8 ms·
Zed is so great, I do wish they would focus just a little bit more on bringing the UI just a bit more up to parity with VS Code, I would switch full time.
by extr 1y ago
Zed is so great, I do wish they would focus just a little bit more on bringing the UI just a bit more up to parity with VS Code, I would switch full time.
- sirodoht 1y agoWhat do you feel is missing from the UI?
- tmdh 1y agoI feel like the UI is not as smooth as VSCode. There is a slight lag when scrolling.
- Longhanks 1y agoWait what? Isn't a super fast UI one of their main selling points, what led them to write their own rendering in Rust? ...and now they lose to a web app?
- seanssel 1y agoI have no idea what they're talking about. Maybe they're used to a smooth scroll animation in VS Code or something? Zed feels snappier/lighter in just about every way to me.
- sayrer 1y agoNo kidding. It is /so/ fast. It has remote development like VS Code, and most of the features I use, so it's my main thing now. Claude Code was the only thing that made me wince, since I wondered if I was living in the dark ages. VS Code of course has many more extensions, but I don't use that many.
- sapiogram 1y agoThere's a reason everyone writes their GUI apps in Electron nowadays. Browser have spent 30 years figuring out fast rendering, it's hard to beat that, even with native code.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mlnj 1y agoSmoothness and frames per second is the core of why they were building a very optimized editor. Not sure if it is just your machine that it is not leveraging the right bits. For me the extension ecosystems is something I really like about VSCode, but that is an entirely different matter.
- rtaylorgarlock 1y agoWow. This might be the 1st time i've seen someone comment negatively regarding UI performance. Zed is one of the fastest programs i use. I used to laugh when seeing them market fps and such, but yeesh it's fast
- hu3 1y ago> Wow. This might be the 1st time i've seen someone comment negatively regarding UI performance Here you go: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=zed%20slow&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... > I found Copilot tab completion completion to be VERY slow in Zed, for some reason. > Zed still takes a relatively long time to start on my old desktop. I thought something was wrong but no, it is just THAT slow > I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code. > 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. > Zed tab is a lot worse in comparison (partly because it’s slow) > In 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). > All I'm saying is that contrary to what someone else said about the software being "fast" I tried it and at startup, it was unusably slow. > Tried using zed on Linux (pop os, Nvidia) several months ago, was terribly slow, ~1s to open right click context window. > Zed is as close as it gets, I also use it, but it is still slow and cumbersome sometimes. I'll stop here. There are other 4 pages of comments to pick anecdotes from, in this simple search alone.
- cyanf 1y agoThe other examples you listed are valid, but A.I tab auto complete is a model & inference issue unrelated to the editor.
- 1y ago
- blurbleblurble 1y agoThis could be an issue with GPU drivers. I experienced some incompatibility with GPU kernel drivers that allowed Zed to crash the whole window manager during text selection.
- sapiogram 1y agoTheir font rendering looks awful on non-high dpi displays, and the devs don't seem to care at all. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
- jsheard 1y agoThat figures, their lead platform was the Mac where HiDPI is totally ubiquitous, so their renderer probably has no provisions for subpixel font rendering.
- jamesgeck0 1y agoIt's frustrating because even on macOS, every other text editor looks better on a 1440p display.
- delta_p_delta_x 1y agoMy guess: their shaders or text rendering don't account for sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which is critical to getting decent text rendering on low pixel density displays. If they'd used Skia (which is what Electron and Chromium use), they would've got this for free. Instead they tried to reinvent the world and didn't realise how big the world was.
- AlexandrB 1y agoI love how we just reinvent the wheel again, and again, and again, and again... MacOS native apps have had great sub-pixel rendering all along, but I guess since we have to develop everything in Electron now it's time to reimplement all the exiting functionality.
