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I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limite

I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limited understanding, none of the existing alternatives offer anything (and often misses at least something) truly innovative or anything else that VSCode extension wouldn't solve. On VSCode I have about 15 different profiles setup, each with different settings and dozens of extensions based on either a technology stack or a project - it would be really difficult to find a good reason to throw it all away. The idea of switching between IDEs does not appeal to me either. I do use Neovim a little bit too, but most of that usage time was spent on configuration.

pimeys 1y ago
It's really interesting point of view. I'm one of those people who avoid using VSCode at any cost. It's slow, it's bloated, the UI is not great, and it's slowly being locked down by Microsoft. If Zed would not exist, I would be using helix, neovim, or emacs as I did before.
- torben-friis 1y ago
  It’s not at all slow when compared to IntelliJ products or similar. It doesn’t compete with editors, it competes with IDEs.
- hu3 1y ago
  Interestingly I disagree with all your points about VSCode. It's fast, barebones by default, UI is minimal and it's Open Source enough that competitors forked from it. I guess YMMV because there is a comment in this post from another user about Zed being sluggish.
  - pimeys 1y ago
    I tried VSCode many times in my life and just hated the experience so much. It put me away from GUI editors for years, didn't want to try any of them. So ugly and so sluggish. Zed was the first one that put me to rethink my position. It is so snappy on my Linux workstation and I don't have any issues with it's GUI. I finally switched from vim et.al. But I know I have "weird" opinions, I also really dislike Apple products and their software.
    - typpilol 1y ago
      My experience is the exact opposite Vscode has never had any input delay for me
  - timeon 1y ago
    Even not counting the LSP, for a text editor, it eats quite large amount of RAM.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  VSCode is actually not slow. The problem is to make it useful you need to add quite a few extensions, and those can be slow. That itself wouldn't be too bad but VSCode doesn't expose any information about what is causing the slowness. You end up with "VSCode is slow and it could be due to any one of the dozen extensions I have installed", which effectively means that VSCode is slow. It remains to be seen if Zed can avoid that though.
  - WD-42 1y ago
    VSCode (and all Electron based editors) have undeniable input latency. Zed is built by the same team that developed Atom and Electron and one of their stated goals is to make up for the shortcomings of these technologies. If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it.
    - Barrin92 1y ago
      >If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it. I don't think this is a fair claim. When you start doing an apples to apples comparison, that is to say make full use of IDE and auto-completion features it's difficult to see a difference given that the latency and speed of the plugins starts to dominate any millisecond difference in input latency or rendering speed.
      - WD-42 1y ago
        No. When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately. All other IDE features like auto-completion happen asynchronously.
        SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
        > When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately. Seems to work the same for me in VSCode, CLion, and nvim. I don't doubt that you have issues with it (I've experienced slow editors & laggy input, it sucks) but I don't think it's inherent to VSCode. Doesn't mean it's not a bug, but if I had that issue I'd try with no extensions to verify, then binary search disabling the extensions I want until I find the one causing the lag.
monstrado 1y ago
I think the point of ACP being an open protocol is so that other editors (e.g. VSCode, Neovim) can implement it as a receiver and integration with ClaudeCode/GeminiCLI/... would just work.
kiney 1y ago
I had to use VSCode for some projects in the past because it was what was available on the clients workstations... I can't imagine having to use that laggy electron abomination all the time. For me Zed is sent from heaven, because my previously preferred editor (geany) hast basically zero developtment nowadays.
- meowface 1y ago
  I normally care a ton about latency and in the main project I work on I put extreme focus on reducing input latency in text input fields, but... I've used VS Code for ages. I tried Zed. I don't really feel a difference. It's smoother but VS Code is more than smooth enough for me and has tons of features I rely on that don't exist in dev. Meanwhile, when I tried Ghostty I noticed a significant improvement in "typefeel" compared to iTerm. So I'm not immune to detecting such a difference. I will try Zed again though.
  - BoredPositron 1y ago
    >>I don't really feel a difference. >>It's smoother but...
- typpilol 1y ago
  How big was his project bc I've never had any input away and I've worked on some pretty good size projects. Are you using an old computer or something?
  - kiney 1y ago
    I mainly used VSCode on locked down corporate laptops. Usually good hardware but running windows and corporate security bloat. But where I was allowed to install alternative editors they were snappy.
mikeocool 1y ago
