as promised, my doubts are gone!

Truly one of my favorite pieces of dev software in 15 years.

nielsbot3• 3 months ago

Does a native UI experience have no value these days? I mean--amazing achievement building an alternate GPU-accelerated UI framework from scratch, and I do love the responsiveness, but this leaves you with a non-native app that doesn't follow OS conventions and will not get appearance and behavior updates going forward without a lot of additional effort.

conception• 3 months ago

Electron has basically killed this practice sadly. Which Microsoft modern app follows Windows native UI these days? Teams? Settings? Office? All dramatically different.

einpoklum• 3 months ago

TBH, Microsoft has made such a huge mess of UI on Windows, that even if you wanted to use the "native" UI you would have difficulties figuring out what that is, exactly, right now.

Having said that - Teams is a piece of #$%^&; and MS Office has dropped the ball with its UI switching to ribbons in 2007 and has languished in the land of bad UI ever since. Settings makes me want to just use Control Panel like a human being.

Cthulhu_3• 3 months ago

Unfortunately the reality nowadays seems to be that besides the dated QT, there are no good or popular cross-platform UI libraries for these use cases. It's bold that they built their own.

Squarex• 3 months ago

And what cross platform code editor does that nowadays? vscode is electron, jetbrains has swing, ...

Pay084• 3 months ago

The old ones, and the ones that use Qt.

nielsbot3• 3 months ago

Maybe what I'm saying is that people shouldn't use cross-platform UI solutions. (write-once-suck-everywhere)

nsm2• 3 months ago

If you are on macOS, there is https://nova.app/

hackermanai6• 3 months ago

And soon™, https://hackerman.ai/

eviks3• 3 months ago

The value depends entirely on specific conventions, but you've mentioned none. There is also value in consistent UI across platforms (which native UI don't support) as for some conventions you'd prefer to ignore the OS defaults.

saratogacx• 3 months ago

Not OP but I have a similar complaint.

The two primary OS items that turn me off of zed are not being able to have a title bar and the fact that menus open on hover and not on click.

VSCode, and IntelliJ let me turn on OS level title bars so I can handle the window without needing to try and find the magic spot not filled by some other app based nonsense as well as making it easier to see what window is active.

Menus can be unrolled from the hamburger but now pop open if I just swing my cursor through. I've no idea what convention that was pulled from but I think they just took the hamburger menu event triggers and left them as they were instead of changing them to act like an OS menu is expected to function.

I'm sure there are others that I'd find using the app but just those two was enough of a personal issue for me to just not bother.

nielsbot3• 3 months ago

I definitely hate the non standard context menus that can’t render outside of their containing window. (And when they can’t turns out they can secretly be scrolled up and down) Yikes.

aorth• 3 months ago

Massive congratulations to the team and the community. Thanks for the solid product. It's fast and native on Linux with Wayland. I don't use any of the AI stuff, though, so I'm glad there is a switch to disable it.

kstrauser5• 3 months ago

Zed got me off of Emacs for the most part, which is about the highest praise I can offer. I've never used an editor that 1. closely mapped to how I think about code, and 2. is easily extensible enough that it's broadly supported with a gazillion third-party packets, and 3. is lightning fast. Emacs does 1 and 2. VSCode excels at 2. Sublime is good for 2 and 3, and Vim, and BBEdit 2 too. Zed's the only one I've ever tried that nailed all 3, plus excellent out of the box defaults.

I think it's fantastic. I still keep my Emacs chops up because it's 50 years old and I know it'll be here another 50 years from now, but Zed's open on my desktop more than any other app.

throwaway73747• 3 months ago

Hopefully Neomacs, “A GPU-powered Emacs written in Rust with a modern display engine … starting with the display engine and expanding to the core“, will succeed.

https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs

kstrauser5• 3 months ago

I know there've been a couple of stabs at this in the past, but I hope beyond hope that one of these catches on now. Given some extra LLM boost for the grunt work, I'm more confident today than before. Crossing my fingers!

artooro• 3 months ago

Been loving Zed for the last few months. The Dev Containers were the last thing I needed to switch over and been steady ever since.

post-it2• 3 months ago

Congrats to the Zed team for abandoning zero-based versioning!

https://0ver.org/

ggandhi• 3 months ago

Once there was Vim, and then there is Zed. In between I just found useless UI bloats.

Simply love it!

d0100• 3 months ago

Tried using Zed but for some reason the AI can't open the browser?

jxmesth2• 3 months ago

Why do I get a warning when trying to run this on Windows 11?

8note4• 3 months ago

windows makes it really hard to distribute applications now.

everything gets a warning until the app has some minimum count of installs

JCTheDenthog2• 3 months ago

everything gets a warning until the app has some minimum count of installs

Unless the devs sign their app

lexoj• 3 months ago

I want to use Zed but last time I tried it was spawning node processes, i guess for lsp. (I develop in Go)

entropyneur• 3 months ago

I've tried switching from JetBrains IDEs just a few days ago. The speed and memory footprint are very impressive. I ended up badly missing refactorings and some other features and configuring a debugging session looked like something that needs more time than I had on my hands. So went back for now. I hope they add more IDE features eventually. There's not much a pure text editor can offer over Emacs after all. But this announcement sounds like they are prioritizing agents integration - the same thing that seemingly made JetBrains drop the ball on their core advantages.

atraac• 3 months ago

Was in the same boat. I ended up not using Zed because it had a bunch of minor quirks that annoyed me but I moved to vscode. I primarily write Typescript and C# these days. I was a JetBrains fanboy for years and it feels way too bloated now, stuff notoriously hangs or takes too long on my M3 Pro. I also love Claude Code integration with vscode just a bit too much to give it up for CLI.

DangitBobby6• 3 months ago

Zed's CC integration is really good now.

wiseowise• 3 months ago

JetBrains should really start investing into porting to Rust/C++ over their bootleg Java.

DangitBobby6• 3 months ago

Seriously. I love the IDE but given that my idle workload of Electron apps and Docker Desktop VM brings my discretionary allotment of RAM down from 32GB to 8GB, I have absolutely no headroom when running JetBrains IDEs so I keep them closed unless there's a specific feature I want.

steve-atx-7600• 3 months ago

no emacs key bindings??? Makes me taking this is another hipster text editor that isn’t “an ide” (vscode)

atonse• 3 months ago

Congrats to the Zed team. I love that there's such a powerful and blazingly fast editor out there for us.

While it's been hard to use zed when the pull of claude/chatgpt desktop and terminal apps feel more full featured and take up more of the share of daily work, I continue to use Zed any time I do need to explore a codebase or review a markdown plan from an agent.

I hope that there can be improvements to the markdown preview because at least in my case, I'm using that feature a LOT these days.

gazebo2• 3 months ago

Unrelated to the actual editor but this is one of the best looking and most responsive websites I've ever used

mlsu• 3 months ago

I switched to Zed for the first time over the weekend on a somewhat complex mixed C/rust project. I was able to set the whole thing up in about an hour to my liking and it is a really nice IDE, coming from bloated VS Code. I think they have a really nice AI-assisted coding setup, I think that the "file review pane, in line with IDE" UX is correct for AI tools. I'm skeptical that terminal or "agent" based AI programming is viable long-term.

culebron21• 3 months ago

I tried Zed several times, and still VS Code + Sublime win.

