23 ms·

Zed is our office

• blks 11mo ago
  I lost all faith and interest in Zed after they introduced AI features.
  • bigyabai 11mo ago
    That's alright, there's always Sublime Text.
    • maratc 11mo ago
      Or TextMate -- that Sublime was, let's say, "inspired by."
    • blks 11mo ago
      My main editor for the last 15 years is Emacs.
  • acdyer824 11mo ago
    you dropped this king
  • frankfrank13 11mo ago
    Why? Its still incredibly plug and play, by default you don't even see it
  • jazzyjackson 11mo ago
    The AI features work well but to each their own
  • richardhenry 11mo ago
    I feel the opposite way, but fwiw you can turn off all AI features in Zed by adding `"disable_ai": true` to your settings.json.
    • blks 11mo ago
      Yes, that is correct, but this indicates change of the product direction that make me lost any trust or interest in it. Their core features were done nicely, they should have stayed and developed them, maybe introduce more file editing related functionality.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• bguthrie 11mo ago
  I hadn't realized Zed was built from the ground up to support collaborative programming. I liked it already, and I like it even more now.
• phito 11mo ago
  I was very surprised to find a "forum" integrated in Zed when I first opened it. But to be honest, it is not something I ever felt the need for and overall I don't like having this in my text editor. So far it never got in my way and that's a good thing, I hope it stays that way :)
  • theoldgreybeard 11mo ago
    yeah, I love Zed - but I turn all this stuff off (even the AI)
• siva7 11mo ago
  This looks more like a collab note-taking app. Don't know about code since i don't code anymore inside an editor but for collab things who knows
• wateralien 11mo ago
  Zed is lovely and I hope it becomes super successful but this kind of mass collaboration might be ok for meeting minutes... maybe. But thinking of it for coding it gives me shingles. Code by mass live committee. Yikes.
  • drcongo 11mo ago
    It's just pair programming when you're doing it on code so if you can bear pair programming you'll be fine. Personally, I hate it.
    • wateralien 11mo ago
      Actively programming in pairs (or more) is also not for me. Reviewing work async is great IMO though.
      • xpe 11mo ago
        Yeah, people are different, but a lot of this difference results from various constraints, such as cultural practices around collaboration or technological options. Many of these limitations probably shouldn't be locked in by our tools or norms. When learning a new way of thinking or moving (i.e. martial arts) people often really benefit from high-bandwidth, low-latency, shared-viewport-onto-reality interactions. Watching someone's cursor move while they talk is one way to get a window into their problem-solving toolkit.
    • electroly 11mo ago
      Pair programming usually has a single "driver" on the keyboard to keep things controllable. Here, everybody is driving: "dozens of cursors are concurrently editing the same file in real-time."
      • drcongo 11mo ago
        That's not how they, or anyone else, uses it on code though - that's on their notes. This is just a feature, it's up to you how you use it.
• zamalek 11mo ago
  I have been trying to figure out how this works in concert with Git (or SCM in general). Is one of the developers in the session merely responsible for it?
  • giancarlostoro 11mo ago
    I mean, you have the same "problem" when peer coding in person. Whoever is officially working on the fix will commit it. I've helped devs get around a hump for ages, you don't get "credit" for all the work you do. It's why I hate most ticketing systems (when management starts to ask why your tasks fell behind), they don't let you correctly track multiple people when they work together.
    • sensen 11mo ago
      Does a `Co-authored-by:` trailer in the commit message not resolve this issue?
• Octoth0rpe 11mo ago
  I _really really_ want to try this feature, but only if I can selfhost the collaboration server. If there is any way to do this, it's not obvious. Given that as I understand it, lots of project details will pass through Zed's servers, I can't imagine any enterprises would knowingly allow this without some kind of SLA with Zed.
  • nixpulvis 11mo ago
    It could be easier, but it is supported AFAIK: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/8260#issuecomment-1965463519 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/8260#issuecomme...
    • mikaylamaki 11mo ago
      Unfortunately, we no longer support self hosting. We're planning on reintroducing it once we've polished the single player experience a bit more :)
      • Octoth0rpe 11mo ago
        Thanks for the update. Can't wait to hear more!
      • nixpulvis 11mo ago
        Oh, that's unfortunate. Why not support it at all, even if just for people who are kinda hacking it in?
        • mikaylamaki 11mo ago
          We’ve been growing and have had to scale authentication beyond what our original collab server could handle. Not many people are using collab yet, we’re prioritizing non-collaborative features (like our recent Windows release), and we’re planning on rebuilding all of this on top of DeltaDB. Fundamentally, it just fell through the cracks. Self hosting will be a vital feature for users and enterprises though, we’re planning on revisiting it once we have a few more features settled :D
• Aperocky 11mo ago
  commence feature creep
  • dcchambers 11mo ago
    The collaboration tools built into Zed have basically existed since the product launched. It is one of the primary drivers behind the product - they wanted to build the best editor for remote code collaboration.
    • Aperocky 11mo ago
      I think the most difficult question are going to be how do you constraint that core feature without ever wanting to add more to it? For instance, collaboration is a huge topic. You can have coding collaboration on the file, and that would be basic and appropriate, you can then replicate slack and you'll have chat rooms, which is entering creep territory, but it's natural! Then soon the chat room will need to link with issues and you can now have TODOs linked to some kanban board and we should be able to speak while we code on the same file! And this goes on and on. It's exceedingly rare that the organization found hard courage to specifically avoid features that looks like easy pickings for the purpose of avoiding them.
  • max-privatevoid 11mo ago
    The collab editing stuff was Zed's original gimmick. The AI stuff is the real feature creep.
    • goosejuice 11mo ago
      Without AI, the company would be dead in the water. You can very easily disable all AI features. I think Tuple is a better collab app, but far more expensive.
  • TiredOfLife 11mo ago
    Many of these features were in Zed since first release. Also Zed was announced as a closed source comercial tool.
• otikik 11mo ago
  I ... don't like this one bit. I hope Slack doesn't start including a text editor.
