9 ms·

SSH Remoting

279 points by ingve 2y ago

bbminner 2y ago
I have been using code server over ssh for this purpose for years.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
"the language server is continually out of memory" "8gb is enough for everybody"
jiri 2y ago
Is somewhere a comparison of Zed to Visual Studio Code?
- wiz21c 2y ago
  for a start, zed doesn't work on Windows. I'm not exactly a fan of MSFT but at work, I must use Windows...
  - Flex247A 2y ago
    It does work. Automated builds are here: https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds
    - TiredOfLife 2y ago
      Builds are there, but they don't work. At least on my laptop.
- timeon 2y ago
  Memory footprint, startup times, overall responsiveness. At the end of the day VSCode is still Electron app.
  - speedgoose 2y ago
    In my experience, the electron overhead is relatively negligible compared to the ressource usage of the language servers. And zed seems to use the same language servers.
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      It is certainly true that the language servers have the same speed in Zed, but there is something to be said for just never suffering from any UI delay for any reason. Though I'll admit a LS that takes three seconds to respond is kinda indistinguishable from UI delay.
      - cybrox 2y ago
        What kind of codebases do you work with? Other than with multi-MB files or thousands of multi-cursors, I've never had any performance issues with VS-Code. It's actually one of the fastest Electron apps, I would say. If I notice a delay, it's usually the language server or some support package's background command taking a bit of time.
        stavros 2y ago
        How old is your computer? Some people have longer upgrade cycles than others.
        speedgoose 2y ago
        I remember that my computer in 2016 was already fast enough.
        cybrox 2y ago
        Granted, all of my machines are pretty new and powerful. Maybe performance is a lot worse on >5yo machines.
        drcongo 2y ago
        If all you know is VS Code it probably feels fine and you should definitely not try Zed - "one of the fastest Electron apps" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
- kruxigt 2y ago
  [dead]
m3nu 2y ago
Also works well in vscode. Just wish the remote instance would keep running forever. Currently it's only a few hours it seems. Then one needs to reopen the workspace window.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  I don't use code editors, but when we had an issue with ssh sessions hanging, it was always coworkers that were using vscode and connecting something up with that. Man, just ssh through the terminal like a normal person and transfer files with git.
  - uniqueuid 2y ago
    "Man, just put it on tape and walk over to that machine to load it there". Sorry, I know such low-effort puns are shunned on HN, but once in a decade I grant myself the permission to not resist.
- lifthrasiir 2y ago
  Given my experience with the vscode remote instance, that actually sounds terrible as it can get bloated very quickly. The instance state can and should be retained without running the instance indefinitely.
Hamuko 2y ago
I tried to use Zed but the text rendering on macOS was so painful that I didn't get far. Hopefully they'll address so I can give it another go in the future.
- stanmancan 2y ago
  What’s the issue exactly? I’ve been using it on macOS for a few months now and while it has its issues, text rendering hasn’t been one of them.
  - Hamuko 2y ago
    Text looks very blurry when compared to Sublime Text with the same font family and size. There's an active issue about it on GitHub with screenshots. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
- neurostimulant 2y ago
  Such is life using macos on low dpi screen. A lot of apps render blurry texts :(
  - Hamuko 2y ago
    It was definitely a lot worse than any other application I use on a 1440p 27-inch screen.
iveqy 2y ago
I also switch between a lot of computers (work computer at home/work computer at work) but have to develop on "big powerful machine at work". My current solution is tmux + nvim and it works really good. I can just pickup a session from whatever computer I'm in front of at the moment. Am I correct in that neither Zed nor VS Code support this usecase yet?
- senko 2y ago
  I use VSCode + SSH remote for this and works great. The only nitpick I have is needing to manually reconnect when I suspend my laptop and ssh connection breaks. It's a separate session though, which doesn't matter to me but may be a deal breaker for you. I use Tailscale for a personal VPN so the beefy workstation is always securely available from my laptop, even when across the pond).
  - hu3 2y ago
    Thank you both for sharing the experience. I'm tempted to go lightweight laptop + beef server. Do you get used to the the input delay? I guess coding is not a FPS game so it's fine. Just a flow of words being edited.
    - dagw 2y ago
      Do you get used to the input delay? The input delays are very dependent on where the server is and what it is doing. If the server is idle and close by (ping wise) delay is virtually indistinguishable from local VSCode. If I'm connecting to the server via a VPN in a different country while stressing all the cores with some background compiling or number crunching work, input delay gets quite noticeable.
      - hu3 2y ago
        I guess editing files in the same continent must feel good enough. Thank you! I should try a project in this way. Perhaps rent some hetzner VPS.
    - 2y ago
p-e-w 2y ago
Caveat emptor: "Zed downloads NodeJS binary and npm packages from Internet without user’s consent"[1] This has been an open issue for 5 months. When I noticed it, I couldn't believe my eyes and it was the last time I've run Zed so far. Judge for yourself whether this is a deal-breaker for you; I wish I had known about it earlier. [1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589
- lifthrasiir 2y ago
  Oops indeed. (Downloading can be fine in many---but not all---cases, but the lack of authentication is not really justifiable!) The latest comment does hint that it will change in the near future, as the change is required for remote development anyway: > Status update: We are still working on this! The major blocker is that extensions have not been setup to interact with setting. However, we also need to change this API to support our upcoming remote development feature. So we're going to roll both of these breaking changes into a larger extension update, coming this November or December :)
- Aeolun 2y ago
  I don't see how this is different from having all these pre-bundled with a new version of Zed? Either way I'm going to download all of them again.
  - lifthrasiir 2y ago
    By bundling, Zed guarantees or at least claims that those bundled executables can be trusted. The same level of trust is possible with on-demand downloading only when some sort of authentication is used [1] but Zed currently doesn't actually authenticate any downloads to my knowledge. [1] Either by embedding cryptographic hashes to the distribution, or by having some means to distribute publicly signed hashes (e.g. minisign via HTTPS).
    - coldtea 2y ago
      >By bundling, Zed guarantees or at least claims that those bundled executables can be trusted As if anyone at Zed cares and checks them all thoroughly? Even if they wanted they couldn't, given how expansive Node dependencies get. At best, someone will report an issue/vulnerability for one of those to them. Usually months/years after it exists.
lionkor 2y ago
I switched to Zed for C, C++, Rust, Angular, and am extremely happy with it. I use it with it's vim mode, which is very good. For the record, I've tried the JetBrains suite for at least a year, vscode, vim, neovim, visual studio (windows), qtcreator, and at least one more I dont remember. Zed is superior for everyday coding, for me. The only thing it lacks is debugging, so I can't use it for C#, but I also can't use vscode for C# so that's understandable. And man, its so snappy.
- b4ckup 2y ago
  I use vscode (with omnisharp not c# devkit) for c# every day. Did you try it out?
  - leosanchez 2y ago
    Is devkit better than Rider ?
    - b4ckup 2y ago
      I tried to use vscode c# devkit but it is horribly unstable and has severe bugs that make it unusable for my projects. But I'm really happy with vscode + omnisharp. I never used rider so I cannot really say which is better but I tend to not like jetbrains IDEs (from experience with IntelliJ and webstorm).
  - lionkor 2y ago
