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Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor
- kookamamie 1y agoHow does Zed fare for C++ development? Last I checked it did not support CMake as a build system.
- constantcrying 1y agoIt's a text editor not an IDE.
- kookamamie 1y agoI don't think that argument holds very well. It supports extensions for languages such as Java and seemingly that extension can build code, too. Zed also contains Git-support out of the box, which sounds pretty much like a lightweight IDE.
- dkersten 1y agoYou can set up tasks to run cmake for you: https://zed.dev/docs/tasks https://zed.dev/docs/tasks Personally, I just use the terminal for my build tools and Zed talks to clangd just fine for autocomplete etc.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- keybits 1y agoFor people who have tried the new agent panel in Zed, how does it compare to something like Cursor or Windsurf? (I've yet to dive deep into AI coding tools and currently use Zed as an 'open source Sublime Text alternative' because I like the low latency editing.)
- DreaminDani 1y agoI'd say it's closer to Claude Code than to either of the two IDE-oriented ones. I say this because it actually does the right thing more often than either Cursor or Windsurf. It gathers the right context, asks for feedback when needed and has yet to "go back and forth between two failing solutions" like I've seen Cursor do. I don't know what Zed's doing under the hood but the diffing tool has yet to fail on me (compared to multiple times per conversation in Cursor). Compared to previous Zed AI iterations, this one edits files much more willingly and clearly communicates what it's editing. It's also faster than Claude Code at getting up to speed on context and much faster than Cursor or Windsurf.
- wrcwill 1y agowhat about the vscode agent? is there a reason it is never in the conversation? I thought they added an agent early 2025?
- bmulholland 1y agoI'm curious what others' experiences have been with this. I haven't tried it out yet. Is it comparable to Cursor's capabilities? More on par with VS Code Copilot? Something else entirely?
- xmorse 1y agoBasically same level as Cursor, one thing missing is the Apply Cursor model which sometimes makes better edits in the code
- seumars 1y agoWow that's one awkwardly pompous introduction. Nevertheless Zed never fails to impress. Aside from all the AI fireworks it really goes to show how building software "from scratch" pays off in the long run.
- MichaelGlass 1y ago(I thought the introduction was, if not outright funny, deserving of at least one chuckle).
- TacticalCoder 1y ago[dead]
- seafoamteal 1y agoI generally use Neovim, but Zed was the first code editor that made me go, "Wow, I can see myself actually using this." My only gripe is the "Sign In" button at the top that I can't seem to remove. But apropos TFA, it's nice to see that telemetry is opt-in, not opt-out.
- pimeys 1y agoYeah. I've been using vim since the 90's. A bit of emacs here and there, and more recently some helix too. Zed was the first GUI editor that took me over. I've always hated VSCode, but Zed is so fast and its UI just clicks on me that I've been using it as my main editor for months now. Subscribed to their paid plan just to keep the lights on and hoping it will get even better in the future.
- terminalbraid 1y ago> that I can't seem to remove It's open source, builds extremely well out of the box, and the UI is declarative.
- charcircuit 1y agoSorry if this is obvious, but have you tried signing in?
- aaravchen 1y agoNot OP, but the Sign In button is for GitHub on Zed. Which conflicts with GitHub sign in for any of the other AI agents, so you have to pick only one (the others will time out and do nothing after the first). On work machines I use the corporate Copilot login, so I just have a permanent Sign In button in the upper right that doesn't function and can't be hidden. Also I don't want to pay with my private data from some of my systems. So I don't ever want to sign in on those systems and just have a useless button sitting there.
- seafoamteal 1y agoI had a reply typed out to the parent but decided I didn't want to take the bait, so thank you for putting my concern (your second point) into words.
- outcoldman 1y agoI am amazed how well it works. Yesterday I have spent a full day with a new macOS project with idea in my head. Spend half a day writing basic features, and after that opened the project in Zed to add features. Not very well documented things like AppKit + SwiftUI integration - no issues, and I mean I was getting about 500 new lines from my questions and was getting compilable code (and working). A few times after review I modified a few things to make it compilable/or better. But still. And I had one interesting problem with objc/swift and javascript integration - and Zed AI delivered some masterpiece in JavaScript, that is definitely outside my knowledge. This technology is definitely going to change how we program now.
- camjw 1y agoa bit offtopic but whats your workflow for building macos products using a different editor to xcode? i am new to this and xcode seems awful (?)
- LinusU 1y ago(not the one you asked, but can chime in with some info) This was a long time ago, but the way I did it was to use XcodeGen (1) and a simple Makefile. I have an example repo here (2) but it was before Swift Package Manager (using Carthage instead). If I remember correctly XcodeGen has support for Swift Package Manager now. On top of that I was coding in VS Code at the time, and just ran `make run` in the terminal pane when I wanted to run the app. Now, with SwiftUI, I'm not sure how it would be to not use Xcode. But personally, I've never really vibed with Xcode, and very much prefer using Zed... 1: https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen 2: https://github.com/LinusU/Soon https://github.com/LinusU/Soon
- camjw 1y agoThanks this is super useful! Really appreciate it!
- dchest 1y ago"For millions of years, humans have used tools to create things." Huh?
- VWWHFSfQ 1y agoobviously tongue-in-cheek
- lopatin 1y agoHumans haven’t been around for millions of years though. Or is that part of the cheekiness?
- two_handfuls 1y agoHomo Abilis, 2 million years ago, used stone tools. Yes it's not the modern human but I think that's close enough.
- orra 1y agoIt depends on what you mean by human. Homo sapians emerged 200k or 300k years ago. But the genus goes back further. Homo habilis goes back 2.4M years.
- lordofgibbons 1y agoI really want to move off VS Code and start using Zed, but unfortunately the text is always extremely blurry. It's just unusable. I check back on the GitHub issue every few months and it just has more votes and more supportive comments, but no acknowledgement. Hopefully someone can rescue us from the sluggish VS Code. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992 I have a 1440p monitor and seeing this issue.
- askonomm 1y ago1440p monitor would probably be why the text is blurry - there simply isn't enough pixels to make things smooth without resorting to special hacks to improve LowDPI text rendering, which with more and more displays being HiDPI many don't bother doing.
- krastanov 1y agoI am amazed people consider 1440p low resolution. My knee-jerk reaction was to assume you were sarcastic. I use a monitor of roughly that many lines of pixels and have never had observed blurry text in the tools I use (and I use fairly small fonts).
- trevorhinesley 1y agoAre you using enlarged text or native 1440p? If the latter, have you used 4k or retina displays in the past? It’s hard to go back after that.
- ammmir 1y agoI was using Zed up until a few months ago. I got fed up with the entire AI panel being an editable area, so sometimes I ended up clobbering it. I switched to Cursor, but now I don't "trust" the the editor and its undo stack, I've lost code as a result of it, particularly when you're in mid-review of an agentic edit, but decide to edit the edit. The undo/redo gets difficult to track, I wish there was some heirarchical tree view of history. The restore checkpoint/redo is too linear for my lizard brain. Am I wrong to want a tree-based agentic IDE? Why has nobody built it?
