11 ms·

You can now disable all AI features in Zed

577 points by meetpateltech 1y ago

palata 1y ago
It should be like it should be with JavaScript: it should work without it by default. But the reality is like for JavaScript: it's required by default :D. Good that Zed fixes this!
bionhoward 1y ago
This is great, My 2 cents since I see a Boolean: what if that setting were an enum every operator started with AiMode::Off so we can consciously opt-in, plus then Zed could have more AI Mode levels besides just on or off? Maybe there could be a level for experienced programmers and another level for vibe coders, and prompts / permissions could be set accordingly?
- mikeocool 1y ago
  That's basically the case when you have AI mode on in Zed today. The four AI features in Zed (that I'm aware of) are: * autocomplete -- this can be turned on and off separately from the AI features toggle, and can be put into 'subtle' mode, where you have to hold a key to see the completions. * inline AI editing -- only activated by hitting ctrl-enter, otherwise you'll never see it. * agent/chat editing -- you can disable the right-side chat panel, and you'll never see/use this. * AI generated commit messages -- there's a button you hit in the commit message panel to activate this.
crooked-v 1y ago
What I'd really like is an option to disable the automatic multi-buffer behavior for things like git diffs. It just doesn't work for me, and the Zed UX seems to not even realize that not everyone will love it.
- jchw 1y ago
  Honestly, this is a weak point of Zed IMO. I just find it a bit confusing to deal with. I don't know exactly how to get it to jump to the location of a specific block in the multi-buffer view, e.g. a Find in Files view. I double click various places in the UI until it goes to the file and sometimes I have to scroll to where I was at in the multi-buffer view. It's very frustrating. I think it could be made to work better, but as it is now, it feels cumbersome to work with.
  - Latty 1y ago
    I believe what you want to do is click on the line numbers, which should take you to that exact point in the file.
    - jchw 1y ago
      Could it really be that simple?! Holy shit. It really is that simple. Thank you.
      - gwking 1y ago
        Even after figuring this out for myself I still struggle to do it fluently.
        sisk 1y ago
        There's a setting that will allow you to double-click to open a file from the multibuffer which I find more natural: { "double_click_in_multibuffer": "open" }
      - throw324678 1y ago
        you can also use alt+enter while the cursor is inside of a multi-buffer, and it will open at that point in the file.
  - throwaway240403 1y ago
    Took me a bit to find this, but you can click on a line number in multi-buffer to open that file at that location. I think their default assumption is for you to not use the mouse much. If you're using vim mode g+[space] will open the file where your cursor is. I think it's alt+return in normal mode but either way there's a shortcut hint on the right side of the header for the file your cursor is currently in.
- olejorgenb 1y ago
  I think this is one of the best innovations in Zed, though it could use some more polish to work really great. Being able to edit the diff directly surely is a great thing?
  - crooked-v 1y ago
    The problem is that it insists on jamming together all files in the list, each with only a tiny bit of context, when I want to look at things one at a time with full context, and there's no way to change that behavior.
    - olejorgenb 1y ago
      "Alt-Enter" jumps directly to the selected entry in the git side panel. Ctrl-clicking works as well (granted it's not obvious)
- gherkinnn 1y ago
  The multi buffer is the most amazing thing about Zed. AI be damned. It now feels wrong to use an editor that doesn't have it. It is so obvious in hindsight.
jchw 1y ago
I am really, really starting to like Zed. I noticed recently that it now respects my EditorConfig files, which was one of my biggest gripes before recently. In general almost everything that I didn't love about Zed has been fixed. I have only tried it a couple of times, but Zed's AI assistant view indeed works as promised, doing about as well as Cursor does. Now there's just one thing that is a bit annoying... It's kind of heavy on the GPU. I mean it looks and runs great, but it really loves to suck the battery out of a device that's running on battery. But frankly, I've been ready to ditch text editors based on web browsers basically since they became "in vogue" and have just been waiting for the right thing to show up. As time goes on, I think it becomes more and more obvious that Zed is "the right thing". I don't know if there's anything we can do to make sure Zed succeeds sustainably and doesn't eventually get enshittified, but I'm crossing my fingers that for once we can have nice things.
- sisk 1y ago
  Re GPU usage: noticed this myself a few months back and decided to poke around. Recommend turning off the minimap if you have it enabled. There seems to be some over-rendering that is exacerbated by it. It's actively being investigated and improved upon (0.192 was a great step in the right direction) but, even still, I've found it (currently) has a big positive impact once disabled.
  - jchw 1y ago
    It hasn't been a huge deal: I'm still getting a decent number of hours doing work on battery on my Framework 16, and usually I can plug into AC for a little bit if it gets too low. That said thanks for the information; I'll have to keep it in mind.
- xpe 1y ago
  > I don't know if there's anything we can do to make sure Zed succeeds sustainably and doesn't eventually get enshittified, but I'm crossing my fingers that for once we can have nice things. This is a good conversation to have. We can start by pointing this out and encouraging broader interest. Zed has been my daily driver for over a year. I'll make a claim -- does anyone disagree (?) -- the incentives are not pointed in the right direction. Unless developers are paying directly for the functionality they want, that's misalignment. So enshittification seems probable, maybe inevitable, unless something structural changes. OTOH, because they charge for their editor, JetBrains has incentives that are better in line with customers.
whinvik 1y ago
This is great. I just hope that they continue to make money. We really need someone to invest in making a Fast, modal editor.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Why? Neovim exists.
  - f311a 1y ago
    I don’t want to install 5-10 plugins with a hundreds of config lines just to make it usable. I prefer zed with 0 extensions and vim motions which are built in.
    - t_mahmood 1y ago
      LazyVim makes it trivial, actually. I would take nvim/vim over VSCode any day.
      - f311a 1y ago
        Not really, it installs even more plugins. Some of them are unnecessary. Ideally, every time you update or install a plugin, it must be reviewed. I just don't wanna deal with it and trust plugin developers. I already got bitten by an infected Python library (that used to be legit). I treat plugins the same since they can be used in supply chain attacks.
        t_mahmood 1y ago
        You have to trust VS Code plugins too, along with trusting MS not using your code to improve their AI suggestions, or doing a sudden rug pull. All three happened if I remember correctly. You can easily enable/disable plugins in LazyVim, and they are simple Lua Script/VIM scripts easy to review. I don't think VSCode would be that easy. And even with more plugins, nvim/vim will be much more performant then VSCode.
bachittle 1y ago
This is why I still use VS Code with AI features off and none of the AI integrated IDEs. It's not that I don't use AI. It's just that having the AI de-coupled from editor makes it much easier to separate concerns. Some days I don't feel like using AI and just need to edit one line. Other days I want to do a major sprint and test the latest AI and see if it will accomplish the task.
aitacobell 1y ago
I find it more effective (for me) to keep my AI tools separate from VS code. It helps me control when I actually apply AI
ricokatayama 1y ago
Do you know what I like more than AI in my IDE (which I adore, by the way)? It's an IDE that respects the developer.
- AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  Yep, fwiw there's often live coding interviews done in the editor of your choice that require AI to be off. As in even if you love AI and use it a lot you should have the ability to turn it off.
  - xeonmc 1y ago
    Aw shucks, I guess that rules out Notepad on Win11 then.
    - deleted 1y ago
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  - everforward 1y ago
    The ones I’ve done (as of late last year), they were okay with AI autocomplete but not a full prompting/agentic workflow. They wanted me to architect the solution, but were okay with it filling in basic for loops.
  - 0x457 1y ago
    I would actually start interviewing with AI as well. How well they prompt and how good they are at reviewing AI slop?
    - taude 1y ago
      Yeup, this exactly. If they're going to be allowed to use claude-code/copilot day to day, how well they review the ai-generated code is going to be huge signal, as well as they could explain what happened. Also, if they're jsut blind vibe-coding something, without creating a nice quick spec for the LLM, that would also be a signal. Also, makes for very easy follow on questions during the interview.
jwpapi 1y ago
I mean all good but I still wonder if building an editor is really sustainable you basically only fight for new coders everybody else will just stay with vs or IntelliJ because of muscle memory I know you can share keymaps but it never works 100% Like I must’ve been tremendously more disappointed with my current ide to even consider switching
- pzmarzly 1y ago
  Counterexample: I went Sublime Text 2 -> ST3 -> Atom -> VSCode -> Zed, and every time barely noticed a difference in editing experience. The keymaps were >95% compatible after each of these switches. But I guess that was the happy path given these editors share lineage. OTOH I was never able to switch to Jetbrains IDEs for long, because everything was too different, even after installing compat keymaps.