    I did not! Rider is extremely satisfying to use.
- pimeys 2y ago
  I've been using vim since the 90's, then emacs and helix. Never a GUI editor, always terminal. This year I just tried Zed and I'm super happy about it. It's open source, they offer a flake in their repo for me to get the latest version compiled to my NixOS installations if I want. It's fast, their LLM features are tasteful and they come with the open source version of the editor. It's written in Rust which is my main programming language. This SSH feature is great, I can just remotely turn on my workstation at home and use it with Zed over tailscale. I'm also waiting for a good debugger story, especially for Rust. It will come...
klemola 2y ago
How's Zed with WSL (now)? I've liked the ability to run the VS Code back-end in WSL and front-end in Windows, is this possible with Zed?
- TZubiri 2y ago
  I wouldn't go there. These things are supposed to be helpful, any bug or chance of a bug will be detrimental to their stated purpose, just imagine scenarios were zed tells git to download a repo and you have to make sure it downloads to a linux directory and not a windows directory, otherwise you lose all of the access bits, and it's slow af. Asking for trouble.
  - klemola 2y ago
    I appreciate your concern and I will consider this. The [VS Code] WSL back-end has access to things in WSL PATH, like compilers and language servers. I don't duplicate them in Windows, and would like to avoid having double installs. It's also nice to be able to open integrated terminal and use `fish` and other unix-only CLI utilities.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  Zed still doesn't have Windows version (but someone is working on it), so currently no.
ceving 2y ago
Someone reinvented tramp-mode.
- pineapple_sauce 2y ago
  This appears to be a significantly better implementation. Tramp mode is god awful slow and does not maintain a persistent connection.
  - noufalibrahim 2y ago
    The default setup is pretty crappy but with some tweaking of the ssh connection setup, It does a decent job and I used it for actual work for several years.
    - globular-toast 2y ago
      Would you mind outlining the settings or pointing to a reference?
      - noufalibrahim 2y ago
        It's been a long time. Most of the stuff I was able to get from conversations on the Emacs IRC channel of freenode. Many of those "tricks" are documented here https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode but I don't know if it's out of date.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 2y ago
  I suggest you try it and compare it to tramp-mode and see for yourself how different it is(and just how much better it is to tramp-mode)
unsnap_biceps 2y ago
Just a FYI, this feature will install a binary on the remote host and run it. > Your local machine will attempt to connect to the remote server using the ssh binary on your path. Assuming the connection is successful, Zed will download the server on the remote host and start it. https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development
- echoangle 2y ago
  That's what VS Code does too, BTW.
  - frankjr 2y ago
    ..and is not even open source (EDIT: I'm wrong, see below). Zed's remote server on the other hand seems to be OSS. One could probably install it themselves without relying on the automatic download. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/633b665379c18a06959102c3857889b8bcbde4bb/crates/remote_server https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/633b665379c18a069...
    - echoangle 2y ago
      Interesting, I didn’t know the VS Code server component wasn’t open source.
      - hu3 2y ago
        it is though
    - eddythompson80 2y ago
      ? The remote server (reh) is part of the vscode repo itself https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/main/src/vs/server/node https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/main/src/vs/server/... there is a vscodium and codeoss builds of it too (reh builds). The extension that invokes it isn’t, but there are a few implementations of it that are, and I think vscodium bundles one with their build. It’s just some shell scripts that download the reh build and run it with the correct args.
Protostome 2y ago
with a little bit of work, vi/emacs works great as an IDE for most setups... The learning curve is steep but once you get the gist, you never go back to those bloated IDEs. (Disclaimer: I haven't tried zed, but have been working throughout my career with Eclipse, Visual C/C++/Basic (!), Atom)
- jebarker 2y ago
  Unless you need a graphical debugger, then vi/vim/nvim/emacs all start to get creaky. That single requirement keeps me on vscode. I'd love a terminal based alternative.
  - frou_dh 2y ago
    Graphical as in integrated with the normal editing view? There's a new very nicely done one for Emacs: https://github.com/svaante/dape https://github.com/svaante/dape . The documentation about using it is currently a bit terse though.
    - jebarker 2y ago
      I actually don't mind if it's not integrated with the editor. I'm fine with a debugger being a standalone application. What I want is the ability to see the source, set breakpoints and navigate the code efficiently inside the debugger. vscode is currently the best option for this remotely
  - _hyn3 2y ago
    just don't write buggy code ;) (or have to work on anyone else's)
- nurumaik 2y ago
  Try remote development with vim over 200ms ping ssh connection
  - Protostome 2y ago
    I've tried that, but in this case i would just NFS/sshfs share the directory and work with vim locally. Vim can also read and write files across networks (while running locally): vim scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt should work. If you want to run builds and such on a terminal, just have a tmux window with an active ssh connection. There's a solution to most issues out there.
mike_d 2y ago
I recently tried to use SSH remote editing with VSCode on a plane. It is so incredibly chatty that the in-flight wifi system thought I was trying to tunnel traffic via SSH and kept killing the connection. I hope the Zed developers have taken bandwidth minimization into account.
- mrklol 2y ago
  Afaik the problem are big file directories, at least that what I noticed.
- reubenmorais 2y ago
  You were tunneling traffic through SSH :P
keybits 2y ago
Zed with SSH Remoting and Orbstack is pretty much my dream setup for programming on a Mac. I can now spin up a Linux machine in Orbstack[0] in a few seconds and then SSH into it from Zed for a fast Linux development environment with a fast macOS native editor. It feels a bit like the macOS version of WSL and VSCode. Just a whole lot nicer (subjective of course)! A couple of years ago I was inspired by what Mitchell Hashimoto was doing[1]. He was running a GUI VM via VMware on macOS so that he could have the best of both worlds - macOS apps and ecosystem and a Linux dev environment with his preferred package managers and a more reliable NixOS. That route still felt a bit heavy to me, but I related to the desire for the best of macOS and the best of Linux. I tried with VMware and Docker Desktop with VSCode but it always felt like a lot of overhead and a bit clunky to achieve a smooth fast dev environment. With Zed and Orbstack it finally feels like the fast elegant system I'll stick with. Thank you to the developers for these excellent tools! [0] https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture#linux-machines https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture#linux-machines [1] https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1346136404682625024 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1346136404682625024
- rfoo 2y ago
  I've always been running a headless Linux VM wherever I do any dev work, Windows or Mac. Works very well. Glad to see that WSL2 and OrbStack promotes this workflow. For now my only complaint is I prefer full-blown VMs instead of WSL-like setup (so that I can work with the same Linux kernel my code targets), but client virtualization support on Apple platforms are pretty meh, definitely not at Hyper-V level yet. OrbStack went out of their way to fix a lot of these but they are not interested in making a VM product.
- mbreese 2y ago