  • Jailbird 11mo ago
    There are canvases.... Some similarities if you squint. Clearly not for code use but for shared durable notes....
• xrd 11mo ago
  I love Zed. I, mostly, love the direction they are taking the editor in. But. There are now two times I see Zed going in the wrong direction. The AI integration was one. This feels like the wrong direction again. I never really liked the AI integration. It felt off to me. I do love coding with Claude and I think I know why. It presents the "information I need to know" in a way my puny brain can handle it. Colored diffs. Summaries of what happened. It isn't perfect, but it has been incredibly productive for me. I never got that from Zed's AI integration; perhaps this has been improved, but I was up and running with Claude in a way that I never was with Zed. This write-up sounds like "slack in my editor." If it is that, I hate it. Slack has destroyed company culture and communication. People, who are inherently lazy (I'm an old Perl programmer, so I can say that), have stopped thinking carefully and writing carefully, and in that void just throw the first thing in their head into a slack channel and think that is "collaboration" and "communication." It's toxic. For example, this comment rubs me the wrong way: "Staff members hop in, volunteer to show off a cool feature or bug fix they worked on, and get real-time feedback from the rest of the team." I don't think our human brains work well with "real time feedback" UNLESS we have the information presented in a way that gives us massive clues on what's right and what's wrong. Reading a wall of text is not the way. A colorized git diff, or a video, or an entirely new way of presenting information might make real time feedback possible, but I am highly skeptical a text editor is the way or place to do that. And, I'm an emacs user and love text UIs, don't get me wrong. Do I want to have "generalized one off rooms for things that don't fit anywhere?" I definitely don't want that. I want you AS THE AUTHOR to be really intentional about what's important and fit that into the proper channels. I need to know that information, but I don't want to know about, nor have the unspoken expectation that I SHOULD have known, about the other stuff. And, I want "managers" (if that still exists) to be carefully thinking about those channels and how the company is organized and push that structure down to people in the organization. As Zed is the office, having one off rooms instead of in person coffee time feels very dangerous. That's the world a lot of people live in, but I don't like that office. If this comment is the guiding light, then I'm worried: "We're building toward a future where collaboration is continuous conversation, not discrete commits—where every discussion, edit, and insight remains linked to the code as it evolves, accessible to both teammates and AI agents." I'm human, I have kids, I have other interests. A continuous conversation is impossible for me. I want discrete ideas, and right now, discrete commits and PRs are better, IMHO, than what I hear here. It's hard, but setting the expectation that to be successful I need to be paying attention to a river of information flowing by seems like a bad idea to me. I don't buy that Zed solves the problem of hiding the pieces of information that I don't need to see. Oh hey! I have an idea. Why not use AI to summarize those conversations into discrete pieces! </joke> I do love Zed. It is the best GUI editor out there. I know they will get it right. I just am skeptical about this direction and feel it misses the forest for the trees.
• jes5199 11mo ago
  I could imagine that in ten years git will feel strangely slow and ceremonial. Why not just continuously work and continuously deploy live-edited software
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • snerbles 11mo ago
    Often projects need a history of stable checkpoints, and source control is one way to provide that.
    • fragmede 11mo ago
      Yes, but does it need all the ceremony surrounding it? If, every time I saved the file, the changes were analyzed and committed to git, and a useful commit message included, and commits squashed automatically and pushed and tested and tagged (using magic, let's say); if the system existed in the background, seamlessly, how would our interactions with source control and with other developers look?
      • apsurd 11mo ago
        automated commit message will tell you the "what" not the "why". In any circle of "what makes a good commit message and why even do it" discussions, invariably the recommendation is to explain the "why" and leave out the self-evident "what". If your stance is that commit and commit messages can be automated away then we might as well not even have them. I don't share this view, but yeah in this world we don't need AI to do things that shouldn't be done in the first place.
        • jes5199 11mo ago
          increasingly, the automated systems have access to the original ticket or bug report, and maybe even the conversation while implementation is happening. They can record the “why”
• desireco42 11mo ago
  As long as I don't have to use, feel free to include it. It is really not essential feature for editor. I run update and Collab requires you to sign in... which again, it is fine if you want it. I don't, so it can be dormant, icon is really tiny, doesn't take much space. The feature of Zed that is most annoying yet essential is frequent updates. Pretty much daily when I switch to Zed window, I can expect update and restart, which messes up my window layout, so this is annoyance. Getting updates and knowing you guys are shipping good stuff is what is essential. I think integrating terminal ai's is great move and useful. Sometimes I use it like that, often I use it in terminal (like the outside of the editor terminal) and switch to editor to review or update stuff. Same with git. I am old-fashioned.
• animeshjain 11mo ago
  I tried the collaborative features to pair program with a colleague a few months ago, but it was bad. It was very flaky in establishing a connection. In the cases we were able to establish a connection, the voice chat would not work. We tried to make it work for a couple of days, and then we gave up. Has there been lots of work in the past few months on the collaborative features?
• conradev 11mo ago
  If you've been a developer long enough, you might recall the teletype package for Atom—both built by Zed's founders. I first experienced this in SubEthaEdit in 2013 or so, but it has been around since the early 2000s: Appropriately working together on a truly collaborative tool, Martin Ott, Martin Pittenauer, Dominik Wagner, and Ulrich Bauer of Technische Universitat Munchen won the Best Mac OS X Student Project for Hydra 1.0.1, a Rendezvous-based text editor that enables multiple people to contribute to a shared document. (Adam and about ten other attendees at MacHack used Hydra to take notes during this year’s Hack Contest.) It seems like the "unlock" here that makes it different this time is organization-wide sharing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubEthaEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubEthaEdit https://tidbits.com/2003/06/30/apple-announces-design-awards-2003/#:~:text=Appropriately%20working%20together%20on%20a%20truly%20collaborative%20tool%2C https://tidbits.com/2003/06/30/apple-announces-design-awards...
  • sandbags 11mo ago
    I'd forgotten all about it but SubEthaEdit was such an amazing tech when we were using to collaborate internationally back in about '04. It went off my radar but I am glad to see its still available as a free app.