neoden 1y ago
Sadly, I came back to using VS Code recently. There's a lot to like in Zed but imo that decision to write their own rendering framework is unfortunate, because of ridiculous problems in Linux still not resolved like poor font rendering, especially on low-DPI screens, or visible lags of UI which is being developed to be blazingly fast. So far, VS Code is faster for me.
- cgag 1y ago
  Doing their own rendering is one of the most attractive things about it imo. I am on macos though.
  - mosura 1y ago
    Even on a mac the text rendering is wonky though, like it isn’t processing the metrics correctly or something. At least it is noticeably fast.
  - Hamuko 1y ago
    Text rendering is awful on macOS too. I can’t even consider switching from Sublime Text because of it.
- deleted 1y ago
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- princevegeta89 1y ago
  +1 I've explored Atom when it was the hot thing, and more recently, an IDE called Lapce, which is built in Rust and doesn't use Electron. They've been great, but the lack of an ecosystem stares glaringly right at your face. I don't like Electron apps but VSCode gets the job done. I have my entire set of plugins and things installed here and now the productivity that I get off this setup even exceeded my long-loved Jetbrains IDEs. I hope that will be temporary though, seriously. The only thing that I strictly dislike about VSCode is the number of high quality themes available - and there are not that many. Recently stumbled upon VSCodium which is a clean VSCode fork that can work with any VSCode plugin, but I am yet to try it out.
jahewson 1y ago
Something tells me that disabling AI is going to age about as well as disabling JavaScript. Even so, I like what Zed is doing here.
- mr90210 1y ago
  Do Zed AI features require interacting with third-party providers such as OpenAI? If so, I don’t think your comparison applies. I use Golang from JetBrains, and disabling all AI features is only two clicks away. No fuss no muss.
- Eggpants 1y ago
  Disagree. The tab completion is very annoying when you’re trying to type. I know, I know, AI hipsters think typing code is so 15 minutes ago. Get off my lawn/keyboard. Its agent AI assistant isn’t bad but sadly the restore points button in the AI panel seemed to be broken. The fact it reminds me of sublime text is a big plus for me. The rust evangelism is annoying. Really. No one cares what language a program is written it.
  - anon7000 1y ago
    I mean, good AI tab completion feels like a super power. Zed’s is not that good. It’s slow and normally not at all what I want. In cursor, it’s at least 80% of the time jumping to the next thing I was going to do anyways. (Example: I add a function call, and tab recommend jumping to the top of the file, importing the function from the right spot, and then jumping back to the call site. Example2: I change a function signature and update one call site. It then correctly auto-completes the 5 other call sites to match the new format.)
    - rileymichael 1y ago
      both of those examples (auto imports + refactoring) 'just work' in Jetbrains editors, and have for a decade, without any AI at all! and you have the added benefit of no hallucinations when doing a refactor across hundreds of KLOC
lvl155 1y ago
I tried Zed many times. In fact I try to use it at least once a month because it is indeed fast. However, I just think it’s a half-baked product and I don’t want to invest too much time into it. Wish they didn’t get distracted by AI and focused on making a viable VSCode replacement as an IDE/Editor.
- free_bip 1y ago
  What do you think is half baked about it? I've found the experience quite good myself.
k_bx 1y ago
Zed is the best editor until someone finally adds a perfect agentic mode for Emacs so I can go back 100%
lbrito 1y ago
Has anyone got Zed to work consistently on Ubuntu, specifically with nvidia optimus laptops?
gwking 1y ago
I went from VS Code to Cursor, then got frustrated with Cursor breaking keybindings and other things, tried to go back to VS Code but missed the superior tab completion. Then I gave Zed a long hard try, but after over a month of daily usage I went back to Cursor again, just for the tab completion quality. I don't use any of the chat or agent features, but for me Cursor's tab completion is a step forward in work efficiency that Zeta and Copilot were not. Sometimes it's subtle, and sometimes it is very obvious. Cursor seems to have sources of context that the others don't, like file names from the directory tree, and maybe even the relevant .pyi type annotations and docs for python modules. It also jumps to the next relevant problem site very effectively. It feels like the Cursor devs have done a ton of practical work that will be hard to match with anything other than a full-on competitive effort. I want to see Zed succeed. I think it's very important that VS Code and its ultra-funded derivatives not dominate the modern editor landscape too thoroughly. Tab completion used to seem like a straightforward thing, but if the state of the art requires a very elaborate, whole-workspace-as-context environment to operate in, then I wonder if it's going to become a go big or go home kind of feature. I can't help wonder what the actual internal API for this kind of thing is going to look like in the future. It used to be something like, what's the current token behind the cursor, and look in a big prefix tree of indexed words. Then maybe it got more elaborate with things like tree-sitter, like what's the incomplete parse tree up to this point. Then when editors started using AI, I stopped having any idea of what the actual inputs are. I'd love to hear about real implementation experience at any stage of this evolution.
- blurbleblurble 1y ago
  What kind of configuration did you use for tab completion? Did you try hooking up different LLMs?
  - gwking 1y ago
    I paid for a subscription to both cursor and zed, without configuring any different LLMs or other options as far as I recall.
- singhrac 1y ago
  I think we don’t talk enough about tab completion model quality. Recently Copilot’s model got a lot better (probably trying to catch up to Cursor) but I feel like there’s still so much room here (and I assume Zeds is worse from your description). Smart context / big context is a really interesting question, I’m kind of surprised Google isn’t building here given how much effort they’ve put into big context (they have Jules and Gemini CLI but no tab completion UX). On further thought I think one of the big 3 (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) should partner (ideally not buy) with Zed to get a foothold.
appleaday1 1y ago
FINALLY was waiting for this. This is a great feature it was annoying af.
johnfn 1y ago
Zed seems really nice, and the usability has come a really long way in the last couple of months. That being said, I have one issue, and I hesitate to even bring it up because it seems so shallow: I hate all the themes! They all look so ugly and amateur. I know this is a really trivial thing, it's like complaining I don't like Python because it uses whitespace for indent or something, but I just can't get over it. VSCode/Cursor is beautiful in comparison. I recently found Github Dark Default, which is probably the okay-est of the 10-15 I tried, but there is so much that still looks bad. The autocomplete popover looks far worse than VSCode, the file tree looks much worse, tabs look ugly, etc. Does anyone have any suggestions here?
- singhrac 1y ago
  I use the Night Owl theme in all my editors (and terminal), including Zed, and the consistency is nice. It looks good, but if there’s a Zed-specific issue I haven’t used Zed in a while.
- cuu508 1y ago
  I spent a couple hours recreating the theme I was using previously in Sublime Text. The end result was not identical but close enough to feel OK.
- alternatex 1y ago
  You're not alone. The only reason I struggle to onboard to Zed is the design. They're doing an incredible job with the editor, but I have never seen a more bland design in any IDE. It's genuinely so bad that it affects my productivity in it. I'm a fan of Visual Studio and VS Code dark themes, I don't need anything special.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Isn't "bland" design precisely what you'd want from an IDE? To help you focus on the code and all that? It's been a while since I last looked at Zed, so I just started it again, and it ... looks like your average macOS app? Which to me sounds pretty much ideal.
nailer 1y ago
{ "disable_ai": true } That creates a system with a potential double negative (disable is false) which is unclear. It's cleaner to do: { "enable_ai": false }
kbdiaz 1y ago
My problem with AI in Zed is not that it's there, but that it feels like it's always behind in AI code editor paradigms. They were pretty late to the party to add edit predictions, and their agent UX is pretty behind the game. Recently, Cursor added background agents which I feel is a game changer and I now feel it's a deal breaker when choosing an editor. It makes me wonder if choosing to build their own GUI framework in Rust was the right move. Zed is a great code editor, but for me, it's not a great AI code editor.
- Sxubas 1y ago
  I haven't used background tasks/agents in cursor. Could you provide an example for stuff that you use it for?
  - kbdiaz 1y ago
    This week, I remember giving it these tasks: - Upgrade our NodeJS version because it just got deprecated - Upgrade our linter to the newest version, add a new rule, and fix all instances of that rule in our code - Make minor changes to our UI - Fix small bugs that I know how to fix, and can tell it exactly what to do The main pain point they're solving for me is that I have many small tasks I need to do. Coding them isn't the main bottleneck, but creating a new branch and then creating a new PR is the main bottleneck for me. With cursor specifically, I don't even have to check out the branch locally to verify the code. For any significant work, I'd rather manually do it in editor.
travisgriggs 1y ago