  I’ve been using Colima to host docker containers and VSCode with devcontainers to do something similar. Being able to spin up a full stack environment on the fly for working is amazing. It may not be as fast as Zed, but it’s a well thought out workflow that’s very reproducible. It’s been a quick workflow to start using, but is still quite flexible. Regardless of which stack you use, I think this is a great style of working. When you have a reproducible dev environment, everything is so much easier. (As vagrant users will probably attest to - it’s not a new method). But having this feature of SSH remoting is also quite handy without the dev environment stack stuff. I also find it quite nice to work with a local client, but remote SSH environment when I’m doing data work (large genomic data files). In this case, instead of reproducibly, the main benefit is data locality. If my large dataset is on a different server, it’s far more convenient to write the analysis code on that remote server. This new Zed feature seems like it will also support this workflow, which is also a win in my book.
zifpanachr23 2y ago
I'd really like a good remote editing solution that is genuinely portable. I don't think there's anything technical stopping that from happening (and I've tried some half baked solutions along those lines before). For a variety of reasons relating to my line of work, this or vscode's solution are no gos since they require you to install a server on the remote, and that server is interpreted or compiled in a language that is absolutely not guaranteed to be present or stable on said remote (I'm saying my ideal extension, if a server is really necessary, would be in a reasonably widespread subset of C, perhaps ISO c99, which I'm sure I'll catch some flack for saying). That is an underserved (although perhaps not large, but probably they would be enthusiastic) market given that remote editing is perhaps the most useful in situations where the remote environment is different to such an extent you can't easily copy a project over and expect it to just work. If I'm deploying to an x86_ 64 Linux box, I can totally just develop locally and do a lot of testing locally deploy to the remote after all of that, and so I tend not to get too excited about remote editing features for a platform like a normal x86_64 Linux distro. I'm obviously being picky and demanding and people are free to ignore everything I just wrote. As far as Zed is concerned, the editor looks good and this functionality looks good and I'm happy to see it moving along. Please forgive me for indulging my personal pet peeve. It is a good thing by itself to have competition to vscode and so please don't interpret my post as being overly negative to Zed given it's main competitor has the same issue. Also, I'm aware that a fair response to everything I just wrote would be "just use vi/vim/emacs"...which is actually really fair and does a lot to demolish my argument, at least as far as a remote editor being a necessity is concerned rather than just a nice to have.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Although I don't understand why you would still want to do that with modern processes, configuration management, CICD tools and the decentralization of git, you can just mount the remote directory via ssh. People have been doing that for decades already. Works with any editor/ide/tool.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - 2y ago
pseudony 2y ago
Can someone explain. What is the catch ? Zed is worked on by paid employees. So who is the product, how is the money made and is it open source and if so, how much ? (Vscode has strings attached too) Just interested since building my workflows around a company's products usually ends in tears (figuratively).
- keyle 2y ago
  You are the product. The editor is free afaik, and is very good. It has a plugin system and many languages have been added. It's really, really close to be my replacement to intelliJ. Sadly many bugs are stopping that for now. They'll charge for integrations later, collaboration etc. I'm not sure exactly where the money is going to come from but I value a quality native IDE. I hope they don't stuff crap down our mouth in the future and simply charge a one time fee per version. But that of course is unlikely to happen. Every new version of IntelliJ I gasp that they F'd with something, and usually I'm right.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - TylerE 2y ago
    I’ll have to give it a look. I’m an increasingly disenchanted IntelliJ customer also.
    - gregoryl 2y ago
      I assume they did the same as with Rider, and made the UI objectively worse, rather than solve a million other things that actually need improvement (performance!)?
      - keyle 2y ago
        10 years ago, Intellij, 1 IDE to rule them all they said. There are 14-15 at my last count. Complete cash job. Bugs I reported went unanswered for 3 years and then swept under the carpet, still not fixed. Obvious stuff too. Breaking and annoying stuff. The best part was when they came out and claimed they had the best latency to screen rendering, long article explaining the technology etc. behind it. Mac just came out with retina screen, and their stuff is written in Java, did not handle any kind of graphics acceleration. It was a complete joke, just pressing 'aaaaaaaaaaa' on the keyboard would start lagging after 10 characters to seconds long to render. Insanely funny stuff. If you shrank the IDE to 1/4 of the screen it was much faster! yay. I stopped paying a little while back and jumped on the community edition for debugging and other IDEs to write the code. I'm sick of their antics.
BossingAround 2y ago
Personally, I need support for remote debuggers, e.g. debugpy on Python. Would this feature help me debug code that's already running on a remote server and I just need to connect to it?
- jebarker 2y ago
  I really wish there was a good alternative to vscode for remote debugpy
  - BossingAround 2y ago
    Same. I don't like VSCode, but debugpy is, for me, a killer feature for which I'd pay if I had to.
    - worthless-trash 2y ago
      I was told that pythons repl was equivalent or as good as Common Lisp/Clojure, and it doesn't even look like it has a networked repl without third party code. I now wonder if pythons repl experience isnt even close to lisp likes.
reacharavindh 2y ago
A nice setup for Rust development where compile times are high. You can offload that to a beefy machine while using the editor on a MacBook Air :-)
jeeybee 2y ago
Used Zed for a week or so, loved it! But the lack of mypy / git integrations forced me back to VS-code :'(
- drcongo 2y ago
  I switch between Sublime and Zed all day depending on what task I'm doing, some things it's still not quite as good at as Sublime. The Ruff integration is excellent though, and the good news there is that apparently they're working on a type checker for Ruff's language server.
- uneekname 2y ago
  Yeah, while I'm pretty happy with git in the terminal, I'm eager to see what Zed's take on a git workflow will look like. The inline git blame info is nice, but a UI for committing and push/pulling the repo would be great.
greener_grass 2y ago
I wonder if image based screen sharing (e.g. Google Meet) is the "worse is better" here? Zed collaboration sounds great, but what about all of the other apps I use? Image based sharing supports everything (poorly) automatically.
teddyh 2y ago
I can find no mention of Emacs (or Tramp) in any of the documentation or a sampling of blog posts. It’s as if the authors don’t even know it exists. This is concerning. (As is their apparent 100% all-in on the AI hype train.)
- globular-toast 2y ago
  Yep. Emacs had this 25 years ago. I find editing over SSH a last resort, though, as it introduces a lot of undesirable latency.
  - amszmidt 2y ago
    Emacs had this 40 years ago. ;-)
    - globular-toast 2y ago
      I'm not surprised! I said 25 because the TRAMP manual says (c) 1999.
      - teddyh 2y ago
        Before there was Tramp, there was AngeFTP.
  - rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 2y ago
    >I find editing over SSH a last resort, though, as it introduces a lot of undesirable latency. I suggest you give Zed a try then or even VS Code remote, just to compare. They're much better engineered than Emacs tramp.
indulona 2y ago
why is there so much hype about yet another editor?
- coldtea 2y ago
  "So much hype" being defined as "the ocassional release announcement HN post now and then", most of which could be submitted by Zed themselves? And "yet another editor" as in implying that all editors edit, so Vim or Emacs or VSCode or Zed or whatever shouldn't matter, as none brings anything different/new to the table?
- fredoliveira 2y ago
  If we all stuck to the first thing that worked and searched for no improvements whatsoever, we'd all be riding horses.
  - _hyn3 2y ago