1. In Zed, all my Rust files are reformatted on save. (I also code in Go, and don't like this approach at all.)

2. It takes ages to find out where to configure the language servers, and find those little options several layers deep, that I need to switch. (E.g. turn of rustfmt, or turn off some PEP8 checks.)

3. Zed is still missing the killer feature of Rust in VS Code -- underlining the mutable vars. (TBH, VS Code custom themes also lack this, and it's unclear how to turn that feature on, but at least the default ones have it.)

For comparison, I have bought all 4 Sublime editions. I tried Pycharm, and still preferred Sublime. VS Code came when I needed interactive debugger for Rust.

wldcordeiro7• 3 months ago

1. That's a pref, turn off "format on save" lots of editors and IDEs have it. Maybe they should default to off but it's not an unheard of option with no way to turn off.

0xCE0• 3 months ago

I actually downloaded and tried Zed first time about a week ago, because I needed a text editor that looks and behaves almost identically with Windows/macOS/Linux, so there is minimal switching hassle between developing for all these three OSs. And vims/emacs are no-choice for me, because if I don't use them for a while, I have to google how to exit/save etc. Not a choice for CEO.

I have now one week experience, and I like it very much. Some settings take a bit time to get right for my taste, and themes doesn't look polished, but otherwise it is excellent choice (even when thinking Sublime, which I considered the best of all). AI-things can be disabled for now, so let's hope it stays that way.

I also tried VSCode, and omg, I can't understand who want to use that... It is almost Visual Studio grade bad. At least by default settings. It couldn't even open 900 kb text file without freezing (Zed/Sublime had no problem, like 2026 computers/software shouldn't have with 1 mb file).

larusso• 3 months ago

Zed is my daily driver for the last couple of month. I tried it a few times before but had to switch to various other editors for different projects. But my plan was to finally ditch VSCode as my normal file editor. I really love how fast the editor fires up. I also love the fact that it has great vim binding not just in the editor pane.

wg0• 3 months ago

This is a solid release and first time, I feel like it is pretty good for the use case of decent sized Typescript mono repos. I can jump around codebase quicker.

PS: Pretty daring move to think of building an editor when there's already sublime, textmate, Jetbrains and VSCode.

nye2k• 3 months ago

I want to like and use Zed, but in my mind there was some odd commerce, or 3rd party share decision that was made which had me avoid it for security reasons. Like... Zed was endorsed as the only editor for something... can anyone remember or elaborate? I cannot!

Pay084• 3 months ago

I think you mean their terms of service which are pretty restrictive and involve(d) a clause that lets them revoke your access to the editor at any time for any reason.

atombender2• 3 months ago

I've been using Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA as my main IDE for Go, Rust, TypeScript, etc. for the last 3 years, and this Christmas I switched to Zed, and I'm not looking back.

I was admittedly skeptical of Zed in the beginning, because they started out with so few features, and it seemed impossible to really switch permanently to it and still be as productive. The Jetbrains platform has got such an amazingly rich set of features and an uncanny ability to just nail the editor experience. It seems almost unthinkable that anyone would be able to compete, and for a long time Zed was very far behind, but this year I feel they're finally a viable alternative.

What ultimately pushed me towards Zed was performance and the sheer amount of work-stopping bugs. I would have days where Jetbrains would get unresponsive or extremely sluggish. Suddenly "undo" would stop working (!). Major and minor upgrades often introduced perplexing performance degradation. In short, I've wasted insane amounts of time on bugs and on filing detailed bug reports that are never looked at. That undo bug has been open for maybe a year now.

For all the bells and whistles, I think Jetbrains faces an intractable problem. It's just utterly unrealistic that they'll be able to solve everything unless they stopped all development to focus on just stability. The product is too big, too complex, too unwieldy, and too bloated. I was always allocating 16GB RAM to Jetbrains, and often had it sit there consuming 1000% (!) CPU. Zed chews up a couple of gigs at most, and rarely uses much CPU. There's a tendency for editors to get bloated as they evolve. This certainly happens with Atom. I'm really hoping Zed will stay lean.

MoonWalk3• 3 months ago

Is what?

gervwyk• 3 months ago

Well done on this milestone! Gave zed a decent chance last week and it wins on many fronts to replace my now scattered setup. 1. For me to use it I need to apply prettier formatting of the current project (maybe there is a way? i could not find it) 2. I need to run the claude cli, not an agent interface. or allow me to place the terminal on the left in the agent view or something.

for the everything else it was a win. will give it another chance in a month or three to see if it can do, excited to have a setup that easily navigates code diffs.

z5h• 3 months ago

So, the S and P in LSP stands for Server and Protocol. The Protocol is to exchange JSON-RPC messages with a server. So to add a new language to Zed, we should just be able to direct Zed to the server to talk to right? No. You have to write an extension in Rust. https://zed.dev/docs/extensions/languages#language-servers.

Or am I missing something?

Matl• 3 months ago

I get what you mean, but to be fair it seems like you can get away with copy pasting what's in the doc your linked pretty much if you don't care to customize any further.

m3kw9• 3 months ago

I'm using it and i fail to see what is the difference between this and VSCode

zargon• 3 months ago

I want to try Zed, but it's just too much of a supply chain attack waiting to happen. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589

I did install it in a VM with virtio-gpu, but it was absurdly slow, so I wasn't able to try it.

skue• 3 months ago

Had similar concerns, but just noticed they seem to be taking this more seriously now: https://zed.dev/blog/secure-by-default

yellow_lead• 3 months ago

Is that directly related to the GitHub issue? Or you just mean that they're taking security more seriously?

I was searching the article you linked to see if it addresses the GH issue in any way, but it seems to not.

sevenseacat3• 3 months ago

Seems not applicable, given it will still download and install random LSPs for you without asking.

MoonWalk3• 3 months ago

Well, just fired it up on Windows, and already dislike it. And I went in with a positive attitude, because I would welcome a better tool than VS Code.

Main problem: No menu. Where are the settings? The first thing I wanted to do was move the file treeview to the left side; I don't know what country the authors live in, but in Western countries we read from left to right. But nope, there's no View menu or anything of the sort.

Then I examined every other little button around the UI, to no avail. I want to get stuff done; not play with an Advent calendar, hunting for goodies.

nbf_1995• 3 months ago

There's no View menu

Control + , > Window & Layout > Show Menus = true

This unhides the menu instead of hiding everything behind a burger. This should be the default. The defaults are awful in many ways and they've only gotten worse with the recent panel rearrangement.

VerifiedReports2• 3 months ago

Why on earth would anyone guess that? That is absurd.

I had the same problem and there's not even a burger anywhere.

But... thank you for posting that.

vovavili3• 3 months ago

Congratulations to the team, big milestone. Aside from an occasional drop to Positron for dataframe visualization, I haven't had a need to open any other IDEs like PyCharm/IDEA or VSCode in a long time, and I've been using them for over five years at this point. Zed's internals is software engineering at its finest, and I hope GPUI will eventually become the go-to Rust GUI library.

mugamuga• 3 months ago

Just installed it and used it for a bit, Great Editor. It sometimes lags and slows down but overall good experience, all these things can be fixed in later patches.

pbiggar• 3 months ago

Would not recommend getting attached to an editor that's VC funded by Sequoia.

smeshny• 3 months ago

I switched to Zed about three months ago, and honestly, I’m loving it. It just works, it doesn’t lag, and it doesn’t eat all my RAM. Thanks, and congrats!

scottmessinger• 3 months ago

I love Zed and have been using it for years. I’ve been especially excited about multi-agent support—it feels like it could be a genuinely powerful model.

