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Zed on Linux Is Here

• Razengan 2y ago
  @ people who have used both extensively: How does Zed compare to Sublime Text?
• syngrog66 2y ago
  As a longtime vim user text editing is not an unmet need or unsolved problem. Lack of time, energy to execute on everything is a much bigger problem. And the very biggest and most dangerous unsolved problems I can see on all our plates involve democracy and climate. Heck I'd like to "solve" all issues with public restrooms in the US, for example, or the lack of planning for trees or shade or water conservation, first, before I'd spend time on Yet Another Hip New Text Editor. The latter is perhaps several hundred slot ranks down (at most generous to it) in my priority list.
• lbhdc 2y ago
  Zed seems like its gotten a lot of buzz on HN, and its great to see new players in the space. For those who have used it, what are some of the killer features?
  • threatofrain 2y ago
    No killer features, just nice ergonomics and speed out of the box. I use it as my Vim replacement.
    • boomskats 2y ago
      Do you find it to be faster than vim/neovim?
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • vehemenz 2y ago
        The Vim emulation is pretty far behind JetBrains, VSCode, and Sublime Text. I wouldn't compare it to Vim as a replacement at this point.
    • renewiltord 2y ago
      Do you use it for Rust? Does it do "Show usages" well when the usages are through a macro?
    • nickorlow 2y ago
      What motivated you to switch to it from vim?
  • choilive 2y ago
    Its killer feature seems to be speed. Otherwise I dont see much of a reason to use it over VS Code.
    • gavmor 2y ago
      Have you had much success with VS Code's multiplayer extensions? I've found them buggy to the point of useless, but maybe things have improved. Zed, on the otherhand, is developed by people who understand pair programming, which is my priority.
      • choilive 2y ago
        No not much experience there since multiplayer editing has never really been a part of my personal workflow (mostly a lot of screensharing), but I can definitely see that being useful for people that use it regularly.
      • cmiles74 2y ago
        Not the OP but I tried hard, looking for an easy pair programming solution. Worked decently a couple of times and inexplicably failed most of the time.
        • gavmor 2y ago
          This is why I'm excited to try Zed. I regularly "pair" via Pop, but keybindings and lag make it hard to switch seats, so we basically decide at the beginning of the session who is going to hog the keyboard, and that's a crippling dynamic.
    • griftrejection 2y ago
      [dead]
  • nequo 2y ago
    Besides speed, the other killer feature that Zed focuses on is collaborative editing: https://zed.dev/docs/channels https://zed.dev/docs/channels
  • wolfadex 2y ago
    For me the "killer feature" is a graphical editor (like VSCode or the Jet Brains editors) but with performance more like vim. I'm also very much enjoying the modal editing, which VSCode lacks.
    • thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
      >> I'm also very much enjoying the modal editing, which VSCode lacks. The VSCode Vim plugin works great: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevim.vim https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevi...
      • 3836293648 2y ago
        The VSC Vim plugin barely works with default keybinds and not at all as soon as you start modifying it. It's also super slow
      • wolfadex 2y ago
        When I specified the modal editing I was referring to how the workspace search in Zed brings up each result in an editable "window" allowing me to make edits across my whole project from 1 tab. VSCode's workspace search feels much more limited in comparison.
        • thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
          That sounds like an interesting feature. Could you provide a link that gives more information about it? I am not finding it in the docs.
          • wolfadex 2y ago
            I'm not seeing it in the docs, maybe I should write up a little something on my editing experience! Also to correct my self, I think I mistakenly said `modal` when I should have said `buffer` earlier. So searching across the project brings up your results in multiple buffers, each about 5 lines (expandable to more) and you can do all of your normal editing within each/all of the buffers. If I happen to write something up, I'll try and remember to share it in this thread.
  • drcongo 2y ago
    I use it as my secondary editor (after Sublime) but could easily see myself switching in the not too distant future. It's incredibly fast, possibly even more so than Sublime, and really well designed. While the UI design of an editor is possibly not that important to a lot of people, I find it really matters to me for unknown brain reasons, I get anxious if I ever have to use VS Code as it has zero attention to design details. I'm really pleased for the Zed team on reaching this milestone. I think the only thing holding me back from it being my daily driver is the built-in Pyright (which I hate) and lack of Ruff support.
  • pcthrowaway 2y ago
    I haven't used Zed in the last year, but Zed's search across codebase display was divine. I don't want to necessarily open the file when looking at search results to see additional context in the matching sections. Zed brings up a view with all the results where you can expand context, and IIRC even edit in the results panel without having to open the entire file. It's also collaboration-first, and unlike VS code, I believe the software behind collaboration mode is open source
  • barrell 2y ago
    For me, a couple things; - fast enough to compete with neovim. Idk if it’s my previous interest in display engineering, but I substantially notice the speed - vim bindings…. Satisfactory. I don’t struggle to navigate at all, feels pretty native to me. I can split panes every which way till Sunday - collaboration mode is pretty great - Ability to have your current pane magnified - Ability to set your terminal font size to a different font size than your editor (been looking for this for years in a terminal emulator) - Super clean and crisp ui. TBH it was too much ui when I first tried it, I stopped using it almost immediately. But I have it a second try and got used to it. It’s still a lot more than vim but hey - Outline mode (pretty sweet) - Multi-file buffers (makes editing text across multiple files stupidly easy) - Cracked team. Awesome people, super transparent, just some sick engineers doing sick engineering
• jak2k 2y ago
  Now they just need a flatpak…
  • mikaylamaki 2y ago
    We have a flatpak build! It's not on flathub yet though :) https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/docs/src/development/linux.md#flatpak https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/docs/src/dev...
    • Vinnl 2y ago
      Any chance we can download that pre-built from somewhere? :)
    • correct-horse 2y ago
      I really don't have much to say, just wanted to thank you for officially releasing a Linux build, and supporting us at all. We, the silent majority, very much appreciate your work. Every release of every application brings out the moaners, this is to be expected. Thanks.
    • zitsarethecure 2y ago
      Great! I am way more likely to try out software when it's available as a regular package that I already know how to manage.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Awesome. Been looking for a next-gen Atom for coding. I use PyCharm most of the time, but sometimes its overkill with its eternal indexing ... :) So I often find myself bringing up SublimeText for working on individual files as opposed to a whole project.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  At first I thought this might be a creation of Zed Shaw (whose Learn Ruby the Hard Way, was the best introduction to that language, back in the day; and Mongrel was great).
  • romwell 2y ago
    I can vouch for "Learn C The Hard Way" as well :)
  • simonw 2y ago
    Instead it's a creation of the team who built Atom, Tree-sitter and Electron. Pretty solid resume!
    • insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Absolutely.
• cassepipe 2y ago
  vim mode in the json settings: "vim_mode": true,
• whalesalad 2y ago
  Really dislike the one line installer. How is it installing? Flatpak? Adding an apt repo? Manual install? Fortunately docs go into better detail, https://zed.dev/docs/linux https://zed.dev/docs/linux I'm on Debian anyway so who am I kidding expecting this to be in apt :D
  • bscphil 2y ago
    It's already in the Arch Linux repositories, which is pretty cool: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/zed/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/zed/
    • anotherhue 2y ago
      Am I missing something? NixOS has had it since April https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits/nixos-unstable/pkgs/by-name/ze/zed-editor/package.nix https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits/nixos-unstable/pkgs...
      • bscphil 2y ago
        Yeah apparently there have been working builds since at least January, that's when the PKGBUILD was created: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/zed/-/commit/6f66ba1d2b03acce3102d75579f05b787033ddb7 https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/ze... It's been in the main repos since May.
  • porphyra 2y ago
    You can just read the script that you're curling rather than pipe it into sh directly. It seems like it just extracts the binary from a tar.gz and puts it into ~/.local.
    • fao_ 2y ago
      "reading a script" is actually a worse user experience on Linux than just using repositories or flatpak, though. It's pretty rude of software developers to put the onus on users to verify that they're not doing something outright malicious in terms of the installer.