    I'm still riding text-mode vim over ssh, and it's very fast and suits me just fine. If I get frisky, I can always go check out the latest plugins.
  - gitaarik 2y ago
    A horse is still an excellent text editor
jeppester 2y ago
I wish I would be able to start a dedicated server that could then be joined by both myself and my co-workers to work together. From reading the article, it seems that collaboration is a wholly different layer, just like in VS Code.
edweis 2y ago
Zed is great. But as long as they don’t support eslint properly, it’s a turn down for me and my organization.
ktosobcy 2y ago
I've tried zed again and it's kinda "meh" when it comes to Java development. It's kinda nice editor (but BBedit feels even faster) but nothing more and using it feels like an added friction...
DrBazza 2y ago
Has anyone tried this and ssh'd into a container? IIRC VSCode struggled to correctly ssh into a container that's set up in your `.ssh` config file. Not sure if this fixed it: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/194879 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/194879
- uneekname 2y ago
  I'd really like to see this. I already run a bunch of containers on servers at home and work, and running a "Zed server" of some sort would be fabulous. I also wonder (I haven't looked yet) how Zed communicates with its server process over SSH, and if this could be accomplished over some other protocol. Is it possible SSH could be a speed (or latency) bottleneck on high-speed networks?
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  I just connected from VS Code running on Windows to a devcontainer running on a Steam Deck
  - DrBazza 2y ago
    I'm not familiar with devcontainers. The situation I was curious about was a general container, for example singularity, rather than something more common like docker. When I've tried that with vscode, it didn't like the ssh config that allowed you to ssh into the container and wouldn't work, even though in a bash shell it worked exactly as advertised.
Dinux 2y ago
I cant wait to switch to something like Zed. VS Code can take up half of my memory and keeps crashing after updates. How much language support is there for Go?
- gabeidx 2y ago
  It has built-in support for Go: https://zed.dev/docs/languages/go https://zed.dev/docs/languages/go
- Instantnoodl 2y ago
  I switched from Goland to Zed. Works really well. Only missing debugger support... After that it would be perfect for my usage :)
meitham 2y ago
How’s this different from starting tmux session on a remote server and editing code with a text editor and running in that session? Is Zed not a terminal text editor?
- dagw 2y ago
  Zed is a GUI code editor. Also the difference is where the UI runs. Running the UI locally gives much better response and lower latency than running the UI remote.
bert2002 2y ago
Any chance for a iPadOS release?
VeejayRampay 2y ago
I want to like Zed but two things are still an issue for me: - Zed doesn't know how to highlight XML - I use a theme called FairyFloss which doesn't exist for Zed and Zed doesn't provide anything to import VSCode themes
xiaodai 2y ago
make windows here before doing ssh?
tracker1 2y ago
Glad to see this. It's probably one of the biggest features in vs code that I find indispensable along with the integrated terminal. Will give Zed a try now.
rmrf100 2y ago
this is cool, love it.
vermon 2y ago
I would switch over to Zed for all my non-JVM needs if only it would have a debugger support. Currently it's filling a role of a text editor pretty well though.
evbogue 2y ago
How does this compare to vim over mosh?
Instantnoodl 2y ago
I tried to use zeds SSH remoting for a work project. Typescript with big codebase and sadly the performance is a rollercoaster. Types sometimes load so slow that it's unusable. VSCode remote doesn't seem to have this problem, although I'm not sure yet if it's really just a zed problem. I would need to try it with some more isolated use-case. Still happy to see the progress! I switched to zed for a lot of my private dev work already
eadmund 2y ago
Those who do not understand Emacs are doomed to repeat it. Poorly, in worse languages. —C.S. Santayana Emacs TRAMP mode has been doing this for 26 years, since November 1998. Fashions come, and fashions go, and Emacs remains. Anyone remember Atom? Anyone remember TextMate? Just use vi or Emacs.
- amszmidt 2y ago
  Fun fact. Emacs was doing this even long before Tramp, in the 1980s it was already common to work with remote files. So more like 40 years …
- thiht 2y ago
  "Just" does quite a bit of heavy lifting here. VSCode and Zed are much easier to use than emacs or vim. To me as a user, emacs lisp (and lisp in general) is the worse language compared to TypeScript which I can work with.
  - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    > VSCode and Zed are much easier to use than emacs or vim. False. It's just that Emacs comes with fewer features out of the box. > emacs lisp (and lisp in general) is the worse language compared to TypeScript Elisp is truly a piece of shit language, but TypeScript is not much better.
- fallingsquirrel 2y ago
  What's the point of this comment? Zed didn't exist in 1998, so I think it's forgivable that Zed didn't support remote editing in 1998. It's pretty funny you'd comment this at the same time there's a thread on the front page with people complaining about emacs bugs/performance issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41954030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41954030 Is that really the best we can do? Should we have frozen tech in 1998 with our 28.8kbps modems and stopped trying to improve anything ever again? Why did you switch to this emacs fad when you could have stuck with ed(1)? I think it's great that people are advancing the state of the art. Good for Zed.
trollied 2y ago
Jetbrains Gateway also does this.
stephenr 2y ago
There was discussion about Zed over at Lobste.rs ~9 months ago when it went open source. I tried it then (as it was compared a lot to VSCode or Visual Studio code, which according to comments here are two separate things, to my surprise?) and I just updated and tried it again, and my initial feeling about it is unchanged: Something about the UI is just... off. I don't know what it is exactly, but it feels like one of those "web page trying to mimic a desktop environment" demos that were all the rage 15-20 years ago. It's bizarre to think that IntelliJ, which is a JVM app, feels way more 'native' on macOS than Zed.
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Alifatisk 2y ago
How are people so happy with Zed? I've tried it, it's fast sure, but it lacks some very essential features like inline error highlighting and button for running code like how Intellij has it, there is no extensions that cover this either. At the moment, the Zed IDE is more like an lightweight ai-assisted text editor for me.
- fordsmith 2y ago
  I think that is precisely why people, and myself, ate happy with Zed. I don't, personally, care for those kinds of features. I want something that is snappy, and bloat free. I beloved extensions are planned so that will come in time. I'm terms of inline error highlighting, it absolutely has that. is your LSP just not working correctly?
  - Alifatisk 2y ago
    > is your LSP just not working correctly? I don't know, I can't tell, but I would guess it does not. I just got the one and only Java extension there is (the other has has something to do with Eclipse). Yet, no error highlighting.
_hyn3 2y ago
Running an unknown app on a trusted remote server under your local user account - not a good idea! Just keep it local on your own machine. Your editor can handle everything way faster locally, plus it can grab files with SSH’s built-in (and mature to the point of being ancient!) capabilities: caching, compression, and instant text file downloads over an open connection. You can even check for remote file changes using stat. Even better, use sshfs or another FUSE option. There’s a ton you can do with plain SSH alone. This whole running-a-remote-server idea is, frankly, puzzling.
- gitaarik 2y ago
  I guess the reason to run the IDE on the server is so that the IDE can inspect the whole (potentially huge) codebase and provide LSP features like code completion & go-to definition, and AI assistance etc.
caeril 2y ago
Wow, this is some incredible technology. It's not like tmux and neovim have been available for a decade now. This is like space-age alien technology with which, for the first time ever, we can develop over ssh! What a world we live in, what a time to be alive!
prinny_ 2y ago
Is that similar to webstorm's remote development?