That said, the current UX is pretty confusing.

There’s a mismatch in visual hierarchy: selecting an agent in the sidebar appears to change the entire editor’s worktree/branch, but the worktree/branch selector lives in the window titlebar, which strongly implies it controls the whole window. So it’s unclear which is the source of truth—the agent or the window.

That ambiguity shows up in the workflow too. If I want to create a new branch/worktree and then start an agent on it, I can’t do that directly. I have to:

1. create an agent 2. start a conversation (to instantiate it) 3. then switch the branch/worktree

That ordering feels backwards—I’d expect to define the context first, then start the agent.

Even basic navigation is unclear. If I switch the branch in the titlebar, does that affect the current agent, or the whole window? If I want to return to a previous worktree, is that tied to the agent or not? I still don’t have a solid mental model.

It feels like there are two competing concepts:

* agents as independent workspaces * the window as the workspace

Right now they overlap in a way that’s hard to reason about.

The feature has a lot of promise, but the current UX makes it difficult to predict what’s going to happen, which makes it hard to rely on.

DangitBobby6• 3 months ago

I do like the new UI, it beats having a window per workspace, IMO. But personally I'd rather the workspace switcher be based on the project explorer than the conversation history.

graphememes• 3 months ago

I would use zed, but I can't get over tabs for terminals and the file explorer doesn't refresh when new files are added from external sources, outside of that it's pretty good.

dev_l1x_be• 3 months ago

Zed is the only editor I use on a daily basis and VIM. It is fast and renders nicely. I do not need to configure it much, few extra plugins but most of the things are working out of the box.

__rito__• 3 months ago

It has replaced VS Code for my for my work and side projects.

I don't use AI tools in 90% of the projects.

It's snappy, fast, everything just works. I have the vim mode turned on while editing.

rawoke083600• 3 months ago

Congrats on shipping !

I love that most of my (small but important) set of keyboard shortcuts from VSCode jsut works.

- Terminal - Ctrl + P (and siblings).

Suggestion (minor):

To me, font size is as import these days as dark/light mode. Would be cool if basic font-size (ui panel etc, were part of default/first-run config)

Also like that AI is a "first class citizen" it seems on Zed.

Well done guys :)

actinium226• 3 months ago

VSCode is draining my battery, looking forward to trying this

haspok• 3 months ago

My biggest gripe with Zed right now (it seems they had changed the default force-formatting of source code) is that it is non-extensible.

I just wanted a custom action when I right click on a file (or multiple files) in the file tree - uh-oh, sorry, you can't have that.

Basically all text editors should be extensible. Emacs and vim, Notepad++ or Sublime - this is one of their core features. Do I need to explain this to the HN crowd?

GPU acceleration is nice, and in general, the whole basic editing experience is quite nice. But lack of extensibility is just a punch below the belt.

Maybe Zed 2.0 will be worth another look.

simonask2• 3 months ago

Not gonna lie, I kinda hate this attitude.

There’s tons of extensions for Zed, but you’re asking for particular extension hooks that don’t exist yet.

I expect the reason they don’t is that Zed sandboxes extensions quite aggressively (they’re essentially WASM running under wasmtime), which is fantastic for both security and performance, and it means they don’t break when the app updates, but it also means that a bit more care needs to be put into designing extension points.

I’m sure it’ll come.

eviks3• 3 months ago

There’s tons of extensions for Zed

There can't be without those "particular" hooks. Editors with them have tons, Zed is limited to kilos

flippy_flops• 3 months ago

fwiw i agree - i mean, i just want to add a button. it's a bit shocking that's literally not possible

stellalo• 3 months ago

I switched to Zed as my main editor about a year ago, and I’m not going back! What a great product!

crabbone• 3 months ago

We're also launching Zed for Business. Companies have been asking us for a way to roll out Zed to their engineering teams, and very soon they can, with centralized billing, role-based access controls, and team management.

Regardless of everything else being said, does anyone actually still do it? I thought this practice more or less died with Eclipse, where proprietary editors often shipped as Eclipse plugin and then the ops of a company that bought the plugin would have to configure it for every developer, set up with home-made automation etc.

I haven't seen anything like this in the last ten years at least and assumed the practice was dead, and, instead, developers were allowed to use whatever editor they want, while committing editor-specific (configuration) files, for example, would be considered a noobie mistake.

Or was I just happily living in the world where the long arm of the corporate was unable to reach me?

snarfy2• 3 months ago

Can I replace Vim with Zed? Is there a vim mode?

piskov2• 3 months ago

https://youtu.be/ltE30UmsBlY

jorgeleo• 3 months ago

I was all for trying it until I saw this in the License Agreement:

"4.1. Zed's Use of Customer Data Customer hereby grants Zed a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable (except to service providers and Customer’s designees), non-transferable (except as set forth in Section 15.1) right to use, copy, store, disclose, transmit, transfer, display, modify, create derivative works from, collect, access, store, host, or otherwise process (“Process”) any materials that Customer inputs into or otherwise makes available to the Service (including prompts and other written content) (collectively, “Customer Data”) solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws. Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."

Sorry, no I don't agree to make my source code and the product I am working to give you "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable (except to service providers and Customer’s designees), non-transferable (except as set forth in Section 15.1) right to use, copy, store, disclose, transmit, transfer, display, modify, create derivative works from, collect, access, store, host, or otherwise process (“Process”) any materials that Customer inputs into or otherwise makes available to the Service (including prompts and other written content)"

desireco42• 3 months ago

Yeah this really makes you wonder... now, they are to best of my knowledge fantastic people, so I guess some lawyer slipped this in. I would love to hear some clarification and will always give them benefit of the doubt.

So far they've been great and product is fantastic as you know.

bigbadfeline• 3 months ago

now, they are to best of my knowledge fantastic people,

They could be the next "don't do evil" people but practice shows that doesn't last for long. And then the messy license terms become very handy for what comes next.

If they went to the trouble to specify all of their rights over your data, their glossing over about what they can do with it is a solid reason to push for complete clarity or pull out completely.

uneekname• 3 months ago

Oof. Is this for the software itself or their add-on LLM subscription?

meantub• 3 months ago

Aren't you forgetting the part that says "solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws. Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."

Seems like legalese to be able to take that data for support reasons, telemetry, and local laws that require that data be sent to them. I think ignoring this portion is a little uncharitable to them.

halJordan• 3 months ago

This is a bad faith take. The terms are modifiable without the customer's consent or knowledge so "pursuant to these terms" is meaningless.

No one needs all those rights to do what this block says it's going to do. Any one would require that block to be changed in any contract between equals. But this is a contract of adhesion, so it's uncharitable for you to demand charity where they withhold their charity

piker• 3 months ago

I had the same thought but if you chase down the definition of "Telemetry" as well as unilateral amendment rights pointed out in sibling comments, there's some broad authority implied.

coldtea7• 3 months ago

Aren't you forgetting the part that says "solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws

None of the above I like, and (a) is so vague as to be useless, including if you read the obligations.

Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."

Companies still do it all the time despite "applicable laws". And when the company is sold, all bets are off.

I'd rather they don't get, or keep, any to begin with.

anvuong• 3 months ago

Why do you need to see what I'm writing in my IDE for telemetry?

makeitdouble2• 3 months ago

None of that would require the "create derivative works" part.

I honestly can't see any legitimate reason why they'd have the right to derivate work from yours, and you don't insert that kind of terms by mistake.

gpm4• 3 months ago

I'm not a lawyer, but the only part of this that seems objectionable is the "telemetry" bit, the rest of it basically seems to say "we can use things you send us to do the things you asked us to do, including for support purposes. We can comply with the law as necessary (e.g. responding to warrants)".

That said the definition of "telemetry" is so broad that I think it would include training a LLM and the like. Telemetry is defined in section 4.4 as

Zed may collect, generate, and Process information, including technical logs, metrics, and data and learnings, related to the Software and Service (“Telemetry”) to improve and support the Services and for other lawful business purposes.

I guess that it's so opaque is also objectionable. Contracts don't have to be inscrutable.

mwigdahl• 3 months ago

"Other lawful business purposes" sounds awfully close to "all lawful use".

lowbloodsugar• 3 months ago

The problem is that I don’t send them anything. So it’s “we can use whatever of yours that the application we wrote sends to us”.

seb1204• 3 months ago

Wow, so why not just write that instead of the legalese? Reads like an overjustification to me.

aljaz823• 3 months ago

I understand that differently. The last part of the statement is important I think. It reads as if this grants them the right to "Process" "Customer Data": 1. to perform its obligations, including support obligations, 2. to perform telemetry, 3. when required by law.

This is sensible, no?

nomel• 3 months ago

when required by law

Suggests there's a longer term storage, available for hackers.

mandeepj• 3 months ago

wait, there's more [copied from the top comment of their youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Bns1T77HM)] -

1. Mandatory arbitration by default. You waive your right to a jury trial and cannot join class action lawsuits. You have only 30 days to opt out after agreeing to the terms.

2. 1-year statute of limitations. You must file any legal claim within one year, which is much shorter than the default period under most state laws.

3. Zed can terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with no liability. No notice is required, and they owe you nothing if they pull the plug.

4. Autocomplete sends your code to AI providers in the background unless you turn it off. Worth knowing if you're working on proprietary or sensitive code.

5. No guarantees about data retention. If your payment lapses, they reserve the right to delete your account and all associated data with no liability.

6. All fees are non-refundable except where required by law, with one narrow exception for disagreeing with modified terms.

7. Zed can modify the terms at any time. For existing users, material changes take effect after just 30 days, and continued use counts as acceptance.

8. Zed can use your name, logo, and brand in their marketing without asking. You'd have to send a written request to stop them.

9. No warranties whatsoever. The service is "as is", they disclaim all responsibility for errors, data loss, or AI-generated output being inaccurate or harmful.

10. Liability is capped very low, at most, whatever you paid in the last 12 months, or $100, whichever is higher.

Nevin1901• 3 months ago

These are all fairly standard terms.... nothing crazy

marshray2• 3 months ago

Yeah, screw that.

I am literally shopping for a new editor. A once-a-decade thing for me. I want something that can effectively sandbox local models for code gen.

So I was looking at Zed yesterday. Cloned the repo. Then I noticed they were funded by our favorite VCs.

Between this and CVE-2026-31431 ("Copy Fail"), it seems like I dodged a bullet.

Andrex• 3 months ago

Why does a text editor have such a defensive license? This is extreme and reckless levels of paranoia.

Zed devs reading this: just release it as GPL. It will be better for literally everyone.

astafrig• 3 months ago

Some of these are questionable, but 3 and 5 stick out. Being included makes it sound like whoever wrote this list doesn’t really know what Zed is?

It’s a local text editor. The only thing an account gives you is access to their specific flavour of coding agent and a collaboration server.

If your payment lapses, they reserve the right to delete your account and all associated data with no liability.

Pretty much the only associated data is your payment info.

jacobsenscott• 3 months ago

Can't you just build the source and run it without giving them any information? Or does the editor itself require information and phone home while running?

xpe10• 3 months ago

1. Yes, Zed is open source, you can build it yourself.

2. Telemetry defaults to on. So turn off telemetry as explained at https://zed.dev/docs/telemetry#configuring-telemetry-setting...

    "telemetry": {
        "diagnostics": false,
        "metrics": false,
    },

marshray2• 3 months ago

Initializing the http client is one of the very first things this text editor does in "app.run()": https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/a7c9c24f40d7e9169... Line 497 suggests it fails without it.

There are hundreds of references to http requests in the source tree, though most seem associated with calling particular AI model providers.

This looks to be the telemetry struct: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/a7c9c24f40d7e9169...

It appears to crawl your worktrees collecting an inventory of the types of projects you have and is interested in certain named files specificaly: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/a7c9c24f40d7e9169...

fittingopposite• 3 months ago

You made me curious. Found this fork https://github.com/zedless-editor/zedless Wdyt?

ouraf• 3 months ago

I encourage you to mail them specifically about this concern.

If it is a matter of communication, they can fix and clarify it. If it's genuinely scummy, they can change their approach now that they know they were caught in the act

sneak• 3 months ago

Any local editor that includes any sort of telemetry whatsoever is an instant nonstarter for me.

What’s local stays entirely and totally local, always and every time, otherwise what’s the point?

aljgz• 3 months ago

Curious, how does this compare to the editor you use?

yobid20• 3 months ago

wouldn't touch this editor with a 10 foot pole. no i am not giving them the rights to use my code for their product. hell no. thanks for highlighting this. people need to making a bigger deal about it. maybe they will rethink their tos.

nextaccountic• 3 months ago

Is Zed open source or not?

If it's open source it can't have a license agreement to use the software itself

Or is this an agreement to use some cloud service? Supposedly you can opt to not use it

Elsewhere people said that "even if you disable telemetry, Zed can still collect telemetry" but, it being open source means you're still in control

No open source license can force you to run misfeatures

freehorse5• 3 months ago

The Terms of Service and the open source editor are separate. Zed's editor is licensed under GPL v3 (with Apache 2.0 for certain components). Those licenses govern the software itself and haven't changed. The Terms of Service apply when you create a Zed account and use our hosted services. If you use the editor without signing in, the open source licenses are the only thing that applies, and the new terms codify this more clearly than the old.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/50568#issuecomm...

NewsaHackO• 3 months ago

After MinIO, I don't care if a VC-backed product is open source or not, frankly. Especially if it has a CLA to contribute (which this one does).

Razengan2• 3 months ago

Oh no.. fuck them, not this shit again..

With AI being so good why isn't someone making fully open source alternatives to all this crap by now?

Oh Zed is open source, maybe Codex/Claude can make a VSCodium-like fork off it?

roarcher2• 3 months ago

With AI being so good why isn't someone...

It baffles me that people ask this question all the time and it never occurs to them that perhaps the answer is "because it isn't".

dgellow• 3 months ago

forks exist…

eclectric• 3 months ago

Gram, a fork of zed, exists already. https://gram.liten.app/

Motivation: https://gram.liten.app/why/

lokar• 3 months ago

Why would they have your code in the first place?