I did 4 months of Cursor. Figured I’d try 4 months of Zed, and see from there. I’m about 3 months in and so far might stick with it. I’ve generally been pleased with it. My only issues really have been a) all the settings are just in a file, not even a commented skeleton, and with a decent change rate, hard to invest in learning them; I’d love something like the jetbrains settings dialog b) the stupid placement of the burn mode button; it’s so easy to accidentally turn this on and not realize (done it twice now). Would love an option to just remove said button c) I wish there was more panel control; I’d like to place outline and project views BOTH in a panel, but you only get two full height tools in the left/right panels.
- metadaemon 1y ago
  Also wish they would put more emphasis on autocompletions, that's like 99% of what I use AI for is basically a better Intellisense
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Zed has everything I want out of an editor, the AI stuff wasn't really a concern to me since its always been optional, but I fully appreciate where they're coming from. I think Zed is one of the good gems of our time. I have been looking for a decent spiritual successor to Sublime, and Zed to me is really good at it.
porsager 1y ago
This gives me hope they might fix collaboration too. Unfortunately had to switch to VSCode Liveshare (which has its own problems) a few times because Zeds collaboration was so broken.
har777 1y ago
I moved to Zed last week and its been amazing so far! Something about using it feels a lot more crisp and fast compared to vscode. Their AI integration is pretty decent too. But I am very glad I can disable AI now. I find AI sometimes takes me out of the flow because I am constantly reviewing its code.
deleted 1y ago
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microflash 1y ago
I appreciate this option since I use Zed without AI. However, their overwhelming focus on cramming AI in the editor just disappoints me. The core experience is still very raw and there are small things that build over to make it annoying. I still have Sublime Text as the backup editor. It's lack of a powerful sidebar and search are the only things that stopped me from using it regularly. I do use VSCode at times and the CoPilor powered tab completion (which mostly hallucinates and spits out nonsense) is just obnoxious. I've found JetBrains' implementation of full line completion and block completions a lot more thoughtful and reliable.
mritchie712 1y ago
I want this in Warp. It's a solid terminal, but Claude Code is so good that I don't need my terminal trying to do something similar without me asking it to.
- bitwize 1y ago
  If you want this for Warp, you know where to find xterm, iTerm2, Kitty, etc.
- opan 1y ago
  Have you tried foot?
  - yewenjie 1y ago
    I loved foot but now I gotta use a macbook :(
3836293648 1y ago
What is the point of this? Surely anyone who (correctly) has moral objections would require a fork getting rid of the code to support it entirely, not just a runtime toggle?
- zamadatix 1y ago
  There are more reasons than moral objections one might not want to use the AI features in Zed. The post gives a few concrete examples but I think this sums up the general situation best: > Zed is built for engineers who care about their tools. That means giving you control over your development environment, including the choice to work without AI if that's what works best for you.
- zzo38computer 1y ago
  If you have a moral objection of enabling that feature, you might or might not also have a moral objection of the program having that feature, so I think not everyone does.
- max-privatevoid 1y ago
  That's true for this and many other features of Zed. For example, telemetry can be disabled with a simple switch. However, I feel deeply uncomfortable knowing that my editor is ready to report every file I open, commit I make, code action I perform, etc. at a moment's notice, held back only by that one line in my config file.
  - eviks 1y ago
    You can add firewall block as another line if defense
- deleted 1y ago
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senbrow 1y ago
Total nitpick, but: Why would you name an option "disable_ai" with a default value of false instead of calling it "enable_ai" with a default value of true? Are there some mechanical semantics I'm missing here that make this beneficial? Negative booleans (ie that remove or suppress something when true) are generally a source of confusion and bugs and should be avoided like the plague in my experience.
- wanderingstan 1y ago
  I concur. Same thing in many UI frameworks where you’ll have a Boolean “isHidden” to control visibility. Makes it so hard to reason about.
  - Rexxar 1y ago
    IMHO, in this case it should not even be a boolean but an enum {Visible, Hidden}.
    - roguecoder 1y ago
      Even with working with an existing framework, we can define a constant `HIDDEN=true`
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  Technically, "enable_ai" doesn't imply that all AI features are really turned off. Without context, it might imply that some basic AI features exist and "enable_ai" just enables further features. "disable_ai" is unambiguous.
  - whilenot-dev 1y ago
    Enable/disable are the only two dichotomies in the whole of all possible states regarding this AI feature, so I'll have to bite: What's your "Technically," referring to here?
    - 1y ago
leafmeal 1y ago
The thing that's so sticky for me with JetBrains IDEs is their run configurations. Being able to configure all of the environment variables etc. for the actual code that I need to run, especially when connecting to a debugger or tests integrated with the IDE. I haven't seen anyone else complain about this so I figure I must be missing something. Does Zed let you set up run configurations like this? If not, how do users actually run their code? Just in the terminal? It seems backwards to me to use a fancy IDE, but then run all your code in the terminal. I love IDE features like clicking on the test I'm editing to run it, and setting breakpoints in the IDE. Does anyone else have this problem?
- deleted 1y ago
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- ivanjermakov 1y ago
  For personal projects I just use npm scripts or make
  - 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
    Minus some magic, those scripts are not going to interface with the IDE debugger.
- Noumenon72 1y ago
  I love these too. I have a run config checked into my repo that runs three run configs, for `fastapi dev`, npm start, and launching a JavaScript debugger, with one click. I also like clicking on a test or script and just hitting "ctrl+shift+d" to launch that particular code with the debugger. VS Code can launch a fleet of dev containers but it's just not as good of an experience to restart and debug.
- codethief 1y ago
  > It seems backwards to me to use a fancy IDE, but then run all your code in the terminal. Having literally spent days at a time just to get a working run configuration at various employers and clients over the past decade, I find it backwards to use anything besides the terminal and version-controlled scripts & task runners / CLIs to fire up anything. (: People rarely document their JetBrains setup fully and even if they do, JetBrains IDEs are not exactly known for their reproducible behavior or for not occasionally messing up your configuration (in case you do decide to check in your IDE config & share with your team). Besides, you will need those terminal scripts for your CI pipeline, anyway. That being said, > I love IDE features like clicking on the test I'm editing to run it, and setting breakpoints in the IDE. I agree, that is very useful. However, to me it's the cherry on top of proper self-contained run scripts for the terminal.
AtlasBarfed 1y ago
I think I'm never going to get another software job because I cannot stand the word "agentic". Of course the software industry will probably make any desire I might have a moot point anyway.
Havoc 1y ago
Love this. Prefer deciding feature by feature basis, but in a world where everyone is ramming AI down your throat with a jackhammer and compulsory ToS this mindset is welcome
_heimdall 1y ago
Maybe this is a pedantic nitpick, but I do wish the feature was "disable_llm" or similar. The term AI is so poorly specified today, and while I don't want my editor using LLMs to predict my next keystroke I do still like the more basic auto complete features.
koito17 1y ago
Started using Zed about a year ago and, besides Magit, it has managed to completely replace Emacs for me. I was missing a good debugger for a long time, but that also went GA a month ago or so. One thing that goes underappreciated is the input latency and how light on resources the editor is overall. Whenever I switch tabs to a web browser (or any web app), I can feel the lag in typing now, despite the fact I use an M3 Max MacBook Pro. Zed's built-in terminal used to feel high-latency too, but they recently shipped a bunch of performance improvements, and it's just amazing how clunky inputs feel in web apps feel after using Zed for a long time. Two things I find interesting about this development. 1. This is a long-standing feature request ever since Zed added any AI capability. Adding AI-related functionality at all was a very controversial move at the time. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41302782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41302782 2. Text threads in Zed came out only 11 months ago. At the time, it felt revolutionary being able to effortlessly paste terminal output and entire folders into context. Additionally, being able to stop the LLM, correct part of its output, and have it continue code generation. Around 4 months ago, agentic coding released, and now this once-revolutionary workflow feels quite primitive. In the meantime, Zed also added screensharing, Linux support for collaboration, a Git UI, a debugger, and performance improvements to the editor.
- anamexis 1y ago
  I use Zed too, and as a longtime magit devotee, I've really been enjoying using gitu [0] in Zed. gitu doesn't have everything magit does, but there's not much I find myself missing. I have it nicely integrated with Zed by defining the following task, which you can then add a keybinding for if you want: { "label": "gitu", "command": "gitu", "reveal_target": "center", "hide": "always", "env": { "VISUAL": "zed", "GIT_EDITOR": "vim" } } [0] https://github.com/altsem/gitu https://github.com/altsem/gitu