  • Aurornis 11mo ago
    SubEthaEdit was a very inspiring software project for me. The fact that a small team could, in a few months, produce an amazing app that solved real problems and gained notoriety was amazing. As time goes on it feels like much of the low hanging fruit opportunities in software is disappearing faster and faster. I'm also a fan of Zed and everything they're doing, but it's notable that shipping next-gen editor software takes a lot more developer effort now than it did in the 2000s.
    • leetrout 11mo ago
      > it feels like much of the low hanging fruit opportunities in software is disappearing faster and faster. Yes I agree but so many things that might seem "done" (and in someways I think software/SaaS as an ecosystem is "done" compared to where we came from). BUT - so many companies just bloat themselves and their products. I think the end of ZIRP is going to have an effect on that (more enshitification / rent seeking for sure) and I think there will be an opportunity to iterate and make copyware that doesn't take the higher development efforts. We really need a winning electron alternative that is more resource friendly. That, IMO, will be a big game changer and I know there are lots of promising alternatives already.
• domenkozar 11mo ago
  You guys need to figure out how to create Slack shared channels in Zed and we're all switching until they won't be needed anymore.
  • alberth 11mo ago
    Can you share more on this. While I do not work at Zed, I'm curious to hear more about this use case for my own company needs.
    • leovander 11mo ago
      Your company has a user pool, you sign a BAA or start working with a partner company that has their user pool. Instead of creating slack accounts in both you can share external slack rooms that only people that are invited in/from their respective orgs can join without having to co-mingle employee user pools.
      • satvikpendem 11mo ago
        But why would external partners want to look at your code? I guess if you're also integrating with them? But generally you just give them repo access instead. For Slack, it's different as messaging is a core feature to collaborate between different people in different companies, but looking at code is a very specific use case.
        • leovander 11mo ago
          Not sure, I was only answering in regards as to what Slack shared rooms brings to the table for companies in the form of letting Project Managers/Account Managers have direct line of contact with clients. Code wise I guess you can could be working with any agency or contractors and you could collab on PR reviews? No idea to be honest.
• aanet 11mo ago
  /offtopic Is it just my vision, or are websites getting super low contrast these days, esp the text-heavy ones?
  • bityard 11mo ago
    I'd say it's medium gray on white, which is not too bad in my subjective opinion. I have seen far worse. Light gray on white was "trendy" for a while and dark gray or dark green on black has always been popular among the edgy crowd.
  • gpm 11mo ago
    I feel like that's been a trend for the past decade at this point. I don't think this one is particularly egregious but it ain't great either. Could be your monitor as well.
  • duderific 11mo ago
    Also the typeface, kerning and line heights are a bit - unconventional, which doesn't help the readability
• porphyra 11mo ago
  Haha it's like Google Wave!
• tracker1 11mo ago
  These are definitely some interesting features, though not sure I'm in any position to take advantage of them at all. The multi-user editing is kind of cool... there's an ANSI art tool (PabloDraw) that you can run a host session so multiple artists can create text art, and I thought back when I first saw it, that it might be cool to be able for multiple editors to work on a project. I've used some of the collab stuff with VS Code, but haven't done enough to even begin to compare. Not to mention that in a lot of workplaces, self-hosting or otherwise layers of bureaucracy stand in the way.
• mariusor 11mo ago
  Is this the new Zawinski's Law? Instead of extending to read email, Zed extends to enable chat and voice-video. :)
  • antoniojtorres 11mo ago
    I’ve been using “The Notioning” for the last few years to refer to the convergence of tools like slack adding notion like features, clickup adding notion and slack type features, and so on. There seems to be a stable set of features that retains teams in an org
  • verdverm 11mo ago
    Perhaps we can call it the "Hashimoto Valley", analogous to the Uncanny Valley, but for DX
    • satvikpendem 11mo ago
      What does this have to do with Hashimoto?
      • verdverm 11mo ago
        HCL / TF DX and my missassociation of Zed / Hashimoto (see where I was corrected elsewhere in these comments)
• nixpulvis 11mo ago
  I would love to see collab servers take the same path as LSPs in being standarized and integrated across various editors and IDEs. I would love to work more closely with my VSCode peers, for example. Of course some features may be outside the standard and only supported with likewise editors, e.g. voice chat perhaps, but having shared cursors and a text chat would be a good start.
  • bluehatbrit 11mo ago
    This is what I'd like to see as well. These collaboration tools are really good, but I barely use them because they always assume that you and your team are using the same editor. Most of the time that's just not the case, so I've used them a handful of times but beyond that there's little opportunity. It's probably not an issue the Zed team will experience as they're all naturally using their own editor. Hopefully it's on their radar though.
    • satvikpendem 11mo ago
      > because they always assume that you and your team are using the same editor. Network effects are probably a strength for a company, not a drawback (which it is for the user of course). Even VSCode has some notion of network effects, such as their proprietary extension store.
  • paradox460 11mo ago
    We actually had it that way 20 years ago. SubEthaEdit could work with Coda 2 and TextMate
    • p4bl0 11mo ago
      And there were an Emacs minor mode and a Vim plugin too that did this too, both for the SubEthaEdit protocol and for the one of the Gobby editor (https://gobby.github.io/ https://gobby.github.io/).
• huflungdung 11mo ago
  [dead]
• the__alchemist 11mo ago
  Here is where I've settled on for Zed. I initially thought it might be a Sublime replacement for one-off files, but it seems it's geared towards projects. It's not as powerful as Jetbrains (RustRover, PyCharm etc), but is much faster. So here's how I'm using Zed: - On my Tablet, which is too slow for Jetbrains IDEs to run smoothly - On certain projects I have which choke Jetbrains IDEs. (Due to macro use maybe?) I think its' a much nicer experience than VsCode, which I admittedly haven't figured out to run in a project-oriented way. I'm also trying their GPUI library, but am in the early stages, so can't really comment on how it compares to EGUI.
