Congrats to the Zed team for building the best modern editor I have ever used. I subscribe to the monthly plan just to give you guys the funding you need, even if my funding is a tiny drop in the bucket. I always wanted a feature rich alternative to Sublime Text that can run anywhere and do basically anything I need from it. I've use JetBrains IDEs for years (been subscribed annually since 2017), but since Zed I havent really opened any of those IDEs in a long time, other than maybe Rider but that's due to C# nuances I needed to work with.
Zed really is delightful to use. I haven't had any need to open VSCode in over a year. Extending it has been relatively simple, even as someone who doesn't know Rust well.
The Zed team seem to have really learned their lesson on performance from the Atom days, because it's very performant. @nathansobo, @maxbrunsfeld, @as-cii and the team, congrats!
I've always thought of Zed as a good Sublime Text alternative. I can tinker with and potentially break my Neovim config, but I'll have Zed as a backup for when I need to do a quick edit. Their Vim mode is the best I've used outside of JetBrains (or Vim itself).
Never thought of Zed as Sublime replacement, but now that you've mentioned – why not? I use Sublime only as blazingly fast temp note taking that doesn't lose them on exit, but I see Zed fits the job perfectly. One less close product hopefully!
it's now my go-to for when I need to wrangle basically any text file manually - has handled everything I can throw at it (some of which has crashed other editors -looking at you Cursor/VSCode)
I was downloading it "just to see," but your comment is roughly a carbon copy of my own IDE/editor usage history, so 1) ooo spooky deja vu and 2) here's hoping I feel the same way you do.
Can you speak to your feelings on Zed's customizability/extensibility? Zed is shiny and impressive, but Sublime's rich ecosystem of python plugins is hard to beat...
EDIT: Tho if sublime wasn't already "doing everything [you] need", maybe you aren't familiar with the plugin ecosystem!
I used Sublime Text since ST2, and bought into ST3. It just felt stale compared to Visual Studio or any JetBrains IDE. I loved the speed, but at least back when I was using it, LSP wasn't as big and so I didn't have that at my fingertips.
With Zed all the high quality features are OOTB. For example, with Python they run some high quality linters out of the box, I don't even have to think about setting anything up, I don't even thing I have installed a single plugin for Zed outside of themes. It's a very batteries included text editor.
Not the OP, but for me ST can't be beat in terms of how easy it is to write a plugin. It uses Python (Zed is Rust). Plugins generally auto-reloads. If extensibility is important to you, ST is still the way to go.
What an abysmal series of top comments. These guys created a phenomenal product using novel technology, which will only continue to improve. Great work to the Zed team.
FWIW, the top comments at the time of my comment (one hour after yours, two hours after the article was posted) are all complimentary. You commented one hour after the article was posted; it's worth waiting a bit for the comment voting to shake out.
What exactly is phenomenal and novel about Zed? I've tried it a couple of times for a week or so, didn't see the point, and moved on every time.
And I'm not luddite swearing by vi or something, I use VSCode and Idea, and have used Sublime for many years, Xcode on/off for some Obj-C/Swift dev, Eclipse for 5-6 years in the 2000s, and vim for everything cli/lightweight since forever.
Is the GUI tech what's supposed to be novel? I couldn't care less about that backend in my everyday editor use as long as the editor is fast enough. Which on modern hardware, even Idea is.
Currently on this machine: using 900MB of RAM, including all language servers, with nine open projects - that is pretty phenomenal. VSCode could barely keep one open with the same memory.
The perception of 'fast' is very subjective. To me having a smooth, jitter-free UI, low input latency, and instant startup, all matter a lot.
VS Code is also offering significant more ability than Zed at the moment. If you want to sell RAM-usage as a phenomenal benefit, then you should compare it with similar editors, like Sublime or (Neo)Vim.
It's amazing that a gig of ram is considered lightweight for having 8 project dirs open in an editor, which normally means 8 tree views and a few open file tabs per project :)
Even more amazing that 10GB for the same purpose is considered acceptable. ± 100MB for window, project files, LSP servers, ASTs etc is something very few editors can achieve - I'm pretty sure Zed beats both Emacs and Neovim in memory consumption.
I understand wanting your software to be well optimized, but at no point in my years of using VSCode have I ever actually had to care about how much RAM it's using. I have 32GB, I'm going to use it.
I, too, would like to use my RAM. And I would like to be able to use it on the things I deem important, not to subsidize the laziness of devs who reach for Electron.
A side effect of Electron crap, before Zed many editors and IDEs on Atari, Amiga, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, Mac OS, NeXTSTEP, were written in fully native code.
I heard that Zed has very impressive collaboration features. I tried them a little and they really look well (like discord, but directly in editor). But this was very superficial look
What?! Really?! Link? I'm not a Zed user. That comment was based off a few minutes of research, and I guess a small dose hopium of a VSCode user and understanding what a shit show the extensions setup is and wanting someone to do better.
Recent example I looked at: https://github.com/nilskch/zed-jj-lsp, which downloads jj-lsp if not found in the system. I have seen other extensions doing similar for convenience, but can't remember names to give concrete links.
Yep, it pulls stuff from at least npm, it’s not a secret - check the source code.
Actually it pulls latest versions (checking registry then installing that exact version, not sure why they sidestep normal resolution algorithms) no matter what .npmrc may say, so min-release-age breaks almost everywhere it integrates with JS/TS ecosystem (most visibly, Copilot). I probably should’ve filed an issue.
It also installs Go packages but I haven’t looked into that.
From what I can see, one of the top comments (at the time of this comment) is worried about legalese claiming to have "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable" access to your source code. I think it is very fair criticism to not want to give away your source code.
There is this big recurrent misunderstanding with zed's ToS that produces some extreme, misinformed reactions. Zed (the ide) is open source ("GPL v3 with Apache 2.0 for certain components"). The ToS are only applicable for the services they provide when you subscribe for an account and use them [0]. Some people read the ToS, think they apply just for the editor, and think that zed is stealing your source code and whatnot, because it would indeed be weird to have these ToS for just editing stuff locally, without any of the additional services provided. However, if one actually reads the ToS instead of nitpicking a paragraph, it is very clear what it is about.
Any ToS for a company that you send data to process includes similar terms that just allow it to process the data as you are expecting them to in order to provide these services. Eg for the AI tab-completion, they process part of your source code on their servers and provide a tab-completion suggestion ("derivative data"). Some people are evidently either unfamiliar about how these things work or about the data-related legalese terms used (barring any bad intentions assumed). If anything, paragraph 4.2 [1] makes it clear that any data output is owned by the user (and not by zed). This whole discussion made me read the terms and (apart from the arbitration thing imo, though not uncommon), I couldn't see any kind of dark pattern or issue.
I like zed a lot, it works great, I am definitely cautious about the fact that they have received VC money which holds me from getting "all-in", but criticism that is based on misunderstandings or on obviously factually wrong arguments is not very useful.
Maybe this wasn't true an hour ago, but all the top 3 comments right now look supportive (if I am to count yours), and the next few are just mildly critical.
yeah, all forms of criticism, all feature suggestions, any comparisons to other products/solutions, etc. should be outright banned by HN. if you aren't praising the thing, get out!
(do you comment this same type of thing on github, microsoft, apple, etc. posts? all of these comments seem absolutely tame compared to the vitriol in those threads. most top comments here are supportive. most of the negative ones are constructive.)
I agree, the toxic trolls focusing on minor nitpicks like a license agreement that allows your text editor to steal all your source codes really harshes the vibes.
I hope HN can appreciate what a game changer (and paradigm shift) Zed can be.
To the Zed developers: CONGRATULATIONS! I have been following your project with great interest since your speed demo years ago. And since it’s AI-first, I’m interested to see how we can integrate it with https://safebots.ai (Safebots, Safebox, and Safecloud).
I would love to see how we might be able to increase the safety of agents in Zed, use local models like Qwen/Deepseek and we also have Grokers which can turn any codebase into a graph with tree-sitter and help your agents far more than RAG and similarity search (https://grokers.ai/deck.pdf)
What’s the best way of getting in touch? (If you want, my profile has a way of emailing me).
I haven't read them because they're now buried, but whatever those top comments said can't be bad enough to warrant your vitriol. Abysmal means bad, not pessimistic. It's inappropriate for the (currently) top comment to be casting such judgment in its preface.
I don't think overly-opinionated meta-comments are inherently bad, but I don't come to this site for them. I don't even think your comment is bad; I'm mad that this is what the people of HN have decided is the most important remark on the matter. It tells me something unfortunate.
My daily driver is Zed developing on SSH remote servers on exe.dev.
It's crazy to think of all the dev tools I've churned through over the last 18 months but these two feel sticky.
Zed has everything I need in a unified pane. File editor, terminal, agents, SSH remotes. And it's fast and intuitive
exe.dev is the first "dev container" I've ever *loved*. The remote sandbox means `dangerously-skip-permissions` is safe. Being on the internet with good private / shared / public access saves so much time.
I also use https://conductor.build/ and GitHub but this is starting to feel clunky compared hacking directly against online live reloading apps.
I'm glad to hear the SSH remote editing is working well.
A lot of the time I'm developing on a remote server using VSCode Remote-SSH. I mostly love it. But! It consumes a lot of memory. And not only that. At times it gets stuck in some infinite loop or such, and ends up consuming all memory on the machine, preventing all traffic. Takes a few minutes for the OS to finally kill it, so I can get back in. I'm pretty this is happening due to large collections of symlinks (the subprocess eating up the memory is rg). But also just JavaScript editing at times launches up a bunch of ts-servers consuming everything and more.
This is super scary, if I'm poking around on the prod server.
Actually, inspired by this, I went ahead and installed Zed to try it out. After a couple of hours of working remotely using Zed, I'm impressed. It actually works, and the experience feels great. Only little issue was that when I first opened the remote folder, I was greeted with a blank window. I thought it was stuck loading and was about to give up, but turns out I had to open the project panel myself to see the files. Otherwise, working fine so far! Memory-wise it's practically free.
EDIT: Scrap that. After a while it starts running at 100% CPU on my macbook. I'm editing a small, simple PHP remotely over SSH. I haven't yet tested if it only happens with remote editing. Too bad... Well, at least it didn't trash the server like VSCode.
EDIT: Logs showed it was trying to do some auto suggestions every few seconds, but failed due to missing credentials. Didn't seem like something that would eat up 100%, but after disabling all AI features (I'm glad there was an option for this), the problem disappeared, and I'm happy with Zed again.
The only reason I remained on vscode for so long was the remote ssh editing as I also use a dev box (M2 air + dev box = multi-day battery life) but recently got sick and tired of the vscode instability and frequent need to blow away state / reinstall plugins after updates. When I saw Zed had an ssh dev equivalent I jumped ship and haven't looked back. Here is my theme if anyone is interested, https://github.com/whalesalad/dotfiles/blob/master/zed/whale...
Personally the main advantage is to simply spin up new ones with the same setup. You can also do that by yourself but imo it includes way more managing and time compared to exe
I'll have to check it out again. Last time I tried, the got integration didn't work when connecting to a remote SSH server, and ports couldn't be mapped at runtime.
Had to shut everything down, list the port, and then reconnect. A big pain when other tools just automatically figure out what needs to be forwarded, or just let you specify arbitrary ports at runtime.
"online live reloading apps" => trying to get my head around this workflow. so the disk is shared across these? so do you still have the problem of say running a "main" version of an app, and it's weird experimental version of that same app? because they still have to live in different folders/worktrees? that's where I get stuck a little trying to enable things like this for others. right now, I've got people a system we can spin up N "vms". but it's not persistent storage if the vm goes away. it's whatever version exists in their GitHub branch. hopefully if they hack the vm app they commit and push back to the repo.
For many apps the weird experimental version is all there is. Call it vibe coding or experiments or non-critical tools. These may not even have a GitHub repo. I trust local git and the exe.dev disks.
Then for serious apps the above is the same shape for development branches. Spin up a VM in a few seconds with the code checked out and running online and editable over an SSH mount is the magic.
Then that turns into a PR on GitHub and a normal review then CI/CD to staging and prod takes over.
Using Zed with ssh is an interesting idea. I spend a lot of time mosh/ssh to VPSs, then running 'emacs -nw' locally on the server. This is a great setup since I love Emacs, but I will give Zed/ssh a try. Thanks.
I really want to like Zed because they've clearly put so much work into it, but so far I've been sticking with Sublime. I have several large PHP projects that were started in the 2010-2020 era, and Zed will highlight and complain about all sorts of minor things that were standard PHP fare at the time: functions without return types, for example. My code (which works fine) looks like an ocean of red when I view it with Zed, and turning all those warnings off is not trivial.
For each kind of warning, I wish there was a button that said "don't warn me again about issues like this one in this project." Then I could keep the interesting warnings (like undeclared variable) and ditch the ridiculous ones.
Coming from Sublime, I'd never even heard of a Language Server when I first tried Zed. As I recall, disabling particular kinds of warnings required copy-pasting some pretty exotic incantations into my project config. All of it was poorly documented, and it felt like I was doing something nobody expected me to do. Instead, I should have been able to mouse over a particular warning and say "don't warn me again about things like this", at which point Zed should edit the project config for me.
Well, PHPStorm (and the other JetBrains IDEs) does it this way. You can disable a certain "inspection" globally, per project, per file, per method or just for one occurence - the last three work by inserting annotations into the code. Then again, PHPStorm costs money (not just if you want AI assistance), and is based on (drum roll) Java technology (although JetBrains don't advertise this fact a lot nowadays).
that does sound like a pretty nice ui idea to add to code actions (command + .), it already lets you one-click add an ignore comment iirc so probably not too hard to wire a global per-project option
however, i think LSP or integrated linters/typecheckers have been standard fare in editors for a while now (zed does seem to have a lot more set up by default, but i like the sane defaults most of the time). The "correct" solution would be to configure whatever lsp zed is running for the project the way you want, and reap the benefits even outside of zed. for php the tools are listed here: https://zed.dev/docs/languages/php the main one seems to be Phpactor and you should be able to configure it globally or per project https://phpactor.readthedocs.io/en/master/usage/configuratio...
but i understand the frustration, sometimes i try to navigate an ancient python codebase and it really is a sea of red
Yeah, I really can't stand every vscode has done to the ecosystem for settings. JSON as a storage format for config is entirely fine, but it's a truly awful UX for changing things. But they're successful and it's easy to build, so everyone mindlessly copies them.
It has a UI to change some of the settings. And not even all of the settings with autocomplete help - I have no idea why those aren't equivalent to each other at least as a fallback, but they very clearly are not. And plugins frequently have major settings documentation gaps, including absolutely massively used ones like Go.
Compare that to something like a JetBrains product.