- taude 1y ago
  These were the comments I came looking for. What existing users of Zed migrated from. I'm pretty curious to try it, but lacking some time to tool yak-shave at the moment.
- 1y ago
jaredcwhite 1y ago
Why is a code editor negging me? "Even if you're skeptical [of genAI], these tools are quickly becoming part of how software gets built." Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. I am thankful Zed added this feature and most of the post seems reasonable, but it's still the height of weird that they feel compelled to say this—obviously it's not how software gets built by the people who are avoiding these tools intentionally and for good reason!
- roguecoder 1y ago
  Especially given the recent study that found people felt more productive while objectively getting less done. It's like saying, "marijuana is rapidly becoming a part of how people get through their day, but we understand not everyone wants to spend their day high."
ajkjk 1y ago
"Some developers have fundamental objections to AI in their coding process—whether it's concerns about training data, environmental impact, or philosophical reasons about machine-generated code." not only that, there's the "jesus christ fuck off" angle. Stop bullying me into using AI when it serves you, not me. Every goddamn surface wants me to click on their "write your email like a fake idiot" button because they get to report X% WAU uptick which is supposed to vaguely correlate with revenue/growth somehow according to some stupid metric. But no matter how much you can twist reality to justify it financially the fact remains that shoving features in your users' face is not the best user experience you could have made, because you could have not done it. Good designers (...picture your platonic ideal of Jobs-era Apple, not that it was actually perfect but it was better than this shit...) would never do that. If only we lived in a world where there was enough market pressure to annihilate a company for designing things badly---unfortunately no one is competing on that angle yet (big opportunity, imo). In the meantime we just have to ask, nicely and then angrily: please, god, fuck off. It should not take angrily asking, or finding leverage, in order to get you to be respectful. You should be respectful by default.
max_ 1y ago
What an amazing selling point! It requires lots of independent thinking (which I value) from founders to refrain from something everyone else is hitting the gas pedal on.
- swyx 1y ago
  refrain? they're going full steam on it. they're just not forcing all their users into it, which reflects taste and empathy few other founders have.
  - conartist6 1y ago
    Taste and empathy maybe, but their choice of licenses, technologies and priorities can still be juvenile to the point of sinking their company. Just look at the amount of excitement in their industry right now. New IDEs are springing up practically by the week. Are any of these new IDEs based on Zed? No, of course not. GPL closes the door on that, and who would want to own a fork of a tool that's so painful to develop? Developers working on VSCode can probably do an average dev-test cycle in 1-5 seconds. I've no idea how long the Zed dev-test cycle is, but I hear Rust builds are notoriously slow so I assume it's more like 1-5 minutes.
    - alice-i-cecile 1y ago
      With the help of subsecond[0], we're seeing <1 s dev-test cycles for changes to Rust GUI projects these days :) That's with a fast CPU and optimized compiler settings, but it's competitive with things like Flutter and the web stack. Even without hotpatching, Rust incremental compile times are on the order of 10 seconds, not multiple minutes. Clean compiles still take minutes, but that's a "once-a-week" workflow usually. Not sure if Zed has gotten it hooked up yet, but things are changing rapidly in the Rust GUI (and games) space because of Dioxus's innovation here. [0]: https://crates.io/crates/subsecond https://crates.io/crates/subsecond
      - conartist6 1y ago
        Thank you for educating me. I don't actually work with Rust so I shouldn't be spreading misinformation about it without knowing what I am talking about. It doesn't really change my multitude of problems with Rust as a language for a project like Zed. Zed feels like a cathedral to me in the Eric S Raymond sense. Rust feels like a language for building cathedrals. Javascript is the language of the commons, which is why the idea of a hackable IDE in JS was so brilliant. Somewhere along the line the team forgot what made Atom great (despite its flaws).
riigess 1y ago
Other than zed.dev being down for the first time since I started using it, I’ve been manually disallowing AI connections from the get-go. What’s different? What wasn’t I disabling originally? Is this just a shortcut to other options?
ivanjermakov 1y ago
> Our goal at Zed has always been to build the world’s best code editor. Not true, Zed goal is > code editor [with] high-performance collaboration with humans and AI
- comprev 1y ago
  > code editor [with] high-performance collaboration with humans and AI When investors are involved this immediately changes to: > Our goal is to build a product which will hopefully return more than our financial investment. I get the feeling many HN contributors to this discussion forget that Zed is not a software project like Neovim, Nano or Emacs (etc.) which rely on donations and/or sponsors to either pay developers or cover required infrastructure costs. It's a product backed by investors who - one day - will demand their pound of flesh, and "features" like AI are added to market the product to _more_ investors. Perhaps the use of AI itself inside the product will also be tracked to steer potential opportunities for the investors themselves. Like many fellow HN'ers, I use Zed on a daily basis, and it's no different than Google search or Facebook - "If a product from investors is free, YOU are the product"
bobajeff 1y ago
I'm glad they decided to add this. I still want the ability to disable all the account login stuff part of the UI. So i hope they make that as an option too. Since, I don't like signing into my software.
loeg 1y ago
Weird that it wasn't optional before, right? Not sure if this is related to the recent stories of AI agents nuking people's code, but that's just one more reason to make it optional.
serbuvlad 1y ago
The one thing I love about VSCode is how trivially I can fire it up on a container or on a remote machine via SSH. If Zed had this I would switch tomorrow. So my question for Zed users is: does it? The UI is a tad idiosyncratic on Linux (can't speak for Macs) but DAMN is it fast, I love the generality of tasks.json (haven't played with debug.json yet), by far the best system I've ever used, and everything just works well out the gate.
- c-hendricks 1y ago
  Zed has SSH editing. But when I tried it a couple of weeks ago, their in-ui git didn't detect a repo in a folder that very much used git, and ports you want mapped have to be specified ahead of time, there's no way to do it at runtime like in neovim/vscode
MentallyRetired 1y ago
I've been using Zed for half a year. Love the simple interface. I wanted a glorified notepad. Zed does well for me.
daft_pink 1y ago
For what it’s worth, I would really like to have an iPad version of Zed that I could use the remote function into my Mac and homeserver via Tailscale and be able to code on my iPad. Please make this!
hollowturtle 1y ago
> Even if you're skeptical, these tools are quickly becoming part of how software gets built. Understanding them helps you make informed decisions about when and how to use them—or not use them. What? Blockchains and Web3 again? Oh no wait... AI
beefnugs 1y ago
Damn where is the "stochastic interwoven unpredictable" graphic of how they can use a webpage to pin my firefox to 100%cpu and start blasting fans
bigstrat2003 1y ago
Just wanted to say thank you to the Zed team for listening to this bit of feedback! I'm very much of the opinion that AI is not a value-add, so I appreciate the ability to disable it.
tiltowait 1y ago
I used Zed a decent amount before it started being too in-your-face with AI features. Glad to see an option to disable it all, but at this point, I’ve become so much more efficient with Helix than I am with any graphical IDE. I wouldn’t love to go back.
vector_spaces 1y ago
I've wanted to try Zed but I'm generally antsy about tools unexpectedly phoning home -- haven't had a chance to closely evaluate myself. A few tinfoil-hat questions: I know obviously it needs to phone someone to use functionality like remote dev or certain integrations, but outside of those situations, does it otherwise perform any kind of telemetry by default? Are there situations where it could ship off tokens in files I'm editing to some remote server where one wouldn't be expecting it? Also, I know it's open source, but is it meaningfully open source in the sense that the prebuilt binaries available for download in the obvious places aren't some reskinned proprietary version like is the case with VSCode? These are meant in good faith -- genuinely interested and curious
xedrac 1y ago
Zed has been nice, but I really miss the fuzzy search (files and grep) with live preview - something like telescope in neovim. The search results in zed feel super clunky to navigate through.
drewbitt 1y ago
Zed has been moving fast lately and I can almost use it full time, but no git log and poor git diffing has me frequently clicking out of it. They are spending a huge amount of dev time on AI features instead, so this is a nice feature, but it still doesn't change their focus.
WuxiFingerHold 1y ago
I've tried Zed last week but C# LSP (Ominsharp) had too many issues. Does anyone use Zed with C# with good success?
v3ss0n 1y ago
good one. Just yesterday It got me to a point that I can't stand ai forced auto completions in vscode that I ended up whole copilot extension. It's too distracting that Ms forcing too much on AI
BomberFish 1y ago
Meanwhile (at least from what I've heard from friends), VS Code is pushing for users to use Copilot more and more. I'm glad I jumped to Zed a few months back.