- senko 1y ago> I got fed up with the entire AI panel being an editable area, so sometimes I ended up clobbering it. They fixed that with the new agent panel, which now works more like the other AI sidebars. I was (mildly) annoyed by that too. The new UI still has rough edges but I like the change.
- freehorse 1y agoInteresting. I actually like the editable format of the chat interface because it allows fixing small stuff on the fly (instead of having to talk about it with the model) and de-cluttering the chat after a few back and forths make it a mess (instead of having to start anew), which makes the context window smaller and less confusing to the model, esp for local ones. Also, the editable form makes more sense to me, and it feels more natural and simple to interact with an LLM assistant with it.
- gempir 1y agoWish it could use OpenRouter
- ribelo 1y agoYou can, but not together with openai: ``` "openai": { "api_url": "https://openrouter.ai/api/v1 https://openrouter.ai/api/v1", "version": "1", "available_models": [ { "name": "anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet:beta", "max_tokens": 200000 }, ... ``` Just change api_url in the zed settings and add models you want manually.
- ImPostingOnHN 1y agoLuckily, OpenRouter has OpenAI models as an option :) https://openrouter.ai/models?fmt=cards&providers=OpenAI https://openrouter.ai/models?fmt=cards&providers=OpenAI
- antx 1y agoThere's a PR for that [0] ! Eager to see it in action. [0] : https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/29496 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/29496
- divan 1y agoMeanwhile I'm checking Helix editor every 6 month to see if authors became any less hostile to the idea of thinking about considering of starting thinking about potentially adding copilot support. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037
- nba456_ 1y agoThis is exactly why I bounced off Helix a while ago. No copilot and endless bikeshedding for plugin development.
- eikenberry 1y agoThe bikeshedding has long past. They've been working on the implementation now for some time. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675
- master-lincoln 1y agoWhy should an open source editor support some single commercial product API in their core? Why copilot and not another product? It's completely reasonable to me that this should be a third party plugin or that they should wait for some standard that supports many products.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lemontheme 1y agoAs @adriangalilea recently aptly wrote in Helix's 2nd-longest discussion thread (#4037): > For the nth time, it's about enabling inline suggestions and letting anything, either LSP or Extensions use it, then you don't have to guess what the coolest LLM is, you just have a generic useful interface for LLM's or anything else to use. An argument I would agree with is that it's unreasonable to expect Helix's maintainers to volunteer their time toward building and maintaining functionality they don't personally care about.
- volkk 1y agoZed is exactly how software should be made. Granted, I don't agree with all of their UX decisions (i think the AI panel is really bad compared to Cursor's), but good lord is the thing fast. These guys are the real deal. They built a rendering system (GPUI) in Rust before building Zed on top of it, and so it is one of the fastest (if not the fastest) pieces of software that resides on my computer. I can't wait until GPUI becomes a bit more mature/stable so I can build on top of it, because the other Rust GUI libraries/frameworks aren't great. edit: they updated the AI panel! looking good!
- cies 1y ago> because the other Rust GUI libraries/frameworks aren't great. Iced, being used by System76's COSMIC EPOCH, is not great in what regards? Serious question.
- volkk 1y agothere's basically zero documentation for Iced as it stands. They even wrote that if you're not a great Rust dev, you're going to have a bad time and that all docs are basically "read the code" until their book is written. I'm glad System76 is able to build using Iced, but you need a great manual for a tool to be considered mature and useful. IMO Slint is milestones ahead and better. They've even built out solid extensions for using their UI DSL, and they have pages and pages of docs. Of course everything has tradeoffs, and their licensing is funky to me.
- rice7th 1y agoThen you should try egui. It has a lot of examples and it is among the most mature libraries along with iced and slint, without the licensing problems
- jenadine 1y agoegui is nice but its API changes a lot between versions which makes it hard to rely on. Slint is stable and well documented. Its license is open source and also free to use in many cases so there is no real issue there.
- submeta 1y agoHangs on my M4 MBP when I open Clojure files. CPU usage at 130%. Other than that a beautiful editor.
- createaccount99 1y agoIncredibly buggy still
- dimaor 1y agoI'm not sure, it might have changed since, but my personal experience was different. Tried using zed on Linux (pop os, Nvidia) several months ago, was terribly slow, ~1s to open right click context window. I've spent some time debugging this, and turns out that my GPU drivers are not the best with my current pop os release, but I still don't understand how it might take so long and how GPU is related to right clicking. Switched back to emacs, love every second. :) I'm not sure if title referring to actual development speed or the editor performance. p.s. I play top games on Linux, all is fine with my GPU & drivers.
- jjice 1y agoI know they started on MacOS and their Linux support is relatively new, so I wonder if that "fastest" label is really only applicable to MacOS currently.
- constantcrying 1y agoNo. It works incredibly well under Linux. Nvidia drivers in particular are terrible on Linux, so what OP is describing is likely some compatibility/version issue.
- adriano_f 1y agoI also tried Zed on Linux a few months back, and had GPU/driver issues, so it was either slow or didn't run. Tried it just now and it worked right out of the box, and it's incredibly fast. I will keep playing around with it to see if it's worth switching (from JetBrains WebStorm).
- mirawelner 1y agoIt’s funny that they lead with AI tools. I love zed because it’s fast, customizable, has a clean interface and it’s easy to pair program. The LLM bit is just an annoying thing I shut off because imo I’m too junior at the moment to use LLMs
- sitkack 1y agoAs someone who has 35 years of programming experience and now vibes half the day, this is a refreshing take from a junior programmer. One way you could use LLMs w/o inducing brain mush would be for code or design reviews, testability, etc. If you see codebases you like, stash them away for AI explanation later.
- erk__ 1y agoIs it possible to shut the AI things off? As in properly hide all the buttons and stuff that relates to it?
- aDyslecticCrow 1y agoIts a small button in the top right corner. Very oit of the way unless interacted with. I use zed because its faster and cleaner than vscode. I dont want AI in my editor.
- anderber 1y agoYes, you can. Just edit your settings: { "features": { "edit_prediction_provider": "none" } }
- shantara 1y agoI was interested in zed as I was looking for a performant VSCode replacement, but its inability to fully remove AI integration and disable the prominent sign-in button made me lose any interest. Judging by the project’s response or lack of it on these topics, I am worried about adopting zed in my workflows. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12325 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12325 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/6756 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/6756
- LeafItAlone 1y agoA bit off topic: For work I mostly develop on Python and Typescript. I’ve been using PyCharm Professional for over a decade (after an even longer time with emacs). I keep trying to switch to vscode, Cursor, etc. as they seem to be well liked by their users. Recently I’ve also tried Zed. But the Jetbrains suite of tools for refactoring, debugging, and general “intelligence” keep me going back. I know I’m not the only one. For those of you that love these vscode-like editors that have previously used more integrated IDEs, what does your setup look like?