Zed is highly configurable via JSON (so already puts them in a tier above many editors) and also for some things like shortcuts provides an actual interface for editing that JSON. I imagine as time goes on they'll expose more interfaces for editing configurations. For now I'll take JSON over nothing/gui-only.
While this comment is overly general (some major editors ship without LSP support built in; many more do not have a sane configuration out-of-the-box), it is useful to learn about them and how your editor of choice integrates with them.
The landscape isn't generally intuitive, unfortunately, and while it's getting better, understanding the differences and interop places between LSP, Treesitter, DAP, your editor, and the underlying language-specific tooling can be a big, confusing time hog.
That said, and to be clear: LSP's been a huge boon for me. I used a minimal, kinda-broken configuration for a while with Python, then rebuilt the whole thing when I switched to Rust for work, and holy hell, this thing's awesome.
You are a craftsman, learn your tools. Could you imagine the equivalent from other professionals? A machinist saying, "Understanding the differences and interop places between the DRO, hand controls, and CNC controls for the lathe can be a big confusing time hog."
It takes a couple of hours, and it's a tool you use every single day. Learning how it works is the price of entry, not a mountain to overcome.
It is a fact that some useful things in the software world are a pain in the ass to learn, and that they could be better on that front.
LSP is one of those things, or at least it has been, for a while.
LSP is also something that's not necessary to writing quality code; it's absolutely a major quality-of-life boost, but before rewriting my configs after switching to Rust, my LSP usage was limited to being a slightly faster autocomplete engine more than anything. I didn't have keybinds set up for going to definitions, implementations, or references of symbols. I still put out what I think was decent code. I'm also better off now that I've adopted a more useful config.
IMO it's an important part of this industry (among others) to let developers have whatever workflow they want, within reason. If someone decides they want to invest the time into setting up LSP with their editor, that's their prerogative. If not, that's fine too. I don't know who among my present or past coworkers use LSP outside of occasionally chatting about editor configs with one or two of them, because they've usually figured out a workflow that lets them produce respectable code, and I've never had to question their tooling before questioning their methodology.
The context is a user adopting an editor that has LSP integration and is relying on the language server. That's why I said "it's a tool you use every single day".
If your tool is TextMate, you should learn how TextMate grammars work. If your tool is vi, you should learn how modal editing works. If your tool is Ed, you don't need to learn anything because "Ed is the standard text editor".[1]
To be fair, vi has got its dose of "modal editing is difficult to learn" criticism for years. Why shouldn't zed receive the same treatment if configuring LSP is a pain point for many newcomers?
The only craftsmen are the ones at the edge of the lingo tree?
To use your own analogy, as a machinist myself : I can master the concept of the lathe and bow drill without learning simulation-driven CAM, and I would be no less a machinist than the guy pressing buttons on a brand new Haas.
If you work via notepad.exe and assembly with a compiler and linker ready in the next window, fine! the work is what matters.
It stops at the tools you use, "it's a tool you use every single day". If it's not a tool you use every day, you don't need to learn it.
If you don't use language servers, you don't engage with development environments which rely on them, you need not learn them.
If you're making chips on a Monarch 60 you don't need to learn shit about CNC. If you're pushing buttons on a Haas you do.
If you're coming from a Monarch and want to try pushing buttons on the Haas on the kids are using, you need to learn how CNC works. That's your job. If you want to switch from notepad to Zed, you need to learn how language servers work.
If you have never used an LSP and don’t need it, you can just turn the LSP off. I do it from the UI (thunderbolt icon on bottom bar I think) for some projects which don’t have LSP typing support. There should also be a setting to turn off permanently.
I love Sublime, but I don't want to pay to upgrade from 3 to whatever version it is now, Zed is everything I wanted Sublime to be. Honestly, I wanted VS Code but fully native, and I feel like that's what I'm getting from Zed.
I feel like some people will be put off by all the "AI" mentioned by Zed, but you're sleeping on a top tier editor where you can just ignore the AI stuff if you don't want it. It's very high quality, and probably the reason I wont be renewing next year for JetBrains, unless JetBrains does something impressive, I thought by now they'd have a more native feeling IDE that handles most / any language instead of so many separate ones.
VS Code has gotten so bloated over the years. The gold standard of ST has spoiled me with simpler editors. Zed is the first time I felt like someone finally built an editor that is modern and has a rich set of features.
> I love Sublime, but I don't want to pay to upgrade from 3 to whatever version it is now
I don't know what your financial situation is, but given that the upgrade is an $80 one off payment (a new license is $99), that it's a per-user license (not per-machine), and that there were 8 years between Sublime Text 3 (2013) and Sublime Text 4 (2021) (only major versions require a new license), I personally think it's very reasonably priced.
Agreed-- Sublime is asking $99 right now, which is quite reasonable for something that you're going to use for hours a day in your professional work. Somebody gave many years of their life to make that tool the best it could be, and as a well-paid professional, I feel it's more than fair. In other high-end professions (like the legal field), I've heard of law firms paying a lot more than $99 for certain software licenses.
That said, there are a lot of reasons why someone might be struggling with money. If I was the creator, I wouldn't object to someone using an unlicensed copy forever in that case.
It is "one time" in the sense that it will never stop working, unlike a subscription model.
You are however limited to 3 years of updates, so if you want to keep up to date, it is $80 for 3 years. Which if fine for me, it is the one piece of software I used the most except for the browser and OS, I even use it to make money, $80 / 3 years is not much.
It is also the kind of software I like to support. It is... respectful in that it isn't a resource hog, runs fast, launches fast, and it doesn't try to be anything but a text editor. No ads, no subscription, no cloud, no AI, no slop, no dark patterns, no enshittification. Just an executable that does what it say it will do, and does it well. I wish it was open source, but it works well enough out of the box to not need it.
Ah, you are correct. I thought a renewal was only required for a new major version after 3 years. But it's actually any update after 3 years. Which is still pretty reasonable (but not quite such a good deal)!
It's perpetual for the version you buy. 3 years of updates.
And tbh, Sublime Text is pretty stable and the kind of program you could probably get away without updating for some time if you wanted to. Things like LSP support are in 3rd party packages (that are open source, not subject to the license), so you'd get updates for those anyway.
There isn't any other than the occasional message when you save that tells you to buy the product. It's about as close to freeware as a paid product can get.
I do suggest people pay though, it's cheap for a one-time purchase. The only reason I've ever seen the message at all is because I spent months being too lazy to dig up the license key to send to my work email. (That should also say something about how little I was being bothered by the message too)
on paid 3, i get a popup every time i try to do anything telling me i must upgrade and pay again, so i've steadily just stopped using sublime. Didn't install it on the new computer
I don't like that it upgrades to ST4 without telling you, but there's a simple workaround if you want to continue using your ST3 license. Download the latest stable build of ST3 from their website:
I can't justify upgrading Sublime if I don't even find myself using ST3 I just don't see what 4 offers that would entice me, and compared to Zed, I get way more out of it.
I tried Zed last month but found that it uses high CPU usage even when idle (up to 50% of 1 core of my i7-7500U).
This is even higher CPU usage than my vscode causes.
Sublime does not do that; in fact it has 0% CPU usage when idle:
sudo strace -fyp "$(pidof sublime_text)"
shows that Sublime issues no syscalls when idle, as it should be.
(Note, you need to either unfocus it so that the caret stops flashing, or switch from fading caret to fixed / non-fading caret, otherwise it necessarily has to do syscalls to draw itself.)
Zed spams syscalls even when its screen is entirely still:
strace -fyp "$(pidof zed-editor)"
In fact Zed makes 800 syscalls per second when completely idle and unfocused.
Syscall spamming is one of the main reasons why computers get slow when many apps are running.
Good software does not do that; when idle, it should only consume RAM, not CPU.
Aside: Browsers, and Electron, seem to always syscall-spam no matter what, which is probably a key reason why people feel that all Electron apps bog down their computers. When your computer gets faster, the software just does more syscall loops per second, for unchanged misery.
From what I recall they generally avoid caching anything and just try to repaint the whole UI really, really fast on every frame so I think that's the design.
It's like how a video game renders, which is their stated goal from the beginning.
I always thought their stated design goals were a bit... wonky.
Actually, I do like Kate, but Zed seems to give me the best of everything I want. It's like they know exactly what I want out of an editor, they provide way more than I need, but that is okay too.
I think I need to give Zed another look. A while back, it seemed like they’d shifted gears toward prioritizing AI, and I lost interest because I was looking for a more pure IDE with solid LSP support, good debugging tools, and so on.
Kate is REALLY underrated. The UI is a bit meh, but it makes up for it in terms of features. It is actually a fantastic document editor. Don't really use it for coding.
I've tried a lot of editors, including Zed, and always come back to Sublime Text.
I use it every day. The #1 reason is because it never loses unsaved files (though I'm still working on breaking the habit of typing a few characters and pressing Ctrl-S). Column editing! Macros! Record/Playback! Configuration! Plugins! Responsiveness! Low resource utilization! Etc!
Why wouldn't I pay for it? I've bought all four versions. The author deserves to be paid.
I guess the question is: why don't you want to pay for it? Assuming here that you're a professional coder being paid a reasonable, US-equivalent salary. I understand not everyone fits that situation; plenty of us pirated software as starving college students / interns, folks in other countries don't get the same pay for the same work, etc.
We should all want to pay the authors of great software. We're on HN, which is a celebration of creating great code and awesome businesses.
This is a big one indeed. I keep many unsaved tmp notes and pastes open all the time. Sublime Text also have it's super smooth pane and window management, so easy to select many tabs, drag and drop tabs to windows etc. Never mind what is unsaved and not. Everything always there on open anyway.
I think this is a highly requested feature in Zed as well, but not sure if they are actually working on this or not.
With Zed touting itself as an AI first editor, is it possible to completely disable all AI features so that you never have to look at the equivalent of a copilot icon ever again? I don't want to have to spend energy to actively ignore these things.
Thanks, I might give it a spin on the weekend then and see how well it performs compared to Sublime Text. If what other people say here are true - as in it uses considerable CPU and GPU resources being idle - then I'll know it's not a usable piece of software.
The AI stuff was a lot more prominent in an earlier version, but they tweaked it a bit. It's the same with Warp forcing a login at first.
Jetbrains is a heavyweight IDE, but I'm not sure if the weight is worth the features it offers anymore, at least for the things I work on.
VS Code is also an IDE, but it's a bit easier on resources depending on what plugins you use and what you allow them to do. I've had combinations of plugins that caused my whole system to freeze up with too much memory usage because it spawned several Node processes each taking up multiple GBs of memory :/.
I'm also sticking with Sublime for many years, and at this point it feels like it is some kind of old man stubbornness (like George R.R. Martin using WordStar 4.0 type thing). I don't know why its ergonomics for me have been just unbeatable. I gave others (VSCode and Zed) good weeks and months of configuring them to my liking and using them exlusively, and always returned to Sublime. All the AI stuff just runs on the side in the terminal (iTerm2 for me, but checking in on Ghostty sometimes too, waiting on them to figure out their minimal text brightness feature).
I used vim before TextMate but TM has multiple cursors where vim has none, and I use that every day. The closest thing to that in vim is "repeat edit" but your edits need to be somewhat trivial to be repeat-able. Next is vim macros but that is too complicated already.
You should be able to just turn off the language server. Go to the lightning bolt icon in the bottom bar, "Stop all servers" or just the PHP one lighting up your source code.
Had the same experience with a rails project, it injected an LSP+linter we don't use in our project and it has really annoying to figure out how to disable it in a settings. Having to debug an editor's settings JSON the first time you use it is not a good UX, it should be optional to enable it instead of assuming we want aggressive on-save linting/autoformatting (that the repo doesn't even have configuration files).
I've worked with mostly PHP from this era, or at least developers that are from this era. The code still runs fine, and not having things like return types don't make the code less able to run (just not as easy to catch bugs).
I haven't used Zed, but can you choose the PHP version, or point to a PHP executable for warnings/errors? I know in VS Code, you point to the PHP executable for the version you are using, to catch errors. I haven't created a new PHP project in quite some time, but I did work on many older PHP projects, and never had this issue with VS Code. I suspect even if you don't go about it this way, there has to be configuration to specify what is and isn't an error vs. warning.
I love Zed, but I hear you. It's a very fast and capable editor with lots of IDE features, but it's lacking comfortable ways of tuning it for specific projects. (This is a problem with every general purpose, everything-to-everyone kind of IDE versus stack "native" IDEs that are geared toward the one true way of developing for particular target.) The configuration file structure is arcane, and it certainly not clear what the boundaries are between language feature configuration, LSPs, built-in and third-party code quality tools, etc.
I eat the cost of configuring it manually when I start up something new because it's just not that big of deal, even when you're like me, working across myriad languages and frameworks and organization with varying standards. It's not ideal, but it's not deal-breaker.
I do wish that there was a better way to definitively set it up a particular way and know that it is doing what you want it to do. I want something like presets/profiles. If I'm working with typescript, I want to be able to set it up to use a specific version of tsc, eslint, prettier; I also want to be able to create a different one with biome; I want it to work correctly whether I have my source in the project root or in a sub directory or in a monorepo tree.
Fairness to Zed: it is difficult to support all of these permutations, but I do think that they ought to be able to do something better to abstract these things and make the reusable.
The standard approach these days is to have all of those declared in a config file somewhere in your project. That way, other contributors (and the CI) can lint/format consistently.
Even if it's for solo projects, it's nice that you don't have to update them in lockstep. As in, you revisit an older repo, you don't get bombarded with squiggly lines from your latest user profile, instead you can upgrade it at your leisure.
1. I want to be able to readily duplicate that configuration for another similar project.
2. It's not always appropriate to co-locate those specific files within the project source itself, especially within a source repository. Notable cases are if we're working on different platforms with different binary paths, or if we're not standardized on a particular editor. I should be able to configure my editor without polluting the common source.
Last time I have updated (half a year ago) it deleted tabs. And since that time I haven’t been brave enough to update it again as I have too many tabs unsaved :)
I have not lost any Sublime tab in 15 years (I have tabs this old).
Sublime also saves a backup of its state files next to the state files in your home dir, so you can restore in case anything ever goes wrong (e.g. bugs in the new version).
The .sublime_session state files are JSON, easy to read for a human.
> spending an hour making up names for random junk files
That is completely unnecessary. You can just backup the '.sublime_session' file that contains all that before an upgrade if you are worried. Sublime already stores all its state in 1 file; manually spreading that across N files seems unfun busywork. A quick web search reveals that by the way.
(I perpetually have 40 Sublime windows open, each one with tens to hundreds of tabs. My 'Auto Save Session.sublime_session' is 70 MB.)