577 points by meetpateltech 1y ago

It should be like it should be with JavaScript: it should work without it by default. But the reality is like for JavaScript: it's required by default :D. Good that Zed fixes this!

bionhoward 1y ago

This is great, My 2 cents since I see a Boolean: what if that setting were an enum every operator started with AiMode::Off so we can consciously opt-in, plus then Zed could have more AI Mode levels besides just on or off? Maybe there could be a level for experienced programmers and another level for vibe coders, and prompts / permissions could be set accordingly?

mikeocool 1y ago
That's basically the case when you have AI mode on in Zed today. The four AI features in Zed (that I'm aware of) are: * autocomplete -- this can be turned on and off separately from the AI features toggle, and can be put into 'subtle' mode, where you have to hold a key to see the completions. * inline AI editing -- only activated by hitting ctrl-enter, otherwise you'll never see it. * agent/chat editing -- you can disable the right-side chat panel, and you'll never see/use this. * AI generated commit messages -- there's a button you hit in the commit message panel to activate this.

crooked-v 1y ago

What I'd really like is an option to disable the automatic multi-buffer behavior for things like git diffs. It just doesn't work for me, and the Zed UX seems to not even realize that not everyone will love it.

jchw 1y ago
Honestly, this is a weak point of Zed IMO. I just find it a bit confusing to deal with. I don't know exactly how to get it to jump to the location of a specific block in the multi-buffer view, e.g. a Find in Files view. I double click various places in the UI until it goes to the file and sometimes I have to scroll to where I was at in the multi-buffer view. It's very frustrating. I think it could be made to work better, but as it is now, it feels cumbersome to work with.
- Latty 1y ago
  I believe what you want to do is click on the line numbers, which should take you to that exact point in the file.
  - jchw 1y ago
    Could it really be that simple?! Holy shit. It really is that simple. Thank you.
    - gwking 1y ago
      Even after figuring this out for myself I still struggle to do it fluently.
      - sisk 1y ago
        There's a setting that will allow you to double-click to open a file from the multibuffer which I find more natural: { "double_click_in_multibuffer": "open" }
    - throw324678 1y ago
      you can also use alt+enter while the cursor is inside of a multi-buffer, and it will open at that point in the file.
- throwaway240403 1y ago
  Took me a bit to find this, but you can click on a line number in multi-buffer to open that file at that location. I think their default assumption is for you to not use the mouse much. If you're using vim mode g+[space] will open the file where your cursor is. I think it's alt+return in normal mode but either way there's a shortcut hint on the right side of the header for the file your cursor is currently in.
olejorgenb 1y ago
I think this is one of the best innovations in Zed, though it could use some more polish to work really great. Being able to edit the diff directly surely is a great thing?
- crooked-v 1y ago
  The problem is that it insists on jamming together all files in the list, each with only a tiny bit of context, when I want to look at things one at a time with full context, and there's no way to change that behavior.
  - olejorgenb 1y ago
    "Alt-Enter" jumps directly to the selected entry in the git side panel. Ctrl-clicking works as well (granted it's not obvious)
gherkinnn 1y ago
The multi buffer is the most amazing thing about Zed. AI be damned. It now feels wrong to use an editor that doesn't have it. It is so obvious in hindsight.

jchw 1y ago

I am really, really starting to like Zed. I noticed recently that it now respects my EditorConfig files, which was one of my biggest gripes before recently. In general almost everything that I didn't love about Zed has been fixed. I have only tried it a couple of times, but Zed's AI assistant view indeed works as promised, doing about as well as Cursor does. Now there's just one thing that is a bit annoying... It's kind of heavy on the GPU. I mean it looks and runs great, but it really loves to suck the battery out of a device that's running on battery. But frankly, I've been ready to ditch text editors based on web browsers basically since they became "in vogue" and have just been waiting for the right thing to show up. As time goes on, I think it becomes more and more obvious that Zed is "the right thing". I don't know if there's anything we can do to make sure Zed succeeds sustainably and doesn't eventually get enshittified, but I'm crossing my fingers that for once we can have nice things.

sisk 1y ago
Re GPU usage: noticed this myself a few months back and decided to poke around. Recommend turning off the minimap if you have it enabled. There seems to be some over-rendering that is exacerbated by it. It's actively being investigated and improved upon (0.192 was a great step in the right direction) but, even still, I've found it (currently) has a big positive impact once disabled.
- jchw 1y ago
  It hasn't been a huge deal: I'm still getting a decent number of hours doing work on battery on my Framework 16, and usually I can plug into AC for a little bit if it gets too low. That said thanks for the information; I'll have to keep it in mind.
xpe 1y ago
> I don't know if there's anything we can do to make sure Zed succeeds sustainably and doesn't eventually get enshittified, but I'm crossing my fingers that for once we can have nice things. This is a good conversation to have. We can start by pointing this out and encouraging broader interest. Zed has been my daily driver for over a year. I'll make a claim -- does anyone disagree (?) -- the incentives are not pointed in the right direction. Unless developers are paying directly for the functionality they want, that's misalignment. So enshittification seems probable, maybe inevitable, unless something structural changes. OTOH, because they charge for their editor, JetBrains has incentives that are better in line with customers.

whinvik 1y ago

This is great. I just hope that they continue to make money. We really need someone to invest in making a Fast, modal editor.

deadbabe 1y ago
Why? Neovim exists.
- f311a 1y ago
  I don’t want to install 5-10 plugins with a hundreds of config lines just to make it usable. I prefer zed with 0 extensions and vim motions which are built in.
  - t_mahmood 1y ago
    LazyVim makes it trivial, actually. I would take nvim/vim over VSCode any day.
    - f311a 1y ago
      Not really, it installs even more plugins. Some of them are unnecessary. Ideally, every time you update or install a plugin, it must be reviewed. I just don't wanna deal with it and trust plugin developers. I already got bitten by an infected Python library (that used to be legit). I treat plugins the same since they can be used in supply chain attacks.
      - t_mahmood 1y ago
        You have to trust VS Code plugins too, along with trusting MS not using your code to improve their AI suggestions, or doing a sudden rug pull. All three happened if I remember correctly. You can easily enable/disable plugins in LazyVim, and they are simple Lua Script/VIM scripts easy to review. I don't think VSCode would be that easy. And even with more plugins, nvim/vim will be much more performant then VSCode.

bachittle 1y ago

This is why I still use VS Code with AI features off and none of the AI integrated IDEs. It's not that I don't use AI. It's just that having the AI de-coupled from editor makes it much easier to separate concerns. Some days I don't feel like using AI and just need to edit one line. Other days I want to do a major sprint and test the latest AI and see if it will accomplish the task.

aitacobell 1y ago

I find it more effective (for me) to keep my AI tools separate from VS code. It helps me control when I actually apply AI

ricokatayama 1y ago

Do you know what I like more than AI in my IDE (which I adore, by the way)? It's an IDE that respects the developer.

AnotherGoodName 1y ago
Yep, fwiw there's often live coding interviews done in the editor of your choice that require AI to be off. As in even if you love AI and use it a lot you should have the ability to turn it off.
- xeonmc 1y ago
  Aw shucks, I guess that rules out Notepad on Win11 then.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- everforward 1y ago
  The ones I’ve done (as of late last year), they were okay with AI autocomplete but not a full prompting/agentic workflow. They wanted me to architect the solution, but were okay with it filling in basic for loops.
- 0x457 1y ago
  I would actually start interviewing with AI as well. How well they prompt and how good they are at reviewing AI slop?
  - taude 1y ago
    Yeup, this exactly. If they're going to be allowed to use claude-code/copilot day to day, how well they review the ai-generated code is going to be huge signal, as well as they could explain what happened. Also, if they're jsut blind vibe-coding something, without creating a nice quick spec for the LLM, that would also be a signal. Also, makes for very easy follow on questions during the interview.

jwpapi 1y ago

I mean all good but I still wonder if building an editor is really sustainable you basically only fight for new coders everybody else will just stay with vs or IntelliJ because of muscle memory I know you can share keymaps but it never works 100% Like I must’ve been tremendously more disappointed with my current ide to even consider switching

pzmarzly 1y ago
Counterexample: I went Sublime Text 2 -> ST3 -> Atom -> VSCode -> Zed, and every time barely noticed a difference in editing experience. The keymaps were >95% compatible after each of these switches. But I guess that was the happy path given these editors share lineage. OTOH I was never able to switch to Jetbrains IDEs for long, because everything was too different, even after installing compat keymaps.