  • nixpulvis 11mo ago
    Zed is the only modern IDE-like editor which is fast enough to replace (n)vim for me. I plan to use it for more and more projects, but I've had minor issues with it's Vi-mode. I'll always remain someone plugged into vim because I need it sometimes when shelled over a terminal. Editing files over SSH can work with editor support, but is often less reliable or fast than jumping through whatever hoops I need to to get an SSH connection once and then doing everything from there.
    • the__alchemist 11mo ago
      Incidentally, I use Vim for editing files via SSH as you do, or if I'm in WSL, but haven't figured out how to use it for projects!
      • nixpulvis 11mo ago
        I just have a few plugins which help. Mainly the LSP for gotodef and popovers for type info, etc. This was what finally made me transition to neovim. Also a tree viewer, Startify, and :Rg for ripgrep integration. Those are my big ones. Sadly my workflow of using `!` to get back to my terminal and things like `!make` or `!cargo build` is fucked in neovim. So I do a lot of ctrl-z and the a lot of killing stopped processes I forgot I suspended. I've complained about this in various threads and chats, but the developers aren't interested in letting us use the old vim `!` which is super lame.
• sayrer 11mo ago
  Haha: Can't find a good Windows laptop. It's true, most of them are bad. Galaxy Book5 Pro or Microsoft Surface are OK.
  • thewebguyd 11mo ago
    Ever since Apple Silicon macs came out, it's been a real struggle. Almost 6 years later and there is still nothing on the market that: * Has the same level of performance * With the same or better battery life * With the same quality of screen * With the same quality of speakers and touchpad * Runs as quiet or as cool as the Apple Silicon macbooks. If you add in "needs to be able to run Linux" your choices go down from maybe 1 or 2 to 0. They all have some sort of compromise. Either the speakers, screen, keyboard, touchpad, build quality, battery life, or thermals. I have a Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon X Elite, and it's pretty close. Checks the boxes for Screen, build quality, and touchpad. Loses out on speakers and battery life, and the fans need to run a lot more than my M4 Pro MBP does. It also loses on performance, and it doesn't run Linux. Windows on Arm also still has a lot of little quirks and bugs that start to become daily annoyances. It's incredibly frustrating. I want, essentially, my 14" M4 MacBook Pro, but in a Linux laptop, and there's no OEM out there that's fulfilling that need without compromises. Apple keeps pulling ahead in silicon and every other laptop OEM is just being left in the dust, shrugging their shoulders, and putting out the same old 1200p 16:9 plastic garbage they have always been putting out.
• _se 11mo ago
  Don't tell the Posthog guys about this. Far too much collaboration going on here!!!
• _gmkt 11mo ago
  Just another fence for monkeys :)
• tacone 11mo ago
  Don't want to sound negative, yet when I read "it's in our DNA", I immediately lose interest.
• Redster 11mo ago
  It would have been good to include a link to the collaboration docs https://zed.dev/docs/collaboration https://zed.dev/docs/collaboration in the article. There were a lot of links in that article and a lot of assumptions that I knew how things worked. And I daily drive and like Zed, but I had so many questions.
• robinhood 11mo ago
  Technically really impressive. In practice, completely unpractical in any medium to large organization. And although I adore Zed's speed and reliability, I still don't understand why we need these features at all.
  • jazzyjackson 11mo ago
    Because Zed is not somebody's side project, it's a business looking for ways to pay everybody's salary > Collaboration as it stands today is considered alpha, and for the time being, is free for all to use! Peruse the source code.
  • ModernMech 11mo ago
    Because "maximum editor" was achieved with Visual Studio Code (which is why all these new editors look and feel like VSC), the same way "maximum toothbrush" was achieved with the electric toothbrush. But the toothbrush industry had to keep going, so now we have a $400 bluetooth connected toothbrush-as-a-service that monitors your brushing habits to optimize teeth cleanliness, with brush heads that cost more than 5 regular toothbrushes. Zed and the current crop of AI editors (including VSC itself) are that toothbrush.
  • qudat 11mo ago
    Based purely on this blog post it looks like they are trying to compete against notion but with an IDE extension
• Iwan-Zotow 11mo ago
  Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead
• frankfrank13 11mo ago
  Very cool idea, and helps promote owning your own data, and it being highly interoperable (plain text!) I do wonder if we need a term for shoe-horned dogfooding though. Like sure, you can do this. You could do this in Figma! Or in Notion! Or in LEETCODE if you wanted to. At least with Zed though, its plain text. If you find another way to collab realtime on plain text, you're not bound to 1 vendor.
• verdverm 11mo ago
  I really really don't want comms or multiplayer tools in my IDE. Don't bring the attention economy to my cave of solitude, it's where I go to escape all that noise
  • pprotas 11mo ago
    I removed the collaboration panel from my bottom bar and don’t have to deal with it at all. Can recommend
    • verdverm 11mo ago
      I stay away from anything Hashimoto is making after my experiences with TF & HCL, or at least the bar is much higher / projects get a lot more scrutiny
      • hrimfaxi 11mo ago
        What does Mitchell Hashimoto have to do with Zed beyond a guest blog post?
        • verdverm 11mo ago
          My understanding is that he is involved in the development of Zed I find Zed's feature choices to be really poor, and then I probably made a poor association based on his talking about zed
          • smj-edison 11mo ago
            I know he's working on ghostty, but I've never heard anything about him working on Zed, was that what you were thinking of?
          • RaoulP 11mo ago
            Hashimoto writes Ghostty in the Zig programming language. There might be a mixup here between Zig and Zed.
• sunnyps 11mo ago
  > Despite attempts to make Atom—an Electron application—more responsive, it never reached the performance standards the team yearned for. This feels like an attempt at deflecting blame. VSCode is another Electron application that ended up having better performance than Atom. There's another Electron adjacent application that has good performance, the one you're probably using right now to read this page. Depending on page content of course
  • kriops 11mo ago
    What are you saying here? It is true that VS Code is less bad in terms of responsiveness in comparison to Atom. Zed, however, is written in Rust (i.e., not Electron), and I would guess it is at least an order of magnitude more responsive than VS Code across every possible scenario. Web technologies are an unrivaled technological marvel for what they are, but it is disingenuous to imply they represent anything near the peak of what we are capable of in the context of performance.