• AndyKelley 2y ago
  > To install Zed on most Linux distributions, run the shell script below. This is not an acceptable way to install anything on Linux. If you want to target Linux users you can't distribute with a shell script for installation. I get that the idea is to reduce friction to installation and trying it out, but most Linux users - the ones you want filing bug reports anyway - are ones who will do due diligence and inspect the shell script to see what kind of opinions it makes about how to install the software. For example, I see that the shell script downloads a tarball and unpacks it to `~/.local`, then tries to mess with my PATH variable. Well, my local directory is `~/local`. So that's not where I want it. Actually, I would want it in `~/local/zed`, isolated from the rest of the installations in there. Then the PATH variable stuff just creates junk files since I don't use zsh. So I end up having to figure out the URL to the tarball and install it myself. My point is that if you just listed the download link to the tarball, it would actually be closer to your own goal of reducing installation friction. The shell script is so much more friction because I have to read bash code instead of just clicking a download link.
  • pkage 2y ago
    This is a fairly common way to install tools on Linux. Tailscale, Homebrew, Pi-hole and many others offer installations in this way.
    • AndyKelley 2y ago
      The same criticisms apply to Tailscale, Homebrew, Pi-hole and all those others.
      • usr942568903890 2y ago
        > The same criticisms apply to Tailscale No it doesn't. Tailscale's shell script is entirely optional and installs a distro/package manager specific package. It also doesn't mess with your PATH variable. They maintain packages for most popular distros as you can see here https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/ https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/. The sibling comments are just spreading misinformation because those people were too lazy to actually look anything up.
• handsaway 2y ago
  I tried zed for a few weeks because I'm generally sympathetic to the "use a native app" idea vs Electron. I generally liked it and its UX but: 1. VSCode is pretty damn fast to be honest. Very rarely is my slowdown in my work VSCode loading. Maybe I don't open very large files? Probably 5k lines of typescript at most. 2. Integration with the Typescript language server was just not as good as VSCode. I can't pin down exactly what was wrong but the autocompletions in particular felt much worse. I've never worked on a language server or editor so I don't know what's on zed/VSCode and what's on the TS language server. Eventually all the little inconveniences wore on me and I switched back to VSCode. I will probably try it again after a few more releases to see if it feels better.
  • dijit 2y ago
    Yeah, I agree about VSCode being sort of fast enough. Computers are getting faster and I’m on a M-series mac which makes web rendering much faster but still I feel like as far as electron apps go: VScode is basically the golden child. Slack & Teams on the other hand, ouch.
  • yoyohello13 2y ago
    My only problem with VSCode is that it's owned by Microsoft. I'm willing to put up with some extra friction if it allows me to escape their ecosystem even a little bit. My general rule is if I can get at most of what I need from the open source version of something, I use it. Even if it's less user friendly.
    • whalesalad 2y ago
      but vscode is open source: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode https://github.com/microsoft/vscode and there are third-party builds from the community that disable things like telemetry: https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/
      • yoyohello13 2y ago
        Sorry, I should have been more specific and said FOSS. VSCode is still encumbered by the weight of a mega corp. It's like saying Chrome is open source. Sure it is, but it still exists to serve the corporation that owns it.
• llagerlof 2y ago
  How to install/activate extensions? I saw that exists a directory called "extensions" in the repository.
  • simlevesque 2y ago
    There's an extension ui in the app. Ctrl + Shift + X or use the top right dropdown menu.
• assimpleaspossi 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • Zambyte 2y ago
    https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/
• unshavedyak 2y ago
  I'll have to figure out how to get it on NixOS. Always the challenge with Nix lol.
  • Zambyte 2y ago
    https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=24.05&show=zed-editor&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=zed-editor https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=24.05&show=zed-edi...
    • unshavedyak 2y ago
      Wait, added 2 months ago? This isn't new then, i take it? Interesting. Linux release announcement now i wonder? I expected this just was released today, so it definitely wouldn't be in Nixpkgs yet lol
      • delichon 2y ago
        For the last few months it has been available on Linux to build from source.
• riiii 2y ago
  I don't know if it's just me but vscode feels like it isn't as fast as it used to be. The terminal also keeps getting messed up on Linux. Will definitely try one this out! Although the amount of plugins and community knowledge of vscode is immense.
• dabber21 2y ago
  neat! just installed it in podman, so far so good
• rareitem 2y ago
  FYI, to launch Zed, run `'~/.local/bin/zed'`
  • whalesalad 2y ago
    If .local/bin is in your PATH you would be able to fire it up with just `zed`
• hi_dang_ 2y ago
  Zed Shaw started a company called Zed Industries?
  • ebrescia 2y ago
    LOL no. The Zed founders are the guys who built Atom and Electron (and Treesitter): Nathan Sobo, Max Brunsfeld and Antonio Scandurra.
• DarkCrusader2 2y ago
  Does anyone know what is their monetization plan, or if they even have one? Editor with even this much polish takes a lot of time and effort. How is it being funded? Can we expect useful features to progressively get locked behind subscription as it grows in popularity (a la Gitlab)? Edit: Nevermind, found it - https://zed.dev/faq#how-will-you-make-money https://zed.dev/faq#how-will-you-make-money. Interesting charter. We envision Zed as a free-to-use editor, supplemented by subscription-based, optional network features, such as: Channels and calls Chat Channel notes We plan to allow offer our collaboration features to open source teams, free of charge. Edit 2: They have apparently also already raised money via private equity. I am quiet soured on "free" products which will almost always be enshittified as the pressure to turn profit grows.
  • mikojan 2y ago
    > We envision Zed as a free-to-use editor, supplemented by subscription-based, optional network features, such as: > > Channels and calls > Chat > Channel notes > > We plan to allow offer our collaboration features to open source teams, free of charge. https://zed.dev/faq https://zed.dev/faq
  • jarule 2y ago
    Build a big enough userbase for big tech to want to buy it. It's the only game left outside ads. Worked for WhatsApp, Instagram, Github, Kaggle, etc.
  • kelnos 2y ago
    Yeah, I just can't get excited by anything this foundational that has monetization plans. While neovim is a pain to configure and will probably never be a polished "product", it's completely free to use, with no weird monetization features that might start out in good faith, but slowly creep into must-have parts of the software. I'm perfectly willing to pay for some types of software, but for something as fundamental as my text editor, I want a model that doesn't depend on a company that needs money. That may sound a bit backward, as it otherwise depends on the goodwill of volunteer contributors, but that's the model I prefer and actually believe in.
• w-m 2y ago
  Is (Python) debugging on the roadmap somewhere for Zed, or will this remain out of scope? I have a fast editor in Sublime already, but I’d consider jumping ship from VS Code to Zed if I can set some breakpoints and look at local variables and whatnot (very basic IDE stuff).
  • pavinjoseph 2y ago
    Not very good experience after opening a simple Python script with no external dependencies in zed for linux. They use Pyright and there was an error and warning that were both incorrect. VSCode uses Pylance IIRC and it's not complaining.
• llagerlof 2y ago
  Just a suggestion. One of the best features of pure text editors (and incredible, not all of them implement it) is autosave keeping the "unsaved" state of the file. For example, if you make some changes in a file (new or not), don't save the changes, close and open the editor, the state of the opened files are kept like I never had closed the editor. The unsaved files are still unsaved. New edited files are still there, unsaved, ready to user manually save them. Notepad++ works that way, and it is an amazing feature.
  • misternugget 2y ago
    Working on it!
  • sa-code 2y ago
    Sublime works this way and I do appreciate it
    • shitlord 2y ago
      I have a tab in Sublime Text for my todo list, which I created several years ago and never bothered to save. It's a great feature for indecisive procrastinators.
    • mhuffman 2y ago
      Just an fyi, I have shot myself in the foot with Sublime's version of this. I became dependent on using unnamed/unsaved documents for quick notes, then at some interval I would clean up. And because Sublime would remember, I could rest safe that they would be there even if closed and reopened until I cleaned them up myself. Well, I also got so hooked on Sublime, I set it as my default system text editor. Then, (more than once), I would click a downloaded text file or something that would open in another window. Then after browsing or something I would be back in my original Sublime window. Close it for the day and as I was closing other windows realize there is another Sublime window still open with that document that I read early ... and all my other temp notes were gone! If you are good at grepping you can still find the files cached on your system with a little work, but something to watch out for. Or just get used to saving files somewhere.