neoden 1y ago

Sadly, I came back to using VS Code recently. There's a lot to like in Zed but imo that decision to write their own rendering framework is unfortunate, because of ridiculous problems in Linux still not resolved like poor font rendering, especially on low-DPI screens, or visible lags of UI which is being developed to be blazingly fast. So far, VS Code is faster for me.

cgag 1y ago
Doing their own rendering is one of the most attractive things about it imo. I am on macos though.
- mosura 1y ago
  Even on a mac the text rendering is wonky though, like it isn’t processing the metrics correctly or something. At least it is noticeably fast.
- Hamuko 1y ago
  Text rendering is awful on macOS too. I can’t even consider switching from Sublime Text because of it.
deleted 1y ago
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princevegeta89 1y ago
+1 I've explored Atom when it was the hot thing, and more recently, an IDE called Lapce, which is built in Rust and doesn't use Electron. They've been great, but the lack of an ecosystem stares glaringly right at your face. I don't like Electron apps but VSCode gets the job done. I have my entire set of plugins and things installed here and now the productivity that I get off this setup even exceeded my long-loved Jetbrains IDEs. I hope that will be temporary though, seriously. The only thing that I strictly dislike about VSCode is the number of high quality themes available - and there are not that many. Recently stumbled upon VSCodium which is a clean VSCode fork that can work with any VSCode plugin, but I am yet to try it out.

jahewson 1y ago

Something tells me that disabling AI is going to age about as well as disabling JavaScript. Even so, I like what Zed is doing here.

mr90210 1y ago
Do Zed AI features require interacting with third-party providers such as OpenAI? If so, I don’t think your comparison applies. I use Golang from JetBrains, and disabling all AI features is only two clicks away. No fuss no muss.
Eggpants 1y ago
Disagree. The tab completion is very annoying when you’re trying to type. I know, I know, AI hipsters think typing code is so 15 minutes ago. Get off my lawn/keyboard. Its agent AI assistant isn’t bad but sadly the restore points button in the AI panel seemed to be broken. The fact it reminds me of sublime text is a big plus for me. The rust evangelism is annoying. Really. No one cares what language a program is written it.
- anon7000 1y ago
  I mean, good AI tab completion feels like a super power. Zed’s is not that good. It’s slow and normally not at all what I want. In cursor, it’s at least 80% of the time jumping to the next thing I was going to do anyways. (Example: I add a function call, and tab recommend jumping to the top of the file, importing the function from the right spot, and then jumping back to the call site. Example2: I change a function signature and update one call site. It then correctly auto-completes the 5 other call sites to match the new format.)
  - rileymichael 1y ago
    both of those examples (auto imports + refactoring) 'just work' in Jetbrains editors, and have for a decade, without any AI at all! and you have the added benefit of no hallucinations when doing a refactor across hundreds of KLOC

lvl155 1y ago

I tried Zed many times. In fact I try to use it at least once a month because it is indeed fast. However, I just think it’s a half-baked product and I don’t want to invest too much time into it. Wish they didn’t get distracted by AI and focused on making a viable VSCode replacement as an IDE/Editor.

free_bip 1y ago
What do you think is half baked about it? I've found the experience quite good myself.

k_bx 1y ago

Zed is the best editor until someone finally adds a perfect agentic mode for Emacs so I can go back 100%

lbrito 1y ago

Has anyone got Zed to work consistently on Ubuntu, specifically with nvidia optimus laptops?

gwking 1y ago

I went from VS Code to Cursor, then got frustrated with Cursor breaking keybindings and other things, tried to go back to VS Code but missed the superior tab completion. Then I gave Zed a long hard try, but after over a month of daily usage I went back to Cursor again, just for the tab completion quality. I don't use any of the chat or agent features, but for me Cursor's tab completion is a step forward in work efficiency that Zeta and Copilot were not. Sometimes it's subtle, and sometimes it is very obvious. Cursor seems to have sources of context that the others don't, like file names from the directory tree, and maybe even the relevant .pyi type annotations and docs for python modules. It also jumps to the next relevant problem site very effectively. It feels like the Cursor devs have done a ton of practical work that will be hard to match with anything other than a full-on competitive effort. I want to see Zed succeed. I think it's very important that VS Code and its ultra-funded derivatives not dominate the modern editor landscape too thoroughly. Tab completion used to seem like a straightforward thing, but if the state of the art requires a very elaborate, whole-workspace-as-context environment to operate in, then I wonder if it's going to become a go big or go home kind of feature. I can't help wonder what the actual internal API for this kind of thing is going to look like in the future. It used to be something like, what's the current token behind the cursor, and look in a big prefix tree of indexed words. Then maybe it got more elaborate with things like tree-sitter, like what's the incomplete parse tree up to this point. Then when editors started using AI, I stopped having any idea of what the actual inputs are. I'd love to hear about real implementation experience at any stage of this evolution.

blurbleblurble 1y ago
What kind of configuration did you use for tab completion? Did you try hooking up different LLMs?
- gwking 1y ago
  I paid for a subscription to both cursor and zed, without configuring any different LLMs or other options as far as I recall.
singhrac 1y ago
I think we don’t talk enough about tab completion model quality. Recently Copilot’s model got a lot better (probably trying to catch up to Cursor) but I feel like there’s still so much room here (and I assume Zeds is worse from your description). Smart context / big context is a really interesting question, I’m kind of surprised Google isn’t building here given how much effort they’ve put into big context (they have Jules and Gemini CLI but no tab completion UX). On further thought I think one of the big 3 (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) should partner (ideally not buy) with Zed to get a foothold.

appleaday1 1y ago

FINALLY was waiting for this. This is a great feature it was annoying af.

johnfn 1y ago

Zed seems really nice, and the usability has come a really long way in the last couple of months. That being said, I have one issue, and I hesitate to even bring it up because it seems so shallow: I hate all the themes! They all look so ugly and amateur. I know this is a really trivial thing, it's like complaining I don't like Python because it uses whitespace for indent or something, but I just can't get over it. VSCode/Cursor is beautiful in comparison. I recently found Github Dark Default, which is probably the okay-est of the 10-15 I tried, but there is so much that still looks bad. The autocomplete popover looks far worse than VSCode, the file tree looks much worse, tabs look ugly, etc. Does anyone have any suggestions here?

singhrac 1y ago
I use the Night Owl theme in all my editors (and terminal), including Zed, and the consistency is nice. It looks good, but if there’s a Zed-specific issue I haven’t used Zed in a while.
cuu508 1y ago
I spent a couple hours recreating the theme I was using previously in Sublime Text. The end result was not identical but close enough to feel OK.
alternatex 1y ago
You're not alone. The only reason I struggle to onboard to Zed is the design. They're doing an incredible job with the editor, but I have never seen a more bland design in any IDE. It's genuinely so bad that it affects my productivity in it. I'm a fan of Visual Studio and VS Code dark themes, I don't need anything special.
- int_19h 1y ago
  Isn't "bland" design precisely what you'd want from an IDE? To help you focus on the code and all that? It's been a while since I last looked at Zed, so I just started it again, and it ... looks like your average macOS app? Which to me sounds pretty much ideal.

nailer 1y ago

{ "disable_ai": true } That creates a system with a potential double negative (disable is false) which is unclear. It's cleaner to do: { "enable_ai": false }

kbdiaz 1y ago

My problem with AI in Zed is not that it's there, but that it feels like it's always behind in AI code editor paradigms. They were pretty late to the party to add edit predictions, and their agent UX is pretty behind the game. Recently, Cursor added background agents which I feel is a game changer and I now feel it's a deal breaker when choosing an editor. It makes me wonder if choosing to build their own GUI framework in Rust was the right move. Zed is a great code editor, but for me, it's not a great AI code editor.