    • IshKebab 11mo ago
      It depends. It definitely opens faster and the general UI seems a bit faster, but open a largish file (a few MB) and VSCode will easily out-perform Zed because it doesn't have that fancy CDRT thing. In my experience VSCode is plenty fast. Use it with no extensions and you will have zero problems with performance (though memory use isn't great). The real problems come when you have extensions, especially because it's often impossible to attribute performance issues to them because they can often do a lot of work all in the same "extension host" process.
      • verdverm 11mo ago
        Why is Zed using a CRDT when I open a source file to edit code? Are they using it for more than their multiplayer stuff? (agentic stuff?)
        • satvikpendem 11mo ago
• travisgriggs 11mo ago
  I like Zed. I pay for pro. I like the integrated agent stuff (though my usage model has changed a bit after 5 months of use). I'm happy that others can type in each others' space, but this post reveals a tension here. They are building a tool for building the tool, and their own team. I think that's cool, but at a 2-3 person shop heavy polyglotted across 4 OSes and 5+ programming languages, this is not what I really need. What I'm looking for is a snappy tool (check) that lets me explore, understand, modify code at a next level (marginal). And I want it to not only be snappy by virtue of execution efficiency, but cognitive load. I want the less-is-more experience. I don't need it to do Swift, Kotlin, or Python, because there are bespoke IDEs for each of those that focus on the environments where I deploy them best. What I mostly want from Zed is the ability to see the outline panel at the same time as the directory panel, and to separate the search outline from the file structure outline. I spent too much time toggling views in Zed.
  • olejorgenb 11mo ago
    > What I mostly want from Zed is the ability to see the outline panel at the same time as the directory panel You can do this now by moving one of them to the right dock (right-click the toggle-button)
    • travisgriggs 11mo ago
      And then toggle between that and the AI agent? Zed is a workbench that lets you put two, and only two, tools on your "workbench" to either side of your text workspace. I want to put more tools on my benchtop.
      • olejorgenb 11mo ago
        > And then toggle between that and the AI agent? Yes - Do you want to split a dock vertically? - Do you want to open the panels inside an editor split? - Do you want to detach the panels as separate windows? (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/17618 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/17618)
• BinaryPie 11mo ago
  I generally like what Zed is trying to become. However, all of these features and blog posts are frustraing when they struggle to keep basic editor features stable. Edit a file outside of the editor? It's not going to show up in the project pane or the git diff. Need to work inside a container because it's 2025 and we don't need to clutter our local machine with 100s of dependencies and env managers... well now all the AI stuff is broken. ACP sounds cool until you realize every single CLI in existence works better. My wish is that Zed gets the core working correctly 100% of the time before moving on to expanding feature sets. For now I'm back in NeoVIM because it always works the first time.... https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/38109 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/38109 Hopefully soon I can give it another shot at full time usage.
  • lvl155 11mo ago
    I agree with you 100%. If basic functionalities are not airtight, there’s no way I am going to deal with growing pains just because they want to get paid on AI fluffs. Contrast this with something like Ghostty.
  • mystifyingpoi 11mo ago
    How does Neovim handle outside changes then? Or is there a plugin to make it work? AFAIK it doesn't reload any bufferes when files change. IntelliJ is the only other one I know that does it transparently.
    • vmiklos 11mo ago
      Plain vim asks what to do by default. A single 'l' does a reload.
    • BinaryPie 11mo ago
      In vanilla neovim you can use autoread... this does depend on a focus event like entering and leaving the pane or switching buffers. However, for my workflow which is "go to a different terminal pane and do some things then switch back" as soon as I focus the buffer it updates. Where as with Zed it'll just keep showing the old content and in fact closing and opening file wont even change what it shows in Zed. It's really really annoying. I have to exit zed and open it again. This means if you are working with AI agents you end up having to do this often.
• bitbasher 11mo ago
  Maybe I'm old, jaded, stubborn and paranoid, but something about a coding editor that is controlled by a company is off-putting to me. It's even more off-putting when you add Zoom, Slack and everything else into said editor.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • aduffy 11mo ago
    …you’re free to use other editors? People like Zed. They like IntelliJ. They like VSCode. If you have an aesthetic preference against all professionally maintained IDEs, I think you’re in the minority.
    • bitbasher 11mo ago
      ...doesn't mean the majority is right :)
      • cipehr 11mo ago
        ...doesn't mean there is a right or wrong either :)
        • fallat 11mo ago
          ...but it does mean there is a corporate controlled program that can back stab you at any moment!
          • jabbywocker 11mo ago
            Same thing could happen with non corporate open source
            • fallat 11mo ago
              Uh no? You have to pull in the change and recompile
• malkia 11mo ago
  Please work on decreasing the binary size - it's whopping 400mb!
• insane_dreamer 11mo ago
  Looks very cool, and of course it's nice to basically have Slack inside of Zed. But personally, what I want in a Code Editor / IDE, is to be the very best experience at writing code and working with code projects. That is what will save me time and make the coding experience better. Collaborative features are nice but not essential since there are other tools out there. It's not likely to move a team away from Slack (though if it's self-hosted, it stands a chance). I'm not yet at the point where I can rely solely on Zed for python coding. I mostly use Zed because I like new initiatives, especially open source ones, and it's fast and responsive. But PyCharm is still better for python development at this point, with its one black mark being endless indexing on large codebases / dependencies, and I find myself falling back to it regularly. I would argue that the priority should be to achieve parity as a _code editor / IDE_, and then we can talk about other shiny new features.
• submeta 11mo ago
  Whenever a product tries to be too many things, it dilutes the core USP. Try to be an excellent code editor. Add extensibility. Done. I get it, you are VC funded, investors want to turn this into a multi billion dollar unicorn. Do not focus on investors, but developers.
  • jamesgeck0 11mo ago
    As mentioned in the post, Zed's collaboration functionality is its core USP. The entire editor was literally built around it. IIUC their moonshot is to replace the GitHub PR model with something more collaborative and granular.