SSH Remoting

279 points by ingve 2y ago

bbminner 2y ago

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

KingOfCoders 2y ago

"the language server is continually out of memory" "8gb is enough for everybody"

jiri 2y ago

Is somewhere a comparison of Zed to Visual Studio Code?

wiz21c 2y ago
for a start, zed doesn't work on Windows. I'm not exactly a fan of MSFT but at work, I must use Windows...
- Flex247A 2y ago
  It does work. Automated builds are here: https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds
  - TiredOfLife 2y ago
    Builds are there, but they don't work. At least on my laptop.
timeon 2y ago
Memory footprint, startup times, overall responsiveness. At the end of the day VSCode is still Electron app.
- speedgoose 2y ago
  In my experience, the electron overhead is relatively negligible compared to the ressource usage of the language servers. And zed seems to use the same language servers.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    It is certainly true that the language servers have the same speed in Zed, but there is something to be said for just never suffering from any UI delay for any reason. Though I'll admit a LS that takes three seconds to respond is kinda indistinguishable from UI delay.
    - cybrox 2y ago
      What kind of codebases do you work with? Other than with multi-MB files or thousands of multi-cursors, I've never had any performance issues with VS-Code. It's actually one of the fastest Electron apps, I would say. If I notice a delay, it's usually the language server or some support package's background command taking a bit of time.
      - stavros 2y ago
        How old is your computer? Some people have longer upgrade cycles than others.
        speedgoose 2y ago
        I remember that my computer in 2016 was already fast enough.
        cybrox 2y ago
        Granted, all of my machines are pretty new and powerful. Maybe performance is a lot worse on >5yo machines.
      - drcongo 2y ago
        If all you know is VS Code it probably feels fine and you should definitely not try Zed - "one of the fastest Electron apps" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
kruxigt 2y ago
[dead]

m3nu 2y ago

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

TZubiri 2y ago
I don't use code editors, but when we had an issue with ssh sessions hanging, it was always coworkers that were using vscode and connecting something up with that. Man, just ssh through the terminal like a normal person and transfer files with git.
- uniqueuid 2y ago
  "Man, just put it on tape and walk over to that machine to load it there". Sorry, I know such low-effort puns are shunned on HN, but once in a decade I grant myself the permission to not resist.
lifthrasiir 2y ago
Given my experience with the vscode remote instance, that actually sounds terrible as it can get bloated very quickly. The instance state can and should be retained without running the instance indefinitely.

Hamuko 2y ago

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

stanmancan 2y ago
What’s the issue exactly? I’ve been using it on macOS for a few months now and while it has its issues, text rendering hasn’t been one of them.
- Hamuko 2y ago
  Text looks very blurry when compared to Sublime Text with the same font family and size. There's an active issue about it on GitHub with screenshots. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
neurostimulant 2y ago
Such is life using macos on low dpi screen. A lot of apps render blurry texts :(
- Hamuko 2y ago
  It was definitely a lot worse than any other application I use on a 1440p 27-inch screen.

iveqy 2y ago

I also switch between a lot of computers (work computer at home/work computer at work) but have to develop on "big powerful machine at work". My current solution is tmux + nvim and it works really good. I can just pickup a session from whatever computer I'm in front of at the moment. Am I correct in that neither Zed nor VS Code support this usecase yet?

senko 2y ago
I use VSCode + SSH remote for this and works great. The only nitpick I have is needing to manually reconnect when I suspend my laptop and ssh connection breaks. It's a separate session though, which doesn't matter to me but may be a deal breaker for you. I use Tailscale for a personal VPN so the beefy workstation is always securely available from my laptop, even when across the pond).
- hu3 2y ago
  Thank you both for sharing the experience. I'm tempted to go lightweight laptop + beef server. Do you get used to the the input delay? I guess coding is not a FPS game so it's fine. Just a flow of words being edited.
  - dagw 2y ago
    Do you get used to the input delay? The input delays are very dependent on where the server is and what it is doing. If the server is idle and close by (ping wise) delay is virtually indistinguishable from local VSCode. If I'm connecting to the server via a VPN in a different country while stressing all the cores with some background compiling or number crunching work, input delay gets quite noticeable.
    - hu3 2y ago
      I guess editing files in the same continent must feel good enough. Thank you! I should try a project in this way. Perhaps rent some hetzner VPS.
  - 2y ago

p-e-w 2y ago

Caveat emptor: "Zed downloads NodeJS binary and npm packages from Internet without user’s consent"[1] This has been an open issue for 5 months. When I noticed it, I couldn't believe my eyes and it was the last time I've run Zed so far. Judge for yourself whether this is a deal-breaker for you; I wish I had known about it earlier. [1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589

lifthrasiir 2y ago
Oops indeed. (Downloading can be fine in many---but not all---cases, but the lack of authentication is not really justifiable!) The latest comment does hint that it will change in the near future, as the change is required for remote development anyway: > Status update: We are still working on this! The major blocker is that extensions have not been setup to interact with setting. However, we also need to change this API to support our upcoming remote development feature. So we're going to roll both of these breaking changes into a larger extension update, coming this November or December :)
Aeolun 2y ago
I don't see how this is different from having all these pre-bundled with a new version of Zed? Either way I'm going to download all of them again.
- lifthrasiir 2y ago
  By bundling, Zed guarantees or at least claims that those bundled executables can be trusted. The same level of trust is possible with on-demand downloading only when some sort of authentication is used [1] but Zed currently doesn't actually authenticate any downloads to my knowledge. [1] Either by embedding cryptographic hashes to the distribution, or by having some means to distribute publicly signed hashes (e.g. minisign via HTTPS).
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >By bundling, Zed guarantees or at least claims that those bundled executables can be trusted As if anyone at Zed cares and checks them all thoroughly? Even if they wanted they couldn't, given how expansive Node dependencies get. At best, someone will report an issue/vulnerability for one of those to them. Usually months/years after it exists.