Zed's main selling point over VSCode for me is the lack of a slight delay between when I press a key and when the character appears. VSCode has always felt ever so slightly sluggish to me, and I find it maddening as I type.
- pmg101 1y ago
  So glad to hear I'm not alone! I continue to use SublimeText for this reason. Yet it doesn't seem to bother others.
  - WD-42 1y ago
    I think a lot of people forget how long ago Electron/Atom were released, and the subsequent Cambrian explosion of Electron based apps and editors like VSCode. There's probably a huge amount of developers that haven't used anything else.
    - RussianCow 1y ago
      Ironically, I used JetBrains products for years before switching to VS Code because the latter felt so much faster. So it definitely depends on what you're used to. Zed feels significantly faster than VS Code, but it also doesn't feel as polished and "complete" as an IDE, so I'm going to stick to VS Code for now for the same reason I stuck to JetBrains IDEs for so long.
  - pkorzeniewski 1y ago
    Same here, still using Sublime Text due to its general snappiness, but can't wait for Zed to be released on Windows, it feels like a modern successor to ST that just keeps getting better.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  Weird, I tried it recently and found it actually a bit laggier than VSCode. The rendering is much worse quality too. Are you using Vim mode or something like that?
kombine 1y ago
I switched to Neovim a year ago, and while I did spend a significant amount of time on configuring it, I haven't touched my config for months now - and I'm perfectly happy with it. There's things I can improve, but it does what I want.
- californical 1y ago
  I’m in the same boat. I spent a lot of nights for a couple weeks getting everything tuned just right, in the beginning. But now, several years later, it really doesn’t take much. I spend maybe 2-3 hours once every few months, and that’s usually just adding a bunch of features that sound nice to make my life better. I’ve easily gone 6+ months without touching neovim config, if not longer, because it’s unnecessary. It only matters if you want to further improve your editor
SubiculumCode 1y ago
I am sure some would have said the same about why would anyone switch to using Linux when there was Microsoft Windows.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  Especially now that Windows has WSL. You can even open GUI Linux apps just as if they were regular apps.
  - SubiculumCode 1y ago
    Yeah, but you still have to deal with all the other Windows shit.
LocalPCGuy 1y ago
There is always a "better mousetrap", and there are those that continue to use the old one because they "know how it works and it's set up just the way I like it". And there are others that try every new mousetrap that hits the market. (and that's ok, not slighting either one) I will say that I personally have never really gelled with VSCode no matter how much I try to customize it, it still is just a bit off. For me, it's like it's too much to be a simple editor like SublimeText or NeoVim, but not quite enough to be an IDE like IntelliJ or Visual Studio (full). It does just enough that I expect a bit more of it and it often fails to deliver. Right now I tend to just use 2 editors - one very simple one for viewing/editing text files and one IDE (currently IntelliJ) for coding in a project. On topic - Zed is actually a really nice editor. It had some rough edges last time I tried it, but it's probably about time to give it another go.
stuaxo 1y ago
I use zed when I need to quickly edit something, it pops up so fast- everything else feels sluggish.
jryio 1y ago
Zed succeeds at reducing the switching cost. I used NeoVim for ten years daily and configured it way back in college days. I thought I would be unable to move to a GUI editor and it turns out that the speed and efficiency of Zed plus the almost one-to-one mapping of Vim features means that I am extremely productive in Zed.
Karrot_Kream 1y ago
I wanted to like VSCode but it has enough input latency on my machines that it's not that enjoyable when I'm "locked in". Also if I'm running a bunch of services in Docker on MacOS (which means they're running VMs sigh) the overhead of VSCode is just too much and the system starts swapping constantly grinding the whole thing to a halt. I also find configuring it a pain. Every configuration pane feels ad-hoc and not part of a holistic, configurable system. Emacs has lots of crusty bits and an annoying event loop that you have to really work around but is designed a lot more holistically than VSCode. Zed to me feels like a great batteries-included editor and I still run it as my non-emacs alternate editor. I wish its configuration was a bit more discoverable (especially with configuring linters/formatters), but it's 95% of what I need 95% of the time.
the__alchemist 1y ago
It sounds like you haven't tried Jetbrains IDEs. I understand still preferring VsCode in that case, but I think you would be saying "I prefer VsCode" vs "I don't see a reason". A big con with JB is they are very slow. The upside is that they manage multi-file projects, refactoring, and introspection far better than VsCode.
norman784 1y ago
OTOH I'd ten to prefer as less plugins as possible in VSCode, just because they are inherently dangerous, I'd like Zed plugins that are WASM, so they don't have access to the world. But I agree that VSCode Typescript support is better than Zed, it works with weird projects setup, while Zed has more troubles. I at work VSCode and Zed/Helix for my projects, generally I use Zed when want to do some AI stuff, otherwise I just use Helix.