> I'm sure you can configure whatever language server PHP is using to disable specific warnings, etc
You may be able to do this by editing a language server-specific config file in whatever arcane syntax they decided to offer. But there isn't any editor support for configuring languages servers, so it's a bit of a lift for a newcomer who just wants to turn off some warnings
We use intelphense with vscode and it's only mildly red (zf1 mutant project). It also understands stubs from phpstorm. Default lsp for Zed is phpactor and it was just an inferior experience compared to intelephense (free) in vs code last time I tried. Now there's even a guide for adding intelephense to zed, but I'm yet to try it out.
I was using JetBrains for more than a decade. Then I got into Python as well and so was juggling between WebStorm, PyCharm, CLion and Intellij Idea. Zed has replaced the first three completely. Put the appropriate config file in project root for whichever LSP/linter/tool is running, and most of these warnings disappear.
Writing C in Zed is a wonderful experience. The LSPs surface errors in an manner that is very easy to view and edit.
My main issues with Zed are:
- Word-wrap: I prefer on-demand, and I haven't been able to figure out which setting triggers that. Of if it is even possible.
- Support for Devanagari and other scripts: I use it as a markdown editor to proofread old texts and it is inadequate for that purpose. Kate/Featherpad offers a superior experience for this, including the ability to zoom to see those visually difficult to parse conjunct consonants.
I anticipate that Zed's rate of improvement will be faster that Jetbrains', a small team of highly competent developers always moves faster than a big business. I've been maining PyCharm/IDEA for years, but Zed has gotten so good that I already see few real reasons to come back.
The UI is a bit different for each and I got used to the differences I guess. I have a lot of projects and I pick one IDE for each and then do not deviate from it.
I still stick with Sublime because when I give them money they haven’t given me reason to believe they’re going to waste that money putting in AI slop features I don’t want.
Zed felt it had the right to download, install, and run node.js without any permission just to run some LSP (which I don't even use). When I mentioned it here, the devs said that they felt that was fine because their priority was to make things seamless for users such that they don't have to install the LSP manually. Sublime Text, on the other hand, has never installed anything I haven't explicitly asked it to.
I'm sticking with Sublime Text, as its developers actually respect boundaries on my computer.
If you're using zed, couldn't you use AI to fix something like that? Those copy and paste type changes over a code base is something AI assistants are really good at.
I could! I'd probably have to take it piece by piece, rather than telling an AI to edit hundreds of files in one epic session and hoping for the best. Even just reviewing a commit that large feels like it would be a bad use of time. Also, giving every variable a type (or using "mixed" everywhere), and giving every function a return type (more "mixed" or "void") would just make the code more verbose without any justification that I can see.
With Zed, I feel like I'm being dragged into a modern style guide that I never agreed to. It would be nicer if I could make it my own by turning off those parts that I disagree with and keeping the rest. I know this is technically possible, but they've certainly not made it easy.
From what I can gather from a cursory glance at the docs, zed uses intelephense and its diagnostics can be disabled. The whole lsp can be disabled. At the risk of sounding like I'm saying "you're holding it wrong", I have to say that this is an OP problem and not a Zed problem. These are sensible defaults that work for almost everyone, in my opinion.
I was all for trying it until I saw this in the License Agreement:
"4.1. Zed's Use of Customer Data
Customer hereby grants Zed a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable (except to service providers and Customer’s designees), non-transferable (except as set forth in Section 15.1) right to use, copy, store, disclose, transmit, transfer, display, modify, create derivative works from, collect, access, store, host, or otherwise process (“Process”) any materials that Customer inputs into or otherwise makes available to the Service (including prompts and other written content) (collectively, “Customer Data”) solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws. Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."
Sorry, no I don't agree to make my source code and the product I am working to give you "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable (except to service providers and Customer’s designees), non-transferable (except as set forth in Section 15.1) right to use, copy, store, disclose, transmit, transfer, display, modify, create derivative works from, collect, access, store, host, or otherwise process (“Process”) any materials that Customer inputs into or otherwise makes available to the Service (including prompts and other written content)"
Aren't you forgetting the part that says "solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws. Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."
Seems like legalese to be able to take that data for support reasons, telemetry, and local laws that require that data be sent to them. I think ignoring this portion is a little uncharitable to them.
>Aren't you forgetting the part that says "solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws
None of the above I like, and (a) is so vague as to be useless, including if you read the obligations.
>Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."
Companies still do it all the time despite "applicable laws". And when the company is sold, all bets are off.
I'd rather they don't get, or keep, any to begin with.
The telemetry section of the TOS explicitly clarifies that that does not restrict their ability to use the data that is sent to them.
> Customer may configure the Software to opt out of the collection of certain Telemetry Processed locally by the Software itself, but Zed may still collect, generate, and Process Telemetry on Zed’s servers.
Note that they have (or did have, I haven't used their editor in awhile) an AI tab completion feature... it's safe to assume that all of the code you edit is sent to them at least when that is enabled.
What I understand reading this is that if you use their online services, incl AI-agents, llm based tab-completion, auto-updates etc, you send data to their servers, and on that part they run analytics. Frankly, this is what I would expect anyway, ie if I disable telemetry locally, it would affect what I do locally, ie no data about how I use my software locally would leave the machine, but if I sent data to some server I would not expect people not to run analytics on their servers.
> AI tab completion feature... it's safe to assume that all of the code you edit is sent to them
Yes, this is quite obvious, how else could they provide AI tab completion? I hope anybody understands this before using sth like this. They do specify that "[...] telemetry expressly does not include Customer Data" though.
>The telemetry section of the TOS explicitly clarifies that that does not restrict their ability to use the data that is sent to them.
Hopefully it does restrict them being sent to them in the first place.
I also found there are a couple of "Chromium" style builds.
>Note that they have (or did have, I haven't used their editor in awhile) an AI tab completion feature... it's safe to assume that all of the code you edit is sent to them at least when that is enabled.
There's also an option to turn ai features off. At which point of course, nvim is just as good :)
I was willing to give it another go. Now I read on this thread that it installs tons of node packages (so much for Rust native code) and even Go packages, and gets many extra processes running along with it.
This is a bad faith take. The terms are modifiable without the customer's consent or knowledge so "pursuant to these terms" is meaningless.
No one needs all those rights to do what this block says it's going to do. Any one would require that block to be changed in any contract between equals. But this is a contract of adhesion, so it's uncharitable for you to demand charity where they withhold their charity
Can you cite the passage that authorizes Zed to modify the terms without the user's consent? Before I retired, my job was, inter alia, writing software licenses. I was GC for a tech company. I'd like to validate what you're saying, bc I'm the author of a Zed plugin and I wrote a language grammar that another plugin uses.
I don't use Zed, but I occasionally consider switching.
I had the same thought but if you chase down the definition of "Telemetry" as well as unilateral amendment rights pointed out in sibling comments, there's some broad authority implied.
Probably 'we reserve the right to train our next version of smart autocomplete based on the text you send to the current version of smart autocomplete'
Which is not different in kind from “we use your source code to improve our products” and is functionally identical to “we own your output because you use our editor.”
How do people continually fall for this. Refusing to look at the playbook that has been run time and time again and then getting offended when it is too late.
They don't. Paragraph 4.2, "Customer's Ownership of Output" [0]. I recite verbatim below for the sake of clarity.
These are about processing the data, not owning it. They need to process the data eg to provide llm-based tab-completion. A completion is derivative work, and it is also owned by the customer, as it says below.
> The Service may generate specifically for, and make available to, Customer text and written content based on or in response to Customer Data input into the Service (collectively, “Output”), including through the use of technologies that incorporate or rely upon artificial intelligence, machine learning techniques, and other similar technology and features. As between the Parties, to the greatest extent permitted by applicable Laws, Customer owns all Output and Zed hereby irrevocably assigns to Customer all right, title, and interest in and to the Output that Zed may possess. For the avoidance of doubt, Zed and its AI Providers will not retain or use Customer Data for the purpose of improving or training the Service or any AI Provider products, except to the extent Customer explicitly opts-in on Zed’s specific feature to allow training and/or such improvement (such as fine-tuning) and is solely for the benefit of Customer.
I had a long conversation about this with Gemini this morning. I described the telemetry practices and Gemini told me about all the local and federal laws that were being violated. Then I mentioned it was telemetry, and it turned on a dime and said it was fine because the user agreed to it in the TOS. Disgusting.
I'm not a lawyer, but the only part of this that seems objectionable is the "telemetry" bit, the rest of it basically seems to say "we can use things you send us to do the things you asked us to do, including for support purposes. We can comply with the law as necessary (e.g. responding to warrants)".
That said the definition of "telemetry" is so broad that I think it would include training a LLM and the like. Telemetry is defined in section 4.4 as
> Zed may collect, generate, and Process information, including technical logs, metrics, and data and learnings, related to the Software and Service (“Telemetry”) to improve and support the Services and for other lawful business purposes.
I guess that it's so opaque is also objectionable. Contracts don't have to be inscrutable.
1. Mandatory arbitration by default. You waive your right to a jury trial and cannot join class action lawsuits. You have only 30 days to opt out after agreeing to the terms.
2. 1-year statute of limitations. You must file any legal claim within one year, which is much shorter than the default period under most state laws.
3. Zed can terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with no liability. No notice is required, and they owe you nothing if they pull the plug.
4. Autocomplete sends your code to AI providers in the background unless you turn it off. Worth knowing if you're working on proprietary or sensitive code.
5. No guarantees about data retention. If your payment lapses, they reserve the right to delete your account and all associated data with no liability.
6. All fees are non-refundable except where required by law, with one narrow exception for disagreeing with modified terms.
7. Zed can modify the terms at any time. For existing users, material changes take effect after just 30 days, and continued use counts as acceptance.
8. Zed can use your name, logo, and brand in their marketing without asking. You'd have to send a written request to stop them.
9. No warranties whatsoever. The service is "as is", they disclaim all responsibility for errors, data loss, or AI-generated output being inaccurate or harmful.
10. Liability is capped very low, at most, whatever you paid in the last 12 months, or $100, whichever is higher.
What I do is to have two things, a simple editor, I use helix for normal editing. And in a second terminal a docker container solution where I put opencode or claude in https://git.jeena.net/jeena/agent-container
By sandbox you mean limit to certain files, certain actions, or both?
I've been wanting to look into better emacs integration for agents. Imagine an agent making direct elisp function calls, or using macros... One could limit which functions are allowed to run similar to how cli harnesses work, but plug straight into LSP and etc.
I understand that differently. The last part of the statement is important I think. It reads as if this grants them the right to "Process" "Customer Data":
1. to perform its obligations, including support obligations,
2. to perform telemetry,
3. when required by law.
Can't you just build the source and run it without giving them any information? Or does the editor itself require information and phone home while running?
> The Terms of Service and the open source editor are separate. Zed's editor is licensed under GPL v3 (with Apache 2.0 for certain components). Those licenses govern the software itself and haven't changed. The Terms of Service apply when you create a Zed account and use our hosted services. If you use the editor without signing in, the open source licenses are the only thing that applies, and the new terms codify this more clearly than the old.
Yeah this really makes you wonder... now, they are to best of my knowledge fantastic people, so I guess some lawyer slipped this in. I would love to hear some clarification and will always give them benefit of the doubt.
So far they've been great and product is fantastic as you know.
> now, they are to best of my knowledge fantastic people,
They could be the next "don't do evil" people but practice shows that doesn't last for long. And then the messy license terms become very handy for what comes next.
If they went to the trouble to specify all of their rights over your data, their glossing over about what they can do with it is a solid reason to push for complete clarity or pull out completely.
I encourage you to mail them specifically about this concern.
If it is a matter of communication, they can fix and clarify it. If it's genuinely scummy, they can change their approach now that they know they were caught in the act
wouldn't touch this editor with a 10 foot pole. no i am not giving them the rights to use my code for their product. hell no. thanks for highlighting this. people need to making a bigger deal about it. maybe they will rethink their tos.
This language fits common SaaS templates. Let me illustrate by removing chunks and labeling them:
Customer hereby grants Zed
{{ broad list of rights }}
solely:
{{ for these purposes }}
IANAL, but the term "solely" seems essential to understanding this. Pivotal. As in "if you get it wrong, you'll be wearing a tinfoil hat" essential.
Also see "4.4. Telemetry: .... For avoidance of doubt, Telemetry expressly does not include Customer Data."
My two cents: I'm not worried about Zed's contract here. Much more important to pay attention to when your data goes to third-party AI providers: read _their_ contract language.
Meta-comment: Don't let a well-meaning comment like the above trigger a panic. Better to get familiar with typical contracts and/or build your personal network for legal advice.
P.S. Look out for shameless legal slop on the Web, I "promise.legal" it is out there.
The comment above has started a sh-tstorm. Please, slow down and learn about the details before jumping to conclusions. Most of us here did NOT "go pro" in the law. [1] For those that want to educate themselves, you could do worse than immediately leave HN and go _learn_:
If anyone has good detailed resources that are free, please add.
[1] IANAL but I wasn't that far from going down that path. I've worked for a legal-tech startup, did really well in an undergrad Constitutional Law class, incorporated several small companies, managed lots of contractor agreements. So, I know from experience: legal language is weird and specific in ways you may not realize. So be intellectually humble and defer judgment until you talk to a legal expert. Hopefully people more experienced than I can weigh in with more specifics.
I tried Zed for a few days and loved it, but had to switch back to Cursor because I've become dependent on Cursor Tab.
The problem is that Cursor Tab seems kinda psychic, and I didn't realise how conditioned I'd become to just expressing a few keystrokes in the right place and have Tab pick up my intentions. If you're refactoring, you can move between files and it'll remember what you just did in a tab you just closed, and work out how to make the same changes here.
It's also really good at picking up patterns and the right imports from the whole repo. It seems to be working with a much larger, more persistent context.
I tried Zed AI, Copilot, and Mercury. All three seemed forgetful after a year of Cursor Tab. I wish there was a fix because literally everything else about Zed was an improvement.
Whereas I'm not a great fan of modals for anything where I'd like to refer back to what I'm working on. I guess I'd just prefer some tabs to open as a split by default and close with esc, maybe call them something like "ephemeral tabs"? Basically, steal some ideas from emacs.
This. I tried Zed for an entire month, but this "search thing" drove me nuts. It is also slow. If you work in a large project search is absolutely essential. Too bad.. Back to Visual Studio Code.
I think VSCode use ripgrep and Zed has its own ripgrep-like search. Zed likely still do more work per match due to the multibuffer. A normal nested tree-based result should be faster.
I think multibuffer can be good in edit/renaming use cases, but it's very annoying for fast lookups/navigation across different files (as mentioned elsewhere).