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
• woile 11mo ago
  To me it feels like 2 different set of products, what they are showcasing here seems very similar to slack/teams. Of course, it would be awesome to have a faster and open source slack, and if I can take notes on the same style as my editor great. So I guess, it would be nice to be able to embed zed in another product. I think this would be appealing for a company that it's core product is code, like zed, but I do wonder if other companies even need this functionality.
• stickfigure 11mo ago
  Looks a lot like Google Wave. This is interesting for some things but I don't think coding is it, for the same reason that IntelliJ's CodeWithMe doesn't work for pair programming. And apparently one of the guys is a former Pivot, so it's a little surprising. Pair programming is Two People One Cursor. A critical aspect of it is you're both looking at the same lines of code and working on the same problem and following each other's thought processes. CodeWithMe (and it seems Zed) is Same Codebase, Same Day. There's no shared focus. You edit stuff, I edit stuff, maybe there's overlap. But this isn't much different from doing separate git commits. So far the only remote pairing tool I've found that works competently is pop.com.
  • spockz 11mo ago
    Pair programming so often degrades into one pilot and one person just sitting there trying to catch mistakes. When those mistakes are caught they are mentioned taking the first persons attention away and breaking flow. In contrast how I like to work, with similar level people, is to work at the same feature in the same codebase at the same time. We either sit next to eachother, or have a remote call, where we continuously talk through what we want to achieve. Sometimes this results in one person writing ahead (code, docs, doesn’t matter) and the second sweeping behind it and cleaning it up. Two cursors, one source. IntelliJ even manages to keep authors correctly in git. The other mechanism is where we work on different parts of the code base at the same time. Either main code and tests, or split across interfaces and implementations. Because this happens on the same machine the iterations are way faster as they are local and incremental. This basically saves the whole dance of creating branches, pulling/pushing, the fixing typos etc.
  • iparaskev 11mo ago
    With zed you can also share your screen in the editor which makes it a bit better, but still you can't take control of the other machine. IMO if you only care about coding doing it in the editor is the best approach, you get zero latency and have all the context that you need (most of the times). But if you want to do more, like opening the browser for whatever reason, or teaching how to use a specific cli, etc, then taking control works better. If you liked pop you might like gethopp.app, which is an OSS pair programming app (full disclosure I am the co-maintainer). Unfortunately because we have chosen tauri for the frontend we can only support macos and windows, but I am working on a solution for Linux too.
• railing 11mo ago
  Any plans to leverage 3D at all in the interface? was floored by the "explode all layers in the user interface and simulate a 3D camera rotating around them" graphic when i first saw it ! 3D is always difficult to get right, but felt it had some really cute possibilities, any way to open this up so devs can try things out?? < 3
  • seanssel 11mo ago
    > was floored by the "explode all layers in the user interface and simulate a 3D camera rotating around them" graphic when i first saw it ! What is this in reference to?
    • railing 11mo ago
      https://zed.dev/blog/videogame https://zed.dev/blog/videogame !
      • seanssel 11mo ago
        thanks!
• zenlot 11mo ago
  [dead]
• dzonga 11mo ago
  i'm now guessing the software engineering universe is becoming like the lawyer ones 1. big corporate shops / vc funded ones - many tens of programmers working on features (this is where zed collab features might be needed) 2. bespoke high productive small teams - less than 5 product programmers in a company e.g basecamp - these would be your bespoke law firms 3. the indies (injury lawyers) -> 1 - 3 programmers chunning out products at scale or eating of one product + maybe with help of A.I for 2 & 3 - a lot of stuff being shilled is not needed. a legal pad + some notes that can be posted via a google doc is all that's needed. Jira isn't needed too
• alberth 11mo ago
  I love Zed’s minimal design language ... clean, restrained colors, low visual noise. The screenshot below surprised me: https://zed.dev/img/post/zed-is-our-office/this-week.webp https://zed.dev/img/post/zed-is-our-office/this-week.webp All the colorful avatars and the busy side/top panels feel out of character with the usual Zed aesthetics.
• arjie 11mo ago
  I use Zed instead of my normal text editor because it opens instantaneously. But I don't write code in it, and still use my IntelliJ + IdeaVim with Claude Code and Codex in a separate terminal in Ghostty. But Zed is an insanely fast text editor to open text files in. Just double click and it's on the screen. Love that. Maybe over time I'll do more in it.
  • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo ago
    If that is all you need there has always been Vim and Nano.
    • arjie 11mo ago
      I do use (and am in the Backers.md of) neovim. But the GUI versions open much more slowly than Zed. Zed is near instantaneous. I do often edit text in neovim by opening a terminal window and doing things, but the experience of browsing a large log file and filtering through it is much nicer in a GUI text editor, so if I ever double-click or open a JSON file I want that to happen instantly. I can't stand Nano. I find it impossible to use because my brain is strongly vim-bound.