- jeremy_k 1y agoI was a RubyMine and later IDEA user for many many years. I agree with everything you've said but I got so tired of the IDE using excessive RAM and constantly making my fan spin (2019 Intel MBP). Switching to Zed made my experience on this laptop enjoyable again, the downside being that I miss out on some of the features from the JetBrains editors. I've learned to work around the loss of some functionality over the past 6 months since I've switched and it hasn't been too bad. The AI features in Zed have been great and I'm looking forward to the debugger release so I can finally run and debug tests in Zed.
- epiccoleman 1y ago> (2019 Intel MBP) I used to have one of these and recently got an M1 Max machine - the performance boost is seriously incredible. The throttling on those late-game intel macs is hardcore - at one point I downloaded Hot[1], which is a menu bar app that shows you when you're being throttled. It was literally all the time that the system was slowing itself down due to heat. I eventually just uninstalled it because it was a constant source of frustration to know I was only ever getting 50% performance out of my expensive dev laptop. [1]: https://github.com/macmade/Hot https://github.com/macmade/Hot
- jeremy_k 1y agoI got an M4 as a new work machine and it is absolutely bonkers how much faster and quieter it is. And the battery lasts forever, even when running my dev setup. I can actually go and work at a coffee shop for a couple hours without taking the charger now.
- camcaine 1y agoLove Zed
- coder543 1y ago> Privacy and Security by Default [...] you can also run custom models on your own hardware via Ollama. That's nice for the chat panel, but the tab completion engine surprisingly still doesn't officially support a local, private option.[0] Especially with Zed's Zeta model being open[1], it seems like there should be a way to use that open model locally, or what's the point? [0]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/15968 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/15968 [1]: https://zed.dev/blog/edit-prediction https://zed.dev/blog/edit-prediction
- WD-42 1y agoRegardless of the AI stuff, Zed is the best editor since Sublime Text and it’s only getting better. Congrats to the team. I also laughed at the dig on VSCode at the start. For the unaware, the team behind Zed was originally working on Atom.
- awill 1y agoAs a longtime Sublime user, Sublime really needs to step it up. Presumably their silence is because they're (hopefully) releasing something big soon.
- createaccount99 1y agoThat's a fresh joke, had a good laugh
- WD-42 1y agoI was a sublime user as well, Zed is the first editor to get me off it. It’s nice using an editor that gets modern improvements again. The writing was on the wall for ST when LSPs happened and support for them was relegated to a community plugin.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoI don't feel the need for Sublime to step it up, because nothing is on their level yet. I tried Zed and went back to Sublime pretty quickly as it is by default lighter weight (the main Zed process is fine but it automatically runs a bunch of nodejs bloat) and doesn't have a bunch of useless AI crap. You can turn those things off in Zed (kudos to them for that at least), but I prefer to stick with an editor that doesn't need to be tweaked to get rid of bloat.
- apwell23 1y agoauthor was big into elm. has he since moved on to rust?
- rtfeldman 1y agoAuthor here. :) I work at Zed and I like using Rust daily for my job, but outside work I also like Elm, and Zig, and am working on https://www.roc-lang.org https://www.roc-lang.org
- 1-more 1y agoThe compiler for Roc (his language) was written in Rust but is now being rewritten in Zig: https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/77fb430ee57b42f5f2ca973a3992532f https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/77fb430ee57b42f5f2ca973a39...
- SafeDusk 1y agoTried Zed and Cursor, but they always felt too magical to me. I ended up building a minimal agent framework that only uses seven tools (even for code edits): read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, and think. These simple, composable tools can be utilized well enough by increasingly powerful LLM(s), especially Gemini 2.5 pro to achieve most tasks in a consistent, understandable way. More importantly - I can just switch off the 'ask' tool for the agent to go full turbo mode without frequent manual confirmation. I just released it yesterday, have a look at https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami for the implementation if you think it is useful for you!
- pseudopersonal 1y agoI would love a vim plugin for this. Many LLM vim plugins started off beautifully minimal, but became too agentic in their chase of Cursor.
- deepsquirrelnet 1y agoMaybe once all of this is a bit more mature we can just get down to the minimal subset of features that are really important. I’d love a nvim plugin that is more or less just a split chat window that makes it easy to paste code I’ve yanked (like yank to chat) add my commentary and maybe easily attach other files for context. That’s it really.
- SafeDusk 1y agoThat is the dream! Would love someone to create a vim plugin for this, if not I'll do it myself if there is enough demand.
- hugodrax157 1y agoHave you seen CodeCompanion (https://github.com/olimorris/codecompanion.nvim https://github.com/olimorris/codecompanion.nvim)?
- valzam 1y agoI can highly recommend gp.nvim, it has a few features but by default it's just a chat window with a yank-to-chat function. It also supports a context file that gets pasted into every chat automatically (for telling the AI about the tools you use etc)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zersiax 1y agoI'm sure it's fast, but is it accessible? Am I as a screen reader user going to get fired if the company I work at decides one day to have all of their devs use this? And if not, any plans to make it so? Might sound a little brusque but this really is the stakes we're playing with these days.
- hello_computer 1y agoThey can pry my vt220-based editor from my cold dead hands.
- dxbednarczyk 1y agoMy favorite part of Zed is the problems/errors view. It's great seeing everything in one place and being able to edit multiple files with context at the same time. That feature + native Git support has fully replaced VSCode for me.
- freehorse 1y agoI tried the agent mode with sonnet 3.7 (not the thinking one). When it started trying to create a file, it kept getting a "Failed to connect to API: 400 Bad Request" error. After a few attempts to create files, it "touch"ed a file and tried to edit this, which also failed. It checked permissions with "ls -la", then it tried to "cat" the code into it but failed because of syntax errors (to do with quoting). Then it tried nano(?!?!) and failed, and then it started "echo"ing the code into the file chunk by chunk, which started working. After 4 chunks it got an error and then it made the following chunks smaller. It took it a dozen "echo"s or so. While the initial 400 error is a bummer, I am actually surprised and admire its persistence in trying to create the file and in the end finding a way to do so. It forgot to define a couple of stuff in the code, which was trivial to fix, after that the code was working.
- rtfeldman 1y agoZed employee here - that sounds like a bug, sorry about that! If you're okay sharing the conversation with us, would you mind pressing the thumbs-down button at the bottom of the thread so that we can see what input led to the 400? (We can't see the contents of the thread unless you opt into sharing it with the thumbs-down button.)
- freehorse 1y agoNo problem, and thanks for the response here! I sent two feedback threads (added a second test where a file succeeded to edit and the rest failed). It was actually quite entertaining seeing the model try troubleshoot stuff anyway. I used github copilot's sonnet 3.7. I now tried copilot's sonnet 3.5 and it seems to work, so it was prob a 3.7 issue? It did not let me try zed's sonnets, so I don't know if there is a problem with zed's 3.7 (I thought I could still do 50 prompts with a free account, but maybe that's not for the agent?).
- maxbrunsfeld 1y agoThanks for the information. We can reproduce this using Copilot Chat. We're fixing now. We'll let you know when the fix is out.
- hirvi74 1y agoLooks interesting. Not sure I would leave emacs or vim for it. I find the UI to be a bit too busy for my goldfish attention span.