Personally I don't hate tab. Sometimes even it's more convenient to have a tab on the side with all the state, instead of reopening modal.
What I hate though is really unintuitive and "non-standard"[1] shortcuts in search tab.
For example "find in project": cmd+shift+f
Whereas for "find and replace in project" I'd expect: cmd+shift+r , but it's: first toggle find, then toggle find and replace. Ok, absolutely fine, but the keyboard shortcut to toggle is: cmd+shift+h - I never can remember it.
When already searching, for my "convenience", if I'd like to adjust my search or search for something new, I click cmd+shift+f and I am focused back to find input, but here's the kicker. Input have automatically changed to what word was under my cursor. So if I was looking for some long or weird string, I need to retype it again or find and copy/paste it again.
#first-world-problems though.
I got tired of babysitting vim/neovim and all it's plugins and use Zed for most of my editing. It has pretty good vim binding support and maybe I just need to remap some key bindings to have better search experience. Zed is much better at emulating vim than Cursor/VSCode.
[1] there's no standard obviously, but some things are the same/similar across most programs.
They have presets from other IDEs and editors. I use a weird combination of Jetbrains and helix shortcuts with helix mode. Because I used them the most.
I love the search in zed. If it was up to me it would open a new tab on every search rather than reusing the same tab, so that I didn't have to redo past searches.
The multibuffer result is so nice for "hands-on" search and replace.
> Sometimes I just want to have a quick glance at some code and close the search using escape.
How else are you going to have “a quick glance at code” *across* project files without using a new view for that? It sounds like you’re describing something impossible.
Zed’s across files search solves this in a similar way as other tools. Except that in zed you can also edit the code where your search results show up. Zed also has within file search.
Look at how Jetbrains IDEs do it. It's a solved UX problem, as far as I'm concerned.
Jetbrains opens up a lightweight floating panel which can also be docked. So you can choose how to view the results. Like Zed, the results view is live editable, even when searching across multiple files.
The floating panel mode is good because you can do a quick search, look at it, and just whisk it away with one key. Opening results as a tab isn't terrible, but mixes one UI (search, very ephemeral) with another (editing, less ephemeral). (Zed also has this thing where search results also show in the right-hand side panel, which I've always found confusing.)
Another thing Jetbrains does better here is to remember your search settings. Your last search is always the default, whereas Zed forgets it every time. Jetbrains also has really nice file scoping via a dropdown, so it's very quick to search all non-test files, for example.
Zed keeps stealing great features from Jetbrains, so I'm sure it's just a matter of time before this gets better.
> How else are you going to have “a quick glance at code” across project files without using a new view for that?
By showing the text around match inline with the search result in the tree. Especially useful if you do not expect to edit every search result. If you do expect to edit every search result, then Zed's multibuffer is arguably better/ faster.
I can’t relate to that, I’ve also struggled with this decision for quite some time, but I’ve gotten used to it. What I hate is that it doesn’t open several search tabs if I need to look for several things at once.
yeah its quite silly they decided to mess around with this universally standard behaviour. The search is the reason why i always end up going back to other vs code based IDEs for real work. I open zed for perf reasons and something quick.
Also now they've introduced this "agent first" layout which i cannot undo. They're strength is in perf, idk why try to reinvent the wheel w.r.t DX.
I'd love to see the Alacritty terminal backend swapped out with libghostty (or more likely libghostty-rs). The work Mitchell is doing with Ghostty and the approach Zed has taken seem super aligned.
And Mitchell definitely seems to want to make Alacritty an easy target for conversion, he was just talking about being open to help support Warp with it: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2049159764261925005
Alacritty is already pretty performant (relative to a lot of the other terminal emulators), but my read is Ghostty has been going hard over performance/standards/protocols (like Kitty).
I did consider that. I remember nope-ing out of alacritty in the early days after seeing the developers response to people requesting a scrollback buffer. It amounted to something like "I use tmux, and if you don't, you use the terminal wrong." It left a bad taste in my mouth.
Ligatures are a renderer issue, so using alacritty as a lib wouldn't have this issue (it does demonstrate their hardline stance). Another example that would translate is how long it took them to support disambiguation of key combinations: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6378 (2019-2023). Of course, the maintainers are free to do whatever they want with the project - but such things do make alacritty-as-a-lib an exceptionally bad choice for situations where you want things to just work.
I quite like Zed, I've consistently driven it for months at a time. But there are two things that add enough friction that over that month or so I end up bailing back to one of my other editors (vscode/neovim). The search experience being a new tab with no sidebar option and the diff viewer being a multibuffer view with no option to see the entire contents of a file you are diffing.
That being said, I love the software and will continue to check back on it with the hopes that it sticks one day. Congrats on the 1.0!!
Not trying to promote too much I don't even get anything out of it, but I've been using a slopfork for a while now and it's great. A few flaws obviously since slopped over the weekend, but it's good enough.
The only thing that bothers me about Zed is the theme. It's so bland it actually gives me reading difficulties. I'd be surprised if some of the color combinations don't pose an accessibility issue. Grey text on grey background is quite the choice.
I do agree that Zed's default themes aren't great. They look too 'plain' for my taste. Bit more contrast can't hurt either.
BUT: It's very easy to just choose a different theme and there are plenty to choose from by now. It's even possible to make your own theme and they even have a first-party theme editor (https://zed.dev/theme-builder) which works great. They should maybe include some descriptions for each color instead of just the name but that's the only negative thing I can say right now.
I'd even say that it's easier to theme Zed than VSCode because there are fewer variables.
As far as I can tell you can theme nearly everything in the app. I've got custom colors for diffs and some syntax, and my base theme is ripped from Monokai.
Personally Cursor feels like a vibe coded slop these days, I canceled the subscription and went back to vscode with AI features off. Claude Code is my third hand and that's it. I need to try Zed though, I remember Atom changed the way I use text editors, I'm certain Zed will provide the same experience.
I've tried switching from JetBrains IDEs just a few days ago. The speed and memory footprint are very impressive. I ended up badly missing refactorings and some other features and configuring a debugging session looked like something that needs more time than I had on my hands. So went back for now. I hope they add more IDE features eventually. There's not much a pure text editor can offer over Emacs after all.
But this announcement sounds like they are prioritizing agents integration - the same thing that seemingly made JetBrains drop the ball on their core advantages.
Was in the same boat. I ended up not using Zed because it had a bunch of minor quirks that annoyed me but I moved to vscode. I primarily write Typescript and C# these days. I was a JetBrains fanboy for years and it feels way too bloated now, stuff notoriously hangs or takes too long on my M3 Pro. I also love Claude Code integration with vscode just a bit too much to give it up for CLI.
Seriously. I love the IDE but given that my idle workload of Electron apps and Docker Desktop VM brings my discretionary allotment of RAM down from 32GB to 8GB, I have absolutely no headroom when running JetBrains IDEs so I keep them closed unless there's a specific feature I want.
What OS are you running? I currently have three Jetbrains IDEs open on my MacBook (M3 Max/36GB) and don’t notice any issue (although I don’t have any electron apps running which probably helps).
MacOS. I have Slack, Teams (different clients use different chat apps), Notion, Docker Desktop VM, several browser tabs, some corporate machine management stuff, and probably some things I'm forgetting about, all open all the time.
Looks much better than when I last tried it! But I couldn't get it to work as well as Cursor for AI development, maybe I just need to get more used to it?
- I tried to use the Cursor Agent via ACP, it worked but it seemed markedly stupider than when I would use Cursor directly (saying that i18n strings were being used when they weren't, editing code differently than what I asked for, also when it is running terminal commands it seems to just say "Run Command: Terminal" and has no information on what's going on). Maybe I just need to not use Cursor Agent, but my company pays for it already so that's what I tried.
- Providing context is also cludgier - In cursor I often highlight specific chunks of code and add it to the AI context via Cmd+L, but I couldn't figure out any specific way of doing that with a keyboard in Zed besides clicking a tiny + button to add "Selection" to context, which got old fast.
- Maybe I just need to get used to it but reviewing code with the git integration is just hard for me to follow; one giant editor with every change in it is just harder for me to grok than showing each file one by one; so it was tiring to review the big changes produced by LLMs. Also, when you stage changes the file just stays where it is with a barely noticeable check in the checkbox in the sidebar - I prefer the behavior of Cursor where it actually moves the staged files to a separate section, but some kind of more obvious visual indication besides that perhaps would help. I did like the tree view, though!
- The tsgo and oxlint LSP servers kept crashing, which was frustrating. GraphQL LSP server also couldn't understand graphql.config.mjs, which is strange as that's supported out of box by graphql-config and works fine in Cursor/VSCode.
- I tried using a few of the different Edit Suggestion LLM options, but unfortunately Cursor is just way too good compared to any of them (slow, and just not very helpful in comparison).
- Just in general figuring out how to configure them is confusing, there's like 3-4 different places to configure agents and LLMs for different purposes, I found it very fragmented and confusing and the docs didn't make it particularly easy to set things up.
That all said, the performance was muuuuch better than Cursor. But the UX issues and general bugginess of ACP and these LSP plugins were impeding my workflow too much for me to tolerate it so back to Cursor for me. If anyone has tips on how I might make some of these better that would be cool, but if it's just inherent limitations then maybe I'll try again in 6 months or something.
I really respect the people who have the sanity and patience to start the development of a new editor.
People are sooo picky when it comes to editors. Guaranteed they will not be satisfied. Too fast? Then it is not doing a lot. Too many features? Well now it is too heavy. Does it use sane key bindings? FU we want vim shortcuts.
Anyway, congrats on the launch folks. Hope you keep delivering excellent software despite the noisy feedback.
I've been using the editor since the early days and have always been a fan of its visual look and feel, so I was pretty happy to see its UI library open sourced.
I wish GPUI could become the go-to Rust UI library and not just an editor backend.
For that, a couple of changes would be highly desirable: being able to switch the GPU backend from Metal to wgpu (so it could be mixed with vello, for instance), and the ability to integrate into an existing event loop like egui allows you to. If this were easy to do, I would switch from egui in a heartbeat.
I took a look at gpui-component a while ago when assessing GPUI for a project I was working on. IANAL but was dissuaded because it's almost certainly not compliant with the Zed license--gpui-component "borrows" gpui code patterns lifted straight from the main zed repo, which therefore must be AGPL/GPL (unlike the gpui-only which is Apache IIRC). Caveat emptor (caveat user?).
I'm beating a dead horse here but the challenge is a11y. Chromium wrappers get a11y for free; bespoke UI frameworks must implement accesskit (or something) which is a lot of work and something that (imo sadly) many small teams decide is not worth the investment.
It looks like their approach could nicely solve a problem that's shared by almost every new GUI toolkit I've tried: text looks terrible, or at least out of place when surrounded by applications built with the desktop's native toolkit.
Shortcuts still don't work on non-Latin keyboard layouts on Linux. For people who use languages with non-Latin writing systems, this is a show-stopper.
(there is, of course, a rich tradition of text editors with the same issue, including Vim and Emacs. They 1) have an excuse; 2) provide both workarounds and their own input method systems. Having this in a new program is nuts.)
Yes that was the primary issue I had when testing Zed in the past. Keyboard layout not working properly, shortcuts being unusable or un-remappable. Sad to see it's still the case for 1.0
- while faster/more responsive than vscode on large codebases, still pretty heavy compared to its AI-averse fork, gram; thus I can't use it on the macbook neo
Until some/all of that is improved, it's just uncanny valley territory with no particular killer feature to migrate. Appreciate all the work they've put into it (especially remote ssh parity!) though and like what they're doing in broad strokes
Just downloaded it and installed the C# language plugin because I need to use that for work. For some unknown reason the program grinds to an absolute halt. I cannot even close it properly anymore. If I type something it appends roughly one character per second.
Not sure if it is the plugin or something else, but unfortunately makes it very hard to try out for me.
Over the years I’ve tried plenty of fast, "snappy" code editors, but always found myself returning to Sublime.
Zed is the first one that got me to actually migrate. It does a great job of staying out of your way. Search and replace works seamlessly across multiple files with regex, and the extremely fast editing experience feels immediately familiar if you’re coming from Sublime. Being open source also gives confidence in its long-term viability.
I am posting this because I want to like and use Zed because it's so fast and responsive (Especially on my tablet, which JB turns into a space heater), and has neat functionality like being able to switch to whatever set of hotkeys you use. And I greatly respect the small binary/download size and fast install. From experimenting in Python and rust:
- Doesn't highlight typos in variable, functions, class/struct names etc. Doesn't highlight rust borrow-check, invalid method etc errors.
- Doesn't seem to understand either language beyond superficial syntax
- "Go to definition" (Ctrl + B) Doesn't do anything
- Doesn't show which versions are valid in Cargo.toml and pyproject.toml
- No ability to move functions/classes/structs etc to different modules
- Doesn't seem to understand rust feature gates
- Doesn't seem to understand what fields a struct has, or params a function has, let a lone what types are valid in them.
- Rename seems naive
Overall: It is taking a superficial view of the code base, and treating it more as text than a cohesive structure.
edit: Thank you very much for those who have pointed out I needed to disable restricted mode. This has added some introspection and in-line error handling. Some of my concerns are partially-mitigated. It seems when introspection and in-line editing/complete/data appears is inconsistent (But working in many cases), and I do not yet know what rules define this. Refactoring tools like moving are still absent. I will continue to use Zed on my tablet with the LSPs enabled, and observe.
I suspect you may be operating in "Restricted mode," aka it doesn't know if it can trust the directory. In that mode, the main tools like Rust analyzer are quite restricted. All of your complaints should be resolved once Rust Analyzer/basedpyrite are up and running.
I do think they should have a more obvious warning that the current directory is untrusted, right now the little green warning in the corner is way too unobtrusive and will result in many people having the same issue as you.
I thought Zed was using tree-sitter: https://zed.dev/blog/syntax-aware-editing? Shouldn't it address all of these issues? Does tree-sitter not understand Python (basically the most popular language out there) and Rust "beyond superficial syntax"? I thought its whole point was that it understands everything about a language's syntax because it builds a concrete syntax tree?
TreeSitter is an amazing tool but is (purposefully) quite limited compared to an IDE--it doesn't even cross file boundaries, so go to definition is a non-starter. Zed uses LSPs like Rust Analyzer to fill that role.
Did you market the project as trusted? Récent update (à few month) requises the trust to reenable the analyses feature
It took me a while to understand lol
At Somme point I though that the parker were broken in my codebase xD
As for your list of grievances, they all seem to boil down to the respective LSPs not doing their job? Does Ctrl-Alt-l (lowercase L, not Shift+i) include the language's server in the context menu, and are there any errors reported for it if it does?