• natemcintosh 2y ago
  Anyone else get ~60-70% CPU usage when moving the mouse around? And no GPU usage.
  • simlevesque 2y ago
    Yeah I get something like that too
  • mikaylamaki 2y ago
    We have a few words on this in our troubleshooting guide: https://zed.dev/docs/linux#troubleshooting https://zed.dev/docs/linux#troubleshooting Let us know if that doesn't fix it!
    • natemcintosh 2y ago
      Tried the advice, but wasn't able to change behavior. Added a [comment](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/13552#issuecomment-2221225309 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/13552#issuecomm...) to an existing issue
• jchw 2y ago
  Man, I'm conflicted. I mean, Zed works pretty damn well. So far my biggest annoyance with Zed though is that it's constantly trying to download language servers and other tools and run them. And sure, that's handy, but 1. I don't really want it, I'd much rather only use distribution-provided tools. 2. It doesn't work at all on NixOS, so it's just wasting its time and our bandwidth constantly downloading and trying to update binaries that will never run. The thing is, I would just disable it, but you can't, as far as I can tell. There's this somewhat angry issue about it here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589 They might have a point but beyond whether or not they have a point regarding the fact that it automatically fetches binaries from the Internet, not having an option to disable it is just cruel. I still like Zed a lot and I also have a big appreciation for the design of GPUI, which I think is a very well-designed UI library that puts focus on the important things. So, I hope it goes well.
  • mikaylamaki 2y ago
    After we finished prepping this linux launch, we've started work on making this situation better. Follow along here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/14034 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/14034
    • jchw 2y ago
      Oh, thank goodness. Yeah, that's going to be a major quality of life improvement for me. I had a feeling it'd eventually make its way into Zed eventually, but when I initially read the issue I was under the impression that there was no plans to add options around this, which I found confusing.
  • brunoqc 2y ago
    > It doesn't work at all on NixOS Doesn't it work with: zed-fhs = pkgs.buildFHSUserEnv { name = "zed"; targetPkgs = pkgs: with pkgs; [ zed-editor ]; runScript = "zed"; }; Still not ideal though.
    • 2y ago
• foresto 2y ago
  Looks like they're developing their own Apache-licensed GUI framework for this, called GPUI. I think of text handling as one of the trickier parts of building such a framework, so one specifically made to support a text editor would seem to be a pretty good foundation for a general purpose GUI toolkit. I wonder if they (or someone else) will pursue it as an alternative to Qt.
  • jchw 2y ago
    GPUI is very cool, they have blogged about it before. https://zed.dev/blog/videogame https://zed.dev/blog/videogame Many UI libraries being built today want to be very forward-focused, so they focus on being as general as possible. This does make some sense, especially considering that, for better or worse, using a web browser engine as a UI has become increasingly popular of a decision. However, in the end this leads to almost all new "greenfield" UI projects trying to develop scalable vector UI rendering engines that need advanced and highly optimized vector rendering libraries like Skia and Pathfinder. Having everything in vector all the way through is elegant, but it's complicated. The insight with GPUI is that it's not really necessary to be that general, the vast majority of UIs are made up of a relatively small number of different primitives that you can build on to basically do anything. So instead the vast majority of what's going on in GPUI is layers of roundrects. Text rendering is the classic approach of rendering into glyph atlases. I think this is a vastly more sustainable model for a UI library. I don't know if GPUI is ready to be used on its own, but it does have a spiffy if brief website. https://www.gpui.rs/ https://www.gpui.rs/ Given that Zed actually has good "UI-feel", it tells me they are focused on the right things. A lot of new greenfield UI frameworks are spending a ton of time on trying to build extremely generic vector graphics systems but the actual widgets feel bad and are missing all kinds of tweaks and nuance. Here's a good litmus test for text editors: what happens if you double click and drag? In most good UI frameworks, this should result in word selection and then expanding that selection left or right. In a lot of smaller greenfield UI libraries, something vastly less useful will happen :(
    • foresto 2y ago
      Thanks for the links. The approach described in that blog post seems like it could actually achieve crisp, native-looking text. What a welcome improvement that would be compared to the blurry, misshapen, overlapping, or poorly laid out results I've seen from other new GUI frameworks.
• toastercat 2y ago
  Definitely looks pretty rough so far (running Debian GNOME) -- font rendering looks wonky, and resizing the window is slow and unresponsive. But I'm very optimistic for what's to come!
  • mikaylamaki 2y ago
    Check out our troubleshooting page, you might not be utilizing the GPU! https://zed.dev/docs/linux#troubleshooting https://zed.dev/docs/linux#troubleshooting If that doesn't work for you, please file an issue, and let us know whether you're using Wayland or X11 :)
• WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
  I gave it a fair try Cons: - spawning nodejs whenever you edit JSON files seems overkill, i'd prefer they use something native and more lightweight, or a way to completely disable it - text still looks a bit blurry on low DPI screens - doesn't support LSP properly, completion items are missing some data - Rust for plugins.. this is painful, compare it to Sublime Text's python API, it's night and day.. Pros: - Fast and responsive - UI is simple yet effective - drag&drop layouting, something i wish Sublime Text had.. - built-in terminal - built-in Debugger (not yet ready) Few more months of developments, and i'll certainly switch from Sublime Text, i'll be a little sad because i wrote plenty of plugins for it I however worry about their business model, i have 0 interests in their AI/collaboration stuff, i'll probably maintain a fork to get rid of all that crap, they should setup something as a back up plan, a small paid license, just for support, i'll be happy to buy one
  • nilslice 2y ago
    > - Rust for plugins.. this is painful, compare it to Sublime Text's python API, it's night and day.. Yes, this is unfortunate as they've unsuitably chosen the barely usable & unstable "component model" for their Wasm plugin layer. It's really only half-decent in Rust (to write the code & compile to CM non-standard version of wasm binary. it's also only truthfully usable to call components _from_ rust too.) I think they are banking on the eventual support for cross-language async - which likely could never come, or could take longer than the company stays solvent!
  • kelnos 2y ago
    > I however worry about their business model For me, this is a showstopper. I don't want to use a text editor that even has a business model.
    • WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
      It doesn't really matter, it's open source with a growing community already, so it can only keep going if the company dies
• sauercrowd 2y ago
  Cool to see a new editor in the arena with a lot of resources behind it, but I'm trying to find the selling point besides "it's really quick". Great feature but there's a lot more stuff I need for a truly outstanding editor, what are the novel pieces? The bar is ridiculously for editors (vim & emacs configurability, vscode just works, jetbrains can do it all) - what will/does it bring to the table to compete?
  • taosx 2y ago
    I really enjoy the AI assistant it has. One of the simplest easiest ways for me to interact with chatgpt/claude apis. Write prompt, copy, paste code.
  • mikaylamaki 2y ago
    As a Zed developer, our killer feature is the parallel programming that our software enables. It's like pairing without the terrible parts.
  • _rwo 2y ago
    > besides "it's really quick" I can see the appeal, as the demo looks really smooth; then again, I'm a terrible slow developer, so personally I find saving few ms here and there irrelevant to my daily workflow
    • sauercrowd 2y ago
      i definitely agree, and Id LOVE a snappy editor, but I struggle to trade thay off with everything else other editors provide
  • DuncanCoffee 2y ago
    I've been looking (for years!) for an editor with code highlight which can open single files as fast as notepad++ but on linux, I have to say I'm really happy about zed. I also use it to open folders with source code and markdown documents without having to boot up an intellij editor
  • mokkol 2y ago
• rwdf 2y ago
  Anyone got this working in WSL? Using WSLg perhaps?
  • shanselman 2y ago
    Trying but not succeeding
• Arch-TK 2y ago
  I really don't get why this is the modern editor style of choice. 20% (35 chars) of screen space permanently wasted on a always on file browser (meanwhile the animation showcases fuzzy finding) 4% (7 chars) of screen space permanently wasted by line numbers (why are the numbers cut off on the right?) 2.7% (5 chars) of screen space taken up by a gutter So 27% of screen space effectively dead 99% of the time. Why do people do this to themselves? I can't quite figure out how to get the gutter to truly only appear when needed (I can't remember why) but in my vim configuration 2 chars of space are taken up by the gutter and the rest is for the actual code. The current line number is in the bottom right, and if I need to go to a specific line number I have `G` for that. If I need a file explorer, there's the default Netrw one, there's NERD Tree, there's a terminal (I actually rarely need this anyway, but I can understand not everyone can cope, but I can't comprehend why you would need it on 100% of the time). Why does the "modern text editor" waste so much screen space? I have a 1200p laptop monitor which gives me 174 chars of horizontal space at a comfortable font size. If I split that in half I get two terminal windows worth of 87 characters each. If I keep my code under 85 characters per line, not only is it easier to read, I can keep a man page or another piece of code on the other half of my screen.