- Wow38363 1y ago[flagged]
- wqtz 1y agoThe pricing page: https://zed.dev/pricing https://zed.dev/pricing The pricing page was not linked on the homepage. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't but it surely was not obvious to me. Regardless of how good of a software it is or pretends to be I just do not care about landing pages anymore. Pricing page essentially tells me what I am actually dealing with. I knew about Zed when it was being advertised as "written in rust because it makes us better than everyone" trend everyone was doing. Now, it is LLM based. Absolutely not complaining about them. Zed did position themselves well to take the crown of the multi billion dollar industry AI code editors has become. I had to write this wall of text of because I just want to just drop the pricing page link and help make people make their own decision, but I have to reply to "whats your point" comments and this should demonstrate I have no point aside from dropping a link.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Dowwie 1y agoJose Valim just gave a demo of Tidewave integration with Zed. Really interesting stuff: https://x.com/josevalim/status/1920062725394243640 https://x.com/josevalim/status/1920062725394243640 I'm catching up on Zed architecture using deepwiki: https://deepwiki.com/zed-industries/zed https://deepwiki.com/zed-industries/zed
- 55555 1y agoLooks good! Did you just release? I’ll give you 1 billion dollars for it.
- gyre007 1y agoFrom my experience Zed agents oftn just goes and edits your files without your asking it to. Even if you ask questions about codebase, it assumes you want it to be changed. For it to be useful it must be better at understanding prompts; I would also like it to generate diffs like it does but prompt me if I want to apply them first
- slowmovintarget 1y ago> ...So far, these futuristic tools have been accessible to programmers in one of three ways: > ... 3. Baked into a closed-source fork of an open-source fork of a web browser I laughed out loud at this one.
- tiffanyh 1y agoSlightly OT: Why aren't AI coding assistants implemented as plugins (like through an LSP), rather than being a standalone AI-first editor (like Cursor)? I might be missing the obvious, and I get no standard exists, but why aren't AI coding assistants just plugins?
- behnamoh 1y agoBecause it would be easier to get funded that way. VCs prefer a product rather than a plugin.
- jptlnk 1y agoI don't think it's obvious but in my own experiments with this it's things like permissions that can get a little hairy. It's all doable and IMO preferable to have an agent-as-daemon. aider is kind of like this.
- chuckadams 1y agoDo you mean for Zed in particular? Because there are lots of AI agent plugins for VSC and Jetbrains IDEs both. I’m currently using one now, namely Augment. And AFAIK, copilot is still a plugin.
- nsonha 1y agoIf you actually look it up you'll see more of them that are plugins than full editors. I don't actually know their thinking but I know that for the VSCode ones (fork or extension), I tend to have at least 2 AIs at any point in time and compare them in my daily work. Probably when this field matures, lock-in will be more common, and you need control of the entire editor for that.
- deliriumchn 1y agoI hate the direction they're going to be honest with this giga focus on AI bullshit. Only good part added was zeta (their own predictive editing model that jumps across the file where it predicts you want to edit your typo etc AND have a "subtle" mode), but they price it at 20/month, which is absurd.
- nsonha 1y agoThat zeta thing you describe is in every AI tool these days.
- rckt 1y agoI'm using it without any AI stuff, just turned everything off. I like it. But in day-to-day usage I don't really see any difference with VSCode. And I'm using it out of pure curiosity and interest to try something new.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoSimply escaping the evil clutches of microsoft is worth suffering a merely "neutral" experience.
- aaravchen 1y agoHonestly, that's why I've been using it too. But it's painful some of the basic features that are missing. Like manually switching indentation settings on a file. Not supported by Zed at all, you have to write an entire editorconfig file for your project instead, or change your global settings. I do really love how simple some of the GUI config options are though. Just a single value to hide the useless Collaboration panel and button. And having a default settings and default keymap file you can open to look at and copy from when modifying your own is so helpful, and makes it much easier to customize a key binding here or there from the defaults instead of the GUI-fied VSCode mess that you can't eve see what's been manually modified easily.
- sashank_1509 1y agoHere’s what I want, a keyboard only code editor, (ideally with all the vim keybindings and features) that also has in built lsp for popular languages like C, C++, Go and just works out of the box (even better if it has good code completion with copilot or something similar). I can’t seem to get this anywhere. I’m still sticking with neovim for now but it’s code complete doesn’t work well that I’ve turned it off and I have to maintain its config every few months.
- pseudosimus 1y agoHave you given Helix a try? It sounds like it might fit the bill for you.
- constantcrying 1y agoLazyvim does that for you. In my experience completion works exactly as well as Vscode. Alternatively helix.
- dcre 1y agoAgreeing with the other replies: Helix. https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/ Here's a nice recent post about it: https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2025-03-16-helix-review.html https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2025-03-16-helix-review.html
- aaravchen 1y agoMy experience is that C and C++ can't be done well, unless you have the world's most trivial code base. There are dozens of possible build tools for C and C++, all with complex syntax and most with mandatory user provided input to configure the build. For anything beyond simple syntax highlighting, you need to be able to context parse all the multi-file cross references and inputs that can only come from building the entire project with preprocessing and then parsing the LLM (the intermediate syntax, not the AI thing). For most projects that are nontrivial, a compilation cycle can be 10 minutes to 4+ hours, and requires the specific settings you want to build with. Breaking them down to per-file also doesn't work because you'd have to do a complete dry run execution of the build system just to get the specific toolchain build settings for each file. And remember there are dozens of possible build tools that your tool has to emulate a dry run of now. Most tools I've seen can only make a half attempt at C/C++ as a result, and usually the solutions scale incredibly poorly. The basic CTags for example, that just indexes symbols in your project source code, easily generates a >4 GB database file on something like a Yocto build. Which is why they invented Exuberant CTags that uses a binary database to try and speed it up. But even still, you're getting almost no useful context from results, and it has a very long lag in response when you do ask something. The AI LLM support for C and C++ seems able to make guesses with the partial info that's available to them, whether its only the one file of context or the whole project (very uncommon), but it has the lowest successful output rate of any context helper I've ever used.
- blks 1y ago[flagged]
- Palmik 1y agoI have been using Zed as my main editor for the past ~5 months and I have been very happy with it. It's actually fast and snappy. I hope they become sustainable. VS Code forks (Cursor and Windsurf) were extremely slow and buggy for me (much more so than VS Code, despite using only the most vanilla extensions).
- cube2222 1y agoThe way context management in Zed works is really well-done imo. I haven't found a different place which does it this way. Basically, by default: - You have the chat - Inline edits you do use the chat as context And that is extremely powerful. You can easily dump stuff into the chat, and talk about the design, and then implement it via surgical inline edits (quickly). That said, I wasn't able to switch to Zed fully from Goland, so I was switching between the two, and recently used Claude Code to generate a plugin for Goland that does chat and inline edits similarly to how the old Zed AI assistant did it (not this newly launched one) - with a raw markdown editable chat, and inline edits using that as context.