Hilliard_Ohiooo2• 3 months ago

Please don't be a buzz kill. Probably agreed to something 10 times worse just by using this website and whatever device you're visiting on.

xpe10• 3 months ago

This language fits common SaaS templates. Let me illustrate by removing chunks and labeling them:

    Customer hereby grants Zed
    {{ broad list of rights }}
    solely:
    {{ for these purposes }}

IANAL, but the term "solely" seems essential to understanding this. Pivotal. As in "if you get it wrong, you'll be wearing a tinfoil hat" essential.

Also see "4.4. Telemetry: .... For avoidance of doubt, Telemetry expressly does not include Customer Data."

My two cents: I'm not worried about Zed's contract here. Much more important to pay attention to when your data goes to third-party AI providers: read _their_ contract language.

Meta-comment: Don't let a well-meaning comment like the above trigger a panic. Better to get familiar with typical contracts and/or build your personal network for legal advice.

P.S. Look out for shameless legal slop on the Web, I "promise.legal" it is out there.

still_grokking• 3 months ago

Wasn't that legalize the reason Gram got created?

https://gram.liten.app/

xpe10• 3 months ago

The comment above has started a sh-tstorm. Please, slow down and learn about the details before jumping to conclusions. Most of us here did NOT "go pro" in the law. [1] For those that want to educate themselves, you could do worse than immediately leave HN and go _learn_:

1. SaaS Agreements: Key Contractual Provisions https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/bu...

2. Cornell Law School's Wex: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex

3. Coursera : American Contract Law I (Yale prof): https://www.coursera.org/learn/contracts-1

4. Software as a Service (SaaS) Agreements: Thomson Reuters/Westlaw (paywalled; trial available) https://content.next.westlaw.com/practical-law/document/I61c...

If anyone has good detailed resources that are free, please add.

[1] IANAL but I wasn't that far from going down that path. I've worked for a legal-tech startup, did really well in an undergrad Constitutional Law class, incorporated several small companies, managed lots of contractor agreements. So, I know from experience: legal language is weird and specific in ways you may not realize. So be intellectually humble and defer judgment until you talk to a legal expert. Hopefully people more experienced than I can weigh in with more specifics.

otabdeveloper42• 3 months ago

my text editor has a SaaS license agreement

Intralexical3• 3 months ago

If you need an education in law to be able to trust a business isn't trying to steal from you, then maybe you just shouldn't trust that business at all.

Especially for something like a code editor, where plenty of less-shady competitors are available.

snarfy2• 3 months ago

Ouch, that was one of the quickest uninstalls after scrolling and reading this.

kstrauser5• 3 months ago

That license agreement covers their online service if you opt in to use it. This reads like every ToS for a SaaS product I’ve read in ages. If you don’t want to use their paid service, don’t create an account and configure it in Zed, and then this doesn’t apply to you.

I’m not associated with Zed in any way except as a user. That said, this is a bonkers misinterpretation of their ToS. You don’t grant them the right to eat all your data just by using the editor. You do give them the right to process your data if you sign up for an account and opt in to send them all your data for processing.

cednore• 3 months ago

Just downloaded, installed, turns out it doesn't have pdf preview capability

ReptileMan• 3 months ago

Testing it now ... it is absurdly efficient with tokens. Probably order of magnitude better than opencode for a couple of tasks.

babu_mick• 3 months ago

Love zed, prepared to love it moreee

christoff12• 3 months ago

I like Zed for the same reason I liked Atom: it's very light. These past few months my workflow has basically consisted of me running Codex + Gemini CLI in the terminal panel and hopping through files in another. Easy-peasy.

It's a nice departure from the visual overstimulation I get while in VS Code (for which I have to take some blame as I need to remove some installed plugins).

There are a couple of features shown in the v1.0 video that I was unaware of and am keen to check out.

Daunk• 3 months ago

1.0 and Zed still won't appear until I touch my mouse or press a key after it's been started...

ksajadi• 3 months ago

Zed is a really good editor in an age that every other editor has forgotten to be about *editing* and wants to be a wrapper around coding agents.

On the agent side, I really like their ACP approach but for now it seems buggy and limited in functionality (previous message editing, occasionally never-ending work, ...)

opengrass2• 3 months ago

Can't run it. Vulkan as a dependency for a text editor is beyond retarded.

MintPaw2• 3 months ago

Vulkan, DX11, or Metal, I'm curious which environment has the ability render a GUI desktop but doesn't have access to a modern renderer pipeline. VirtualBox I guess?

opengrass2• 3 months ago

AMD https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/50996

melonpan7• 3 months ago

After hearing Zed has vim mode, I might give it a try. Currently my workflow is just opencode + nvim/opencode

lifty• 3 months ago

Now that Zed supports remote development, I really hope they can release it for tablets (iOS/Android) so that we can use it as a client for a remote development machine. That would be delightful!

lbrito• 3 months ago

Does it work on Ubuntu yet?

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14237

DangitBobby6• 3 months ago

The issue is tracked elsewhere and that one is closed as fixed so it seems likely. Last time I tried to run it on Ubuntu a month ago it worked, though I use a newer version than the one in the linked issue.

miguelraz6• 3 months ago

Yes, I run it daily on Ubuntu.

kashnote• 3 months ago

Can anyone comment on the inline AI tab completion performance of Zed compared to Cursor? Hoping to move away from Cursor as it seems like they break my settings every time they push an update and Vim motions stop working at random.

The only thing stopping me from leaving Cursor is their tab completion, which is honestly just incredible.

ksymph• 3 months ago

It's okay -- usable but definitely a downgrade from Cursor. Basic pattern matching completion works pretty well, but you won't be zipping around the codebase in the same way as with Cursor, which always seems to be thinking a few steps ahead.

hbn• 3 months ago

I downloaded it, tried opening one of my Java/Springboot projects. When I opened a Java file it had no text highlighting but offered to install a Java extension. Clicking it just made the prompt disappear and seemingly did nothing.

I found the Extensions screen, searched "Java" and tried installing the most popular extension. Clicking "Install" makes the button gray out for a second but does nothing before the button becomes clickable again. Not sure how to proceed from here. (On a work-managed MacBook)

armanj• 3 months ago

i've been a zed user for almost 6 months. i've encountered maaany bugs which i reported, or that were already reported. they're still there. meanwhile, every single update shipped a feature or bugfix for "ai agents".

not sure how 1.0 ships with that massive pile of bugs. but ai agents are the first-class citizen in this editor, and developer experience is not a priority.

funny thing is i uninstalled zed right before the 1.0 release. kinda relieved i didn't miss anything.

_badmike• 3 months ago

Congrats on the launch. I have been using zed since 2026 exclusively. I moved from JetBrains and am genuinely happy. Missing the compare with clipboard though.

bovermyer• 3 months ago

I love how snappy Zed is. Well done, folks. You should be proud of your work.

realo• 3 months ago

Nice! I might try it, it seems genuinely innovative.

I don't need much from an editor. Instant cold start, sane colors, sane folding in origami style , like "kent folding" allows to do on vim ( https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=416 ).

Not much, but it seems all modern editors fail to do good origami folding.

Does Zed do this?

denkmoon• 3 months ago

I seriously hate this “choose your adventure” way with new IDEs. Just install the language plugin, then spend hours making it work, and then it has crazy bugs anyway. Maybe just ptsd from the Java language server, but I’ve also somehow made editing json files laggy and unresponsive by installing the json language server.