  • brunoqc 2y ago
    You can close the left dock (ctrl+b for me). The gutter is still huge, though.
  • Quot 2y ago
    > 20% (35 chars) of screen space permanently wasted on a always on file browser That is toggleable. Cmd+B on Mac. I usually keep it closed, but it's just a shortcut away when I need it. > 4% (7 chars) of screen space permanently wasted by line numbers You can disable that in the settings with: "gutter": { "line_numbers": false } > 2.7% (5 chars) of screen space taken up by a gutter You can also disable the other items in the gutter to free up all of that space. > So 27% of screen space effectively dead 99% of the time. You can also press shift+esc at any time to toggle a fullscreen pane of whatever you are working on when you need more space without affecting your editor's state. I don't know the name of that action, I actually found that accidentally. Edit: I forgot to mention, you can actually disable the tab bar now too if you want even more space. You would just need to rely on the tab switcher feature or file search to move around.
• marcodiego 2y ago
  The last collaborative editor that I could use locally successfully was gobby. Currently its development is very slow or seems abandoned. I've been waiting for Zed because it was introduced as something that was "multiplayer-first" from the beginning. Reading the docs now, it looks like I need a feature called "channels" that I couldn't confirm can be used fully locally. Is there a way to use Zed as a collaborative editor fully locally?
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  • gpm 2y ago
    They've open sourced the server implementation too, but short of figuring out how to run that not that I'm aware of: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/main/crates/collab https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/main/crates/colla...
• croemer 2y ago
  To save you time: If you're on macOS, you can install with brew install --cask zed The docs don't make it very clear that the cask is available via homebrew.
• TiredOfLife 2y ago
  On Steam Deck it just exits, or rather it and the old node.js it bundles stays in memory. But no UI.
• Brechreiz 2y ago
  Is this better than VS Code?
• vondur 2y ago
  Surprised they didn't make it a FlatPak. Probably would anger some, but it would work with most Linux distributions.
  • hnarn 2y ago
    Is there anything stopping anyone from making it a flatpak and maintaining it? I'm personally not surprised that they're reluctant to take on more maintenance responsibility than necessary.
    • GlacierFox 2y ago
      Yeah, right on! We Linux users love dicking around getting software to work on our multi-variant systems. Why maintain a universal package when you can sit and read through issues from nerds trying to get your software to work on insert trendy distro here
• zoogeny 2y ago
  I'm a sucker for text editors. I've used so many at this point. Notepad++ from way back. Anyone remember Komodo, the Perl focused text editor from ActiveState? BBEdit. TextMate. Sublime text. Atom. Visual Studio Code. All kinds of IDEs from Eclipse to the IntelliJ family and the full fledged Visual Studio. I've used many flavors of vim and learned emacs multiple times. I doubt I've named half of the editors I've used. I'm at the point where I just can't motivate myself to try yet another. In my experience, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. My rule of thumb now: use whatever the majority of people on my team use. For non-team related work I find the community around Visual Studio Code to be good enough that it does what I need most of the time. I use bog-standard vim when I ssh into boxes.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • 1oooqooq 2y ago
    komodo the editor (i recall it as a semi-commercial alternative to eclipse, much like intellij, but based on mozilla UX code?) was funny, because exactly the time it got traction and people started to talk about it, the tech news were inundated with Comodo the TLS operator caught doing shaddy stuff (and if i recall, blaming some hackers) didn't hear much about komodo till now
    • zoogeny 2y ago
      Komodo had some promise, in kind of the same way the original hype about Perl 6 had promise. For its time, it had features that were not widely available in other editors. However, I found it to be slow and buggy. And that was compared to Eclipse which was notoriously clunky. (Note: a quick look at the modern Komodo Editor, which appears to still be actively developed, looks much closer to a Visual Studio Code clone and is nothing like I recall the original) I recall it was pitched as a slightly lighter alternative to eclipse and intellij but initially geared towards Perl development (with plugin support for all languages). However, that kind of middle-ground wasn't popular at the time and devs mostly split into the full featured IDE camp or the stripped down editor camp. Editor hype cycles come and go. That's part of the reason I am so jaded when I see a new cycle start for a new editor.
• lofaszvanitt 2y ago
  [flagged]
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• llmblockchain 2y ago
  Seems like a good VSCode alternative, but I'll stick with my editor of choice. I imagine it will be 1~2 years before Zed is bought by Microsoft and either squashed like Atom or replaces VSCode.
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• 1oooqooq 2y ago
  I don't really like their editor, but their fonts (based on iosevka) is my 2nd favorite (after Mensch). And their opensource development mode is the best one I've seen so far! So many nice choices.
  • sphars 2y ago
    Unfortunately, they've switched out their Zed fonts for IBM Plex: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/13596 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/13596
    • 1oooqooq 2y ago
      lol. Of course they would change the one thing i thought was great. and they bumped ligatures to eleven on top of the change. sigh. future generations will look at our silly use of ligatures like we look at comic sans.
• deleted 2y ago
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• dario_od 2y ago
  Sadly I can't run it in WSL. thread 'main' panicked at crates/gpui/src/platform/linux/wayland/client.rs:143:51: called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: UnsupportedVersion note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace
  • shanselman 2y ago
    same. :(
  • daghamm 2y ago
    Man, what kinda of QA do they have that they miss something like this? WSL can be considered the second largest Linux "distro". Of course, zed has always felt like an osx first project with linux/windows being second class citizen.
    • bozey07 2y ago
      That seems a bit rude. You get the QA you paid for - zero. And nevertheless, whenever Windows software doesn't work in Wine, you shouldn't think "Wow, how did you fuck that up?". They never promised it'd work in WSL.
      • bobbylarrybobby 2y ago
        Code that panics on bad external input (such as the OS) is incredibly sloppy. They already have the Result — they can just bubble it up and present an actual error message (and maybe even ask for diagnostics, etc).
      • daghamm 2y ago
        I disagree. They are on front page of HN with "zed on Linux is here". We got to have some standards, don't you think?
        • School-Cotton 2y ago
          WSL is a pretty niche version of "Linux". I would guess that close to 0% of what makes it to the front page of HN had a QA team that explicitly tested it on WSL.
• dcchambers 2y ago
  However silly it is, I've always hated the aesthetics of VS Code. I know it's themeable but despite that the overall look and feel just isn't right on MacOS or Linux. That side bar drives me crazy. I find that out-of-the-box Zed is much prettier and feels more native than VS Code. But for a tool that we spend hours using each day, how it looks and makes you feel really matters. I am enjoying experimenting with Zed. I have kept my extensions and configuration to a minimum which is a refreshing change compared to the cluster that my VSCode installation has become.
  • omneity 2y ago
    The first thing I do on any VS Code fresh install is to switch the sidebar to the right. Pure heresy for many people, I know. But I want my eyes to naturally land on code, not on a file tree.
    • ku1ik 2y ago
      Same here! Also, when it’s on the right toggling it doesn’t move the code panes left and right.
    • omnimus 2y ago
      Its actually pretty obvious advantage if you are often ctrl+b hide sidebar because instead of jarringly moving start of the line you are revealing code without moving it.
    • metaltyphoon 2y ago
      Same. It also mean when toggling the bar what moves is the bar not the code.
  • mikojan 2y ago
    The activity bar is the worst. Luckily you can move it and make it smaller. "workbench.activityBar.location": "top", Just in case might as well try these.. "editor.fontFamily": "'Monaspace Neon', monospace", "editor.fontLigatures": "'calt'", "workbench.iconTheme": "vs-minimal", "workbench.colorTheme": "GitHub Light", "window.commandCenter": false, "window.customTitleBarVisibility": "auto", "window.titleBarStyle": "custom",
• 3836293648 2y ago
  Tried it with mangohud and scrolled up and down a 100-line c++ file with no lsp enabled. 30fps. Absolutely not ready yet. Not sure I'm willing to leave Emacs, but gpui looks cool and I hope someone makes a fast Emacs client with it some day.