lionkor 2y ago

I switched to Zed for C, C++, Rust, Angular, and am extremely happy with it. I use it with it's vim mode, which is very good. For the record, I've tried the JetBrains suite for at least a year, vscode, vim, neovim, visual studio (windows), qtcreator, and at least one more I dont remember. Zed is superior for everyday coding, for me. The only thing it lacks is debugging, so I can't use it for C#, but I also can't use vscode for C# so that's understandable. And man, its so snappy.

b4ckup 2y ago
I use vscode (with omnisharp not c# devkit) for c# every day. Did you try it out?
- leosanchez 2y ago
  Is devkit better than Rider ?
  - b4ckup 2y ago
    I tried to use vscode c# devkit but it is horribly unstable and has severe bugs that make it unusable for my projects. But I'm really happy with vscode + omnisharp. I never used rider so I cannot really say which is better but I tend to not like jetbrains IDEs (from experience with IntelliJ and webstorm).
- lionkor 2y ago
  I did not! Rider is extremely satisfying to use.
pimeys 2y ago
I've been using vim since the 90's, then emacs and helix. Never a GUI editor, always terminal. This year I just tried Zed and I'm super happy about it. It's open source, they offer a flake in their repo for me to get the latest version compiled to my NixOS installations if I want. It's fast, their LLM features are tasteful and they come with the open source version of the editor. It's written in Rust which is my main programming language. This SSH feature is great, I can just remotely turn on my workstation at home and use it with Zed over tailscale. I'm also waiting for a good debugger story, especially for Rust. It will come...

klemola 2y ago

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

TZubiri 2y ago
I wouldn't go there. These things are supposed to be helpful, any bug or chance of a bug will be detrimental to their stated purpose, just imagine scenarios were zed tells git to download a repo and you have to make sure it downloads to a linux directory and not a windows directory, otherwise you lose all of the access bits, and it's slow af. Asking for trouble.
- klemola 2y ago
  I appreciate your concern and I will consider this. The [VS Code] WSL back-end has access to things in WSL PATH, like compilers and language servers. I don't duplicate them in Windows, and would like to avoid having double installs. It's also nice to be able to open integrated terminal and use `fish` and other unix-only CLI utilities.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
Zed still doesn't have Windows version (but someone is working on it), so currently no.

ceving 2y ago

Someone reinvented tramp-mode.

pineapple_sauce 2y ago
This appears to be a significantly better implementation. Tramp mode is god awful slow and does not maintain a persistent connection.
- noufalibrahim 2y ago
  The default setup is pretty crappy but with some tweaking of the ssh connection setup, It does a decent job and I used it for actual work for several years.
  - globular-toast 2y ago
    Would you mind outlining the settings or pointing to a reference?
    - noufalibrahim 2y ago
      It's been a long time. Most of the stuff I was able to get from conversations on the Emacs IRC channel of freenode. Many of those "tricks" are documented here https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode but I don't know if it's out of date.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 2y ago
I suggest you try it and compare it to tramp-mode and see for yourself how different it is(and just how much better it is to tramp-mode)

unsnap_biceps 2y ago

Just a FYI, this feature will install a binary on the remote host and run it. > Your local machine will attempt to connect to the remote server using the ssh binary on your path. Assuming the connection is successful, Zed will download the server on the remote host and start it. https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development

echoangle 2y ago
That's what VS Code does too, BTW.
- frankjr 2y ago
  ..and is not even open source (EDIT: I'm wrong, see below). Zed's remote server on the other hand seems to be OSS. One could probably install it themselves without relying on the automatic download. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/633b665379c18a06959102c3857889b8bcbde4bb/crates/remote_server https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/633b665379c18a069...
  - echoangle 2y ago
    Interesting, I didn’t know the VS Code server component wasn’t open source.
    - hu3 2y ago
      it is though
  - eddythompson80 2y ago
    ? The remote server (reh) is part of the vscode repo itself https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/main/src/vs/server/node https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/main/src/vs/server/... there is a vscodium and codeoss builds of it too (reh builds). The extension that invokes it isn’t, but there are a few implementations of it that are, and I think vscodium bundles one with their build. It’s just some shell scripts that download the reh build and run it with the correct args.

Protostome 2y ago

with a little bit of work, vi/emacs works great as an IDE for most setups... The learning curve is steep but once you get the gist, you never go back to those bloated IDEs. (Disclaimer: I haven't tried zed, but have been working throughout my career with Eclipse, Visual C/C++/Basic (!), Atom)

jebarker 2y ago
Unless you need a graphical debugger, then vi/vim/nvim/emacs all start to get creaky. That single requirement keeps me on vscode. I'd love a terminal based alternative.
- frou_dh 2y ago
  Graphical as in integrated with the normal editing view? There's a new very nicely done one for Emacs: https://github.com/svaante/dape https://github.com/svaante/dape . The documentation about using it is currently a bit terse though.
  - jebarker 2y ago
    I actually don't mind if it's not integrated with the editor. I'm fine with a debugger being a standalone application. What I want is the ability to see the source, set breakpoints and navigate the code efficiently inside the debugger. vscode is currently the best option for this remotely
- _hyn3 2y ago
  just don't write buggy code ;) (or have to work on anyone else's)
nurumaik 2y ago
Try remote development with vim over 200ms ping ssh connection
- Protostome 2y ago
  I've tried that, but in this case i would just NFS/sshfs share the directory and work with vim locally. Vim can also read and write files across networks (while running locally): vim scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt should work. If you want to run builds and such on a terminal, just have a tmux window with an active ssh connection. There's a solution to most issues out there.