- Brainspackle 1y agoCline has been doing this forever
- cube2222 1y agoI might be wrong, I last used Cline in December, but I believe we're talking about different things. Cline's an Agent, and you chat with it, based on which it makes edits to your files. I don't think it has manual inline edit support? What I'm talking about is that you chat with it, you're done chatting, you select some text and say "rewrite this part as discussed" and only that part is edited. That's what I mean with inline edits. For Agentic editing I'm happy with Claude Code.
- mococa 1y agoStill no debugger, this is shame.
- dtkav 1y agoApparently it is in beta -- https://zed.dev/debugger https://zed.dev/debugger
- isaacimagine 1y agoI interned at zed during the summer of 2022, when the editor was pre-alpha. Nathan, Max, Antonio are great guys and build software with care. I'm happy to see the editor receive the success it deserves, because the team has poured so much world-class engineering work into it. I worked with Antonio on prototyping the extensions system[0]. In other words, Antonio got to stress test the pair programming collaboration tech while I ran around in a little corner of the zed codebase and asked a billion questions. While working on zed, Antonio taught me how to talk about code and make changes purposefully. I learned that the best solution is the one that shows the reader how it was derived. It was a great summer, as far as summers go! I'm glad the editor is open source and that people are willing to pay for well-engineered AI integrations; I think originally, before AI had taken off, the business model for zed was something along the lines of a per-seat model for teams that used collaborative features. I still use zed daily and I hope the team can keep working on it for a long time. [0]: Extensions were originally written in Lua, which didn't have the properties we wanted, so we moved to Wasm, which is fast + sandboxed + cross-language. After I left, it looks like Max and Marshall picked up the work and moved from the original serde+bincode ABI to Wasm interface types, which makes me happy: https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-extensions https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-extensions. I have a blog post draft about the early history of Zed and how extensions with direct access to GPUI and CRDTs could turn Zed from a collaborative code editor into a full-blown collaborative application platform. The post needs a lot of work (and I should probably reach out to the team) before I publish it. And I have finals next week. Sigh. Some day!
- porsager 1y agoI wish they would have stayed with the collaborative part a bit longer. Once the AI wave hit it feels abandoned with various bugs and hard to reproduce issues. I am a full time zed user converting from sublime only due to the collaborative features, but by now we don't even use the collaborative features anymore because it's unreliable (broken connections, sounds, overwriting changes, weird history/undo behavior), so will probably go back to sublime again. Note that all of us are sitting on fiber connections, so I don't believe the issues are network related. I've been trying to be active, create issues, help in any way I can, but the focus on AI tells me Zed is no longer an editor for me.
- quaintdev 1y agoZed is insanely fast. The only thing missing from Zed is the debugger. If it had that I would ditch VSCode in jiffy.
- rtfeldman 1y agoThe debugger is now in beta! You can sign up for the beta here - https://zed.dev/debugger https://zed.dev/debugger - or build from source right now.
- ryanmcbride 1y agosigned up for the Windows beta hope I get to try it out sometime
- satiric 1y agoThe website has said it's "coming soon" for ages now. I wouldn't hold your breath.
- ryanmcbride 1y agoGuess I'll just use a competitor then
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fhd2 1y agoThis seems like a really great demo of the agent panel: https://zed.dev/blog/fastest-ai-code-editor https://zed.dev/blog/fastest-ai-code-editor It's fast paced, yet it doesn't blush over anything I'd find important. It shows clearly how to use it, shows a realistic use case, e.g. the model adding some nonsense, but catching something the author might have missed, etc. I don't think I've seen a better AI demo anywhere. Maybe the bar is really low that I get excited about someone who demos an LLM integration for programmers to actually understand programming, but hey.
- MaxikCZ 1y ago> Maybe the bar is really low When any video starts by asking AI "Make me a todo app" I loose interest right away
- ramon156 1y agoI've used zed both for work and personal projects. I'm not a fan of the direction they're going. I don't want "agentic" tools, I just want to back and forth with an LLM to get a better idea. I've specified in my markdown to not write actual code to files. Would be nice if this was togglable in settings. Apart from that, it's a hell of a lot better than alternatives, and my god is it fast. When I think about the perfect IDE (for my taste), this is getting pretty close.
- rtfeldman 1y ago> I don't want "agentic" tools, I just want to back and forth with an LLM to get a better idea. Ah! So you can get that experience with the agent panel (despite "agent" being in the name). If you click the dropdown next to the model (it will say "Write" by default) and change it from "Write" to "Minimal" then it disables all the agentic tool use and becomes an ordinary back-and-forth chat with an LLM where you can add context manually if you like. Also, you can press the three-dots menu in the upper-right and choose New Text Thread if you want something more customizable but still not agentic.
- mapcars 1y agoIn the assistant panel there is a mode option - write / ask / minimal, it sounds like what you are looking for. Anyway you can always make your prompts to do or not do certain actions, they are adding more features, if you want you can ignore some of them - this is not contradictory.
- bratsche 1y agoI'd love to be able to configure it to use OpenAI API but with a custom hostname. I found some comments in a forum about how to configure that, but they were pretty old and didn't seem to work anymore.
- tgtweak 1y agoI get the high performance component, but it seems most of their speed is from underlying models supporting a "diff style" edits and that a small percentage of it is from code-level text-editing optimizations and improvements. vscode running a typescript extension (cline, gemini, cursor, etc) to achieve LLM-enhanced coding is probably the least efficient way to do it in terms of cpu usage, but the features they bring are what actually speeds up your development tasks - not the "responsiveness" of it all. It seems that we're making text editing and html rendering out to be a giant lift on the system when it's really not a huge part of the equation for most people using LLM tooling in their coding workflows. Maybe I'm wrong but when I looked at zed last (about 2 months ago) the AI workflow was surprisingly clunky and while the editor was fast, the lack of tooling support and model selection/customization left me heading back to vscode/cline which has been getting nearly two updates per week since that time - each adding excellent new functionality. Does responsiveness trump features and function?
- rtfeldman 1y ago> Maybe I'm wrong but when I looked at zed last (about 2 months ago) the AI workflow was surprisingly clunky I'm curious what you think of this launch! :D We've overhauled the entire workflow - the OP link describes how it works now.
- DreaminDani 1y agoagreed! I was not a huge fan of the AI integration before in Zed and would always switch to Cursor (or, lately Claude Code) to actually get something done. Now that Zed can target specific pieces of code from the sidebar and edit them directly, it's been my goto for the last 24 hours. I've yet to "eject" to my old tools.
- dogman123 1y agoI think I'd need gemini 2.5 built into the trial to try this out. It's crazy how bad claude has become.
- nico 1y agoThe demo video looks great The free pricing is a bit confusing, it says 50 prompts/month, but also BYO API keys So even if I use my own API keys, the prompts will stop at 50 per month? Also, since it’s open source, couldn’t just someone remove the limit? (I guess that wouldn’t work if the limit is of some service provided by Zed)
- rtfeldman 1y agoZed employee here - there are no limits if you bring your own API keys!