- jsheard 1y ago> MacOS native apps have had great sub-pixel rendering all along Apple removed subpixel anti-aliasing in Mojave, seven years ago, because it's not necessary on the HiDPI/Retina displays they ship as standard. They still do greyscale anti-aliasing but that's not the same thing as subpixel. Discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476873
- kenhwang 1y agoTop of my head switching between IntelliJ and Zed: - Git UI is extremely barebones with no support for other VCS - No merge tool or side-by-side diffs - Configuration is all JSON - Would be nice having a full file tree for the search editor instead of just the list; having the functionality split between a tab and the outline panel is quite clunky. - Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows or other configurations (multiple docks per side, multiple copies of the same panel linked to a specific tab). Zed is basically a slightly more featured text editor, so it does a good job when I just want to open something quickly and do small edits. So it's really replacing Sublime Text. But I find myself hopping out to other tools when I'm using Zed which wasn't really common with IntelliJ. So I still want to use a proper IDE for proper development work.
- WA 1y agoNo side-by-side diff is a deal-breaker for me unfortunately.
- ricardobeat 1y agoThis is a great divider between people who want an IDE vs a text editor - Zed explicit is the latter.
- ronyeh 1y agoI use git icdiff (a plugin) in my terminal. I use Zed and VSCode GUI editors, but I don’t care to use their git tools. Command line git is fine. https://www.jefftk.com/icdiff https://www.jefftk.com/icdiff
- seanssel 1y agoThe IntelliJ 3-way mergetool/diff viewer is best in class. I haven't found anything else that touches it.
- conartist6 1y agoMe either. I thought by now it would be standard UX everywhere, but that is very much not so.
- valentinnnnn 1y agoI can’t really pin down the reason but somehow vscode just feels a bit more „balanced“ to me - the font sizes, little borders, icons and details, it’s more consistent.
- pseufaux 1y agoMerge tool is the big one for me
- SJMG 1y agohttps://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/20086 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/20086
- extr 1y agoPeople are bringing up a lot of sophisticated stuff. Honestly for me it would just be a more flexible panel system that lets me see eg: File Explorer, Git UI, AI mode, etc, all at the same time.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoGit: IntelliJ is miles ahead. And we’re talking about essential features like three-may merge panel, diffing 2 files, diffing same file between branches, diffing folders, etc Tests:. Zed is bare bones compared to IntelliJ (rerun failed tests, export list of failures, go to failed lines easily etc The AI stuff is cool but it won’t get me to switch from PyCharm.
- TheRoque 1y agoWhat's so great about zed ?
- simonw 1y agoIt uses a fraction of the memory of VS Code and is much faster to launch.
- johnisgood 1y agoZed still takes a relatively long time to start on my old desktop. I thought something was wrong but no, it is just THAT slow. Emacs starts up faster than an empty Zed window, unfortunately. It is still way faster than IntelliJ but comparing it to that is a low bar. VSCodium starts up faster for me than Zed which I compiled yesterday with release mode. Here I am referring to the time spent just on waiting for the window to start up, not the extensions and all that I am using with VSCodium, that takes time. I wonder why this is, that VSCodium shows the window quicker than Zed. Regardless, I will give Zed a try with Go development. I assume Zed has extensions, too? Are there any extensions for Go? If so, I might replace VSCodium with Zed but only if it has similar features to VSCodium. If not, I will stick to VSCodium as there is no reason for me to change.
- yobert 1y agoZed has easy to use extensions, but also Go support is built in. (syntax highlighting, gofmt on save, and language server support)
- johnisgood 1y agoIt's builtin? Nice. I will give it a try, then! I wonder why the startup time is slow though, may have to debug that one.
- tracker1 1y agoI'm not a Zed developer, but I'm pretty sure LSP interfaces are pretty much standardized now, in large part to VS Code's efforts, so they're pretty consistent across most editors that support them. That doesn't mean Zed will have all the other extensions that VS Code has... Recently added the new SQL Server extension(s) and it's been at least interesting, in a way slightly better than using SMMS. It's pretty much burrowing the UI from Azure Data Studio (or whatever it was called). Haven't tried similar for PG/SQLite etc yet.
- cpuguy83 1y agoAnyone running this on Linux? I find it works fairly poorly there. To be fair, vscode is also not great for me (especially vim mode) on Linux.
- johntash 1y agoZed was working great for me on linux. It recently broke support for using a remote env over ssh, but locally still works fine.
- WD-42 1y agoRunning on Linux here. Working great for me. If you are referring to font rendering, unfortunately the Rust ecosystem for it is still young, so there are improvements to be made.
- neurostimulant 1y agoI don't notice any major issue yet, except for that freezing on wayland which seems to be fixed already.