mike_d 2y ago

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

mrklol 2y ago
Afaik the problem are big file directories, at least that what I noticed.
reubenmorais 2y ago
You were tunneling traffic through SSH :P

keybits 2y ago

Zed with SSH Remoting and Orbstack is pretty much my dream setup for programming on a Mac. I can now spin up a Linux machine in Orbstack[0] in a few seconds and then SSH into it from Zed for a fast Linux development environment with a fast macOS native editor. It feels a bit like the macOS version of WSL and VSCode. Just a whole lot nicer (subjective of course)! A couple of years ago I was inspired by what Mitchell Hashimoto was doing[1]. He was running a GUI VM via VMware on macOS so that he could have the best of both worlds - macOS apps and ecosystem and a Linux dev environment with his preferred package managers and a more reliable NixOS. That route still felt a bit heavy to me, but I related to the desire for the best of macOS and the best of Linux. I tried with VMware and Docker Desktop with VSCode but it always felt like a lot of overhead and a bit clunky to achieve a smooth fast dev environment. With Zed and Orbstack it finally feels like the fast elegant system I'll stick with. Thank you to the developers for these excellent tools! [0] https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture#linux-machines https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture#linux-machines [1] https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1346136404682625024 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1346136404682625024

rfoo 2y ago
I've always been running a headless Linux VM wherever I do any dev work, Windows or Mac. Works very well. Glad to see that WSL2 and OrbStack promotes this workflow. For now my only complaint is I prefer full-blown VMs instead of WSL-like setup (so that I can work with the same Linux kernel my code targets), but client virtualization support on Apple platforms are pretty meh, definitely not at Hyper-V level yet. OrbStack went out of their way to fix a lot of these but they are not interested in making a VM product.
mbreese 2y ago
I’ve been using Colima to host docker containers and VSCode with devcontainers to do something similar. Being able to spin up a full stack environment on the fly for working is amazing. It may not be as fast as Zed, but it’s a well thought out workflow that’s very reproducible. It’s been a quick workflow to start using, but is still quite flexible. Regardless of which stack you use, I think this is a great style of working. When you have a reproducible dev environment, everything is so much easier. (As vagrant users will probably attest to - it’s not a new method). But having this feature of SSH remoting is also quite handy without the dev environment stack stuff. I also find it quite nice to work with a local client, but remote SSH environment when I’m doing data work (large genomic data files). In this case, instead of reproducibly, the main benefit is data locality. If my large dataset is on a different server, it’s far more convenient to write the analysis code on that remote server. This new Zed feature seems like it will also support this workflow, which is also a win in my book.

zifpanachr23 2y ago

I'd really like a good remote editing solution that is genuinely portable. I don't think there's anything technical stopping that from happening (and I've tried some half baked solutions along those lines before). For a variety of reasons relating to my line of work, this or vscode's solution are no gos since they require you to install a server on the remote, and that server is interpreted or compiled in a language that is absolutely not guaranteed to be present or stable on said remote (I'm saying my ideal extension, if a server is really necessary, would be in a reasonably widespread subset of C, perhaps ISO c99, which I'm sure I'll catch some flack for saying). That is an underserved (although perhaps not large, but probably they would be enthusiastic) market given that remote editing is perhaps the most useful in situations where the remote environment is different to such an extent you can't easily copy a project over and expect it to just work. If I'm deploying to an x86_ 64 Linux box, I can totally just develop locally and do a lot of testing locally deploy to the remote after all of that, and so I tend not to get too excited about remote editing features for a platform like a normal x86_64 Linux distro. I'm obviously being picky and demanding and people are free to ignore everything I just wrote. As far as Zed is concerned, the editor looks good and this functionality looks good and I'm happy to see it moving along. Please forgive me for indulging my personal pet peeve. It is a good thing by itself to have competition to vscode and so please don't interpret my post as being overly negative to Zed given it's main competitor has the same issue. Also, I'm aware that a fair response to everything I just wrote would be "just use vi/vim/emacs"...which is actually really fair and does a lot to demolish my argument, at least as far as a remote editor being a necessity is concerned rather than just a nice to have.

prmoustache 2y ago
Although I don't understand why you would still want to do that with modern processes, configuration management, CICD tools and the decentralization of git, you can just mount the remote directory via ssh. People have been doing that for decades already. Works with any editor/ide/tool.
- deleted 2y ago
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pseudony 2y ago

Can someone explain. What is the catch ? Zed is worked on by paid employees. So who is the product, how is the money made and is it open source and if so, how much ? (Vscode has strings attached too) Just interested since building my workflows around a company's products usually ends in tears (figuratively).

keyle 2y ago
You are the product. The editor is free afaik, and is very good. It has a plugin system and many languages have been added. It's really, really close to be my replacement to intelliJ. Sadly many bugs are stopping that for now. They'll charge for integrations later, collaboration etc. I'm not sure exactly where the money is going to come from but I value a quality native IDE. I hope they don't stuff crap down our mouth in the future and simply charge a one time fee per version. But that of course is unlikely to happen. Every new version of IntelliJ I gasp that they F'd with something, and usually I'm right.
- deleted 2y ago
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- TylerE 2y ago
  I’ll have to give it a look. I’m an increasingly disenchanted IntelliJ customer also.
  - gregoryl 2y ago
    I assume they did the same as with Rider, and made the UI objectively worse, rather than solve a million other things that actually need improvement (performance!)?
    - keyle 2y ago
      10 years ago, Intellij, 1 IDE to rule them all they said. There are 14-15 at my last count. Complete cash job. Bugs I reported went unanswered for 3 years and then swept under the carpet, still not fixed. Obvious stuff too. Breaking and annoying stuff. The best part was when they came out and claimed they had the best latency to screen rendering, long article explaining the technology etc. behind it. Mac just came out with retina screen, and their stuff is written in Java, did not handle any kind of graphics acceleration. It was a complete joke, just pressing 'aaaaaaaaaaa' on the keyboard would start lagging after 10 characters to seconds long to render. Insanely funny stuff. If you shrank the IDE to 1/4 of the screen it was much faster! yay. I stopped paying a little while back and jumped on the community edition for debugging and other IDEs to write the code. I'm sick of their antics.

BossingAround 2y ago

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

jebarker 2y ago
I really wish there was a good alternative to vscode for remote debugpy
- BossingAround 2y ago
  Same. I don't like VSCode, but debugpy is, for me, a killer feature for which I'd pay if I had to.
  - worthless-trash 2y ago
    I was told that pythons repl was equivalent or as good as Common Lisp/Clojure, and it doesn't even look like it has a networked repl without third party code. I now wonder if pythons repl experience isnt even close to lisp likes.

reacharavindh 2y ago

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

jeeybee 2y ago

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

drcongo 2y ago
I switch between Sublime and Zed all day depending on what task I'm doing, some things it's still not quite as good at as Sublime. The Ruff integration is excellent though, and the good news there is that apparently they're working on a type checker for Ruff's language server.
uneekname 2y ago
Yeah, while I'm pretty happy with git in the terminal, I'm eager to see what Zed's take on a git workflow will look like. The inline git blame info is nice, but a UI for committing and push/pulling the repo would be great.

greener_grass 2y ago

I wonder if image based screen sharing (e.g. Google Meet) is the "worse is better" here? Zed collaboration sounds great, but what about all of the other apps I use? Image based sharing supports everything (poorly) automatically.

teddyh 2y ago

I can find no mention of Emacs (or Tramp) in any of the documentation or a sampling of blog posts. It’s as if the authors don’t even know it exists. This is concerning. (As is their apparent 100% all-in on the AI hype train.)