- nico 1y agoAwesome, thank you. I've been trying it for the last few minutes, really liking it. Pretty impressed with how well it works using ollama + qwen3:32b Two nitpicks: 1) the terminal is not picking up my regular terminal font, which messes up the symbols for my zsh prompt (is there a way to fix this?) 2) the model, even though it's suggesting very good edits, and gives very precise instructions with links to the exact place in the code where to make the changes, is not automatically editing the files (like in the video), even though it seems to have all the Write tools enabled, including editing - is this because of the model I'm using (qwen3:32b)? or something else? Edit: 3rd, big one, I had a js file, made a small 1 line change, and when I saved the file, the editor automatically, and without warning, changed all the single quotes to double quotes - I didn't notice at first, committed, made other commits, then a PR - that's when I realized all the quotes changes - which took me a while to figure out how they happened, until I started a new branch, with the original file, made 1 change, saved and then I saw it Can this behavior be changed? I find it very strange that the editor would just change a whole file like that
- notpeter 1y ago1. You can specify your terminal font via terminal.font_family in zed settings.json 2. Not sure. 3. For most languages, the default is to use prettier for formatting. You can disable `format_on_save` globally, per-language and per project depending on your needs. If you ever need to save without triggering format ("workspace: save without formatting"). Prettier is /opinionated/ -- and its default is `singleQuote` = false which can be quite jarring if unexpected. Prettier will look for and respect various configuration files (.prettierrc, .editorconfig, via package.json, etc) so projects can set their own defaults (e.g. `singleQuote = true`). Zed can also be configured to further override prettier config zed settings, but I usually find that's more trouble than it's worth. If you have another formatter you prefer (a language server or an external cli that will format files piped to stdin) you can easily have zed use those instead. Note, you can always manually reformat with `editor: format` and leave `format_on_save` off by default if that's more your code style. - https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#terminal-font-family https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#terminal-font-family - https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#format-on-save https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#format-on-save - https://prettier.io/docs/configuration https://prettier.io/docs/configuration - https://zed.dev/docs/languages/yaml#prettier-formatting https://zed.dev/docs/languages/yaml#prettier-formatting - https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#formatter https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#formatter
- rconti2 1y ago[flagged]
- raconti 1y agoIt's honestly frustrating to see such a promising product make _so many_ sub-par product decisions. It's probably one of the only products that I have genuinely tried using > 5 times and gave up right after. I would grant this if they were new in the block, but it's been a while now. If they had focused on 1. Feature-parity with the top 10 VSCode extensions (for the most common beaten path — vim keybindings, popular LSPs, etc) and 2. Implemented Cursor's Tab 3. Simple chat interface that I can easily add context from the currently loaded repo I would switch in a beat. I _really_ want something better than VSCode and nvim. But this ain't it. While "agentic coding" is a nice feature, and specially so for "vibe coding projects", I (and most of my peers) don't rely on it that much for daily driving their work. It's nice for having less critical things going on at once, but as long as I'm expected to produce code, both of the features highlighted are what _effectively_ makes me more productive.
- dkersten 1y agoHuh? I'm a bit confused by your comment: 1. Zed has been working great for me for ~1.5 years while I ignored its AI features (I only started using Zed's AI features in the past 2 weeks). Vim keybindings are better IMHO than every other non-vim editor and the LSP's I've used (typescript, clangd, gleam) have worked perfectly. 2. The edit prediction feature is almost there. I do still prefer Cursor for this, but its not so far ahead that I feel like I want to use Cursor and personally I find Zed to be a much more pleasant editor to use than vscode. 3. When you switch the agent panel from "write" to "ask" mode, its basically that, no? I'm not into vide coding at all, I think AI code is still 90% trash, but I do find it useful for certain tasks, repetitive edits, and boilerplate, or just for generating a first pass at a React UI while I do the logic. For this, Zed's agent feature has worked very well and I quite like the "follow mode" as a way to see what the AI is changing so I can build a better mental model of the changes I'm about to review. I do wish there was a bit more focus on some core editor features: ligatures still don't fully work on Linux; why can't I pop the agent panel (or any other panel for that matter) into the center editor region, or have more than one panel docked side by side on one of the screen sides? But overall, I largely have the opposite opinion and experience from you. Most of my complaints from last year have been solved (various vim compatibility things), or are in progress (debugger support is on the way).
- GolDDranks 1y agoI've been recently using Zed, and I'm in love. It's the best editor experience I've ever had. Everything's snappy like notepad.exe, but it's also quite featureful, and quickly becoming even better.
- Eggpants 1y agolol. Hopefully the devs changes the Zed webpage header to "Zed - Everything's snappy like notepad.exe"
- icco 1y ago[flagged]
- facundo_olano 1y ago[flagged]
- dpstart01 1y agoGood stuff, but I remember not even having a UI to select among multiple python virtual environments. That killed the deal for me at the time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dkersten 1y agoBeen using Zed as my daily driver (without AI) since sometime in late 2023 when I decided I wanted to ditch vscode for mention leaner and faster. Love it. I switched to cursor earlier this year to try out LLM assisted development and realised how much I now despise vscode. It’s slow, memory hungry, and just doesn’t work as well (and in a keyboard centric way) as Zed. Then a couple of weeks ago, I switched back to Zed, using the agents beta. AI in Zed doesn’t feel quite as polished as cursor (at least, edit predictions don’t feel as good or fast), but the agent mode works pretty well now. I still use cursor a little because anything that isn’t vscode or pycharm has imho a pretty bad Python LSP experience (those two do better because they use proprietary LSP’s), but I’m slowly migrating to full stack typescript (and some Gleam), so hope to fully ditch cursor in favour of Zed soon.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoI tried Zed out and successfully got Claude chat working with my API key. But I'm not sure how to get predictions working. When the predictions on-ramp window popped up asking if I wanted to enable it, I clicked yes and then it prompted me to sign in to Github. Upon approving the request on Github, an error popover over the prediction menubar item at the bottom said "entity not found" or something. Not sure if that's related (Zed shows that I'm signed in despite that) but I can't seem to get prediction working. e.g. "Predict edit at cursor" seems to no-op. Anyways, the onboarding was pretty sweet aside from that. The "Enable Vim mode" on the launch screen was a nice touch.
- sippeangelo 1y agoI was trying to figure this out too. It seems like you need to sign up for their "Zed Pro" subscription for it to work at all, and nothing indicates this anywhere. It just appears broken. Not the best first impression.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- aaravchen 1y agoThe AI integration with their "Zeta AI" (a Zed product), is incredibly half-baked, and it screwed up/with their existing third-party AI integration. You have to command-pallet to "assistant: show configuration" to setup almost any API or integration except the Zed "Zeta AI", and that configuration directly conflicts with the authentication needed for the Zed login. So you currently can't use a third-party authenticated AI engine and the Zed Collaboration features at the same time. Once you've setup the third party AI configuration, you then have to open the settings.json and copy the "features" section from the default settings into it manually. Ignore the blog posts and docs from Zed, they're all wrong now that they've completely changed/broken everything with the "Zeta AI" release. In the copied "features" section of your settings.json, you have to set the value for the predictions to the name of your third party AI engine. Good luck guessing what the right string value is, the values for each engine aren't documented anywhere I can find.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- greener_grass 1y agoHuh, Richard Feldman of Roc and Elm fame!