It sounds like LSP isn’t working for you for some reason. Have you installed the extensions for those languages? These things are definitely supported via LSP
I want to love Zed. I really do. I like how fast and performant it is. Few UI things are a nightmare, though:
1. Zed insists on opening files in the active panel AND Terminal opens in a panel -> I constantly open files over my terminal. Arghh.
2. On macOS, when I open another workspace (e.g. by drag and dropping to the app in the dock but also from CLI), it opens in one of the existing windows in a sort of workspace-level tab (?). I want a window per workspace. No way to configure that (or it is so unclear that I could never find it).
Bonus: I want code in a light scheme and terminal in a dark scheme. It is stupid, but my eyes just start hurting otherwise. I created a custom color scheme for that and it sort of works, BUT Zed seem to do some additional post-processing to colors based on the scheme-wide light/dark setting, so I cannot get the colors quite right. If I set scheme to "light" – terminal colors are a bit off. If I set to "dark" – code editor is off, cannot get it fixed with scheme level overrides.
Congratz to the team. I really like zed and started using it quite early, loved the text threads and was using them a lot as I don't think llms fit in a box of only agents, they were a nice way to manage conversations, work through them, edit responses to lead the agent better, copy-paste full text, sad to see them go (text threads).
I'm trying right now the ACP with my own agent and I'm of mixed opinions but that's maybe because I care how my agent works. I believe that for the agent view a plain buffer with small ui elements would be the best ui for an agent conversation but I may have been spoiled by their text threads. I may spin a personal fork but the thought of tens of mins of compile time isn't that attractive.
Edit: I realized I started moving to terminal based editors like helix due to agents: claude -> codex -> custom pi, with the open sourcing of warp I was considering making a native integration for warp + pi but now I'm thinking zed's text threads (~17k lines) + pi might be a better way, any thoughts or ideas?
I love Zed and have been using it for years. I’ve been especially excited about multi-agent support—it feels like it could be a genuinely powerful model.
That said, the current UX is pretty confusing.
There’s a mismatch in visual hierarchy: selecting an agent in the sidebar appears to change the entire editor’s worktree/branch, but the worktree/branch selector lives in the window titlebar, which strongly implies it controls the whole window. So it’s unclear which is the source of truth—the agent or the window.
That ambiguity shows up in the workflow too. If I want to create a new branch/worktree and then start an agent on it, I can’t do that directly. I have to:
1. create an agent
2. start a conversation (to instantiate it)
3. then switch the branch/worktree
That ordering feels backwards—I’d expect to define the context first, then start the agent.
Even basic navigation is unclear. If I switch the branch in the titlebar, does that affect the current agent, or the whole window? If I want to return to a previous worktree, is that tied to the agent or not? I still don’t have a solid mental model.
It feels like there are two competing concepts:
* agents as independent workspaces
* the window as the workspace
Right now they overlap in a way that’s hard to reason about.
The feature has a lot of promise, but the current UX makes it difficult to predict what’s going to happen, which makes it hard to rely on.
I do like the new UI, it beats having a window per workspace, IMO. But personally I'd rather the workspace switcher be based on the project explorer than the conversation history.
Does a native UI experience have no value these days? I mean--amazing achievement building an alternate GPU-accelerated UI framework from scratch, and I do love the responsiveness, but this leaves you with a non-native app that doesn't follow OS conventions and will not get appearance and behavior updates going forward without a lot of additional effort.
The value depends entirely on specific conventions, but you've mentioned none. There is also value in consistent UI across platforms (which native UI don't support) as for some conventions you'd prefer to ignore the OS defaults.
The two primary OS items that turn me off of zed are not being able to have a title bar and the fact that menus open on hover and not on click.
VSCode, and IntelliJ let me turn on OS level title bars so I can handle the window without needing to try and find the magic spot not filled by some other app based nonsense as well as making it easier to see what window is active.
Menus can be unrolled from the hamburger but now pop open if I just swing my cursor through. I've no idea what convention that was pulled from but I think they just took the hamburger menu event triggers and left them as they were instead of changing them to act like an OS menu is expected to function.
I'm sure there are others that I'd find using the app but just those two was enough of a personal issue for me to just not bother.
Unfortunately the reality nowadays seems to be that besides the dated QT, there are no good or popular cross-platform UI libraries for these use cases. It's bold that they built their own.
Electron has basically killed this practice sadly. Which Microsoft modern app follows Windows native UI these days? Teams? Settings? Office? All dramatically different.
TBH, Microsoft has made such a huge mess of UI on Windows, that even if you wanted to use the "native" UI you would have difficulties figuring out what that is, exactly, right now.
Having said that - Teams is a piece of #$%^&; and MS Office has dropped the ball with its UI switching to ribbons in 2007 and has languished in the land of bad UI ever since. Settings makes me want to just use Control Panel like a human being.
So, the S and P in LSP stands for Server and Protocol. The Protocol is to exchange JSON-RPC messages with a server. So to add a new language to Zed, we should just be able to direct Zed to the server to talk to right? No. You have to write an extension in Rust. https://zed.dev/docs/extensions/languages#language-servers.
I get what you mean, but to be fair it seems like you can get away with copy pasting what's in the doc your linked pretty much if you don't care to customize any further.
Just tried it out and it works great and is really fast! It's a breath of fresh air compared to VS Code. Lots of other editors are fast, but this seems feature complete as well as fast.
Migrating from VS Code was also super simple and integrations with AI assistant seem to just work.
I can definitely appreciate the engineering work that went into it. Loving it so far! Thanks!
I use it for Elixir and ansible stuff. I may eventually be open to using it instead of PyCharm for python and/or Nova for C.
If there's one area I still feel that Zed lets me down is in pane management. Maybe I need to just learn more key shortcuts. But I spend a bit of time "managing" the secondary panes and having to switch back and forth between outline, files, search. I'm not sure what the solution is. Just wish the secondary panes weren't a scarce resource that had to be mux'ed betwixt.
I really like(d) the agent integration, but we're currently experimenting with Claude Code Desktop, and I really miss not having the tight integration. My guess is that I'm going to switch back to using the Pro subsidized version. I was getting by with ~$40-$50 a month. Now the company is paying $125 for Claude Team premium seat, and it's a lesser experience.
Zed is a durable piece of software, rather than the current trend of cheap disposable software. Regardless of whether humans or agents use a tool like this, durability is a benefit for both.
I tried Zed several times, and still VS Code + Sublime win.
1. In Zed, all my Rust files are reformatted on save. (I also code in Go, and don't like this approach at all.)
2. It takes ages to find out where to configure the language servers, and find those little options several layers deep, that I need to switch. (E.g. turn of rustfmt, or turn off some PEP8 checks.)
3. Zed is still missing the killer feature of Rust in VS Code -- underlining the mutable vars. (TBH, VS Code custom themes also lack this, and it's unclear how to turn that feature on, but at least the default ones have it.)
For comparison, I have bought all 4 Sublime editions. I tried Pycharm, and still preferred Sublime. VS Code came when I needed interactive debugger for Rust.
1. That's a pref, turn off "format on save" lots of editors and IDEs have it. Maybe they should default to off but it's not an unheard of option with no way to turn off.
I downloaded it, tried opening one of my Java/Springboot projects. When I opened a Java file it had no text highlighting but offered to install a Java extension. Clicking it just made the prompt disappear and seemingly did nothing.
I found the Extensions screen, searched "Java" and tried installing the most popular extension. Clicking "Install" makes the button gray out for a second but does nothing before the button becomes clickable again. Not sure how to proceed from here. (On a work-managed MacBook)
Zed got me off of Emacs for the most part, which is about the highest praise I can offer. I've never used an editor that 1. closely mapped to how I think about code, and 2. is easily extensible enough that it's broadly supported with a gazillion third-party packets, and 3. is lightning fast. Emacs does 1 and 2. VSCode excels at 2. Sublime is good for 2 and 3, and Vim, and BBEdit 2 too. Zed's the only one I've ever tried that nailed all 3, plus excellent out of the box defaults.
I think it's fantastic. I still keep my Emacs chops up because it's 50 years old and I know it'll be here another 50 years from now, but Zed's open on my desktop more than any other app.
Hopefully Neomacs, “A GPU-powered Emacs written in Rust with a modern display engine … starting with the display engine and expanding to the core“, will succeed.
I know there've been a couple of stabs at this in the past, but I hope beyond hope that one of these catches on now. Given some extra LLM boost for the grunt work, I'm more confident today than before. Crossing my fingers!
I was an early adopter of Zed (private alpha mid-2022) and it's crazy how far they have come in a relatively short space of time. Sadly I stopped using Zed when the push of AI features started to happen (same with Warp terminal) and have since used Gram more. I may have to give Zed another run as I believe you can turn all the AI features off now?
On MacOS I never really felt there was a noticeable performance difference to using Zed vs VSCode. I still like the idea of it being Rust/GPU based but just like those GPU optimized terminals (Kitty, Alacritty, etc) the difference is usually pretty marginal for day to day stuff.
The only time VSCode gets slow is if you use a bunch of poorly written plugins, which hasn't been an issue for me in years. It's just like Chrome, chrome is extremely fast as a base but you can mess it up by not being careful with what you add to it.
I still plan to revisit Zed in another year or so once it progresses further, as I find it's still behind Cursor in many ways.
So I'm not so sure how you arrived at your conclusion of Zed having higher memory use than VSCODE but in testing just now that's not at all close to true.
Zed for me on my Linux machine opened to a massive C++ project (the Ladybird browser if you were curious) is (not including LSP or extension processes) using around 480MB of memory.
VSCode on the other hand with nothing open but a 20 line JSON file is (again not including any LSP or extension processes) using around 920MB of memory as reported by its own builtin task manager thing.
I suppose 480MB for a text editor might be a tad high but calling it worse than VSCode is a massive stretch.
If editors own memory usage is your main concern then you should use emacs or even better mg or vi.
The editor + its plugins + it's LSP server is what counts. I dont care if zed is written in rust and uses 400MB when it spawns a multi GB nodejs process when I work on my tiny golang project.
I've personally found it uses significantly less memory on large projects than VSCode. VSCode has historically been nigh-unusable for me on Linux, it gets incredibly sluggish.
Any benchmarks? Scrolling is using 16% of my GPU (vs 5% in Sublime).
Also things like mouse-down to activate a tab (vs mouse-up in Zed) make Sublime feel faster.
If I saw this editor a year ago I would have jumped on it. In today's AI focused development it's not worth the hassle for me to learn new shortcuts and UI layout.
The demo video voice felt super AI generated. Which it many ways felt like it was going against the target audience, people that still code by using an editor and it's shortcuts.
Can you fix the CLI on Windows? You broke it a few versions ago. 'zed --version' and all the other flags don't work. Maybe broken command parser or something, im not sure. Zed with zero flags still launches it. I particularly want to be able to pass it filenames for quick opening and --new and --wait. Used to work. Thanks!
Thank you, Zed team, for creating Zed. It’s clearly a labor of love, and I really want Zed to work for me. It seems like a quality project, it’s fast, and the base editor is easy to use.
I gave it weeks though, and the surrounding UI just never clicked for me. The various AI panels are confusing, the global search is awkward, and something about the type rendering just didn’t ever look right (maybe I’m hallucinating this?). I use VS Code only grudgingly, but I do think its ergonomics are actually pretty reasonable. I came from Sublime before that. I’ll keep trying Zed, and I hope you succeed.
Just opened my current TS/TSX project and everything is working as expected.
Performance is fantastic. I used Sublime for a decade and always missed its native performance after switching to VSCode due to needing first class Svelte, Vue, or Astro support.
The only thing that bothered me is that it enabled the Tailwind LSP even though I'm not using TW and I couldn't stop it. Had to disable that LSP completely in the settings:
Yes - the Claude ACP is nice, as I like to have a view of the code while chatting. Using just the terminal for dense/long running work feels like a handicap imo. It would be great if it supported more commands though!
I feel like it doesn't support some of the commands that manage Claude itself so think `/mcp` `/plugins` etc. Most of the common ones are configured to work though from what I've seen but the ones that do more configuration of Claude seem to be blocked.
That is likely a drawback to their ACP wrapper scheme, it helps exposes IDE functionality but they have to keep up with Claude Code functionality in the other direction. VSCode's Claude code plugin is just like using the CLI.
Entirely right it's a limitation to the ACP side. They're in the middle of adding functionality where you can have terminal/CLI threads and ACP threads too. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/54729
Context usage is in an open PR now! https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/54881 give it a week or two depending on if you want to use stable vs preview releases. I haven't tried pasting images yet either but I have used their context menu that lets you add images.
It works 'well' with Claude Code, but you're going to be missing a lot of features. There's no display for sub-agents/teams, no ability to clear the context without starting a whole new thread window, no ability to view the current context or usage, etc. There's also no built-in ability to view or change the model's current effort level, which I think is a current limitation with the SDK.
I tried it for a bit and it was definitely usable and I got a few features built out, but I eventually moved back to using CC in the terminal. I'm sure they're working on it, though.
Does "local Ollama" or OpenRouter count? I fell into using Zed because there was zero sign-up friction when trying to set up a connection to a local Ollama LLM. Literally "drop-down, select the model you want"
Once I got that running on my machine it was also easy (literally a drop-down+ API key) to switch and explore using models on OpenRouter.
They both work very well. My only complaint is that you can't use them to generate commit messages using the Git Panel (have to do it inside the Agent Thread instead), and /compact seems to have issues so you will often need to start a new thread (this wasn't an issue in the past so hopefully it will get fixed soon).
I used to run Claude code on terminal on zed. But the memory usage would balloon eating all my ram 128gb and have to kill the session every other day. I moved back to vscode. I don’t know if they addressed it
It lacks a lot of features, but IMO feels less "busy" than the terminal version, which I like.
Very recently Zed also gained support for parallel sessions, which is nice.
In general it's very obvious that a lot of effort goes into improving it, and it gets better with every release.
I'm really thankful for Zed. I claim it's a better VI successor than vim/neovim. The fact that it comes with batteries included is a huge win. Multi buffer is super useful. I'd prefer if it was NOT written like a game engine, not depend on GPU, but I can't have everything.
If the idea of hiding extra Markdown elements or making it more WYSIWYG appeals to you, maybe we can put more eyes on some kind of feature request. I've seeing several comments come at this from different angles: ?id=47950471 ?id=47950748
Have they made a way to move those tiny icons in the lower left (aka "activity bar") to larger icons on the upper left like VsCode? As it stands, I can barely see them on my 4K screen and selecting them with a mouse cursor is like a pixel hunting contest. No go for me until they offer a way to change that. Beyond that it seems like a decent editor, but if I can't switch modes back and forth, that is a deal breaker.