globular-toast 2y ago
Yep. Emacs had this 25 years ago. I find editing over SSH a last resort, though, as it introduces a lot of undesirable latency.
- amszmidt 2y ago
  Emacs had this 40 years ago. ;-)
  - globular-toast 2y ago
    I'm not surprised! I said 25 because the TRAMP manual says (c) 1999.
    - teddyh 2y ago
      Before there was Tramp, there was AngeFTP.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 2y ago
  >I find editing over SSH a last resort, though, as it introduces a lot of undesirable latency. I suggest you give Zed a try then or even VS Code remote, just to compare. They're much better engineered than Emacs tramp.

indulona 2y ago

why is there so much hype about yet another editor?

coldtea 2y ago
"So much hype" being defined as "the ocassional release announcement HN post now and then", most of which could be submitted by Zed themselves? And "yet another editor" as in implying that all editors edit, so Vim or Emacs or VSCode or Zed or whatever shouldn't matter, as none brings anything different/new to the table?
fredoliveira 2y ago
If we all stuck to the first thing that worked and searched for no improvements whatsoever, we'd all be riding horses.
- _hyn3 2y ago
  I'm still riding text-mode vim over ssh, and it's very fast and suits me just fine. If I get frisky, I can always go check out the latest plugins.
- gitaarik 2y ago
  A horse is still an excellent text editor

jeppester 2y ago

I wish I would be able to start a dedicated server that could then be joined by both myself and my co-workers to work together. From reading the article, it seems that collaboration is a wholly different layer, just like in VS Code.

edweis 2y ago

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

ktosobcy 2y ago

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

DrBazza 2y ago

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

uneekname 2y ago
I'd really like to see this. I already run a bunch of containers on servers at home and work, and running a "Zed server" of some sort would be fabulous. I also wonder (I haven't looked yet) how Zed communicates with its server process over SSH, and if this could be accomplished over some other protocol. Is it possible SSH could be a speed (or latency) bottleneck on high-speed networks?
TiredOfLife 2y ago
I just connected from VS Code running on Windows to a devcontainer running on a Steam Deck
- DrBazza 2y ago
  I'm not familiar with devcontainers. The situation I was curious about was a general container, for example singularity, rather than something more common like docker. When I've tried that with vscode, it didn't like the ssh config that allowed you to ssh into the container and wouldn't work, even though in a bash shell it worked exactly as advertised.

Dinux 2y ago

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

gabeidx 2y ago
It has built-in support for Go: https://zed.dev/docs/languages/go https://zed.dev/docs/languages/go
Instantnoodl 2y ago
I switched from Goland to Zed. Works really well. Only missing debugger support... After that it would be perfect for my usage :)

meitham 2y ago

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

dagw 2y ago
Zed is a GUI code editor. Also the difference is where the UI runs. Running the UI locally gives much better response and lower latency than running the UI remote.

bert2002 2y ago

Any chance for a iPadOS release?

VeejayRampay 2y ago

I want to like Zed but two things are still an issue for me: - Zed doesn't know how to highlight XML - I use a theme called FairyFloss which doesn't exist for Zed and Zed doesn't provide anything to import VSCode themes

xiaodai 2y ago

make windows here before doing ssh?

tracker1 2y ago

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

rmrf100 2y ago

this is cool, love it.

vermon 2y ago

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

evbogue 2y ago

How does this compare to vim over mosh?

Instantnoodl 2y ago

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

eadmund 2y ago

Those who do not understand Emacs are doomed to repeat it. Poorly, in worse languages. —C.S. Santayana Emacs TRAMP mode has been doing this for 26 years, since November 1998. Fashions come, and fashions go, and Emacs remains. Anyone remember Atom? Anyone remember TextMate? Just use vi or Emacs.

amszmidt 2y ago
Fun fact. Emacs was doing this even long before Tramp, in the 1980s it was already common to work with remote files. So more like 40 years …
thiht 2y ago
"Just" does quite a bit of heavy lifting here. VSCode and Zed are much easier to use than emacs or vim. To me as a user, emacs lisp (and lisp in general) is the worse language compared to TypeScript which I can work with.
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  > VSCode and Zed are much easier to use than emacs or vim. False. It's just that Emacs comes with fewer features out of the box. > emacs lisp (and lisp in general) is the worse language compared to TypeScript Elisp is truly a piece of shit language, but TypeScript is not much better.
fallingsquirrel 2y ago
What's the point of this comment? Zed didn't exist in 1998, so I think it's forgivable that Zed didn't support remote editing in 1998. It's pretty funny you'd comment this at the same time there's a thread on the front page with people complaining about emacs bugs/performance issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41954030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41954030 Is that really the best we can do? Should we have frozen tech in 1998 with our 28.8kbps modems and stopped trying to improve anything ever again? Why did you switch to this emacs fad when you could have stuck with ed(1)? I think it's great that people are advancing the state of the art. Good for Zed.

trollied 2y ago

Jetbrains Gateway also does this.

stephenr 2y ago

There was discussion about Zed over at Lobste.rs ~9 months ago when it went open source. I tried it then (as it was compared a lot to VSCode or Visual Studio code, which according to comments here are two separate things, to my surprise?) and I just updated and tried it again, and my initial feeling about it is unchanged: Something about the UI is just... off. I don't know what it is exactly, but it feels like one of those "web page trying to mimic a desktop environment" demos that were all the rage 15-20 years ago. It's bizarre to think that IntelliJ, which is a JVM app, feels way more 'native' on macOS than Zed.

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Alifatisk 2y ago

How are people so happy with Zed? I've tried it, it's fast sure, but it lacks some very essential features like inline error highlighting and button for running code like how Intellij has it, there is no extensions that cover this either. At the moment, the Zed IDE is more like an lightweight ai-assisted text editor for me.

fordsmith 2y ago
I think that is precisely why people, and myself, ate happy with Zed. I don't, personally, care for those kinds of features. I want something that is snappy, and bloat free. I beloved extensions are planned so that will come in time. I'm terms of inline error highlighting, it absolutely has that. is your LSP just not working correctly?
- Alifatisk 2y ago
  > is your LSP just not working correctly? I don't know, I can't tell, but I would guess it does not. I just got the one and only Java extension there is (the other has has something to do with Eclipse). Yet, no error highlighting.

_hyn3 2y ago

Running an unknown app on a trusted remote server under your local user account - not a good idea! Just keep it local on your own machine. Your editor can handle everything way faster locally, plus it can grab files with SSH’s built-in (and mature to the point of being ancient!) capabilities: caching, compression, and instant text file downloads over an open connection. You can even check for remote file changes using stat. Even better, use sshfs or another FUSE option. There’s a ton you can do with plain SSH alone. This whole running-a-remote-server idea is, frankly, puzzling.

gitaarik 2y ago
I guess the reason to run the IDE on the server is so that the IDE can inspect the whole (potentially huge) codebase and provide LSP features like code completion & go-to definition, and AI assistance etc.

caeril 2y ago

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

prinny_ 2y ago

Is that similar to webstorm's remote development?