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I love Zed and I'm glad you now have native support for Claude. I previously ran it using the instructions in this post: https://benswift.me/blog/2025/07/23/run

• cnqso 1y ago
  What Zed lacks in code generation quality it makes up for in not-being-an-Electron-app
  • shreddit 1y ago
    Does it really? At the end of the day i need it to do my job. Ideal values don’t help me doing my job. So i choose the editor best suited and the features i need. And that’s not zed at the moment.
    • mikepurvis 1y ago
      There's an analogue here with programming language iteration— Python, Ruby and friends showed what the semantics were that were needed, and then a decade or two later, Go and Rust took those semantics and put them in compiled, performance-oriented languages. Electron has been a powerful tool for quickly iterating UIs and plugin architectures in VSCode, Brackets, Atom, etc, now the window is open for a modern editor to deliver that experience without the massive memory footprint and UI stalls.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    • ics 1y ago
      I agree with the main point but I am on battery often and the difference between native vs. one or multiple Electron apps in "doing my job" is easily several hours lost to battery life or interruptions for charging. Not a huge deal, but it's not my ideals that make me frown at charge cycles occurring twice as often.
  • TiredOfLife 1y ago
    Zed includes node.js runtime and 100s of megabytes of javascript. It is essentially Electron.
    • beckler 1y ago
      I'm gonna need you to back that claim up dawg, because the only thing I see the node runtime used for, is for when the user loads a js project. then it's basically just a proxy for node/npm afaik.
    • skhameneh 1y ago
      Complete nonsense. https://zed.dev/blog/videogame https://zed.dev/blog/videogame https://zed.dev/blog/we-have-to-start-over https://zed.dev/blog/we-have-to-start-over
      • TiredOfLife 1y ago
        ~/.local/share/zed/
        • Kudos 1y ago
          No one's debating your first sentence, they're debating your second.
  • iamsaitam 1y ago
    and then loses by not having plugin support
    • nextaccountic 1y ago
      It does have extensions, but they are much more limited. In particular they can't define UI elements inside buffers, so you can't replicate something with rich UI like the Git integration in an extension.
  • llbbdd 1y ago
    Every single new HN thread should come with an automod post badmouthing Electron to save everyone time.
    • dcreater 1y ago
      its a bad anti-pattern that trades developer convenience for performance, UX etc. Its fair to hate on it With the advent of coding agents, I really hope we see devs move away - back to the traditional approach of using native frameworks/languages as now, you can write for 1 platform and easily task AI to handle other platforms.
      • evilduck 1y ago
        Absolutely nothing new has been said about Electron since like 2015, it's boring as hell to downvote and scroll past.
        • llbbdd 1y ago
          Fucking Amen.
      • llbbdd 1y ago
        This will never happen and it's a bizarre, legacy fantasy, borne of a fixed imaginary ideal of what computing should be. Programming will continue to move in the direction of ease-of-use and every time I see an out-of-topic reference to Electron in this forum I feel insane, like I'm fighting upstream. You will not see this - you will see more Electron apps, because that is the modern way of building cross-platform apps, and if you genuinely don't understand why that is I don't know how to explain it to you. You won't see another version of those because nobody is going to waste their time building cross-platform native apps at a native layer to performatively impress posters on HN. You, and seemingly everybody else on HN, can continue to pretend that devex doesn't matter, but that's the difference I guess between caring about devex and shipping products.
        • arianvanp 1y ago
  • diss 1y ago
    This is simply not true… that’s the problem. As much as I like Zed, using it for the sake of not being an electron app doesn’t make any sense when Cursor’s edit prediction adds so much value. I’m not starved of resources and can run Cursor just fine – as far as Electron apps go VS Code is great, performant enough. I value productivity. I’ll very happily drop Cursor for Zed the second edit prediction is comparable. I’m eagerly waiting.
  • ffin 1y ago
    I find Zed has some really frustrating UX choices. I’ll run an operation and it will either fail quietly, or be running in the background for a while with no indication that it is doing so.
• metadaemon 1y ago
  I'd also like to second this and probably will in every Zed post. This is the primary reason I'm not ready to switch to Zed just yet.
• scottcorgan 1y ago
  I'll third this. AI autocomplete is THE most efficient and helpful feature of Cursor, not the agents.
  • danenania 1y ago
    Same sentiment for me. I barely use the agent, but love their autocomplete. Though I sometimes hear people say that GH Copilot has largely caught up on this front. Can anyone speak to that? I haven’t compared them recently. If performance were equal, I’d strongly consider going back to GH Copilot just because I don’t love my main IDE being a fork. I occasionally encounter IDE-level bugs in Cursor that are unrelated to the AI features. Perhaps they’re in the upstream as well, but I always wonder if a. there will be a delay in merging fixes or b. whether the fork is introducing new bugs. Just an inherent tradeoff I guess of forking a complex codebase.
    • debian3 1y ago
      They haven’t. They had time to catch up, but they didn’t. They recently switched their auto complete model from 4o-mini to 4.1-mini. It’s not smarter at predicting what you are trying to do. Nothing magical like last year experience on Cursor (I haven’t tested lately, so it might be even better now). I heard Windsurf is quite good and the closest to Cursor magic, available on Windsurf free plan (unlimited autocomplete). I should give that a try.