Sxubas 1y ago
I haven't used background tasks/agents in cursor. Could you provide an example for stuff that you use it for?
- kbdiaz 1y ago
  This week, I remember giving it these tasks: - Upgrade our NodeJS version because it just got deprecated - Upgrade our linter to the newest version, add a new rule, and fix all instances of that rule in our code - Make minor changes to our UI - Fix small bugs that I know how to fix, and can tell it exactly what to do The main pain point they're solving for me is that I have many small tasks I need to do. Coding them isn't the main bottleneck, but creating a new branch and then creating a new PR is the main bottleneck for me. With cursor specifically, I don't even have to check out the branch locally to verify the code. For any significant work, I'd rather manually do it in editor.

travisgriggs 1y ago

I did 4 months of Cursor. Figured I’d try 4 months of Zed, and see from there. I’m about 3 months in and so far might stick with it. I’ve generally been pleased with it. My only issues really have been a) all the settings are just in a file, not even a commented skeleton, and with a decent change rate, hard to invest in learning them; I’d love something like the jetbrains settings dialog b) the stupid placement of the burn mode button; it’s so easy to accidentally turn this on and not realize (done it twice now). Would love an option to just remove said button c) I wish there was more panel control; I’d like to place outline and project views BOTH in a panel, but you only get two full height tools in the left/right panels.

metadaemon 1y ago
Also wish they would put more emphasis on autocompletions, that's like 99% of what I use AI for is basically a better Intellisense

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Zed has everything I want out of an editor, the AI stuff wasn't really a concern to me since its always been optional, but I fully appreciate where they're coming from. I think Zed is one of the good gems of our time. I have been looking for a decent spiritual successor to Sublime, and Zed to me is really good at it.

porsager 1y ago

This gives me hope they might fix collaboration too. Unfortunately had to switch to VSCode Liveshare (which has its own problems) a few times because Zeds collaboration was so broken.

har777 1y ago

I moved to Zed last week and its been amazing so far! Something about using it feels a lot more crisp and fast compared to vscode. Their AI integration is pretty decent too. But I am very glad I can disable AI now. I find AI sometimes takes me out of the flow because I am constantly reviewing its code.

deleted 1y ago

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microflash 1y ago

I appreciate this option since I use Zed without AI. However, their overwhelming focus on cramming AI in the editor just disappoints me. The core experience is still very raw and there are small things that build over to make it annoying. I still have Sublime Text as the backup editor. It's lack of a powerful sidebar and search are the only things that stopped me from using it regularly. I do use VSCode at times and the CoPilor powered tab completion (which mostly hallucinates and spits out nonsense) is just obnoxious. I've found JetBrains' implementation of full line completion and block completions a lot more thoughtful and reliable.

mritchie712 1y ago

I want this in Warp. It's a solid terminal, but Claude Code is so good that I don't need my terminal trying to do something similar without me asking it to.

bitwize 1y ago
If you want this for Warp, you know where to find xterm, iTerm2, Kitty, etc.
opan 1y ago
Have you tried foot?
- yewenjie 1y ago
  I loved foot but now I gotta use a macbook :(

3836293648 1y ago

What is the point of this? Surely anyone who (correctly) has moral objections would require a fork getting rid of the code to support it entirely, not just a runtime toggle?

zamadatix 1y ago
There are more reasons than moral objections one might not want to use the AI features in Zed. The post gives a few concrete examples but I think this sums up the general situation best: > Zed is built for engineers who care about their tools. That means giving you control over your development environment, including the choice to work without AI if that's what works best for you.
zzo38computer 1y ago
If you have a moral objection of enabling that feature, you might or might not also have a moral objection of the program having that feature, so I think not everyone does.
max-privatevoid 1y ago
That's true for this and many other features of Zed. For example, telemetry can be disabled with a simple switch. However, I feel deeply uncomfortable knowing that my editor is ready to report every file I open, commit I make, code action I perform, etc. at a moment's notice, held back only by that one line in my config file.
- eviks 1y ago
  You can add firewall block as another line if defense
deleted 1y ago
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senbrow 1y ago

Total nitpick, but: Why would you name an option "disable_ai" with a default value of false instead of calling it "enable_ai" with a default value of true? Are there some mechanical semantics I'm missing here that make this beneficial? Negative booleans (ie that remove or suppress something when true) are generally a source of confusion and bugs and should be avoided like the plague in my experience.

wanderingstan 1y ago
I concur. Same thing in many UI frameworks where you’ll have a Boolean “isHidden” to control visibility. Makes it so hard to reason about.
- Rexxar 1y ago
  IMHO, in this case it should not even be a boolean but an enum {Visible, Hidden}.
  - roguecoder 1y ago
    Even with working with an existing framework, we can define a constant `HIDDEN=true`
vouaobrasil 1y ago
Technically, "enable_ai" doesn't imply that all AI features are really turned off. Without context, it might imply that some basic AI features exist and "enable_ai" just enables further features. "disable_ai" is unambiguous.
- whilenot-dev 1y ago
  Enable/disable are the only two dichotomies in the whole of all possible states regarding this AI feature, so I'll have to bite: What's your "Technically," referring to here?
  - 1y ago

leafmeal 1y ago

The thing that's so sticky for me with JetBrains IDEs is their run configurations. Being able to configure all of the environment variables etc. for the actual code that I need to run, especially when connecting to a debugger or tests integrated with the IDE. I haven't seen anyone else complain about this so I figure I must be missing something. Does Zed let you set up run configurations like this? If not, how do users actually run their code? Just in the terminal? It seems backwards to me to use a fancy IDE, but then run all your code in the terminal. I love IDE features like clicking on the test I'm editing to run it, and setting breakpoints in the IDE. Does anyone else have this problem?

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ivanjermakov 1y ago
For personal projects I just use npm scripts or make
- 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
  Minus some magic, those scripts are not going to interface with the IDE debugger.
Noumenon72 1y ago
I love these too. I have a run config checked into my repo that runs three run configs, for `fastapi dev`, npm start, and launching a JavaScript debugger, with one click. I also like clicking on a test or script and just hitting "ctrl+shift+d" to launch that particular code with the debugger. VS Code can launch a fleet of dev containers but it's just not as good of an experience to restart and debug.
codethief 1y ago
> It seems backwards to me to use a fancy IDE, but then run all your code in the terminal. Having literally spent days at a time just to get a working run configuration at various employers and clients over the past decade, I find it backwards to use anything besides the terminal and version-controlled scripts & task runners / CLIs to fire up anything. (: People rarely document their JetBrains setup fully and even if they do, JetBrains IDEs are not exactly known for their reproducible behavior or for not occasionally messing up your configuration (in case you do decide to check in your IDE config & share with your team). Besides, you will need those terminal scripts for your CI pipeline, anyway. That being said, > I love IDE features like clicking on the test I'm editing to run it, and setting breakpoints in the IDE. I agree, that is very useful. However, to me it's the cherry on top of proper self-contained run scripts for the terminal.

AtlasBarfed 1y ago

I think I'm never going to get another software job because I cannot stand the word "agentic". Of course the software industry will probably make any desire I might have a moot point anyway.

Havoc 1y ago

Love this. Prefer deciding feature by feature basis, but in a world where everyone is ramming AI down your throat with a jackhammer and compulsory ToS this mindset is welcome

_heimdall 1y ago

Maybe this is a pedantic nitpick, but I do wish the feature was "disable_llm" or similar. The term AI is so poorly specified today, and while I don't want my editor using LLMs to predict my next keystroke I do still like the more basic auto complete features.

koito17 1y ago

Started using Zed about a year ago and, besides Magit, it has managed to completely replace Emacs for me. I was missing a good debugger for a long time, but that also went GA a month ago or so. One thing that goes underappreciated is the input latency and how light on resources the editor is overall. Whenever I switch tabs to a web browser (or any web app), I can feel the lag in typing now, despite the fact I use an M3 Max MacBook Pro. Zed's built-in terminal used to feel high-latency too, but they recently shipped a bunch of performance improvements, and it's just amazing how clunky inputs feel in web apps feel after using Zed for a long time. Two things I find interesting about this development. 1. This is a long-standing feature request ever since Zed added any AI capability. Adding AI-related functionality at all was a very controversial move at the time. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41302782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41302782 2. Text threads in Zed came out only 11 months ago. At the time, it felt revolutionary being able to effortlessly paste terminal output and entire folders into context. Additionally, being able to stop the LLM, correct part of its output, and have it continue code generation. Around 4 months ago, agentic coding released, and now this once-revolutionary workflow feels quite primitive. In the meantime, Zed also added screensharing, Linux support for collaboration, a Git UI, a debugger, and performance improvements to the editor.