Jetbrains “just worked”, but work isn’t paying for the license anymore because AI so I’ll just bang my head against these plugins.

barcoder• 3 months ago

If I saw this editor a year ago I would have jumped on it. In today's AI focused development it's not worth the hassle for me to learn new shortcuts and UI layout.

The demo video voice felt super AI generated. Which it many ways felt like it was going against the target audience, people that still code by using an editor and it's shortcuts.

vadepaysa• 3 months ago

Congrats to the Zed! I've been using zed since their first launch on HN. They did not even have a search + replace function at that time! I now use zed all_the_time.

What an awesome journey!

vb-8448• 3 months ago

I tried zed a couple of times, it's something I'd like to play more because the feeling is fantastic ... but for python development pycharm is still superior.

PS: One thing I'm really missing is the ctrl+shift+f equivalent

icemanx• 3 months ago

bro why build a new IDE, just use IntelliJ or any other flavor of these for your favorite language. You would have saved years and 37.000 commits

Demiurge• 3 months ago

I love Zed. I was a fan of Sublime Text, and could never get used to VSCode. I thought I'd try Zed a try when it was still extremely raw, before the AI integration, and I loved the simplicity and speed almost immediately. When they added better python linting features, I switched, and haven't used anything else. I know that there are many anti-AI folks here, but I feel lucky that we they added the Zed Agent, and all the integration. It's been great not having to switch back to VSCode for copilot.

herf• 3 months ago

Any benchmarks? Scrolling is using 16% of my GPU (vs 5% in Sublime). Also things like mouse-down to activate a tab (vs mouse-up in Zed) make Sublime feel faster.

hackermanai6• 3 months ago

I recently tested input latency on Mac Mini M2 Pro, keypress to visible pixel (p95 value).

- Zed 36.8ms (26.3 avg) - Sublime 33.5ms (25.9 avg) - VSCode 31.7ms (20.6 avg) - Hackerman Text 15.3ms (12.5 avg)

All editors tested as stripped down as possible, minimal UI etc., empty file, no syntax highlighting. Mostly surprised by VSCode tbh.

Testing on sqlite3.c (with syntax highlighting): Zed 60.5ms, Sublime 37.1ms, VSCode 22.0ms, and Hackerman Text 18.4ms.

miguelraz6• 3 months ago

That's a useful metric to track. Could you explain how you measured those numbers?

twohaibei2• 3 months ago

I thought I was going crazy, but on my M3 pro with 36gb, 300 line file is... Weird when I scroll up/down. It's just not smooth. I don't know how to explain it, but I don't like that effect.

lkvoid• 3 months ago

2.3k issues says enough. License as mentioned by others here equally belongs in the trash. Shameful

piskov2• 3 months ago

Could anyone tell me what’s the point of this when you have neovim?

This will never be an IDE like Jetbrains Rider if you use a language like C# where those guys excel at: sheer volume of refactorings, static and dynamic analysis, cpu and memory analysis, what have you.

And for a scratchpad: is this really better than neovim?

jlledo• 3 months ago

Agreed on the language IDE points.

As for scratchpad: I’ve actually been going back and forth between Zed and neovim. Imo Zed is a good graphical editor with sane defaults and preconfigured tools (and excellent vim emulation). It will never beat neovim's configurability but it’s a smooth experience ootb.

Nowadays I just use both but default to Zed because it can be used both for Windows (for work, don’t @ me) and WSL. Neovim for quick file edits outside my main workspace, editing change descriptions, etc. - $EDITOR stuff.

I could probably get away with plain vim as $EDITOR, but throwing away a perfectly valid neovim config seems silly.

metaltyphoon• 3 months ago

Wait… Neovim also works on windows no?

bigstrat20034• 3 months ago

Well, if one isn't a vim fan, then neovim isn't going to be a good option.

za3faran• 3 months ago

I had a similar reaction. It seems that people don't know what they're missing by working on mature well established languages and platforms with all the benefits you listed. I read comments by people lamenting platforms like Delphi with a proper integrated environment - Java and C# seem to be the follow up today, but some people like to diss them without realizing what they're missing.

gamander• 3 months ago

An editor that sends all your input to the U.S. and consumes 50% of your CPU while idle, and still gets praised to high heaven. We truly live in the age of enshittification.

rambojohnson• 3 months ago

"Instead of building Zed like a web page, we built it like a video game, --", uh, what.

and then the whole telemetry bit.

bye.

Hilliard_Ohiooo2• 3 months ago

Wow! So much yes!!!

classicposter• 3 months ago

Congratulations! I recall there used to be difficulties handling non-ASCII characters in the built-in terminal, but now I can use it without any problems regarding Japanese input. Providing a stable, real-time, stateful application like an editor is incredibly difficult.I appreciate the efforts of the team and contributors.

makuchaku• 3 months ago

Congrats to the entire team!

swordsith• 3 months ago

Seems like a de-webbed fork of this is a no brainer. its crazy what they think people will just take lying down from a open source project.

rickybule• 3 months ago

Nobody in the post or the comment talked about how it is built on top of / similarly to Godot Engine. Congrats to the Zed team!

chamomeal4• 3 months ago

Just wanted to mention they added amp jump to helix mode in preview 1.1.2!! Aka "gw" in helix. And it's AMAZING!!! Seems silly but this was the only thing keeping me from fully switching. It's such a snappy editor, and the helix mode is surprisingly faithful. Expand/shrink selection, multiple cursors from searching in a selection, amp jump... it's just amazing.

Helix lovers who are dying waiting for helix plugins, please try this out

anta40• 3 months ago

Congtats for reaching 1.0

Gotta say farewell to Sublime. Now Zed is my general purposed text editor. For doing most of my coding work, still use VSCode and nvim.

ivolimmen• 3 months ago

I just upgraded to the latest to try it out. It's like Visual Studio Code and I like that. But both are VERY LLM focused and I am not using that at all. If it bothers me with LLM stuf I will switch to https://gram.liten.app/

8n4vidtmkvmk• 3 months ago

Can you fix the CLI on Windows? You broke it a few versions ago. 'zed --version' and all the other flags don't work. Maybe broken command parser or something, im not sure. Zed with zero flags still launches it. I particularly want to be able to pass it filenames for quick opening and --new and --wait. Used to work. Thanks!

miguelraz6• 3 months ago

Zed support engineer here, that sounds like a bug!

I have `zed --version` working on my Windows machine:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> zed --version

Zed 1.0.0 5ec84a926ef83865afb92d2a3d1ca3b419572cf9 – \\?\C:\Users\mrg\AppData\Local\Programs\Zed\Zed.exe

If you're up for it, we can pair next week to get a proper bug report filed

https://calendar.app.google/qPgW7q6upb3RqPjx5

hdjrudni• 3 months ago

I wasn't expecting that level of support, thanks for the offer!