• deleted 2y ago
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• kokada 2y ago
  Interesting the decision[1] of building against glibc instead of musl. Any reason for not using musl instead (and doing a static binary)? This would avoid the compatibility issues e.g.: Alpine and Nix. [1]: https://zed.dev/docs/linux https://zed.dev/docs/linux
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  • oynqr 2y ago
    Can you even do GPU acceleration without dynamic libraries on Linux?
    • kokada 2y ago
      This is a good question. It is not like the current `zed` binary is linked to anything that is needed for 3D rendering: $ ldd zed.app/bin/zed linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffed63f6000) libgcc_s.so.1 => /nix/store/bihw7p4zdqwyxmnc8h67c06lnjkvdan8-xgcc-13.3.0-libgcc/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007fb5def3c000) libpthread.so.0 => /nix/store/m71p7f0nymb19yn1dascklyya2i96jfw-glibc-2.39-52/lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007fb5def37000) libdl.so.2 => /nix/store/m71p7f0nymb19yn1dascklyya2i96jfw-glibc-2.39-52/lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fb5def32000) libc.so.6 => /nix/store/m71p7f0nymb19yn1dascklyya2i96jfw-glibc-2.39-52/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007fb5ded3b000) /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /nix/store/m71p7f0nymb19yn1dascklyya2i96jfw-glibc-2.39-52/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fb5df05d000) However it may well be that this is dlopen during runtime, and for it to work correctly you need to use the same libc as the one in the system.
• alberth 2y ago
  Whirlwind week. First, Zed found to allow silent (non-consented) background binary downloads [0] Now, launching on Linux. Both of which are big news in its own right. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40902826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40902826
• secondary_op 2y ago
  I'm never using this editor unless it can install itself and work completely offline, without going for downloads and making web requests , it is crucial, especially after totally not related xz fiasco and the white house praise for rust.
  • llmblockchain 2y ago
    I only use editors written in C, as God intended.
    • daghamm 2y ago
      Correction: written in C plus some LISP, as God intended.
      • thrwymsss 2y ago
        [flagged]
    • tarruda 2y ago
      This might seem funny until you read Ken Thompson's "trusting trust" paper and realize that bootstrapping Rust is a so overwhelming task that someone implemented a Rust compiler in C++ for this purpose: https://github.com/dtolnay/bootstrap https://github.com/dtolnay/bootstrap I mean, who knows what kind of malware is transparently being injected in all Rust programs out there.
      • School-Cotton 2y ago
        Nobody wrote a C++ compiler for this purpose; they wrote a Rust compiler (mrustc) in C++. > I mean, who knows what kind of malware is transparently being injected in all Rust programs out there. FWIW, using Guix it is very straightforward to build the rust toolchain fully bootstrapped starting from mrustc and gcc.
        • tarruda 2y ago
• satvikpendem 2y ago
  Zed is nice and all, but I simply cannot trust a VC backed editor of all things. Eventually, enshittification will occur and I really don't want that to happen to one of my core daily programs.
  • yencabulator 2y ago
    Still better than VSCode!
    • satvikpendem 2y ago
      VSCode is run by a mega corp that does not need to squeeze money out of it to make revenue, whereas that is what Zed must do as that is their only produt.
      • yencabulator 2y ago
        I've lived through enough history to know Microsoft is not doing things out of the good of their heart.
        • satvikpendem 2y ago
          Then use Neovim. I use both.
  • the_gipsy 2y ago
    It's a ticking timebomb!
• refulgentis 2y ago
  There's something interesting with the light mode / default theme I got after downloading and opening on Apple silicon: Sidebar contrast is too low, yet, spot on for the wrong contrast ratio target (3.0, for fill, versus 4.5 for text/bg). I'll file an issue on GitHub eventually, feel free to pass along email in my profile if y'all see this and have someone who is already nerding out on this stuff. Context on why, and before I get more fuzzy/opinionated, why I'm comfortable speaking to this is some quasi-authoritative tone: I built a new color system that ended up being launched as Material You at Google, at its heart is getting contrast while having expressive colors instead of just flat black/white, so I really appreciate the effort here. Fuzzy/opinionated territory: Problem with the low contrast here isn't just that it doesn't literally hit a 4.5 ratio. IMHO this isn't strictly verboten, if I thought that it would mean the engineer part of my brain was too in control. There's an argument to be made its good the sidebar isn't distracted. Problem is disabled states traditionally lower the foreground brightness, so it crosses over into "disabled element" territory when you visually parse it.
  • mikaylamaki 2y ago
    We'd appreciate the issue and discussion! We've been aware of contrast issues for some time, and I personally have been thinking about switching our color representation from HSL to OKLCH to give us more traction on these problems. But I've been working on Linux and am not a designer, so I haven't had the chance :D
• 1bent 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28text_editor%29#History?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28text_editor%29#History... I found the zed website unhelpful, but if wikipedia is to be believed, it's a successor to the Atom text editor
  • andrewl-hn 2y ago
    The Atom editor is being maintained as a fork: Pulsar https://pulsar-edit.dev https://pulsar-edit.dev Zed is co-founded by one (or more?) original developer of Atom. So, it's a successor in a sense that it is a new project by the same author. Atom was developed at GitHub, and GitHub Inc remains the owner of the original Atom project. From their perspective the successor of Atom is VSCode - developed by their parent company, - despite the claims by a former Atom engineer.
• poetril 2y ago
  I've kept my neovim config, vscode, and zed configs in parity for a while now. To the point that the keybinds and behaviors are the same (or as simliar as they can be) across all three. In my personal experience zed is eating into the time I use vscode, but not really touching neovim as much. It really has come a long way, and I'm excited I'll be able to use it on my Linux machine without having to jump through hoops.
  • p5a0u9l 2y ago
    Tips please, esp configure vscode like nvim.
    • poetril 2y ago
      It comes down to using the vim extension and making use of the context it adds when setting key binds. Both in settings and keybind json files you set commands for certain vim modes, or bind native VSCode commands to your leader. Zed does almost the same but with no defined leader key so you just have to be more specific about the command and the context they are executed in.
• Sesse__ 2y ago
  First impressions: 1. curl | sh, seriously 2. The default theme is so low-contrast that I seriously struggled to read text. I could not find something that was, like, actual white on actual black. 3. I can figure out how to enable Copilot, but not to open a file. (I had to resort to “zed file.cpp” from a terminal.) 4. vim keybindings are not bad, but also not perfect. 5. It feels… laggy? Isn't this supposed to be fast? Whenever I move the cursor over a symbol, it first moves and then like 100 ms later, it tries to highlight that symbol everywhere. And that takes time. In a 200-line file. 6. Ugh programming ligatures. Where are preferences to turn it off? Where are the preferences for anything? OK, well, I guess I could use this if I had nothing better. But if the point is that it's supposed to be zero-lag, #5 really destroys the point for me.
  • Gormo 2y ago
    I couldn't even get it to run at all. It's in the official repo of my distro, but when I installed that package and tried to execute it, the binary launched another executable with a 'zed-cli://' URI pointing to some socket/named pipe it tried to create under /tmp (but didn't) as an argument, then just sat there doing nothing. Seems like it's doing some sort of local client-server implementation -- not sure why a standalone desktop app would be designed that way. It never spawned a window, and possibly because the process is itself launching another process, nothing is output to stdout or stderr to indicate what's going on.
  • ajstarks 2y ago
    Re: #2, use "buffer_font_weight": 600 in the settings.json to fix the font rendering.
  • maccard 2y ago
    > 1. curl | sh, seriously It's pretty much guaranteed to work cross-platform, and if you're worried about it you can save the script and view it yourself. You're about to run their binary on your machine, why are you concerned about the script you're downloading? > 2. The default theme is so low-contrast that I seriously struggled to read text. The landing page when I opened the app had an option to choose from about 40 themes. I tried 3 of them and they were no _worse_ than VSCode's defaults. > but not to open a file. usual keyboard shortcuts, and system menu bar? > Where are preferences to turn it off? Where are the preferences for anything? System menu bar, which links out to some fairly comprehensive docs - https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed I agree on the vim keybindigs and the performance, though.