• hk1337 11mo ago
  From reading some of the comments, I'm not sure which is worse, Zed Shaw or Zed the code editor
• aadishv 11mo ago
  There is a lot of complaints about Zed in the comments here. I don't think that they are "hate", per se; they all definitely care about Zed and want it to succeed. I daily drive Zed for work across several languages and I love it. I use a lot of its features, like the git interface, agentic editing, etc. I might even consider paying for Pro in the future if I want unlimited edit predictions. However, all of these complaints are fully justified. I think Zed is a massive undertaking, only one that a VC-backed company has the capital to do. iirc, it requires 70k lines of Rust just for the cloud part [1]. I cannot fathom the amount of fundamental infrastructure they have to get the editor functional at all. That doesn't excuse all of the papercuts in Zed though. If I were Zed I would do the following: 1. stop all work on future features, like DeltaDB etc. They all seem extremely cool but they won't meaningfully contribute to increasing Zed adoption or fixing its issues. 2. remove all agentic editing features. if Zed tries to simultaneously become the world's best agentic editor and a good general-purpose text editor, it will fail at both. Keep around ACP so users can still use other agents, but remove all of Zed's built in agent stuff. 3. fix literally every papercut. Triage every single issue and go through every PR, even if it will take half a year to do so. People won't switch to Zed until it's perfect, and the existence of this many issues means it's not perfect enough. 4. make extensions actually good. Every programming language, library, etc. has it's own ecosystem, and many such ecosystems mainly rely on VSCode extensions for advanced features. Zed needs to be extremely extensible like VSCode is; obviously its architecture makes this slightly harder, as it's nontrivial, for example, for extensions to render their own GUI, but there are a lot of low(er)-hanging fruit for extensions that need to get solved. People will only switch to Zed if they can get a similar breadth of ecosystems. Of course, this won't happen, and given that none of these will really make them money, Zed has no incentive to focus on these, especially given the amount of time they would need to do this. But I think that if Zed can't nail the core experience, it won't get anywhere. [1] https://maxdeviant.com/posts/2025/head-in-the-zed-cloud/ https://maxdeviant.com/posts/2025/head-in-the-zed-cloud/
• another_twist 11mo ago
  I understand interacting with other engineers right in the editor but I dont get why so many collab tools need to be bolted on to what is basically a text editor. This will only fragment communications since its not just engineers that work in any company. Meaning you'll now have communication spread out in Slack and Zed making collaboration difficult, not easy. I dont honestly dont get the allure of pair programming. My pair programs are the unit tests which I run as often as I can and limit discussions to Gitlab/Slack. I have worked ag FAANGs and large companies and never once pair programmed anything. I honestly cannot think of a single software or process problem that requires real time collab in the editor. Having said that it is a cool feature and I quite like Zed as an editor.
  • piker 11mo ago
    A cynical take is that pair programming in the IDE implies network effects and custom protocols. Just the types of moats necessary to get VC backing.
  • eddythompson80 11mo ago
    My understanding was always that this is a way to monetize a text editor. How else do you monetize dev tools? Developers are used to very high quality free tools. You’re either one of the few old guards (like JetBrains, Microsoft or maybe Oracle) that can sell IDEs and other dev tools because 25 years ago open source dev tools were far from beginner friendly. But how do you monetize a programming language, a text editor, a build system, a terminal emulator, etc in 2025? The examples are deno, bun, mojo, nextjs, zed, earthly, warp, etc. all know they can’t monetize the actual tool. You monetize services that you build around the tool. Like a cloud/workers/deployment (basically compute), or a sharing service or an AI service, etc. once you have critical mass on your platform, you can find other easy services to offer. Like if Zed has a critical mass of users, maybe the offer “in editor chat”. A small startup with just 3 devs working together can replace slack with zed. Maybe they offer an uptime check service. Why not? Maybe a file sharing service. Maybe a small wiki service, etc. all things that have million other solutions. But if you have critical mass, someone will pay for those things.
  • noobly 11mo ago
• cpeth 11mo ago
  Zed looks really cool and I would love to give it a try, but I am just too beholden to devcontainers. I know there are workarounds to use them with Zed but with many extra steps compared to VS Code and it's forks. I can't go back to not having a totally integrated container per repo.
• cantalopes 11mo ago
  It's truly showing that the zed team is chauvinistic by dismissing different encodings not being supported and focusing on other things. "It wurks in merica", it gut i guess
  • leshenka 11mo ago
    If software developers use anything other than utf-8 it's on them
• jokethrowaway 11mo ago
  This is insanely cool but it would be hard for non dev people to join the meetings and there is always an annoying "camera on" policy. Moreover, this would be competing with Google Meet, Teams, Slack, Gather - way too much tech for collaboration And I wish we were more async-first and less forced to deal with humans, especially over the network.
• tharne 11mo ago
  It's nice to see Zed's collaboration features discussed in their blog. The collaboration features are really what makes Zed such an interesting project and product. I was worried they'd gone full AI hype train. There's so much opportunity to improve digital collaboration tools.
• rileymichael 11mo ago
  people live-dumping their comments into a text doc while i'm presenting with no ability to know _who_ left a comment (unless they manually prefix their name) really showcases that its the wrong tool.. https://i.imgur.com/vEttouw.png https://i.imgur.com/vEttouw.png
• ianks 11mo ago
  I’m always _this_ close to adopting Zed, but I just can’t get used to the project search. I’m too used to telescope now. Maybe I need to bite the bullet because I think Zed’s search is objectively better. Old dog, I suppose…
• hank808 11mo ago
  What's up with the letter spacing on that blog? It looks bad.
• internet2000 11mo ago
  Welcome back, Google Wave.
• TheTaytay 11mo ago
  Unlike a lot of other commenters, I found this to be an interesting approach. Text files are good. Having an integrated environment that combines files and channels and collaboration seems like a neat idea, and I could imagine building all sorts of neat stuff on it. However, I just tried it myself and was really shocked to see other people in my sidebar after I clicked on the “collaboration” stuff. I expected to be dropped into my own collaboration environment built around my own channels, like a fresh private Slack instance, but instead I saw the built-in Zed channels and as I clicked around, it looked/sounded like I was joining voice channels. It was as if I’d accidentally joined someone else’s Discord. It was so mentally jarring that I got afraid I was on a live mic or would accidentally be live-sharing stuff with strangers.
• ThinkBeat 11mo ago
  oh good Slack embedded inside my editor. Just exactly what I have always wanted. When it comes to writing tool the trend has been strong that people want distraction free writing with no interruptions. Seems like code editors are going the other way on speed.
• iamnbutler 11mo ago
  I don't work at zed anymore but I do find it funny that anyone would think that the collaboration features of zed are "tacked on"... We started building zed in zed using it's collaboration in early 2021. Collaboration has always been part of it's DNA. Nearly everything at zed is written in pairs over collab.
  • arusahni 11mo ago
    Agreed. I joined a Zed hackathon at RustConf 2024 where I built the "Open in split" functionality from the file fuzzy picker. A member of the engineering team who was floating around helping folks had us exclusively work through the included collaboration features. It was a great tour of the editor, and did not feel tacked on.
  • another_twist 11mo ago
    Tacked on was my first impression as well. But I am glad that they just shipped a feature and are measuring adoption in the wild. So refreshing.