      • dcreater 1y ago
        They plan to allow defining your own endpoint for auto-complete soon and when they do switching to a better model like Sonnet or a fine tune should beat Cursor
  • bastawhiz 1y ago
    I don't know, I think it's a tie. I can have the agent do some busy work or refactoring while I'm writing code with the autocomplete. I can tell it how I want a file split up or how I want stuff changed, and tell it that I'll be making other changes and where. It's smart enough to ignore me and my work while it keeps itself busy with another task. Sort of the best of both worlds. Right now I have it replacing DraftJS with another library while I'm working on some feature requests.
• hajile 1y ago
  I was somewhat surprised to find that Zed still doesn't have a way to add your own local autocomplete AI using something like Ollama. Something like Qwen 2.5 coder at a tiny 1.5b parameters will work just fine for the stuff that I want. It runs fast and works when I'm between internet connections too. I'd also like to see a company like Zed allow me to buy a license of their autocomplete AI model to run locally rather than renting and running it on their servers. I'd also pay for something in the 10-15b parameter range that used more limited training data focused almost entirely on programming documentation and books along with professional business writing. Something with the coding knowledge of Qwen Coder combined with the professionalism and predictability of IBM Granite 3. I'd pay quite a lot for such an agent (especially if it got updates every couple of months that worked in new documentation, bugfixes, github threads, etc to keep the answers up-to-date).
  • slekker 1y ago
    Ditto, that was one of the dealbreakers for me using Zed, the Copilot integration is miles behind Cursor's
  • rolisz 1y ago
    > I'd also pay for something in the 10-15b parameter range that used more limited training data focused almost entirely on programming documentation and books along with professional business writing. Unfortunately, pretraining on a lot of data (~everything they can get their hands on) is needed to give current LLMs their "intelligence" (for whatever definition of intelligence). Using less training data doesn't work as well for now. There definitely not enough programming and business writing to train a good model only on that.
    • hajile 1y ago
      If the LLM isn’t getting its data about coding projects from those projects and their surrounding documentation and tutorials, what is it going to train with? Maybe it also needs some amount of other training data for basic speech patterns, but I’d again show IBM Granite as an example that professional and to-the-point LLMs are possible.
  • 1y ago
• kelthuzad 1y ago
  >One thing that still suffers is AI autocomplete. While I tried Zed's own solution and supermaven (now part of Cursor), I still find Cursor's AI autocomplete and predictions much more accurate (even pulling up a file via search is more accurate in Cursor). It's not only the autocomplete. I've never had any issue with Cursor while Zed panicked, crashed and behaved inconsistently often (the login indicator would flicker between states while you were logged in and vice versa, clicking some menus would crash it and similar annoyances). Another strange thing I've observed is the reminder in the UI that rating an AI prompt would send your _entire chat history_ to Zed, which might be a major red flag for many people. One could accidentally rate it without being aware of that and then Zed has access to large and potentially sensitive parts of your company's code - I can't imagine any company being happy with that. >I am glad to hear that Zed got a round of funding. https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed There are plenty of great VCs out there, going with Sequoia will definitely come with some unpleasant late consequences. >This will go a long way to creating real competition to Cursor in the form of a quality IDE not built on VSCode There are many "real competitors" to Cursor, like Windsurf, (Neo-)Vim, Helix, Emacs, Jetbrains. It's also worth being aware that not everybody is too excited about letting AI slop be the dominant part of their work. Some people prefer sprinkling a little AI here and there, instead of letting it do pretty much everything.
  • svara 1y ago
    > I've never had any issue with Cursor Glad it's working for you but I think you might be the only one!
• hn_saver 1y ago
  "even pulling up a file via search is more accurate in Cursor" Huh? it takes it sometimes like 40s to find some file with the fuzzy search for me. In that time im going to the terminal running a "find" command with lots of * before I get some result in cursor
• atombender 1y ago
  I wonder if Augment [1] are working on a Zed plugin. I've been using Augment for more than a year in Jetbrains IDEs, and been very impressed by it, both the autocomplete and the Cursor-style agent. I've looked at Cursor and couldn't figure out why anyone needed to use a dedicated IDE when Augment exists as a plugin. Colleagues who have used Cursor have switched to Augment and say it's better. Seems to me like Augment is an AI tool flying under most people's radar; not sure why it's not all over Hacker News. [1] https://www.augmentcode.com/ https://www.augmentcode.com/
• epolanski 1y ago
  I now plain hate Cursor's auto complete, it's too aggressive I cannot write any code anymore, it seems to have hijacked CMD too, not just tab.
  • 3uler 1y ago
    This is why I’m not a fan of auto complete in my editor. Much rather pair program with an agent. Give the agent as much context as possible and let it go, review and correct the implementation, let it go again, finish it off… The I just find the autocomplete a little annoying in my workflow, especially with the local self-hosted models I need to use at work. Claude Code on corporate approved AWS Bedrock account.
    • epolanski 1y ago
      I like autocomplete when it used to be a bit slower and only act on tab. Right now it's borderline impossible to write code, the autocompletion results are loaded ultra fast and Cursor maps different buttons to autocompleting functionality. It's no longer usable for me. I'm fine getting autocompletes, but I decide when to trigger it, ideally after reading it, like this I can't even type.
• benswift 1y ago
  Glad it was helpful :) I’ll keep an eye on this ‘proper’ Zed support for sure, although the current setup is working just fine so I might wait for v0.2.