• brokegrammer 2y ago
  I don't see any way to monetize a free text editor but I see that they're hiring and also hired talented devs like Thorsten Ball already. What's the business model here?
  • saratogacx 2y ago
    From their FAQ: We envision Zed as a free-to-use editor, supplemented by subscription-based, optional network features, such as: Channels and calls Chat Channel notes We plan to allow offer our collaboration features to open source teams, free of charge. https://zed.dev/faq#how-will-you-make-money https://zed.dev/faq#how-will-you-make-money
    • dathinab 2y ago
      i.e. very similar to how other editors approach it e.g. vscode uses network features to make people use the non fully open source version instead of codium (and it's otherwise subventioned by MS to reach the part of the editor/programmer market visual studio can't reach but IMHO if it wouldn't be that is also how they would bring in the money)
    • neurobashing 2y ago
      Now see, I'm the opposite. I would like to pay a reasonable fee to drive a silver-and-oaken stake through the heart of the collab features. I will pay real money to just make it all go away. As others have said, I work in an environment with lots of different tools so collab stuff like this is just visual noise, let me turn it all off.
      • mikebelanger 2y ago
        Maybe there will be forks that remove all the collaboration stuff. I can't imagine it'd be that hard.
        • yencabulator 2y ago
          Zodium, anyone?
• ElectronBadger 2y ago
  I couldn't find anything resembling "Send code to REPL", so no Zed for me.
• levkk 2y ago
  > Zed requires a physical GPU with a Vulkan 1.3 driver. That's new. Does everyone running Linux have a dedicated GPU these days? Only caught this because I'm in the middle of updating my nvidia driver.
  • skavi 2y ago
    I believe they mean “physical” as in not implementing in software. So integrated GPUs are perfectly fine as well.
    • PhilipRoman 2y ago
      IMO for a graphical program that's fine, but in general I really hate hard requirements for a GPU which I've seen in the wild multiple times. Just simulate the darn thing in software, I don't care if it takes 10x longer, I have all the time in the world.
      • kvark 2y ago
        I don’t think there is a hard requirement in the code. It may work well on lavapipe (software Vulkan).
    • colinsane 2y ago
      yes. it's working fine for me on 9 y/o integrated intel graphics. but it's kind of still a weird statement to make. i thought it was generally the OS's job to supply the vulkan layer, and that mesa -- which just about every linux OS will be using -- provides pretty robust software implementations of those things as fallback. what would cause them to require a "physical" anything?
• fire_lake 2y ago
  Does Zed work with any language with a language server? Is TypeScript support fully baked in? I don’t want to pay for things I don’t use.
  • mirpa 2y ago
    I think you need extension which will integrate language server. I installed extension for Haskell and it works out of the box.
• CapeTheory 2y ago
  I have fallen in love with Zed on Mac, so glad to see it will still be an option when I switch back to Linux. My main concern is the collaboration features; just seems like a nonsensical addition. I have zero influence over what editors my teams use, and I work with dozens of different people on collaborative development every year - I'm not going to be persuading anyone to switch, and so that feature is just dead code and security risk. Even if I worked on a small and consistent team, I don't think the value-add justifies the complexity and risk.
  • lexoj 2y ago
    Absolutely agree, the collaboration features put me off a bit. I think it can very well become a very successful and popular editor without those features. Perhaps they can invest in those feature when they have a much bigger market share.
  • lbhdc 2y ago
    I have felt similarly about collab tools. Even if the tools in an editor look cool, someone on the team is gonna get left out because they use a different tools. It feels a bit like the wrong layer for the collab tools to live.
    • goosejuice 2y ago
      Indeed, Tuple is a better solution. That said, I think Zed is a great text editor.
  • jitl 2y ago
    For what it's worth, other major code editors Jetbrains and VS Code also offer real-time collaboration built in. For Jetbrains, it's a paid feature. For VS Code, it's free. I love the VS Code implementation (haven't reviewed the other two). If I'm pairing with someone remotely, I don't have any issue having them download VS Code. We provide a config in our project repo for VS Code, so it's really quick for people to get set up enough to join the real-time collab session with me. `brew install visual-studio-code` and then `code .` in our repo, plus OAuth with Github to authenticate the collaboration feature. I think it really is great. Makes pairing much easier, and really speeds up drugery like refactoring 500 cases where it doesn't quite make sense to do a codemod. It's not quite like the upgrade from Word97.exe to Google Docs since we have git, but it feels similarly amazing to "just" to be talking about some code, click the other user's icon to jump right to their cursor and help them get unstuck. I personally bounce between VS Code, Xcode, and nvim+tmux, and I don't have a problem with keeping a "lowest common denominator" editor around for collaboration or pairing. I also keep a regular keyboard at my desk so I don't force people to type on my Glove80/Kinesis Advantage.
• thesurlydev 2y ago
  Super excited for this project. Especially since it's available for Linux now. I still use the JetBrains products as daily drivers but always keen to use new tools like this.
• vanarok 2y ago
  Tried installing on arch Linux, it wouldn't start and I gave up on the idea
• flurly 2y ago
  Generally a big fan of Zed. Super fast and quite innovative in their grep UI. My biggest current gripe is Zed's filesystem watchers are either broken or misconfigured on Mac. If I do a `git rest --hard` via terminal or github desktop UI, zed doesn't detect it and I'm forced to do a hard reset of the app to get back to a synced state.
• lexoj 2y ago
  The only reason why I dropped (and Im not alone) using Zed is the arcaic UI sublime-like search functionality. Please revisit that part because I really want to use ZED.
  • bogwog 2y ago
    > arcaic UI sublime-like search functionality. I've never used Zed, but Sublime is my primary editor specifically because of the incredible search functionality. What do you use that's better?
    • lexoj 2y ago
      Lazyvim or pycharm search functionality. Even vscode is better in that regard, though it kinda requires using mouse. (I love sublime btw, except for searching)
  • iamnbutler 2y ago
    This is actually the first time I’ve seen someone unhappy with search - can you tell me a bit more what you are looking for? There is lots of room for improvement of course, but I’d love to hear what your desired search experience is.
    • lsllc 2y ago
      nvim+lazyvim+telescope (which uses ripgrep and/or fzf). Fantastic, that's the gold standard for finding files, grepping, looking for references to variables etc. Love it.
    • lexoj 2y ago
      When searching I get almost entire file snippets with the search content and scrolling through them would take forever. In comparison see Lazyvim or IntelliJ products search UI, (even vscode is OK, though it requires mouse a bit), you should be able to scroll through found lines, and while you do that you can see the surrounding context of the selected line.
    • lexoj 2y ago
• apatheticonion 2y ago
  What does Zed use as the UI toolkit? Looking at the code they have a handmade UI toolkit called gpui. Does that map directly to OS/DE specific GUI bindings? I can't find where that's happening EDIT: Holy sh*t, they actually have bindings for each OS and built a Rust abstraction on top of that. That's pretty wild https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/crates/gpui/src/platform/mac/window.rs https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/crates/gpui/...
  • jitl 2y ago
    I hope they add UI support for proportional type. I've bounced off the editor every time I've tried it since so many UI elements end up truncated or overly wide in general because of the insistence on fixed-width font.
    • iamnbutler 2y ago
      Hey! Nate from Zed here - have you had issues with proportional fonts in Zed? Let us know if so - they should just work™, but would love to know if that is not the case.
  • iamnbutler 2y ago
    We have a couple of blog posts digging into gpui, but here is one from just after rewriting and shipping gpui2: https://zed.dev/blog/gpui-ownership https://zed.dev/blog/gpui-ownership We’ve slowly been building out gpui to be super ergonomic and fluid for us to build the kind of UI we need to. As a designer that just picked up Rust last February it’s been really nice to have something that is so comfortable to work with without compromising our performance goals.
    • apatheticonion 2y ago
      That's amazing, thanks for sharing this. Native desktop UIs are an area of interest for me so this will be an exciting read for me
  • winternewt 2y ago
• burnte 2y ago
  It's SO BAD when people say ":just pipe this shell script to bash!" for their installers. I just can't take those projects seriously if they think that's acceptable.