- insane_dreamer 1y agoBeen trying out Zed here and there for a few months. There's lots to like about it. Nice clean UI. Extremely fast. No endless indexing (looking at you, PyCharm). It doesn't include a python debugger UI, and the type inspection is far behind PyCharm, so it doesn't take me away from PyCharm yet for serious work, but it might once it's competitive on those features. I have run into some problems with it on both Linux and Mac where zed hangs if the computer goes to sleep (meaning when the computer wakes back up, zed is hung and has to be forcibly quit. Haven't tried the AI agent much yet though. Was using CoPilot, now mostly Claude Code, and the Jetbrains AI agent (with Claude 3.7).
- sippeangelo 1y agoThis doesn't seem ready for real use. Testing it right now, is miles slower than Cursor for simple edits in the AI panel, and behaves in what seems to be a broken way. I gave up after it started to type out my entire file from scratch for every edit and presenting a diff for the entire file, rather than the few lines that were changed. Does it not do incremental edits like Cursor? It seems like the LLM is typing out the whole file internally for every edit instead of diffs, and then re-generates the whole file again when it types it out into the editor.
- as-cii 1y agoHey! Zed co-founder here. We actually stream edits and apply them incrementally as the LLM produces them. Sometimes we've observed the architect model (what drives the agentic loop) decide to rewrite a whole file when certain edits fail for various reasons. It would be great if you could press the thumbs-down button at the end of the thread in Zed so we can investigate what might be happening here!
- jflessau 1y agoI’m developing in TS and Rust for the most part. Went from Atom, to VSC, to Vim and finally to Zed. Never felt more at home. Highly recommend giving it a try. AFAIK there is overlap between Atoms and Zeds developers. They built Electron to built Atom. For Zed they built gpui, which renders the UI on the GPU for better performance. In case you are looking for an interesting candidate for building multi platform GUIs in rust, you can try gpui yourself.
- lispisok 1y agoPeople have been using editors that look comparable for decades that dont need fancy GPU rendering to be fast and responsive. What is happening that stuff like that is necessary now?
- vanviegen 1y agoGPU rendering in some form or another (mostly just bitblitting characters, I guess) has also been common for decades. Classic hardware text mode is basically just that. Also, display densities and sizes have gone up (for some of us).
- oblio 1y ago> Classic hardware text mode is basically just that. I highly doubt that, unless you consider bitblting to be hardware accelerated. When people say "GPU render" they mean 3D accelerators from the line of Voodoo onwards, not regular 2D graphics cards.
- xpe 1y agoThe first time I used Zed, I really noticed and appreciated the very low latency between a keypress and visual result. It created a great sense of “connection” to the experience. (I’ve previously used VS Code, Emacs, Sublime Text, JetBrains, and others)
- random3 1y agoI wanted Zed to work as a high performance dev-enabled Markdown editor as I was looking to replace Obsidian that doesn't scale well (memory use and cursor latency degrades with document size, and generally what I suspect is a weak foundation). My use case is active note taking(PKM) and reviewing including a few large (1-2+ MB) markdown files. However, to my surprise, the performance for Markdown was much worse - it's practically unusable. This is clearly a Markdown backend problem, but not really relevant in the editor arena, except maybe to realize that the editor "shell" latency is just a part of the overall latency problem. I still keep it around as I do with other editors that I like, and sometimes use it for minor things, while waiting to get something good. On this note, I think there's room for an open source pluggable PKM as an alternative to Obsidian and think Zed is a great candidate. Unfortunately I don't have time to build it myself just yet.
- bbkane 1y agoThe thing I really need from my markdown editor is pasting images that then show inline, so I don't have to waste screen space with a "preview pane". So far the only editor I've found that does this is Typora.
- random3 1y agoTry Obsidian, you'll like it. The Markdown editing experience is great and it's overall a good product.
- dtkav 1y ago+1 for Obsidian. If you like Zed's collaboration features, I wrote a plugin that make Obsidian real-time collaborative too. We are very inspired by their work (pre agent panel...). The plugin is called Relay [0]. [0] https://relay.md https://relay.md
- vunderba 1y ago+1 for Typora. It also has a nice option to automatically copy any media that is pasted into a doc into a $doc.assets subfolder so you can keep everything organized.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gunalx 1y agoLike iy way more than the old one. (really didnt like how i couldnt just copy code blocks in one click) The new one seems interresting but useless without the agentic toolcalling, witch seems to be unsupported by most (even tool capable models like o4-mini or gemini2.5-pro. I would like to be able to supply debug info like before, as well as importing regular text threads into the context.
- nurumaik 1y agoI really liked to be able to copy with 3-4 keypresses and now I have to reach for the mouse. Ig can't satisfy everyone
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoI've had aot of issues with AI hallucinating the API surface for libraries, to the point where I kinda gave up using it for a lot of purposes. But I got back on the horse & broke out Zed this weekend, deciding that I'd give it another shot, and this time be more deliberate about providing context. My first thought was that I'd just use Zed's /fetch and slam some crates.io docs into context. But there were dozens and dozens of pages to cover the API surface, and I decided that while this might work, it wasn't a process I would ever be happy repeating. So, I went looking for some kind of Crates.io or Rust MCP. Pretty early looking effort, but I found cratedocs-mcp. It can search crates, lookup docs for crates,lookup specific members in crates; that seems like maybe it might be sufficient, maybe it might help. Pulled it down, built it... https://github.com/d6e/cratedocs-mcp https://github.com/d6e/cratedocs-mcp Then check the Zed docs for how to use this MCP server. Oh man, I need to create my own Zed extension to use an MCP service? Copy paste this postgres-context-extension? Doesn't seem horrendous, but I was pretty deflated at this side-quest continuing to tack on new objectives & gave up on the MCP idea. It feels like there should be some kind of builtin glue that lets Zed add MCP servers via configuration, instead of via creating a whole new extension!! On the plus side, I did give DeepSeek a try and it kicked out pretty good code on the first try. Definitely some bits to fix, but pretty manageable I think, seems structurally reasonably good? I don't know really know how MCP tool integration works in the rest of the AI ecosystem, but this felt sub ideal.
- JonGretarB 1y agoYou can use MCP servers without the need to use an extension. You can either add it in the settings.json or use the "Add custom server..." button on the agent 3-dot menu. The extensions are just for more ease of use as they install the server as well. A one click solution.
- badgersnake 1y agoTried using it, but I’ve found it to be unreliable on my Linux laptop. Maybe it’s a sway thing or an amdgpu thing but last time I tried it was just too prone to crashing.
- rstupek 1y agoAnyone using their remote development feature? If so, how does it compare to VSCs remote editing?
- intellectronica 1y agoI want to love Zed. The UX is absolutely amazing - it just feels like you're on turbo mode all the time. And the AI is excellent too. I don't know how far it can go, though, without the VSCode ecosystem.