pimeys 1y ago

It's really interesting point of view. I'm one of those people who avoid using VSCode at any cost. It's slow, it's bloated, the UI is not great, and it's slowly being locked down by Microsoft. If Zed would not exist, I would be using helix, neovim, or emacs as I did before.

torben-friis 1y ago
It’s not at all slow when compared to IntelliJ products or similar. It doesn’t compete with editors, it competes with IDEs.
hu3 1y ago
Interestingly I disagree with all your points about VSCode. It's fast, barebones by default, UI is minimal and it's Open Source enough that competitors forked from it. I guess YMMV because there is a comment in this post from another user about Zed being sluggish.
- pimeys 1y ago
  I tried VSCode many times in my life and just hated the experience so much. It put me away from GUI editors for years, didn't want to try any of them. So ugly and so sluggish. Zed was the first one that put me to rethink my position. It is so snappy on my Linux workstation and I don't have any issues with it's GUI. I finally switched from vim et.al. But I know I have "weird" opinions, I also really dislike Apple products and their software.
  - typpilol 1y ago
    My experience is the exact opposite Vscode has never had any input delay for me
- timeon 1y ago
  Even not counting the LSP, for a text editor, it eats quite large amount of RAM.
IshKebab 1y ago
VSCode is actually not slow. The problem is to make it useful you need to add quite a few extensions, and those can be slow. That itself wouldn't be too bad but VSCode doesn't expose any information about what is causing the slowness. You end up with "VSCode is slow and it could be due to any one of the dozen extensions I have installed", which effectively means that VSCode is slow. It remains to be seen if Zed can avoid that though.
- WD-42 1y ago
  VSCode (and all Electron based editors) have undeniable input latency. Zed is built by the same team that developed Atom and Electron and one of their stated goals is to make up for the shortcomings of these technologies. If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it.
  - Barrin92 1y ago
    >If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it. I don't think this is a fair claim. When you start doing an apples to apples comparison, that is to say make full use of IDE and auto-completion features it's difficult to see a difference given that the latency and speed of the plugins starts to dominate any millisecond difference in input latency or rendering speed.
    - WD-42 1y ago
      No. When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately. All other IDE features like auto-completion happen asynchronously.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
        > When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately. Seems to work the same for me in VSCode, CLion, and nvim. I don't doubt that you have issues with it (I've experienced slow editors & laggy input, it sucks) but I don't think it's inherent to VSCode. Doesn't mean it's not a bug, but if I had that issue I'd try with no extensions to verify, then binary search disabling the extensions I want until I find the one causing the lag.

monstrado 1y ago

I think the point of ACP being an open protocol is so that other editors (e.g. VSCode, Neovim) can implement it as a receiver and integration with ClaudeCode/GeminiCLI/... would just work.

kiney 1y ago

I had to use VSCode for some projects in the past because it was what was available on the clients workstations... I can't imagine having to use that laggy electron abomination all the time. For me Zed is sent from heaven, because my previously preferred editor (geany) hast basically zero developtment nowadays.

meowface 1y ago
I normally care a ton about latency and in the main project I work on I put extreme focus on reducing input latency in text input fields, but... I've used VS Code for ages. I tried Zed. I don't really feel a difference. It's smoother but VS Code is more than smooth enough for me and has tons of features I rely on that don't exist in dev. Meanwhile, when I tried Ghostty I noticed a significant improvement in "typefeel" compared to iTerm. So I'm not immune to detecting such a difference. I will try Zed again though.
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  >>I don't really feel a difference. >>It's smoother but...
typpilol 1y ago
How big was his project bc I've never had any input away and I've worked on some pretty good size projects. Are you using an old computer or something?
- kiney 1y ago
  I mainly used VSCode on locked down corporate laptops. Usually good hardware but running windows and corporate security bloat. But where I was allowed to install alternative editors they were snappy.

mikeocool 1y ago

Zed's main selling point over VSCode for me is the lack of a slight delay between when I press a key and when the character appears. VSCode has always felt ever so slightly sluggish to me, and I find it maddening as I type.