UPDATE: Looks like they haven't yet, bummer, and doesn't seem to have much traction either. They redirect to discord, but AFAIK that doesn't have a way to make a feature request directly?
While larger icons might be ideal, note that (according to those linked discussions) those icons also have associated keyboard shortcuts, which are displayed when you hover over each icon. If you memorized those shortcuts, you would no longer have to “pixel hunt” to switch modes.
Zed's strongest argument has always been that editor performance still matters. It is easy to forget how much a fast, quiet tool changes the feel of a full workday.
Congrats to the team! Fantastic editor, it really brought me joy after years of VSCode/Cursor. I love how it's crafted, you can feel the soul behind each decision.
What I love:
- the speed, of course
- the high consistency between features, tabs, and panes, while Cursor looks like a crumbly assemblage of plugins. At first I was worried about the lack of plugins, but Zed made me realize you don't need many
- the visual elegance: the padding, the proportions... It reminds me of the best of JetBrains (though I haven't used their products in years). It feels closer to the IDEs I used in the past (for Java or C#), in the sense that it seems to encompass everything you need, without the heaviness.
- the numerous keyboard shortcuts, often displayed visibly, which makes them easier to remember
- the transparency of their roadmap and their velocity: now that we finally have the vertical git diff as promised, my doubts are gone!
Truly one of my favorite pieces of dev software in 15 years.
I’ve tried it multiple times, but the performance issues on different Macs are too significant to ignore. I appreciate responsive UI, but I also prioritize sufficient battery life.
Air M2, MBP 16 2019 on Intel. Created bug report where I can’t even use it on Intel sometimes because of 100% GPU usage. On M2 it’s not so bad, but still see 50% GPU usage where other editors with also smooth scrolling are much less GPU hungry, even PyCharm. Just search “CPU” or “GPU” in their issues on GH, there are a lot of them.
My biggest gripe with Zed right now (it seems they had changed the default force-formatting of source code) is that it is non-extensible.
I just wanted a custom action when I right click on a file (or multiple files) in the file tree - uh-oh, sorry, you can't have that.
Basically all text editors should be extensible. Emacs and vim, Notepad++ or Sublime - this is one of their core features. Do I need to explain this to the HN crowd?
GPU acceleration is nice, and in general, the whole basic editing experience is quite nice. But lack of extensibility is just a punch below the belt.
There’s tons of extensions for Zed, but you’re asking for particular extension hooks that don’t exist yet.
I expect the reason they don’t is that Zed sandboxes extensions quite aggressively (they’re essentially WASM running under wasmtime), which is fantastic for both security and performance, and it means they don’t break when the app updates, but it also means that a bit more care needs to be put into designing extension points.
I would use zed, but I can't get over tabs for terminals and the file explorer doesn't refresh when new files are added from external sources, outside of that it's pretty good.
Could anyone tell me what’s the point of this when you have neovim?
This will never be an IDE like Jetbrains Rider if you use a language like C# where those guys excel at: sheer volume of refactorings, static and dynamic analysis, cpu and memory analysis, what have you.
And for a scratchpad: is this really better than neovim?
As for scratchpad: I’ve actually been going back and forth between Zed and neovim. Imo Zed is a good graphical editor with sane defaults and preconfigured tools (and excellent vim emulation). It will never beat neovim's configurability but it’s a smooth experience ootb.
Nowadays I just use both but default to Zed because it can be used both for Windows (for work, don’t @ me) and WSL. Neovim for quick file edits outside my main workspace, editing change descriptions, etc. - $EDITOR stuff.
I could probably get away with plain vim as $EDITOR, but throwing away a perfectly valid neovim config seems silly.
Well done on this milestone! Gave zed a decent chance last week and it wins on many fronts to replace my now scattered setup.
1. For me to use it I need to apply prettier formatting of the current project (maybe there is a way? i could not find it)
2. I need to run the claude cli, not an agent interface. or allow me to place the terminal on the left in the agent view or something.
for the everything else it was a win. will give it another chance in a month or three to see if it can do, excited to have a setup that easily navigates code diffs.
Just wanted to mention they added amp jump to helix mode in preview 1.1.2!! Aka "gw" in helix. And it's AMAZING!!! Seems silly but this was the only thing keeping me from fully switching. It's such a snappy editor, and the helix mode is surprisingly faithful. Expand/shrink selection, multiple cursors from searching in a selection, amp jump... it's just amazing.
Helix lovers who are dying waiting for helix plugins, please try this out
Congrats to the Zed team. I love that there's such a powerful and blazingly fast editor out there for us.
While it's been hard to use zed when the pull of claude/chatgpt desktop and terminal apps feel more full featured and take up more of the share of daily work, I continue to use Zed any time I do need to explore a codebase or review a markdown plan from an agent.
I hope that there can be improvements to the markdown preview because at least in my case, I'm using that feature a LOT these days.
I just upgraded to the latest to try it out. It's like Visual Studio Code and I like that. But both are VERY LLM focused and I am not using that at all. If it bothers me with LLM stuf I will switch to https://gram.liten.app/
Congrats to the Zed team! I've been using a combination of Zed + Gram [1] (which I predict may lag behind this 1.0 release in features/fixes). They are both nice, fast editors. However, I switched to Sublime Text 4 again recently and... I'm surprised to see how much clunkier Zed feels than Sublime. I can't put my finger on it, but Sublime, although lacking in features, feels considerably more polished and performant.
It's all in the details, eg. in sublime if you use the goto panel and highlight a file it will immediately show a preview, in zed you have to click on it, so you lose the snappy feeling.
I actually downloaded and tried Zed first time about a week ago, because I needed a text editor that looks and behaves almost identically with Windows/macOS/Linux, so there is minimal switching hassle between developing for all these three OSs. And vims/emacs are no-choice for me, because if I don't use them for a while, I have to google how to exit/save etc. Not a choice for CEO.
I have now one week experience, and I like it very much. Some settings take a bit time to get right for my taste, and themes doesn't look polished, but otherwise it is excellent choice (even when thinking Sublime, which I considered the best of all). AI-things can be disabled for now, so let's hope it stays that way.
I also tried VSCode, and omg, I can't understand who want to use that... It is almost Visual Studio grade bad. At least by default settings. It couldn't even open 900 kb text file without freezing (Zed/Sublime had no problem, like 2026 computers/software shouldn't have with 1 mb file).
I used the fastest editor I've ever used, and the UI design was also very good, but the Git interface didn't show the commit history, which was a bit like JetBrains' Git interface.
I tried zed a couple of times, it's something I'd like to play more because the feeling is fantastic ... but for python development pycharm is still superior.
PS: One thing I'm really missing is the ctrl+shift+f equivalent
I love Zed. I was a fan of Sublime Text, and could never get used to VSCode. I thought I'd try Zed a try when it was still extremely raw, before the AI integration, and I loved the simplicity and speed almost immediately. When they added better python linting features, I switched, and haven't used anything else. I know that there are many anti-AI folks here, but I feel lucky that we they added the Zed Agent, and all the integration. It's been great not having to switch back to VSCode for copilot.
Congrats! I have been using Zed for many years now, arguably the best piece of software I have ever used, and the main reason I switched to macOS.
The editor is so good it has been defining how I work - at first I would quickly copy relevant files into multiple AI chat apps using Text Threads (was quite annoyed when it was replaced by the Agent Panel which at the time made it very awkward to add relevant context and copy text), and now I really can't imagine living without the new Threads Sidebar.
It's not perfect, but whenever something is broken then I know it's just a matter of time before it gets fixed or improved.
Zed is a great editor. I think they have done an excellent job and hope they are successful. That said, I do not feel compelled to switch to it. For a pure text editing experience, I've always felt most comfortable with Geany. When I want to extend the editor, I reach for Emacs. AFAICT, extending Zed means using Rust, and that's never going to happen.
I like Zed but as a user of Scala it is not open-enough of a platform to be useful beyond small projects.
e.g. its "run" gutter icons rely on context free grammar queries, but of course Scala allows to define main methods via inheritance from a class. Zed's extension api should let the extension report entry points via whatever internal mechanism it needs.
This also goes for the various testing libraries in Scala that because only tree-sitter queries are supported therefore need a custom pattern match for each library as they have their own mechanisms, rather than letting the extension provide its own test harness (easily handled by build tools automatically) - Zed should provide something similar to VS Code's Test Explorer and Testing API interface.
Also extensions can't add new UI, so you are stuck fitting to the recipe Zed team provides for you to plug into, and often enough this is not satisfactory.
> Also extensions can't add new UI, so you are stuck fitting to the recipe Zed team provides for you to plug into, and often enough this is not satisfactory.
i have been a zed junkie since it came out. i feel very happy for the team. and they seem to be very focused and disciplined about what they are building. it makes me feel like i am making the right bet!
I really want to use Zed, their technical approach and product design seem great. However, I had to stop using it after a few months because the Typescript LSP was just unbearably slow. An order of magnitude slower than VSCode, often more than 10 seconds to typecheck a change. More worrying is that this has been a known issue for more than two years
Still, congrats to the team. Hopefully this launch means more money to fix issues so I can start using it again.
Congratulations!
I recall there used to be difficulties handling non-ASCII characters in the built-in terminal, but now I can use it without any problems regarding Japanese input.
Providing a stable, real-time, stateful application like an editor is incredibly difficult.I appreciate the efforts of the team and contributors.
i've been a zed user for almost 6 months. i've encountered maaany bugs which i reported, or that were already reported. they're still there. meanwhile, every single update shipped a feature or bugfix for "ai agents".
not sure how 1.0 ships with that massive pile of bugs. but ai agents are the first-class citizen in this editor, and developer experience is not a priority.
funny thing is i uninstalled zed right before the 1.0 release. kinda relieved i didn't miss anything.
Well, just fired it up on Windows, and already dislike it. And I went in with a positive attitude, because I would welcome a better tool than VS Code.
Main problem: No menu. Where are the settings? The first thing I wanted to do was move the file treeview to the left side; I don't know what country the authors live in, but in Western countries we read from left to right. But nope, there's no View menu or anything of the sort.
Then I examined every other little button around the UI, to no avail. I want to get stuff done; not play with an Advent calendar, hunting for goodies.
This unhides the menu instead of hiding everything behind a burger. This should be the default. The defaults are awful in many ways and they've only gotten worse with the recent panel rearrangement.
I like Zed for the same reason I liked Atom: it's very light. These past few months my workflow has basically consisted of me running Codex + Gemini CLI in the terminal panel and hopping through files in another. Easy-peasy.
It's a nice departure from the visual overstimulation I get while in VS Code (for which I have to take some blame as I need to remove some installed plugins).
There are a couple of features shown in the v1.0 video that I was unaware of and am keen to check out.
Feature-wise, Zed is still far from VS Code, but for me, the change has been worth it for the performance increase alone. I'm really happy with Zed, and I think it has a bright future ahead. Congratulations on the 1.0 release!
Good for them, but I wish they'd hurry up and catch up on some of the big missing features. Really hoping they'll accept my PR to add the missing call hierarchy feature before the GitHub issue turns 2 years old :)
I switched to Zed for the first time over the weekend on a somewhat complex mixed C/rust project. I was able to set the whole thing up in about an hour to my liking and it is a really nice IDE, coming from bloated VS Code. I think they have a really nice AI-assisted coding setup, I think that the "file review pane, in line with IDE" UX is correct for AI tools. I'm skeptical that terminal or "agent" based AI programming is viable long-term.
For better or worse, my current workflow is to do most things through WSL on Windows 11. VSCode supports running the editor natively on Windows, but then having an agent or something inside WSL that lets me remote control what's going on there. Does Zed do anything similar?
Currently I'm just access the workspace in Zed via Windows Explorer, but I wonder if that's going to kneecap some of the integrations.
EDIT: nm, Zed supports exactly the same kind of remote editor session, via hamburger -> File -> Open Remote
Congratulations to the team, big milestone. Aside from an occasional drop to Positron for dataframe visualization, I haven't had a need to open any other IDEs like PyCharm/IDEA or VSCode in a long time, and I've been using them for over five years at this point. Zed's internals is software engineering at its finest, and I hope GPUI will eventually become the go-to Rust GUI library.
Can anyone comment on the inline AI tab completion performance of Zed compared to Cursor? Hoping to move away from Cursor as it seems like they break my settings every time they push an update and Vim motions stop working at random.
The only thing stopping me from leaving Cursor is their tab completion, which is honestly just incredible.
It's okay -- usable but definitely a downgrade from Cursor. Basic pattern matching completion works pretty well, but you won't be zipping around the codebase in the same way as with Cursor, which always seems to be thinking a few steps ahead.
Zed is a really good editor in an age that every other editor has forgotten to be about *editing* and wants to be a wrapper around coding agents.
On the agent side, I really like their ACP approach but for now it seems buggy and limited in functionality (previous message editing, occasionally never-ending work, ...)
I have been following zed for quite some time and I use it daily alongside nvim (haven’t yet tried zed vim mode, planning to). I really like the performance and control zed provides, as well as the reduced UI clutter compared to alternatives. The collaborator functionality is not talked enough by the community but I believe it’s an ambitious idea worth pursuing. Wishing the team all the best.
Zed is my daily driver for the last couple of month. I tried it a few times before but had to switch to various other editors for different projects. But my plan was to finally ditch VSCode as my normal file editor. I really love how fast the editor fires up. I also love the fact that it has great vim binding not just in the editor pane.
Ever since agents came out I had been lost trying to figure out what I should replace my heavy IntelliJ with. I switched fully over to Zed once they shipped the git graph in stable [0] and couldn't be happier. Congrats on 1.0!
Congrats to the Zed! I've been using zed since their first launch on HN. They did not even have a search + replace function at that time! I now use zed all_the_time.
This is a solid release and first time, I feel like it is pretty good for the use case of decent sized Typescript mono repos. I can jump around codebase quicker.
PS: Pretty daring move to think of building an editor when there's already sublime, textmate, Jetbrains and VSCode.
I want to like and use Zed, but in my mind there was some odd commerce, or 3rd party share decision that was made which had me avoid it for security reasons. Like... Zed was endorsed as the only editor for something... can anyone remember or elaborate? I cannot!
I think you mean their terms of service which are pretty restrictive and involve(d) a clause that lets them revoke your access to the editor at any time for any reason.
I would really love to see an iOS remote control app for zed. I am using it on throw away microvms via ssh. Would love to have the zed server running there, control agents via phone and occasionally use my Mac to connect to the server and use the desktop app as normal for review and hand coding
The issue is tracked elsewhere and that one is closed as fixed so it seems likely. Last time I tried to run it on Ubuntu a month ago it worked, though I use a newer version than the one in the linked issue.