anamexis 1y ago
I use Zed too, and as a longtime magit devotee, I've really been enjoying using gitu [0] in Zed. gitu doesn't have everything magit does, but there's not much I find myself missing. I have it nicely integrated with Zed by defining the following task, which you can then add a keybinding for if you want: { "label": "gitu", "command": "gitu", "reveal_target": "center", "hide": "always", "env": { "VISUAL": "zed", "GIT_EDITOR": "vim" } } [0] https://github.com/altsem/gitu https://github.com/altsem/gitu
taude 1y ago
These were the comments I came looking for. What existing users of Zed migrated from. I'm pretty curious to try it, but lacking some time to tool yak-shave at the moment.
1y ago

jaredcwhite 1y ago

Why is a code editor negging me? "Even if you're skeptical [of genAI], these tools are quickly becoming part of how software gets built." Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. I am thankful Zed added this feature and most of the post seems reasonable, but it's still the height of weird that they feel compelled to say this—obviously it's not how software gets built by the people who are avoiding these tools intentionally and for good reason!

roguecoder 1y ago
Especially given the recent study that found people felt more productive while objectively getting less done. It's like saying, "marijuana is rapidly becoming a part of how people get through their day, but we understand not everyone wants to spend their day high."

ajkjk 1y ago

"Some developers have fundamental objections to AI in their coding process—whether it's concerns about training data, environmental impact, or philosophical reasons about machine-generated code." not only that, there's the "jesus christ fuck off" angle. Stop bullying me into using AI when it serves you, not me. Every goddamn surface wants me to click on their "write your email like a fake idiot" button because they get to report X% WAU uptick which is supposed to vaguely correlate with revenue/growth somehow according to some stupid metric. But no matter how much you can twist reality to justify it financially the fact remains that shoving features in your users' face is not the best user experience you could have made, because you could have not done it. Good designers (...picture your platonic ideal of Jobs-era Apple, not that it was actually perfect but it was better than this shit...) would never do that. If only we lived in a world where there was enough market pressure to annihilate a company for designing things badly---unfortunately no one is competing on that angle yet (big opportunity, imo). In the meantime we just have to ask, nicely and then angrily: please, god, fuck off. It should not take angrily asking, or finding leverage, in order to get you to be respectful. You should be respectful by default.

max_ 1y ago

What an amazing selling point! It requires lots of independent thinking (which I value) from founders to refrain from something everyone else is hitting the gas pedal on.

swyx 1y ago
refrain? they're going full steam on it. they're just not forcing all their users into it, which reflects taste and empathy few other founders have.
- conartist6 1y ago
  Taste and empathy maybe, but their choice of licenses, technologies and priorities can still be juvenile to the point of sinking their company. Just look at the amount of excitement in their industry right now. New IDEs are springing up practically by the week. Are any of these new IDEs based on Zed? No, of course not. GPL closes the door on that, and who would want to own a fork of a tool that's so painful to develop? Developers working on VSCode can probably do an average dev-test cycle in 1-5 seconds. I've no idea how long the Zed dev-test cycle is, but I hear Rust builds are notoriously slow so I assume it's more like 1-5 minutes.
  - alice-i-cecile 1y ago
    With the help of subsecond[0], we're seeing <1 s dev-test cycles for changes to Rust GUI projects these days :) That's with a fast CPU and optimized compiler settings, but it's competitive with things like Flutter and the web stack. Even without hotpatching, Rust incremental compile times are on the order of 10 seconds, not multiple minutes. Clean compiles still take minutes, but that's a "once-a-week" workflow usually. Not sure if Zed has gotten it hooked up yet, but things are changing rapidly in the Rust GUI (and games) space because of Dioxus's innovation here. [0]: https://crates.io/crates/subsecond https://crates.io/crates/subsecond
    - conartist6 1y ago
      Thank you for educating me. I don't actually work with Rust so I shouldn't be spreading misinformation about it without knowing what I am talking about. It doesn't really change my multitude of problems with Rust as a language for a project like Zed. Zed feels like a cathedral to me in the Eric S Raymond sense. Rust feels like a language for building cathedrals. Javascript is the language of the commons, which is why the idea of a hackable IDE in JS was so brilliant. Somewhere along the line the team forgot what made Atom great (despite its flaws).

riigess 1y ago

Other than zed.dev being down for the first time since I started using it, I’ve been manually disallowing AI connections from the get-go. What’s different? What wasn’t I disabling originally? Is this just a shortcut to other options?

ivanjermakov 1y ago

> Our goal at Zed has always been to build the world’s best code editor. Not true, Zed goal is > code editor [with] high-performance collaboration with humans and AI

comprev 1y ago
> code editor [with] high-performance collaboration with humans and AI When investors are involved this immediately changes to: > Our goal is to build a product which will hopefully return more than our financial investment. I get the feeling many HN contributors to this discussion forget that Zed is not a software project like Neovim, Nano or Emacs (etc.) which rely on donations and/or sponsors to either pay developers or cover required infrastructure costs. It's a product backed by investors who - one day - will demand their pound of flesh, and "features" like AI are added to market the product to _more_ investors. Perhaps the use of AI itself inside the product will also be tracked to steer potential opportunities for the investors themselves. Like many fellow HN'ers, I use Zed on a daily basis, and it's no different than Google search or Facebook - "If a product from investors is free, YOU are the product"

bobajeff 1y ago

I'm glad they decided to add this. I still want the ability to disable all the account login stuff part of the UI. So i hope they make that as an option too. Since, I don't like signing into my software.

loeg 1y ago

Weird that it wasn't optional before, right? Not sure if this is related to the recent stories of AI agents nuking people's code, but that's just one more reason to make it optional.

serbuvlad 1y ago

The one thing I love about VSCode is how trivially I can fire it up on a container or on a remote machine via SSH. If Zed had this I would switch tomorrow. So my question for Zed users is: does it? The UI is a tad idiosyncratic on Linux (can't speak for Macs) but DAMN is it fast, I love the generality of tasks.json (haven't played with debug.json yet), by far the best system I've ever used, and everything just works well out the gate.

c-hendricks 1y ago
Zed has SSH editing. But when I tried it a couple of weeks ago, their in-ui git didn't detect a repo in a folder that very much used git, and ports you want mapped have to be specified ahead of time, there's no way to do it at runtime like in neovim/vscode

MentallyRetired 1y ago

I've been using Zed for half a year. Love the simple interface. I wanted a glorified notepad. Zed does well for me.

daft_pink 1y ago

For what it’s worth, I would really like to have an iPad version of Zed that I could use the remote function into my Mac and homeserver via Tailscale and be able to code on my iPad. Please make this!

hollowturtle 1y ago

> Even if you're skeptical, these tools are quickly becoming part of how software gets built. Understanding them helps you make informed decisions about when and how to use them—or not use them. What? Blockchains and Web3 again? Oh no wait... AI

beefnugs 1y ago

Damn where is the "stochastic interwoven unpredictable" graphic of how they can use a webpage to pin my firefox to 100%cpu and start blasting fans

bigstrat2003 1y ago

Just wanted to say thank you to the Zed team for listening to this bit of feedback! I'm very much of the opinion that AI is not a value-add, so I appreciate the ability to disable it.

tiltowait 1y ago

I used Zed a decent amount before it started being too in-your-face with AI features. Glad to see an option to disable it all, but at this point, I’ve become so much more efficient with Helix than I am with any graphical IDE. I wouldn’t love to go back.

vector_spaces 1y ago

I've wanted to try Zed but I'm generally antsy about tools unexpectedly phoning home -- haven't had a chance to closely evaluate myself. A few tinfoil-hat questions: I know obviously it needs to phone someone to use functionality like remote dev or certain integrations, but outside of those situations, does it otherwise perform any kind of telemetry by default? Are there situations where it could ship off tokens in files I'm editing to some remote server where one wouldn't be expecting it? Also, I know it's open source, but is it meaningfully open source in the sense that the prebuilt binaries available for download in the obvious places aren't some reskinned proprietary version like is the case with VSCode? These are meant in good faith -- genuinely interested and curious

xedrac 1y ago

Zed has been nice, but I really miss the fuzzy search (files and grep) with live preview - something like telescope in neovim. The search results in zed feel super clunky to navigate through.

drewbitt 1y ago

Zed has been moving fast lately and I can almost use it full time, but no git log and poor git diffing has me frequently clicking out of it. They are spending a huge amount of dev time on AI features instead, so this is a nice feature, but it still doesn't change their focus.

WuxiFingerHold 1y ago

I've tried Zed last week but C# LSP (Ominsharp) had too many issues. Does anyone use Zed with C# with good success?

v3ss0n 1y ago

good one. Just yesterday It got me to a point that I can't stand ai forced auto completions in vscode that I ended up whole copilot extension. It's too distracting that Ms forcing too much on AI

BomberFish 1y ago

Meanwhile (at least from what I've heard from friends), VS Code is pushing for users to use Copilot more and more. I'm glad I jumped to Zed a few months back.