pmg101 1y ago
So glad to hear I'm not alone! I continue to use SublimeText for this reason. Yet it doesn't seem to bother others.
- WD-42 1y ago
  I think a lot of people forget how long ago Electron/Atom were released, and the subsequent Cambrian explosion of Electron based apps and editors like VSCode. There's probably a huge amount of developers that haven't used anything else.
  - RussianCow 1y ago
    Ironically, I used JetBrains products for years before switching to VS Code because the latter felt so much faster. So it definitely depends on what you're used to. Zed feels significantly faster than VS Code, but it also doesn't feel as polished and "complete" as an IDE, so I'm going to stick to VS Code for now for the same reason I stuck to JetBrains IDEs for so long.
- pkorzeniewski 1y ago
  Same here, still using Sublime Text due to its general snappiness, but can't wait for Zed to be released on Windows, it feels like a modern successor to ST that just keeps getting better.
IshKebab 1y ago
Weird, I tried it recently and found it actually a bit laggier than VSCode. The rendering is much worse quality too. Are you using Vim mode or something like that?

kombine 1y ago

I switched to Neovim a year ago, and while I did spend a significant amount of time on configuring it, I haven't touched my config for months now - and I'm perfectly happy with it. There's things I can improve, but it does what I want.

californical 1y ago
I’m in the same boat. I spent a lot of nights for a couple weeks getting everything tuned just right, in the beginning. But now, several years later, it really doesn’t take much. I spend maybe 2-3 hours once every few months, and that’s usually just adding a bunch of features that sound nice to make my life better. I’ve easily gone 6+ months without touching neovim config, if not longer, because it’s unnecessary. It only matters if you want to further improve your editor

SubiculumCode 1y ago

I am sure some would have said the same about why would anyone switch to using Linux when there was Microsoft Windows.

charcircuit 1y ago
Especially now that Windows has WSL. You can even open GUI Linux apps just as if they were regular apps.
- SubiculumCode 1y ago
  Yeah, but you still have to deal with all the other Windows shit.

LocalPCGuy 1y ago

There is always a "better mousetrap", and there are those that continue to use the old one because they "know how it works and it's set up just the way I like it". And there are others that try every new mousetrap that hits the market. (and that's ok, not slighting either one) I will say that I personally have never really gelled with VSCode no matter how much I try to customize it, it still is just a bit off. For me, it's like it's too much to be a simple editor like SublimeText or NeoVim, but not quite enough to be an IDE like IntelliJ or Visual Studio (full). It does just enough that I expect a bit more of it and it often fails to deliver. Right now I tend to just use 2 editors - one very simple one for viewing/editing text files and one IDE (currently IntelliJ) for coding in a project. On topic - Zed is actually a really nice editor. It had some rough edges last time I tried it, but it's probably about time to give it another go.

stuaxo 1y ago

I use zed when I need to quickly edit something, it pops up so fast- everything else feels sluggish.

jryio 1y ago

Zed succeeds at reducing the switching cost. I used NeoVim for ten years daily and configured it way back in college days. I thought I would be unable to move to a GUI editor and it turns out that the speed and efficiency of Zed plus the almost one-to-one mapping of Vim features means that I am extremely productive in Zed.

Karrot_Kream 1y ago

I wanted to like VSCode but it has enough input latency on my machines that it's not that enjoyable when I'm "locked in". Also if I'm running a bunch of services in Docker on MacOS (which means they're running VMs sigh) the overhead of VSCode is just too much and the system starts swapping constantly grinding the whole thing to a halt. I also find configuring it a pain. Every configuration pane feels ad-hoc and not part of a holistic, configurable system. Emacs has lots of crusty bits and an annoying event loop that you have to really work around but is designed a lot more holistically than VSCode. Zed to me feels like a great batteries-included editor and I still run it as my non-emacs alternate editor. I wish its configuration was a bit more discoverable (especially with configuring linters/formatters), but it's 95% of what I need 95% of the time.

the__alchemist 1y ago

It sounds like you haven't tried Jetbrains IDEs. I understand still preferring VsCode in that case, but I think you would be saying "I prefer VsCode" vs "I don't see a reason". A big con with JB is they are very slow. The upside is that they manage multi-file projects, refactoring, and introspection far better than VsCode.

norman784 1y ago

OTOH I'd ten to prefer as less plugins as possible in VSCode, just because they are inherently dangerous, I'd like Zed plugins that are WASM, so they don't have access to the world. But I agree that VSCode Typescript support is better than Zed, it works with weird projects setup, while Zed has more troubles. I at work VSCode and Zed/Helix for my projects, generally I use Zed when want to do some AI stuff, otherwise I just use Helix.