Congrats on the launch. I have been using zed since 2026 exclusively. I moved from JetBrains and am genuinely happy. Missing the compare with clipboard though.
Zed is the only editor I use on a daily basis and VIM. It is fast and renders nicely. I do not need to configure it much, few extra plugins but most of the things are working out of the box.
Massive congratulations to the team and the community. Thanks for the solid product. It's fast and native on Linux with Wayland. I don't use any of the AI stuff, though, so I'm glad there is a switch to disable it.
Congrats to the Zed team! I really like your editor and it works surprisingly well, althought there are a few rough edges still with the python experience.
The debugger in Python FastAPI and mainly Django is not working as expected. Hopefully soon will be fixed.
Sort of a recurring theme, I find. They have 600+ issues that have been open for over a year, was hoping they'd drive down the backlog a bit before declaring victory
Go look at any large project, they have 500+/1000+ issues and many are ancient. Chrome, Firefox, you name it. I wouldn't be surprised if many issues have even been solved or need new reproduction steps but there's a difficulty to triaging all the issues as well.
I really like Zed but it's most recent big changes to Git integration and Parallel Agents has forced me to disable both of those features as the way they work just didn't suit me and my workflow
Congratulations to the Zed team! What a great project.
The newer layout that came along with the parallel agents feature is very nice; even without using parallel agents regularly, this is a breath of fresh air.
Just installed it and used it for a bit, Great Editor. It sometimes lags and slows down but overall good experience, all these things can be fixed in later patches.
I switched to Zed about three months ago, and honestly, I’m loving it. It just works, it doesn’t lag, and it doesn’t eat all my RAM. Thanks, and congrats!
i investigated this yesterday and there is one cmake extension. It gives basic support to cmake. Not as neat as vscode/jetbrains/qt/vs but it works. It is depends on CMakePresets.json and has no gui etc.
I hate to dismiss Zed for such a stupid reason, but I have tried to use Zed seriously many times and every time I stop because I can't get over the theme. I've tried basically every single theme I can find that is reasonably popular and they are all equally poor. VSCode and Cursor have vastly better default themes.
Does anyone have any suggestions here? I would love to use Zed more.
What's your favorite theme, maybe we can point you to something close? If you have any special needs or usability issues (colorblindness is common), that's probably relevant too.
I seriously hate this “choose your adventure” way with new IDEs. Just install the language plugin, then spend hours making it work, and then it has crazy bugs anyway. Maybe just ptsd from the Java language server, but I’ve also somehow made editing json files laggy and unresponsive by installing the json language server.
Jetbrains “just worked”, but work isn’t paying for the license anymore because AI so I’ll just bang my head against these plugins.
I've been using Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA as my main IDE for Go, Rust, TypeScript, etc. for the last 3 years, and this Christmas I switched to Zed, and I'm not looking back.
I was admittedly skeptical of Zed in the beginning, because they started out with so few features, and it seemed impossible to really switch permanently to it and still be as productive. The Jetbrains platform has got such an amazingly rich set of features and an uncanny ability to just nail the editor experience. It seems almost unthinkable that anyone would be able to compete, and for a long time Zed was very far behind, but this year I feel they're finally a viable alternative.
What ultimately pushed me towards Zed was performance and the sheer amount of work-stopping bugs. I would have days where Jetbrains would get unresponsive or extremely sluggish. Suddenly "undo" would stop working (!). Major and minor upgrades often introduced perplexing performance degradation. In short, I've wasted insane amounts of time on bugs and on filing detailed bug reports that are never looked at. That undo bug has been open for maybe a year now.
For all the bells and whistles, I think Jetbrains faces an intractable problem. It's just utterly unrealistic that they'll be able to solve everything unless they stopped all development to focus on just stability. The product is too big, too complex, too unwieldy, and too bloated. I was always allocating 16GB RAM to Jetbrains, and often had it sit there consuming 1000% (!) CPU. Zed chews up a couple of gigs at most, and rarely uses much CPU. There's a tendency for editors to get bloated as they evolve. This certainly happens with Atom. I'm really hoping Zed will stay lean.
I'd love to try Zed out but I'm locked out unless they deliver a build without any AI integration, or deliver the build tools so that I can build my own editor on their foundation.
Either is fine by me, but I have zero interest until one of those things happen.
That actually exists. I initially avoided Zed for similar reasons, then someone pointed me to Gram. It does come with all the drawbacks of disabling AI, telemetry, phone-home and attempting to protect your privacy. It is hard to get started with than Zed, but it's a nice editor.
They have a single switch that will remove all AI features from the interface. Why do you need more than that? This is not a rhetorical question. I genuinely don't understand it — if you can get all of those features completely out of sight, deactivated, with no trace of them left except that one switch, why is that not enough? Is it as though any kind of AI integration like contaminates the purity of the code or something?
I need more than that because I have no guarantee that its true. I need the source. Or I at least need them to provide a build that they promise doesn't have that stuff in it at all, so that if any analysis was done on a decompilation, there would be some level of certainty that they were telling the truth. Anything that leaves any of it in complicates that effort and makes the certainty that less certain.
RESPONSE EDIT (clear and intentional rate-limit evasion):
It's not paranoia; I'm not concerned if they "take" my content. I write open source, CC0 licensed software. I couldn't give a fuck about anyone doing literally anything they want to do with the code I write. Literally take it and call it your own, for all I care. If I can return the interrogation, why are you so concerned with ownership? Why was that the first place your mind jumped to? Paraphrasing: where is the need for this insane level of "if you've got nothing to hide..." submission?
Like I said: it's about trust. They want me to trust them. You, for some inexplicable reason, seem really upset that I won't trust them. Neither of the parties have given me any reason to trust them. Just insistence that I should, if I want to use their product. And while I entirely agree with that rationale, I don't understand why I get clapbacks for stating that I intend to adhere to that agreement entirely! Won't use the product because they won't give me what I need to trust them. That should be making everyone happy, right? I know I'm happy with the arrangement, at least.
Aside from all that, and far more relevant to my actual comments: another user pointed out the repository where they DO offer the transparency that I'm asking for. So your entire hissy fit is moot when you could have just pointed out that I was wrong in my understanding of what they offered. I mean, that would have gotten in the way of your sycophantic leap to the defense of the company I was so hellaciously attacking, so I understand why a good capitalist bootlicker might not think of that first, but at least now we both know!
You still haven't explained literally anything. Yeah, okay, if there's a switch, you can't be sure that every single AI related code path is fully disabled.
But if you flip the switch and there isn't any AI integration visible in the interface anymore to bother you, why does it matter whether the code is there or not, or technically active or not? Raw integration points and settings windows don't send data literally anywhere at all until you explicitly configure an API key and a URL or sign in to an AI provider or whatever. It'd have nowhere to go, and AI inference costs money. It's just local code providing a set of integrations. Where is the need for this insane level of paranoia?
So you trust a build they say doesn't have AI features, but not a switch that they say turns off the AI features? Doesn't seem like a logically consistent stance to me.
Plus, you can just packet sniff and see if they're doing anything AI related when the switch is off.
Why are you so concerned by there being AI code in the editor that you need this level of trust?
The point I have been attempting to make is that needing this level of trust and verification when you can't even explain or articulate what you're worried about at all is weird and confusing and unjustified, and I've been trying to get you to explain what you're so concerned about.
Required trust/verification should be proportional to what you're concerned about happening.
> Paraphrasing: where is the need for this insane level of ... submission?
It is not an "insane level of submission" to point out that trusting that a toggle does what it's supposed to do, when the possible consequences are basically nonexistent — as I said, without a connection to an AI provider set up, where is it going to be sending your data? No one is doing AI inference for free; and now you've even knocked the concern about code ownership out, so again, what really is the concern? — is probably reasonable.
Also, this is not remotely the equivalent of the old "if you've got nothing to hide" canard, because "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about" is a justification for surveillance of your personal life; this is literally not doing surveillance. Also, even worrying about surveillance needs to be justified with an actual explanation of what negative things you expect to happen; with surveillance that's obvious; with this, it is not, which is why I'm asking you to explain it.
> Like I said: it's about trust. They want me to trust them. You, for some inexplicable reason, seem really upset that I won't trust them. Neither of the parties have given me any reason to trust them. Just insistence that I should, if I want to use their product. And while I entirely agree with that rationale, I don't understand why I get clapbacks for stating that I intend to adhere to that agreement entirely! Won't use the product because they won't give me what I need to trust them. That should be making everyone happy, right? I know I'm happy with the arrangement, at least.
I'm annoyed, because your standards for trust are insane when you can't even articulate what you're trying to guard against. You're getting clapbacks not because you won't use their product if you don't trust them, but because your standards for trust are extremely high and you seem to be completely unable to explain why to any degree, instead just getting irrationally angry at me for just asking you why.
> So your entire hissy fit is moot when you could have just pointed out that I was wrong in my understanding of what they offered
You're very clearly the one having a hissy fit lol.
> I mean, that would have gotten in the way of your sycophantic leap to the defense of the company I was so hellaciously attacking, so I understand why a good capitalist bootlicker might not think of that first, but at least now we both know!
Ah, and now we get to the personal attacks. Of course.
I've only tried Zed like a year ago, and personally have no need for an editor I cannot run in the terminal, but couldn't you just like turn off those features and/or not use those features?
As mentioned, I don't know how much in the way they get, if you don't use them, do they get in the way or something of "normal" usage?
It's mostly a trust thing. You're asking why I don't trust that if I "turn it off" it will be off. So the answer to that is: every US company I've ever dealt with (eventually, in some cases). I don't want to trust you. I don't want you to trust me. I want to provide you with pure transparency, and I want you to provide me with that. And, if they did that, I would trust them more. Maybe even enough to install something that they swear turns off, if I tell it to (and won't ever, even accidentally, even across sessions/devices/locations/etc). But without that transparency, I don't trust them any more than I trust facebook or google, and I consider any prompting to "just trust them, bro" as simp shit. you trust them. I'm good.
I don't. I'm asking them to let me make my own fork, like I can do with VSCode.
RESPONSE EDIT (clear and intentional rate-limit evasion):
hey thanks! that changes things quite a bit! Now I'm curious how well Claude could vibe-code the AI out of that project. Mostly just for the irony of it, but I can't deny that it would probably be faster than doing it myself - at least to start.
anyway, I appreciate the simple and straightforward solution without getting side-tracked by how my ignorance and misunderstandings made you feel.
You can do that, from their repo it seems it's licensed as GPL3. I'd expect someone to do a fork in the same vein of vscodium or ungoogled-chromium. Maybe call it unzedium.
Because it's a huge pain in the ass to get set up (and requires paying Microsoft and providing them with all sorts of personal information). After initial setup it's not too bad, we have a few signed apps at my current employer.
How is their emacs keymap support? I tried VSCode for a while but switched back to emacs because it was so slow and the keymap was not very good. I've been intending to try Zed but emacs is working well enough so the motivation isn't really there yet..
I've got emacs keybinds in my muscle memory and Zed works well for me, although there's no kill ring and the macro system is nothing like emacs. The former will be added at some point (there's an open PR), but I do not expect the latter will ever be comparable.
Congrats guys! I've been using zed since a few months ago, I would consider myself a "light" user but I do enjoy the experience. My only sour point would be the not so smooth integration with claude code. But I've learmt to live with it for now
An editor that sends all your input to the U.S. and consumes 50% of your CPU while idle, and still gets praised to high heaven. We truly live in the age of enshittification.
Now that Zed supports remote development, I really hope they can release it for tablets (iOS/Android) so that we can use it as a client for a remote development machine. That would be delightful!
> We're also launching Zed for Business. Companies have been asking us for a way to roll out Zed to their engineering teams, and very soon they can, with centralized billing, role-based access controls, and team management.
Regardless of everything else being said, does anyone actually still do it? I thought this practice more or less died with Eclipse, where proprietary editors often shipped as Eclipse plugin and then the ops of a company that bought the plugin would have to configure it for every developer, set up with home-made automation etc.
I haven't seen anything like this in the last ten years at least and assumed the practice was dead, and, instead, developers were allowed to use whatever editor they want, while committing editor-specific (configuration) files, for example, would be considered a noobie mistake.
Or was I just happily living in the world where the long arm of the corporate was unable to reach me?
Well done. I've been using Zed pretty much full-time for about 6 months now, and am happy with the experience.
There are still a few things PyCharm does better (debugging, for one), but overall Zed is very good and I haven't used PyCharm in months.
I still use CC in the terminal instead of inside Zed, and lazygit for reviewing git changes and other git actions (though Zed now does a decent job of the basics).
Here is a top-level comment for people who want to post the things they wish Zed had.
Request: please be sincere if you claim "the one thing that keeps me from using Zed is X" ... because let's face it, there is probably more than one thing. Editor ecosystems are complex beasts, and it is ok if people are slow to switch, but the "one thing" claims are rarely credible to me. Anyhow, such comments are rarely consistent with how human nature works. People find rationalizations, and that's fine. It would just be nice if people were a little more self-aware. Changing editors is harder for some people more than others.
My suggestion: if you want to make Zed better for your use case, please smart by explaining who you are as a developer, what you've used, what your expectations are. And be intellectually honest about the last time you've made a big change to your development workflow. End soapbox.
I use two text manipulation plugins in sublime text all the time. I did not manage to have the functionality in zed, which made be renounce to use it:
- Evaluate, a plugin that evaluates the selections as python expressions and replaces them by their respective results. I added "iota" as a variable in the evaluation context, that gives me the current selection index (like iota in go). With that, so many math or text manipulations can be done in bulk.
- Alignment, to align all my cursor into a vertical column by adding spaces.
what do i actually need from a text editor that i dont already have? Sublime's killer feature was column editing, and vscode's was kinda typescript and kinda language servers.
... and why do i want an actual text editor as the primary view, vs a side view to agent TUI? from what Ive experienced, the editor is now a secondary interface to the text, rather than the primary one
if i am picking up a new editor, i think i want it to be focused on how to better understand llm outputs, and how to give really structured feedback without having to write a ton of imprecise text.
how does zed make it easy to have agents build several proposals for a solution, and help me choose which one is actually the best?
I wish Zed had built-in APIs for extension developers to allow for more customizable text transformations. In particular, I want to write tools that have more control over what a buffer displays. Imagine a Markdown extension that gives Zed something close to the WYSIWG experience of Obsidian. To make this happen, I think something like a customizable presentation layer to transform the buffer's contents and adjust cursor movement would be a great start. Vim has a 'conceal' feature that could serve as an inspiration or reference point. [1]
I have no affiliation with Zed, though I have applied to work there, so I'm hardly neutral. I've been an enthusiastic user for probably two years. I don't expect perfect alignment with what I want, and sometimes the team doesn't respond how I would like with particular issues. But man, in a pretty suboptimal world right now, Zed is an amazing thing to have: open source, regular updates, extensions, nice settings. In the past I've used BBEdit, Eclipse, TextEdit, Sublime, Emacs, VS Code, Jetbrains, Helix. Zed is my favorite by far, probably because of the latency. It is an intangible feeling that just clicked immediately for me.
