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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
by 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 agoDoing their own rendering is one of the most attractive things about it imo. I am on macos though.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 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.
- Night_Thastus 1y agoI miss Atom. I loved it. I loved all the crazy plugins people would make to do all sorts of things. It was a fun time. These days I'm stuck on QTCreator most of the time. It's OK for core editing functionality but there's a lot that I miss, and some things like the generic Language Server support just aren't fleshed out much. I'm tempted to use another editor whenever I'm not working on UI files but it adds some friction.
- xrisk 1y agoWas atom functionally ever any different from vscode today?
- princevegeta89 1y agoI only remember Atom being painfully slow. It was using Electron too btw.
- CitrusFruits 1y agoAt the time it was actually called "atom shell" iirc. Electron came from Atom.
- debugnik 1y ago> VSCode fork that can work with any VSCode plugin Technically yes, but if you care about legally, you can't use extensions from Microsoft's marketplace, which excludes Microsoft's own closed extensions such as WSL/SSH/devcontainer remoting and Pylance. It ships with Open VSX instead.
- toastercat 1y agoWondering if you've tried rxi/lite or the community fork, Lite-XL [1] and how you've found the font rendering to be there? FWIW, I've yet to find a better text editor than Sublime Text. [1] https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl
- neoden 1y agoYes, I've tried them (Pragtical actually, which is another fork) and font rendering there is fine
- paraboul 1y agoRemember that Zed hasn't reached 1.0. On other platform, it is much faster and consume much less battery. Just like ghostty, to me the most attracting feature is knowing my editor/term is not backed by a browser engine.
- christophilus 1y agoGhostty is an apt comparison, because it is a slow-launching memory hog compared to foot on Linux.
- neoden 1y ago> the most attracting feature is knowing my editor/term is not backed by a browser engine How and why is this important? At any time I have two browsers with dozens of tabs and on top of it a slack client active, how another instance of a browser engine could hurt in this mad world?
- thejazzman 1y agotry it and found out; it's not about memory overhead (maybe it is to someone), it's that it works so much better than web backed things. it's just an absurdly fast/responsive/delightful thing to experience after years of everything going the other way [while hardware actually gets faster] and i say this as a proud career long web developer. i just really like zed.
- neoden 1y agoZed was my daily driver for almost a year. When it's working fine and not drawing the mouse cursor at 3 FPS it feels pretty much as anything else in terms of perceived speed. I saw mentions that you need to be younger to notice the difference. Like you don't hear frequencies above 18 KHz if you're more than 20 years old. I get the idea, I just don't see where it is connected to my real world experience
- qwrshr 1y agoAs a quick anecdatum, I'm on macos and I'm definitely more than 20 years old, and there is a quite perceptible difference in responsiveness between Zed and a VSCode-based IDE for me. (Though then again I did play fast-twitched games a lot when I was younger.)
- pmarreck 1y agoZed's still pretty beta on linux. It will improve. I'm glad they are at least targeting it as well.
- thefaux 1y agoI listened to a podcast interview with one of the cofounders of zed. One of the revealing things is that he went on and on about how important latency was and how they had to do their own rendering because of the problems they ran into with electron. He also admits that he never used vim, which already has imperceptible latency relative to the terminal emulator, which has already largely solved the text rendering problem. I understand that there are advantages to being a native app from their perspective, but for me, it is even better for my editor to be integrated into my terminal editor. And because they built it the opposite way though, they have to also build a terminal emulator into their editor. There is a real cost to building zed this way. If they were an embedded terminal app, they would get full terminal support for free and would not have to implement 2d text rendering. They could even have made a bundled package with an oss terminal emulator like kitty. Then they could have focused strictly on their editing features and value adds. Every engineer hour spent fixing bugs/adding features to the rendering framework is an hour that could have been spent on value adds. Personally, there is no way that latency itself can be that value add for me because I use neovim and don't use any language plugins so every keystroke already renders instantly. Clearly then you can do everything zed does in a terminal app within at worst tens of milliseconds of latency. Of course their target market uses vscode and not vim and either doesn't know or care that you do not need to write your own rendering engine to make a low latency, featureful text editor. I am admittedly very much not the target consumer for zed though.
- dkersten 1y agoNot everyone wants to use a terminal editor and of those people, not everyone wants to use vscode.
- codedokode 1y agoVS Code also lags and become buggy if there are incompatible drivers and it cannot enable hardware acceleration.
- michaelg7x 1y agoI use it on Linux and think it's great. My laptop has a screen with some crazy-high DPI and a monitor which doesn't. Changing the font sizes in settings to suit has never left me with a poorly rendered view.
- v3ss0n 1y agoSame experience here on Linux, where bast majority of potential users seems to be in Linux who loves vim mode, Zed's focus on Linux is pretty bad. I would say alpha quality at this point.