  • Buttons840 2y ago
    I've often had the same feeling, but taking a critical view: How is "run these bash commands", worse than "run this Python script", or "run these binary instructions on your CPU"? It all seems mostly the same. What am I missing?
  • noisy_boy 2y ago
    I am curious - if they provided a link to the script instead, would it have been ok? If you want to see the code before running, you can just redirect to a file before running it.
  • joeldo 2y ago
    You can review the bash script first. Regardless, they provide a few different installation options https://zed.dev/docs/linux https://zed.dev/docs/linux
• kristianp 2y ago
  Zed's dead, baby.
• TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  Here I am still using Atom in 2024.
• perryizgr8 2y ago
  I like using zed when I'm on the MacBook. It's quite fast, looks good and has some neat features like multi file editing. But I don't get the utility of all the collaboration features. It's noise to me, and feels like they could have invested that energy in other areas. I work in a small fully remote team, and our tool of choice for collaboration is git. Why would I want to edit the same file while someone else is editing it too? Who will commit it? If I want to discuss a part of the code with someone screen sharing works perfectly. There's no need to bring in simultaneous editing. It's such a technically hard feature to develop but just doesn't seem to have any utility for me.
  • einsteinx2 2y ago
    I kind of feel the same about collaboration features, I never use them in any editor, just git and video calls/screen sharing. Ironically though the collaboration features are their monetization plan with the base editor as FOSS, so hopefully for them we’re in the minority on that opinion…
• pmarreck 2y ago
  Any word on whether this can be installed from the nixos repo?
• Thaxll 2y ago
  I tried on Intel GPU ( dell xps 9305 ) with Ubuntu 20.04 and it does not open a window, with --foreground that's what I got: zed --foreground MESA-INTEL: warning: Performance support disabled, consider sysctl dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0 Is there even more debug available?
• sys_64738 2y ago
  I never got these new type editors compared to EMacs.
• trostaft 2y ago
  Ah, I'd love to try this. But I have a hard cross-platform requirement (Windows/Linux/MacOS) and I can't seem to get this running in WSL. Will keep checking if that improves in the future.
  • kvark 2y ago
    Windows builds are out there. You can build it yourself as well. They haven’t matured as much as Linux ones yet. But your requirement of portability is definitely fulfilled.
• anotherevan 2y ago
  Amused that it is already an official package for Arch Linux. https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/zed/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/zed/
• zikani_03 2y ago
  Fantastic news. I've enjoyed using Zed on Mac for Go development, it just feels snappier than VSCode. I hope to try the Linux build over the weekend. I am also tempted to try out their gpui library, might just cure my Rust aversion.
• captn3m0 2y ago
  Pretty nice to see aarch64 packages for so many distros. Sublime packages are x64 only, so this will go well with my Asahi setup
• WuxiFingerHold 2y ago
  There's much to like about Zed. Not only the technical parts, but also how transparently the communication is: https://zed.dev/blog/zed-is-now-open-source https://zed.dev/blog/zed-is-now-open-source To keep things simple yet powerful is the key to find their place in the market IMO. Don't know about the rendering speed (never had issues with other editor), but that's a bonus anyway.
• calebjosue 2y ago
  I would love to give it a try but I am using WSL2 at the time being, so maybe in the future.
• xylon 2y ago
  No syntax highlighting for Clojure :'( No Emacs keybindings :'(
• 29athrowaway 2y ago
  It worked well out of the box, but the font rendering is a bit off. Using x11, not wayland. The default font was a bit small on a 4K resolution by default, but it was easy discover how to enlarge it. Opening a Rust project worked flawlessly without any configuration at all.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• purpleidea 2y ago
  I wouldn't want a collaborative text editor that sends all my data to their servers, but I have incredible respect that they're very open and transparent about this fact on their website. You don't see that kind of behaviour from Microsoft and Apple.
• sriram_malhar 2y ago
  Sounds great; downloading it now to try. To the Zed folks here, can you please add a little line to say that it is an editor, for people like me who are not in the loop. There's nothing clear on the landing page or on the docs page that indicates it is so. The video shows an editor, but plenty of software has built in editors.
• dinozarw 2y ago
  > To install Zed on most Linux distributions, run the shell script below. > curl https://zed.dev/install.sh https://zed.dev/install.sh | sh Please stop telling people to curl pipe scripts into their shell...
  • admax88qqq 2y ago
    Why? I’m going to run their software anyways. And this is a really easy way to run an installer. This is basically the Linux equivalent of download and double click which is a user flow that is underrated for simplicity and usability.
    • hyperbrainer 2y ago
      Completely agree. Furthermore, you could always just not pipe it to sh, read it first if you care so much. Releasing and maintaining packages across a range of distros is extremely hard and time consuming, and they just released the linux version.
      • flexagoon 2y ago
        > Releasing and maintaining packages across a range of distros is extremely hard and time consuming That's why Flatpak exists
      • oneshtein 2y ago
        It's time consuming only if author interested in good UX. If author wants to use their users as alpha-testers, then he can spent a minimal amount of time on packaging.
        • palata 2y ago
          Given that it's open source, it's not the authors' problem to package it. You can package it for your distro, or wait for someone to do it. It will be better because you presumably use it. Chances are that the authors don't use the same distro as you do, so they are not in a good position to make a package for you.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• tomerbd 2y ago
  IntelliJ is much slower than any other editor including Zed and VsCode it's much slower to open and navigate, much slower to work with, much slower, it's so slow! but the code completion, refactoring, code navigation, and debugging features and endless other smart features are incredible. For me, that extra intelligence and code awareness boost translates to way faster development overall, even if the IDE itself takes a bit longer to load or work with or consumes huge amount of memory. Sometimes the smarts outweigh the raw speed.
  • krick 2y ago
    Same. I was just using (heavily customized) vim for many many years, and was kinda ok, but then I eventually switched to IntelliJ products at work, and while I don't really like the idea of using a product with subscription, I cannot quite switch to anything again, and have to install them even on my personal machine. Didn't try Zed though. And it's quite annoying that I really don't think that the product I'm actually using is something crazy complicated only an for-profit enterprise can implement. Just the same as in my vim-years, I only need a good editor, that helps me to type less. In interpreted languages (Python, PHP) I don't even use debugger, debugging via print actually feels totally fine to me. What I need seems pretty similar, and is seemingly included into every modern editor I know: vim-keybindings, good "code smell" highlightings, autocomplete & some refactoring automation. The devil is in the details though. Vim emulation is never perfect, but in IntelliJ it's usable, which doesn't happen often. Static-analysis IntelliJ does seems pretty basic to me, yet somehow even that level is usually lacking (also, the ability to disable specific suggestion via annotations in IntelliJ products is great, as I feel like this functionality is only really useful when I strive for 100% "green" status, just conciously disabling what I'm not going to fix). But the most annoying thing is auto-refactoring. I mean, it feels like a simple thing, I never tried, but I think most common refactoring patterns I do daily I could automate quite easily, given I already have basic syntax-tree operation implemented. But somehow even IntelliJ is pretty poor on refactorings, and what I've seen in VSCode plugins is even worse. Again, no idea about Zed. I guess I should try it.
  • ramon156 2y ago
    If you're familiar with nvim, you slowly realize how bloated and unnecessary the indexing is in intellij. It makes the experience so awful and for what? A file search feature that takes multiple seconds to find a file in root
• gullevek 2y ago
  Shoves ChatGPD with auto install of Node and what not else right up your throat. On top of that I can't install any extensions ... Yeah ... I'll stick with VScode, might be slow but works
• ceving 2y ago
  Is there an Emacs keymap?
• rckt 2y ago
  I have an old Intel Mac Pro 2015, which slowly transitioned from my working laptop to a personal use laptop. I'm using VSCode there and it works fine. I mean I've never faced any slowdowns because of the VSCode. I had a small project coming up and decided to try out Zed. As it's a native app I thought it would perform better than VSCode. But to my surprise it was not the case. The performance was actually worse. And as for the TS integration, the overall experience is worse than on VSCode. The autocompletion works in a weird way, no way to just look at available methods, I have to start typing. It's just frustrating. I even decided to give another go to Sublime Text and it felt much better than Zed. So Zed didn't work for me, but I'm sure it will work for somebody else.