• kombine 11mo ago
  I'm now more convinced that I made the right choice to invest in Neovim.
• bloppe 11mo ago
  I love Zed as an idea. They built some impressive tech. They're clearly a smart and capable bunch. I tried zed out for a bit, then I switched back to vscode. I'm just too hooked on that OpenVSX ecosystem.
• shunia_huang 11mo ago
  Really user here: Switched from vscode to zed for ~2 weeks entirely in a windows PC, getting back to vscode today, just not feeling good enough: 1. zed updates frequently, but I'm not feeling any update at all. I mean, no new features, not fixing stuff that I'm experiencing that's not good enough; 2. while it put heavy in AI stuff, the ACP thing and the integration of codex and claude code just not working as expected as is. Especially I'm getting really poor outcomes from the same tool in zed compared to the cli itself, which is really frustrating; 3. the terminal in windows zed is barely usable, it's slow and slugish, sometimes the texts or some symbols are not rendering properly, it's just not stable at all. I really like to use the terminal inside the ide especially when I need to start up dev server, but with zed I'm used to open an extra terminal app when I need to start up dev server; 4. I'm a frontend dev, which means the tech stack should have great support in morden editors, but the case is not quite right in zed. I got jetbrain style inline type hints for typescript files with deferred types, but it is so annoying cause it makes a line too long I may even need to scroll horizontaolly more than may screen width to see the content at the end of the line, but the line has only 40 chars. At the same time, I'm not sure how to shutdown this feature after openning the settings. And when I want to set wrap width to 80 chars, I don't know how to do this either. The settings maybe there and are easy to tweak but it is not doing great to make the user understand it and use it; 5. it constantly showing some language servers are down and I don't know why, I do not like to tweak with settings so it could not be my bad, I don't event know how to touch the language servers; I have more to input here but I forgot some of them, overall, I just want to get back to vscode which is much easier and battle tested. I think zed have a totally different perspectives on feature sets and stuff, that's good, so people could have another choice. Hope zed could do great and I will definitely come back one day. PS: I don't think collab worth too much effort in an IDE, you have much better tooling out there and have better intergrations.
• v3ss0n 11mo ago
  Zed sounds desperate, nobody in the world would use Zed as office. Zed is a niche. Nobody wants it's multiplayer features since coding id usually asynchronous until crunch happens and nobody wants crunch All the time. All office have their own communication tools , you can't expect all developers just to use zed l, it is missing features and the whole ecosystem which would take one more decade and non development people won't even touch it. Then the office cannot happen inside Zed for the rest of the world, except Zed team.
• tmdh 11mo ago
  Their collab feature looks promising. But I can't move to Zed yet, because it's laggy on both my Linux laptop and workstation. They need to fix these issues first.
• brainless 11mo ago
  This is interesting to read and very important to me since I am building a coding agent with team collaboration in mind. I used to use Zed daily till the point that I moved away from writing code directly and instead generate all my projects only from prompts. I think collaboration for people who eventually use the software will be more critical in the era of agentic coding. Project Management will change. We are not waiting for 2 weeks to build prototypes, it gets done in a hour. What does that mean for end users - do they prompt their changes and get access to new software? Who would double-check, would AI reviews be good enough, would AI agents collaborate along with humans in the loop? There are so many questions not answered. If anyone is keen on having these talks, I would happy to share what I think. Here is what I am building: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo https://github.com/brainless/nocodo I want to see a future where end users can prompt their needs, have collaborators in the company to help clear things up and in an hour the feature/issue is tackled and deployed.
• idk1 11mo ago
  Because I'm apparently a billion years old, I still use Sublime Text and just text editor. If I do switch, it will be to this. However, is it as responsive? Do file changes just appear if I change them elsewhere in like terminal?
• mawadev 11mo ago
  I don't understand why text editors became so complicated. When I ran zed, I think my gpu wasn't properly used and it ran at 5 fps. I couldn't even get the thing to boot.. Remember when people had 1024x768 and coded perfectly fine software without instant messaging pinging every few minutes? We peaked there
  • sevensor 11mo ago
    What I remember from those days was saving my work reflexively because the chances of the window manager or text editor crashing at any given moment were quite high. Also, emacs came in for lots of grief for being so slow. Remember “Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping?” This is not necessarily to endorse Zed; I’m ecstatically happy with my current text editor. However, “we peaked 25-30 years ago” is just not true. Things have gotten better and they continue to do so.
• amonith 11mo ago
  Random thing spotted in the article: > "Wish there was a windows laptop I could buy that is good" What does it even mean? There are macs, there are chromebooks and there are just laptops. Wth is a Windows laptop? There's a good Linux laptop? Just a nit :P
• pjmlp 11mo ago
  What I see in posts like this is that it becomes clear to me that I am not their target demographic. I work with IDEs and low-code/no-code tools, VSCode is kind of unavoidable in some scenarios as it has become the only programmers editor that some companies bother to provide tooling support for their SDKs, and that is it. For bettr or worse, everyone and their dog that used Eclipse forks for their SDKs, now is doing VSCode forks. For historical UNIX purposes vi and Emacs, and then any editor will do when changing some bunch of configuration files, in case nothing else is installed. In no project I would be able to make Zed our office, that is what stuff like Monday, Jira, Confluene, Trello, Workfront, happens to be.
• globnomulous 11mo ago
  Does anybody actually want this?
• colmanhumphrey 11mo ago
  I kind of love this, although I feel like I'd need to try it out to understand exactly how it feels. I'd even like to see a video if Zed could make one. It would be good to understand e.g. if the issue of "who wrote that?" actually affects things in practice, or any other weirdness or limitations. I also kind of get why it's built into an editor! I wonder how it compares to e.g. https://www.coscreen.co https://www.coscreen.co. The default method of remote work, with e.g. Slack and video meetings, I think leaves a lot of potential on the table. I wonder if a flexible collaboration system like this could actually be a lovely default method for many companies.
• aiiizzz 11mo ago
  While certainly an amicable goal, I doubt that many companies/groups would be willing to put their comms inside zed, where it feels locked outside any other ecosystem.