- rtfeldman 1y agoNot to worry! When VS Code launched, it had a tiny ecosystem compared to Atom. When Atom launched, it had a tiny ecosystem compared to Sublime Text. Starting out with a much smaller ecosystem than already-popular alternatives is a totally normal part of the road to success. :)
- intellectronica 1y agoYes and no. An ecosystem can grow, even grow exponentially. But it is sensitive to competitive pressures. VSCode today is so much more widely adopted than anything before it. More than emacs, vim, anything really. So Zed has a good chance because it's simply excellent and many people (myself included) will be motivated to make it happen. But it's not determined that it will succeed in growing a comparable ecosystem. One thing that works in favour of Zed, which previous IDEs didn't have, is that it's a lot easier to program things today, because of AI. It may even be possible to port many of the more popular extensions from VSCode to Zed with relatively low investment.
- aaravchen 1y agoZed's only real differentiator I can see right now is that they're not VSCode, and not run by Microsoft. Their AI isn't really any better than major competitors', and AI integration is table stakes for most new IDEs now anyway. They're missing a LOT of basic features still, their extension system is very lacking, and the extension library us still small. If the community goodwill can be maintained, and they can expand their extension system capabilities, the community will probably catch them up to the effective VSCode extension library size pretty quickly (at least for a 95% of user's needs cases). But I'm seeing a lot of indications they're headed toward enshitification before they even get fully off the ground. I'm just hoping they avoid the obvious pitfalls of prioritizing only profitable new features and flavors of the month when their only real path to success relies so much on tons of unpaid open source community contributions.
- 1attice 1y agoMy daily driver. I love Zed
- leansensei 1y agoZed is great but not so great if you are trying to copy/cut/paste with the keyboard layout being anything other than latin.
- devilsdata 1y agoI like Zed, but my gripes with it are what finally got me to give up GUI IDEs and use NeoVim. Haven't looked back so far.
- _QrE 1y ago>scratch-built in Rust _all the way down to handcrafted GPU shaders and OS graphics API calls_ Is this what happens to people who choose to learn Rust? Joking aside, this is interesting, but I'm not sure what the selling point is versus most other AI IDEs out there? While it's great that you support ollama, practically speaking, approximately nobody is getting much mileage out of local models for complex coding tasks, and the privacy issues for most come from the LLM provider rather than the IDE provider.
- astroalex 1y agoIn my personal experience I couldn't use Zed for editing python. Firstly, when navigating in a large python repository, looking up references was extremely slow (sometimes on the order of minutes). Secondly, searching for a string in the repo would sometimes be incorrect (e.g. I know the string exists but Zed says there aren't any results, as if a search index hasn't been updated). These two issues made it unusable. I've been using PyCharm recently and found it to be far superior to anything else for Python. JetBrains builds really solid software.
- f311a 1y agoThat’s because Python lacks good open source lsp. That’s true for other open source editors.
- gitroom 1y agoHonestly, being able to just turn off all the AI junk and have a fast editor is the main thing I want. You think AI features or speed actually matter more for most devs day to day?
- MentallyRetired 1y agoI love Zed so this is awesome news.
- pryz 1y agoLove Zed! Would love it even more with Helix/Kakoune style binding :)
- swyx 1y agowe recorded a podcast with them talking about their AI work! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZmJInhzIKo&pp=0gcJCYUJAYcqIYzv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZmJInhzIKo&pp=0gcJCYUJAYcqI...
- airtonix 1y ago[dead]
- atonse 1y agoI have launched Zed probably once a week for the past few months to try it out (each time running updates to see what's improved). I so badly want a native editor like this one to succeed. But the UX just seems very difficult to use. For a while, there were no settings UIs, and you had to edit everything in JSON. I think that's still true. But fine. Now I'm excited that they actually have a Cursor-like agentic mode. But the suggestions are still just nowhere near as "smart" as the ones from Cursor. I don't know if that's model selection or what. I can't even tell which model is being used for the suggestions. Today I'm trying to use the Agentic stuff, I added an MCP server, and I keep getting non-stop errors even though I started the Pro trial. First error: It keeps trying to connect to Copilot even though I cancelled my Copilot subscription. So I had to manually kill the Copilot connection. Second Error: Added the JIRA MCP (it's working since Zed lists all the available tools in the MCP) and then asked a basic question (give me the 5 most recent tickets). Nope. Error interacting with the model, some OAuth error. Third Weirdness (not error): Even though I'm on a Pro trial, the "Zed" agent configuration says "You have basic access to models from Anthropic through the Zed Free AI Plan" – aren't I on a Pro trial? I want to give you money guys, please, let me do that. I want to encourage a high performance editor to grow. I'm not even trying to do anything fancy. I just am on a pro trial. Shouldn't this be the happiest of happy paths? Zed should use whatever the Pro stuff gives you, without any OAuth errors, etc. How can I help the Zed team debug this stuff? Not even sure where to start.
- atonse 1y agoUpdate: The JIRA MCP seems to be working now, I'm not sure what happened. I also added an elixir RuleSet (I THINK it's being used, but can't easily tell). Still missing the truly fast and elegant suggestions from Cursor (especially when Cursor suggests _removing_ lines, haven't seen that in Zed yet). But I can see it getting there. Some agents stuff also worked well. I had it fix two elixir warnings and a rust warning in our NIF. Unrelated to Zed, I find myself in the awkward position of maintaining a (very small) rust file in our code base without ever having coded rust. And any changes, upgrades, etc are done via AI. So far it seems to work (according to our unit tests) and the library isn't in any critical path. But it's a new world :-) Also, Zed still seems to only give me access to "basic" models even though I'm in the pro tier trial. Not sure if that's a bug.
- npn 1y agoan editor that made by mac-only developers and put macOS support at is highest priority will be always shit on other OS. sorry, but to me it is just pure garbage.
- hollowturtle 1y agoI hate chat and panels in my ide, they are distracting and have worst ux, I'm using Cursor because of cursor prediction, but lately the trend has been the opposite even in the development of Cursor, apparently people are more interested about chatting instead of doing super powered editing supported by the AI that let you lead the game and makes you feel much more productive. I'd like to see something like that in Zed and I'd pay for it, agent mode and chats never worked for me, always been the worse experience
- Patrick12138 1y agoHow does it compare to void？
- icedchai 1y agoI've been using Zed a bunch lately, mostly with Python, also some Terraform. It feels super snappy. I don't use its AI features though!
- Reubend 1y agoI need Windows support before I would switch.
- Andaith 1y agoI wish it supported a local LLM, like running deepseek locally or in a docker container or something. Edit: Sorry, apparently this is supported. I'll give it a go!
- Eggpants 1y agoSorry. An Editor shouldn't need an account/sign-in to use a locally hosted LLM model.
- Eggpants 1y agoI take it back, it seems I just had to restart zed to get it to work/connect properly. My bad.
- amai 1y agoBefore implementing AI they should rather improve basic stuff like git support and a good debugger. Jetbrains git support and debugger are best in class. No other editor/IDE comes close. So I will stay with IntelliJ an PyCharm for now.
- Evidlo 1y agoTried it on my T420 running Debian and got the incompatible GPU message. Since my iGPU doesn't support Vulkan, I guess this means I am SOL?