• ktosobcy 2y ago
  I installed zed a couple of days ago, tried it for a Java project. It was soooo bare-bone that it vanished from the drive shortly after. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, I got java/maven plugins but there is no XML highlighting. Java does have highlighting but that's it... OH, and and I installed it this time and I noticed "downloading json-language-server"... (it was there before probably but didn't notice)... like WTF - didn't even ask if I want to... utterly rubbish experience. For a simple text editor I prefer BBedit on mac, which is native and blazing fast. And for something slightly more complex I usually end up with `code <file>` to quickly edit it...
  • laughing_snyder 2y ago
    Zed does not support Java (see https://zed.dev/docs https://zed.dev/docs).
    • ktosobcy 2y ago
      That explains a lot though... I have a bit of a qualm with it: 1) the "language support" list both languages as well as runtimes (immediate facepalm) 2) Java is somewhat popular I'd say... not supporting it but having support for things like racket is even weirder... All in all, zed makes even less sense…
• BossingAround 2y ago
  Love it. My VSCode takes 3GB of RAM and that's a single window with like 5 files open at one time. I've long been looking for a good-enough replacement (though I don't think I'll be able to leave debugpy for a while)
• TikolaNesla 2y ago
  Zed's focus on high performance might be misplaced. Compared to editors like VSCode, the performance boost feels marginal. To convince developers to switch, the emphasis should be on enhancing the overall developer experience. Marginal speed gains alone aren't enough to make me move away from VSCode, and I don't care if a tool is written in Rust or any other language.
  • cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    Yep. As a VS Code user, I can’t say that improved performance has been anywhere near the top of my wish list for…half a decade, at least. And yeah, I get it, boo hoo, electron, blah blah. There’s always going to be the rev head at all costs crowd. I don’t think that appealing to them should be this prominent through. The value proposition just isn’t there.
• BaudouinVH 2y ago
  If I understand correctly I need a graphical card - my current linux laptop does not have one. Until I upgrade to a newer model I will uninstall my copy of zed.dev - couldn't even launch it.
  • cirelli94 2y ago
    If you are using a monitor you must have one, I think. At least, an integrated one.
• veidr 2y ago
  I do not get the focus on collaborative editing (surely niche?) while the Remote Development in VS Code (in which "remote" can mean in a docker container running on your local Docker, or a container elsewhere, or a whole-ass other computer you own, or a rented computer/instance in le cloude) seems like such a more game-changing feature, similar in some ways but probably less work. And make that the thing you charge for. ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
  • rainbowjelly 2y ago
    Remote development is being worked on. It’s available in preview and has been assigned a priority task. https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development
    • veidr 2y ago
      Sick!! Thanks for that. I'm a lot more interested in Zed now. (Just emailed 'em to request access to test the feature.)
• mxmkm 2y ago
  Selection color is not particularly good with comments: https://i.imgur.com/ExeT7Ne.png https://i.imgur.com/ExeT7Ne.png
• xwall 2y ago
  Zed is damn fast, with large files and i love it's UI
• haspok 2y ago
  I downloaded ZED for a quick play-around, but was quite shocked to find out that editing and saving a file runs an auto-formatter on it _by default_... Whoever thought that was a great idea obviously has never worked with version control, with other people on a project? Sorry, but this is such an obviously wrong default setting, I'm surprised nobody pointed this out before?
  • praveenperera 2y ago
    wrong for you, right for me everyone on your team should be using a auto-formatter
  • nopcode 2y ago
    Enforcing auto-formatting is a common practice in my experience. Currently working on a project where the repo will refuse commits that are not following the repo-specific formatting settings. I think it is a sane default in 2024.
    • haspok 2y ago
      No, it isn't. And anyway, I downloaded a generic text editor which has no idea of what autoformatting settings are applicable to my repos (maybe it differs per repo?), yet is trying to autoformat anyway? For example, it decided to replace ' characters in a YAML file with ". WTF? The _default_ setting should be to save as-is.
      • flexagoon 2y ago
        > maybe it differs per repo Then you'll already have a formatter config file in the root of your repo, and the formatter that Zed runs will use those settings.
      • p5a0u9l 2y ago
        Evidently this is all very new to you, sounding slightly histrionic. The zed complaint is purely about it be auto enabled. For each language there is usually a standard and at least one tool. Most people want formatting and can’t stands code bases where sometimes it’s a single quote, sometimes a double quote.
• lf-non 2y ago
  I started using this a few hours ago and so far am really pleased with the experience. Vim keybindings mostly work as expected and TS integration works great oob. I can totally see this becoming my primary editor going forward.
• major505 2y ago
  I tried on wsl, but dosent seen to work. I will have to wait for a windows version, since im stuck in windows by now.
• major505 2y ago
  To be honest speed and lightweight are important. But no as important as code completition and a good debug experience.
• stuaxo 2y ago
  Great, the only reason I started using this on my work Mac was because the Linux version was coming + I would be able to use this at home on Linux.
• gigatexal 2y ago
  Installed it on my Fedora 33 box running the AMD drivers from the kernel and a 6800 GPU and I can game no problem with proton and steam but Zed ran very very slowly. Sluggish. Immediately uninstalled. :/
• firemelt 2y ago
  is it for osx at first?
• lnxg33k1 2y ago
  Looks like someone was already maintaining an ebuild for Gentoo https://gpo.zugaina.org/app-editors/zed https://gpo.zugaina.org/app-editors/zed
• peter_d_sherman 2y ago
  On one end of the spectrum, you have programmers who use Visual Studio Code or Atom or one of the other Electron-based code editors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)), and at the other, you have programmers who use vim or even vi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_(text_editor)). Now, me personally (and this is just one man's tiny and insignificant opinion in a sea of billions of people!), I personally, am slightly more inclined to give a slight bit of additional weight to the opinions of people closer to the vim/vi side of editor use, than I am to give to people on the Electron-based side... My humble apologies if this offends anyone.
  • abhinavk 2y ago
    The same team behind Zed created Atom and the Electron framework. But that doesn't say anything about Zed either. The only thing that's shared between Zed and Atom is tree-sitter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree-sitter_(parser_generator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree-sitter_(parser_generator)).
    • peter_d_sherman 2y ago
      I am not against Zed in any way -- note that I have upvoted and favorited this article. Zed looks like it holds promise on several fronts -- most notably that its code (to the best of my knowledge at this point in time, and kindly correct me if I am wrong) is decoupled from JavaScript, Electron, and Chrome/Chromium and other browsers (and other slowness/bloatedness) in general... My comment, if it was directed, was directed to all of the (posters?/bots?) that claimed directly or indirectly, expressed or implied, that one or more of the Electron-based editors are faster than one or more of the non-Electron based editors, when clearly Electron adds a whole lot of unecesary bloat and slowdown to editors that use it (which is one of the reasons why Zed was apparently written: "Engineered for performance Zed efficiently leverages every CPU core and your GPU to start instantly, load files in a blink, and respond to your keystrokes on the next display refresh. Unrelenting performance keeps you in flow and makes other tools feel slow." (from the Zed website: https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/)) Whether or not the same team worked on Electron in the past is not relevant. What is relevant to Zed is only its codebase, and whether or not that codebase is tightly coupled or decoupled to other software that bloats it and slows it down or not. So to recap -- I am not against Zed in any way.
• aftbit 2y ago
  "real programmers" just use vim https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
• p5a0u9l 2y ago
  I don’t think I could ever switch to a windowed app as editor, vs a TUI, eg neovim. The remote story is never great for me. It forces your editor to slowly bloat to become your entire IDE. Native remote dev using tmux is so nice. Can anyone persuade me otherwise?
  • talldayo 2y ago
    > Native remote dev using tmux is so nice. Can anyone persuade me otherwise? I sure as hell can't. SSH + Tmux has consistently been the only good pair-programming solution I've used in the past decade.
• samspot 2y ago
  My first impression is the dark mode color contrast is poor compared to VSCode defaults (I tested a few things with CCA Colour Contrast Analyser). I'm sure this is all configurable but it was off-putting to me. I'm still interested in spending more time checking out Zed.