You said it should work, so I did some poking around. Uninstalled it, reinstalled it. Still didn't work. The "About" in app said I was running 1.0.0+stable

Checked my environment paths and saw I had both

    C:\Users\Me\AppData\Local\Programs\Zed
    C:\Users\Me\AppData\Local\Programs\Zed\bin

So I opened those paths in explorer, and there is indeed a zed.exe in both dirs. So I tried them explicitly:

    Me@DESKTOP-NN7TD9I ~
    $ "C:\Users\Me\AppData\Local\Programs\Zed\Zed.exe" --help
    
    Me@DESKTOP-NN7TD9I ~
    $ "C:\Users\Me\AppData\Local\Programs\Zed\bin\zed.exe" --help
    The Zed CLI binary.
    This CLI is a separate binary that invokes Zed.
    
    ...

They both launch Zed when double clicked, but only one works with CLI args.

Fix is easy then, I just deleted "C:\Users\Me\AppData\Local\Programs\Zed" from my paths.

I don't know if I added that or Zed added that path when installing (maybe from an earlier ver?), but there you have it.

tjek3• 3 months ago

Congrats! I have been using Zed for many years now, arguably the best piece of software I have ever used, and the main reason I switched to macOS.

The editor is so good it has been defining how I work - at first I would quickly copy relevant files into multiple AI chat apps using Text Threads (was quite annoyed when it was replaced by the Agent Panel which at the time made it very awkward to add relevant context and copy text), and now I really can't imagine living without the new Threads Sidebar.

It's not perfect, but whenever something is broken then I know it's just a matter of time before it gets fixed or improved.

phplovesong• 3 months ago

As a heavy (n)vim user for the last decade, what does zed give me i wont get with vim?

Is it targeted for IDE people or vscode users, or is there something else i can benefit from coming from vim?

airport_barfly• 3 months ago

I really want to use Zed, their technical approach and product design seem great. However, I had to stop using it after a few months because the Typescript LSP was just unbearably slow. An order of magnitude slower than VSCode, often more than 10 seconds to typecheck a change. More worrying is that this has been a known issue for more than two years

Still, congrats to the team. Hopefully this launch means more money to fix issues so I can start using it again.

whatever1• 3 months ago

I really respect the people who have the sanity and patience to start the development of a new editor.

People are sooo picky when it comes to editors. Guaranteed they will not be satisfied. Too fast? Then it is not doing a lot. Too many features? Well now it is too heavy. Does it use sane key bindings? FU we want vim shortcuts.

Anyway, congrats on the launch folks. Hope you keep delivering excellent software despite the noisy feedback.

Frannky• 3 months ago

I love zed. What CLI agent and model do you use with it? I am looking for something on par with CC+Opus4.6, possibly subscription-based

petre• 3 months ago

I've installed it from flatpak and it has improved somewhat but won't use it because it doesn't remember the window size and position. Resizing the window is a pain in the ass, the arrows don't show up until you match the border pixels and it doesn't even try to mimic the native UI stuff, uses round corners. Vertical resize doesn't work, it just moves the window up and down so you have to use the corner resize. Good luck doing that with round corners. If the editor doesn't start up as I've left it, then I'll keep using my pinned (because M$ like to randomly add annoying shit that breaks my workflow) VSCodium. Also, the "Sign in" drop down on the title bar. Sign in where? I don't want to sign in anywhere, let me remove that. Maybe keep the dropdown for the settings and other stuff a small icon in front of it and about "Sign in". That should be an entry in the dropdown menu, the last one on the list. In fact let me remove the widgets that I deem useless from the main UI just like the browsers do. I haven't even got to check if it has syntax highlighting for Perl, Ruby and Racket yet because these things annoyed me so much that I uninstalled it. Good stuff: one can disable AI and Git integration, athough I'd appreciate if the further options would just go away when you switched the whole thing off. Atom, Sublime and VSCode keymaps are also nice because I don't have to remap. Will check again at 1.5, I guess. At least it has improved somewhat since that last time I've tried it, I think 0.13 or so.

zephod2• 3 months ago

I tried Zed for a few days and loved it, but had to switch back to Cursor because I've become dependent on Cursor Tab.

The problem is that Cursor Tab seems kinda psychic, and I didn't realise how conditioned I'd become to just expressing a few keystrokes in the right place and have Tab pick up my intentions. If you're refactoring, you can move between files and it'll remember what you just did in a tab you just closed, and work out how to make the same changes here.

It's also really good at picking up patterns and the right imports from the whole repo. It seems to be working with a much larger, more persistent context.

I tried Zed AI, Copilot, and Mercury. All three seemed forgetful after a year of Cursor Tab. I wish there was a fix because literally everything else about Zed was an improvement.

morgankrey• 3 months ago

When was the last time you tried? We recently released a new model and are doing a lot more iterative improvement https://zed.dev/blog/zeta2

zephod2• 3 months ago

Thanks for the reply! I gave it a solid week at the start of this month, about 3 weeks ago.

The only other thing I didn't like (and this is subtle, but I had not realised that I took it for granted): In Cursor, you can close and reopen a tab, and the undo history is kept. Working on a large repo, this comes up surprisingly often.

Save -> Close -> Assume everything is fine -> Do something more -> Oh no! That was a mistake! -> Cmd+Shift+T -> Undo. Cursor will comply; Zed says there's nothing to undo. So you're back to reverting chunks of code in git.

I will try Zeta again shortly. The biggest thing I'm looking for is that I can move between files and the context of recent changes persists, and the assistant treats it has highly relevant. Comes up a lot when refactoring.

khaled_el_walid• 3 months ago

the best modern editor ever

lukaslalinsky• 3 months ago

I'm really thankful for Zed. I claim it's a better VI successor than vim/neovim. The fact that it comes with batteries included is a huge win. Multi buffer is super useful. I'd prefer if it was NOT written like a game engine, not depend on GPU, but I can't have everything.

johntopia• 3 months ago

i have been a zed junkie since it came out. i feel very happy for the team. and they seem to be very focused and disciplined about what they are building. it makes me feel like i am making the right bet!

wicharek• 3 months ago

I want to love Zed. I really do. I like how fast and performant it is. Few UI things are a nightmare, though:

1. Zed insists on opening files in the active panel AND Terminal opens in a panel -> I constantly open files over my terminal. Arghh.

2. On macOS, when I open another workspace (e.g. by drag and dropping to the app in the dock but also from CLI), it opens in one of the existing windows in a sort of workspace-level tab (?). I want a window per workspace. No way to configure that (or it is so unclear that I could never find it).

Bonus: I want code in a light scheme and terminal in a dark scheme. It is stupid, but my eyes just start hurting otherwise. I created a custom color scheme for that and it sort of works, BUT Zed seem to do some additional post-processing to colors based on the scheme-wide light/dark setting, so I cannot get the colors quite right. If I set scheme to "light" – terminal colors are a bit off. If I set to "dark" – code editor is off, cannot get it fixed with scheme level overrides.

npw55036• 3 months ago

I used the fastest editor I've ever used, and the UI design was also very good, but the Git interface didn't show the commit history, which was a bit like JetBrains' Git interface.

KomoD3• 3 months ago

but the Git interface didn't show the commit history

It does, since 0.231, but it doesn't support the remote development feature.

Thundernerd• 3 months ago

Just downloaded it and installed the C# language plugin because I need to use that for work. For some unknown reason the program grinds to an absolute halt. I cannot even close it properly anymore. If I type something it appends roughly one character per second.

Not sure if it is the plugin or something else, but unfortunately makes it very hard to try out for me.

kenanbalija• 3 months ago

Best editor ever.

atlasprompts• 3 months ago

zeds dead baby

0rzech• 3 months ago

Congrats on the 1.0 release to the team!

I tried Zed once, but unfortunately had to give up because of:

    - constant CPU usage when idle,
    - blurry fonts,
    - low-contrast light themes.

shdh• 3 months ago

The best thing about Zed is GPUI

presentation• 3 months ago

Looks much better than when I last tried it! But I couldn't get it to work as well as Cursor for AI development, maybe I just need to get more used to it?

- I tried to use the Cursor Agent via ACP, it worked but it seemed markedly stupider than when I would use Cursor directly (saying that i18n strings were being used when they weren't, editing code differently than what I asked for, also when it is running terminal commands it seems to just say "Run Command: Terminal" and has no information on what's going on). Maybe I just need to not use Cursor Agent, but my company pays for it already so that's what I tried.

- Providing context is also cludgier - In cursor I often highlight specific chunks of code and add it to the AI context via Cmd+L, but I couldn't figure out any specific way of doing that with a keyboard in Zed besides clicking a tiny + button to add "Selection" to context, which got old fast.

- Maybe I just need to get used to it but reviewing code with the git integration is just hard for me to follow; one giant editor with every change in it is just harder for me to grok than showing each file one by one; so it was tiring to review the big changes produced by LLMs. Also, when you stage changes the file just stays where it is with a barely noticeable check in the checkbox in the sidebar - I prefer the behavior of Cursor where it actually moves the staged files to a separate section, but some kind of more obvious visual indication besides that perhaps would help. I did like the tree view, though!

- The tsgo and oxlint LSP servers kept crashing, which was frustrating. GraphQL LSP server also couldn't understand graphql.config.mjs, which is strange as that's supported out of box by graphql-config and works fine in Cursor/VSCode.

- I tried using a few of the different Edit Suggestion LLM options, but unfortunately Cursor is just way too good compared to any of them (slow, and just not very helpful in comparison).

- Just in general figuring out how to configure them is confusing, there's like 3-4 different places to configure agents and LLMs for different purposes, I found it very fragmented and confusing and the docs didn't make it particularly easy to set things up.

That all said, the performance was muuuuch better than Cursor. But the UX issues and general bugginess of ACP and these LSP plugins were impeding my workflow too much for me to tolerate it so back to Cursor for me. If anyone has tips on how I might make some of these better that would be cool, but if it's just inherent limitations then maybe I'll try again in 6 months or something.

devlovstad• 3 months ago

While it seems cool, I am still waiting for native Jupyter Notebook support for it to be useful to me. When that happens, I'll give it a spin, but it seems like they recently took it off the roadmap.

sevenseacat3• 3 months ago

I did not like when Zed started installing LSPs without my knowledge. I will enable the LSPs I want for the languages I want, thank you.

And the markdown preview is basically unreadable, everything is the same font size and all crammed together.

mobeigi• 3 months ago

Last time I heard about Zed I was intrigued. Now i'm interested, going to give it a go.

KomoD3• 3 months ago

I love Zed, it's my main editor and has been for a while. I disable all the AI stuff, though, as it's not for me.

It has some issues and is missing some stuff I want, but I'm happy with it anyway.

One feature I use a lot is remote development over SSH.

unselect59172• 3 months ago

2.3. Acceptable Use The Service uses technology provided by multiple third party AI subprocessors (the “AI Providers”) including but not limited to: Anthropic, PBC (“Anthropic”), Google LLC (“Google”), LiveKit Incorporated, OpenAI, LLC (“OpenAI”) etc., as may be updated from time to time. Customer may not use the Service in a manner that violates any applicable AI Provider policy which are listed on https://zed.dev/acceptable-use-policies, including Anthropic’s Usage Policy, Google Gemini’s Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy, GitHub's Acceptable Use Policy, LiveKit’s Acceptable Use Policy; OpenAI’s Usage Policies or Sharing and Publication Policy; and Community Guidelines; each of which may be updated from time to time and are expressly incorporated by reference. Customer is solely responsible to check for updates to the applicable AI Provider policy from time to time.
Customer may not use the Service in a manner that violates any applicable AI Provider policy

Excuse me?

uobytx2• 3 months ago

Zed has built in support for accessing ai models. You don’t have to use the ai features. But if you do, zed can’t be seen suggesting it’s okay to abuse the Claude api for legal reasons.

matthewtse• 3 months ago

I really wanted to like Zed, but the tab complete was just unusable compared to Cursor's. Be forewarned.

https://x.com/MatthewTse_/status/2042680214187315683

If they can fix tab complete, I'll give it another try!

dmazhukov• 3 months ago

Your downloads are broken for M1 pro Macbook. Both homebrew and site downloads are unable to be installed

unselect59172• 3 months ago

I was delighted to find that "expand selection" was a supported function, doubly so when I noticed that it was ctrl+w (what I'm used to and this may be from the IntelliJ defaults), but it... doesn't do anything.

Even selecting it from the menu does nothing.

An internet search turned up nothing useful. And oddly 'expand selection' is not listed in the keymap?

None of this makes any sense. And if expand selection doesn't work I'm simply not going to use it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

edit: I found that (possibly my intellij mappings) remapped ctrl+w to "close editor" and I deleted that and now it works.

It's weird that it's not to be found in the keymap editor though... I had to manually insert it as a binding AND why would it show up as "Expand Selection Ctrl+W" in the select menu when it isn't? That's got to be a bug or two.

dzonga• 3 months ago

dope work. hopefully this release - fixes the occasional freeze that happens on Mac-os.

I use Zed as my daily driver - I'm happy with it - besides the occasional freeze.

alpha_trion• 3 months ago

Congrats Zed team! Big fan, Zed is my daily driver.

mahi_novice• 3 months ago

zed is very awesome!!

agrippanux• 3 months ago

I loved Zed for a few years - but their insistence on not letting Claude Code use Zed as an external editor forced me to build my own IDE.

This turned out to be pretty awesome because I built something completely customized to my workflow and it has increased my productivity by several factors.

temporallobe• 3 months ago

I use Zed and VSCode together. Zed for a “clean” version of my workspaces (no annoying plugins, no agents, etc.), and VSCode with all the plugins + GitHub Copilot. I really appreciate what Zed has become and how performant it is, and plan to use it more exclusively.

arungopidas• 3 months ago

i'm very new to coding (6 months?)

i started with vs ode, then quickly switched to antigravity and felt it was so much less bloated than vscode.

then i tried zed, and i've never looked back. i don't think i've "loved" a software product this much. it looks super clean and so intentional.

thanks for making this, and making this available for free.

i bet there will be a huge group of developers looking up to zed as a quality benchmark. i certainly am.

benbieler• 3 months ago

my take: https://x.com/benbieler/status/2050322241699655934

mrsssnake• 3 months ago

The biggest problem I personally have with Zed design is it downloading it's own binaries for LSP servers instead of using ones already installed in the system.

mathcartney• 3 months ago

I switched from vscode to zed as a way to keep things interesting at work and now I mostly use zed, it is faster for larger codebases and also have a interesting design which is simmilar enough but with some aspects that feels like a whole different thing.

firemelt• 3 months ago

idk but I feel never like the zed UI at all

Jaskolka• 3 months ago

Feel better than vscode and antigravity, I really like zed, many thanks to the developer team!

Zed 1.0

Related Stories