Personally, as a mostly independent developer/researcher, I go through bursts of re-evaluating my tools. To give some context about my newer tools over the last few years: Ghostty, Nushell, Podman, Nix, Mochi, Monodraw, Swish (window manager for macOS), Base (macOS SQLite editor by Menial), LM Studio, (probably obviously) Claude Code. So for a "seasoned" developer, I'm probably more open to new tools than most? Oh, totally off-topic but I think some of the lesser appreciated new open source tools / formats / conventions are: KDL (https://kdl.dev), Typst, and (evaluating) Djot, Cocogitto (Conventional Commits, took me long enough).
Zed is a very polished and nice product. I tried hard to use it, especially when I decided to migrate away from Emacs. But NeoVim gives me everything I was looking for in Zed: Speed, a polished UI, quick startup, not overloaded. So between Zed and NeoVim I decided for the latter. I use Neovide in GUI and neovim in terminal. I don’t use AI alongside nvim, but claude code helps me configure my config file in lua. So my neovim has a 10k lines config spread of several files. It is my simple text editor with super fast movements, and it can become a full blown programmable interface for my Obsidian, for my journal writing, for coding, writing documentation. It can be as complex as I need it to be. And it’s super fast.
I've installed it from flatpak and it has improved somewhat but won't use it because it doesn't remember the window size and position. Resizing the window is a pain in the ass, the arrows don't show up until you match the border pixels and it doesn't even try to mimic the native UI stuff, uses round corners. Vertical resize doesn't work, it just moves the window up and down so you have to use the corner resize. Good luck doing that with round corners. If the editor doesn't start up as I've left it, then I'll keep using my pinned (because M$ like to randomly add annoying shit that breaks my workflow) VSCodium. Also, the "Sign in" drop down on the title bar. Sign in where? I don't want to sign in anywhere, let me remove that. Maybe keep the dropdown for the settings and other stuff a small icon in front of it and about "Sign in". That should be an entry in the dropdown menu, the last one on the list. In fact let me remove the widgets that I deem useless from the main UI just like the browsers do. I haven't even got to check if it has syntax highlighting for Perl, Ruby and Racket yet because these things annoyed me so much that I uninstalled it. Good stuff: one can disable AI and Git integration, athough I'd appreciate if the further options would just go away when you switched the whole thing off. Atom, Sublime and VSCode keymaps are also nice because I don't have to remap. Will check again at 1.5, I guess. At least it has improved somewhat since that last time I've tried it, I think 0.13 or so.
Vulkan, DX11, or Metal, I'm curious which environment has the ability render a GUI desktop but doesn't have access to a modern renderer pipeline. VirtualBox I guess?
This looks to me like the issue is that Zed is using too many buffer objects, it should be querying the Vulkan context to see what's the max and sticking to it. So it seems like Zed's not doing it right, or maybe the AMD driver is failing to report it correctly?
It is a problem though, the GPU apis are pretty terrible. But with such large modern displays it feels important to have a GPU accelerated path. Maybe sticking with OpenGL would be better.
Looking at Zed (and Brave in another thread) I'm really firming up this idea that the "big funded private company model" for essential tech software is just most often idea. They don't know how to add features without also adding bloat and BS.
This is why I say Docker is the only real "success" story here. And note, I mean a success story for the users; Docker tries real hard to enshittify and fails, and that's good.
The only unusual thing is that I use ruby as primary glue language to everything, so in a way that editor (no longer maintained, similar to Linus' editor) is just a wrapper over ruby as such, and functionality in these scripts.
I have also found that it is not the editor that slows me down, but the need to have to think. This is also one reason why I try to make the specification as useful as possible. For instance, in one project that I use to compile everything from source, I use a ton of simple, mostly smallish .yml files that describe everything - allowed keys, allowed values, settings that are mostly just a pointer to where to fetch the source, how, how to compile it then and so forth. The ruby code then is mostly just a glue over that data. And that approach, while very simple, works quite well. Users can also modify settings, by modifying the .yml file or via commandline flags. And if need be, I could also use and populate a SQL database with that data (but for the most part, yaml actually suffices; I don't understand why people are so upset about yaml, and then only point at use cases where folks use mega-nested yaml files. These guys don't understand why simplicity is a benefit; admittedly yaml is not a perfect format either, I notice this when I have a long .yml file and then some forgotten ":" or "," due to manual copy/paste error, then it takes me a few seconds to notice what's wrong).
> "These guys don't understand why simplicity is a benefit"
I'm not really criticizing, clearly your system works for you. Ironically, as I've been using AI more, I've been rolling more systems that work for me instead of relying on existing ones. It's very freeing.
I tried zed sometime ago, and the limiting factor was devcontainer support. It looks like they’ve made some progress there https://zed.dev/docs/dev-containers
Congrats to the Zed team for building the best modern editor I have ever used. I subscribe to the monthly plan just to give you guys the funding you need, even if my funding is a tiny drop in the bucket. I always wanted a feature rich alternative to Sublime Text that can run anywhere and do basically anything I need from it. I've use JetBrains IDEs for years (been subscribed annually since 2017), but since Zed I havent really opened any of those IDEs in a long time, other than maybe Rider but that's due to C# nuances I needed to work with.
Zed really is delightful to use. I haven't had any need to open VSCode in over a year. Extending it has been relatively simple, even as someone who doesn't know Rust well.
The Zed team seem to have really learned their lesson on performance from the Atom days, because it's very performant. @nathansobo, @maxbrunsfeld, @as-cii and the team, congrats!
I only open VSCode when I need to resolve a conflicted merge. The Zed interface is basically diff2, and doesn't show character-level differences.
Apparently Zed was working on a better diff viewer, but that seems to have been shelved.
I've always thought of Zed as a good Sublime Text alternative. I can tinker with and potentially break my Neovim config, but I'll have Zed as a backup for when I need to do a quick edit. Their Vim mode is the best I've used outside of JetBrains (or Vim itself).
If you break your Neovim config, you can always just run `nvim --clean`
Sure but that turns my IDE into a text editor, where as Zed is a great backup IDE.
Never thought of Zed as Sublime replacement, but now that you've mentioned – why not? I use Sublime only as blazingly fast temp note taking that doesn't lose them on exit, but I see Zed fits the job perfectly. One less close product hopefully!
Sadly this is how I use Sublime as well, though not anymore, on work systems the new Notepad app has tabs finally, and can do exactly that...
yep that lycra wearing bike rider from North Sydney doesn't need more of your money
I was about to pay him, just maybe not this time, since sublime 2...
it's now my go-to for when I need to wrangle basically any text file manually - has handled everything I can throw at it (some of which has crashed other editors -looking at you Cursor/VSCode)
Zed and VSCode can handle about the same file sizes afaik, with Zed just slightly better. Sublime Text etal still beats both.
I was downloading it "just to see," but your comment is roughly a carbon copy of my own IDE/editor usage history, so 1) ooo spooky deja vu and 2) here's hoping I feel the same way you do.
Can you speak to your feelings on Zed's customizability/extensibility? Zed is shiny and impressive, but Sublime's rich ecosystem of python plugins is hard to beat...
EDIT: Tho if sublime wasn't already "doing everything [you] need", maybe you aren't familiar with the plugin ecosystem!
I used Sublime Text since ST2, and bought into ST3. It just felt stale compared to Visual Studio or any JetBrains IDE. I loved the speed, but at least back when I was using it, LSP wasn't as big and so I didn't have that at my fingertips.
With Zed all the high quality features are OOTB. For example, with Python they run some high quality linters out of the box, I don't even have to think about setting anything up, I don't even thing I have installed a single plugin for Zed outside of themes. It's a very batteries included text editor.
Not the OP, but for me ST can't be beat in terms of how easy it is to write a plugin. It uses Python (Zed is Rust). Plugins generally auto-reloads. If extensibility is important to you, ST is still the way to go.
sublime text is a joke with regards to LSP
It doesn't even respect local project dependencies
Plus the whole "holy than thou" attitude of python devs in general just sucks tbh
Python isn't as great as you think it is.
What an abysmal series of top comments. These guys created a phenomenal product using novel technology, which will only continue to improve. Great work to the Zed team.
FWIW, the top comments at the time of my comment (one hour after yours, two hours after the article was posted) are all complimentary. You commented one hour after the article was posted; it's worth waiting a bit for the comment voting to shake out.
Further discussion from dang on the "contrarian dynamic": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601
This comment could easily be expanded into an essay on the sociology of social media, wisdom-to-word ratio is insane.
What exactly is phenomenal and novel about Zed? I've tried it a couple of times for a week or so, didn't see the point, and moved on every time.
And I'm not luddite swearing by vi or something, I use VSCode and Idea, and have used Sublime for many years, Xcode on/off for some Obj-C/Swift dev, Eclipse for 5-6 years in the 2000s, and vim for everything cli/lightweight since forever.
Is the GUI tech what's supposed to be novel? I couldn't care less about that backend in my everyday editor use as long as the editor is fast enough. Which on modern hardware, even Idea is.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good editor still.
Currently on this machine: using 900MB of RAM, including all language servers, with nine open projects - that is pretty phenomenal. VSCode could barely keep one open with the same memory.
The perception of 'fast' is very subjective. To me having a smooth, jitter-free UI, low input latency, and instant startup, all matter a lot.
VS Code is also offering significant more ability than Zed at the moment. If you want to sell RAM-usage as a phenomenal benefit, then you should compare it with similar editors, like Sublime or (Neo)Vim.
It's amazing that a gig of ram is considered lightweight for having 8 project dirs open in an editor, which normally means 8 tree views and a few open file tabs per project :)
Even more amazing that 10GB for the same purpose is considered acceptable. ± 100MB for window, project files, LSP servers, ASTs etc is something very few editors can achieve - I'm pretty sure Zed beats both Emacs and Neovim in memory consumption.
"Including all language servers" is a big part of that. I hope.
I’ll stick to my butterflies.
I understand wanting your software to be well optimized, but at no point in my years of using VSCode have I ever actually had to care about how much RAM it's using. I have 32GB, I'm going to use it.
I, too, would like to use my RAM. And I would like to be able to use it on the things I deem important, not to subsidize the laziness of devs who reach for Electron.
>I, too, would like to use my RAM.
I'd like to BETTER use my RAM, and have faster programs to boot (as programs who overuse RAM also are slower than more optimized ones).
Maybe use it to run a small local LLM + Zed instead of just VS Code?
(I’m probably off on how much memory it takes to run a small LLM, but still.)
A side effect of Electron crap, before Zed many editors and IDEs on Atari, Amiga, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, Mac OS, NeXTSTEP, were written in fully native code.
My experience with Zed differed. On Linux I found it to be very memory hungry.
I heard that Zed has very impressive collaboration features. I tried them a little and they really look well (like discord, but directly in editor). But this was very superficial look
VSCode extensions and the ecosystem is a security time-bomb. Zed looks to be doing things better.
Zed literally downloads random executables and runs them by default without asking
What?! Really?! Link? I'm not a Zed user. That comment was based off a few minutes of research, and I guess a small dose hopium of a VSCode user and understanding what a shit show the extensions setup is and wanting someone to do better.
Recent example I looked at: https://github.com/nilskch/zed-jj-lsp, which downloads jj-lsp if not found in the system. I have seen other extensions doing similar for convenience, but can't remember names to give concrete links.
Yep, it pulls stuff from at least npm, it’s not a secret - check the source code.
Actually it pulls latest versions (checking registry then installing that exact version, not sure why they sidestep normal resolution algorithms) no matter what .npmrc may say, so min-release-age breaks almost everywhere it integrates with JS/TS ecosystem (most visibly, Copilot). I probably should’ve filed an issue.
It also installs Go packages but I haven’t looked into that.
Yes, this is annoying. When doing editor testing, I always also have to open the activity monitor and force quit all extra processes started by Zed.
From what I can see, one of the top comments (at the time of this comment) is worried about legalese claiming to have "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable" access to your source code. I think it is very fair criticism to not want to give away your source code.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953501
There is this big recurrent misunderstanding with zed's ToS that produces some extreme, misinformed reactions. Zed (the ide) is open source ("GPL v3 with Apache 2.0 for certain components"). The ToS are only applicable for the services they provide when you subscribe for an account and use them [0]. Some people read the ToS, think they apply just for the editor, and think that zed is stealing your source code and whatnot, because it would indeed be weird to have these ToS for just editing stuff locally, without any of the additional services provided. However, if one actually reads the ToS instead of nitpicking a paragraph, it is very clear what it is about.
Any ToS for a company that you send data to process includes similar terms that just allow it to process the data as you are expecting them to in order to provide these services. Eg for the AI tab-completion, they process part of your source code on their servers and provide a tab-completion suggestion ("derivative data"). Some people are evidently either unfamiliar about how these things work or about the data-related legalese terms used (barring any bad intentions assumed). If anything, paragraph 4.2 [1] makes it clear that any data output is owned by the user (and not by zed). This whole discussion made me read the terms and (apart from the arbitration thing imo, though not uncommon), I couldn't see any kind of dark pattern or issue.
I like zed a lot, it works great, I am definitely cautious about the fact that they have received VC money which holds me from getting "all-in", but criticism that is based on misunderstandings or on obviously factually wrong arguments is not very useful.
[0] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/50568#issuecomm... (could be some better source than a github comment but it has been repeated many times)
[1] https://zed.dev/terms#42-customers-ownership-of-output
Maybe this wasn't true an hour ago, but all the top 3 comments right now look supportive (if I am to count yours), and the next few are just mildly critical.
yeah, all forms of criticism, all feature suggestions, any comparisons to other products/solutions, etc. should be outright banned by HN. if you aren't praising the thing, get out!
(do you comment this same type of thing on github, microsoft, apple, etc. posts? all of these comments seem absolutely tame compared to the vitriol in those threads. most top comments here are supportive. most of the negative ones are constructive.)
Did Zed ever answer their code of conduct violation?
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
Maybe they'd be better if the title were informative.
Yep. The intentionally obscure titles on here are just inexcusable.
^^the #1 reason I limit my daily time allowance for HN
I agree, the toxic trolls focusing on minor nitpicks like a license agreement that allows your text editor to steal all your source codes really harshes the vibes.
Maybe they shouldn't be releasing it with anti-consumer terms of service? People's objections are legitimate. Where else should they be discussed?
I think the Zed team's enthusiasm adds a lot of momentum to the product, on top of their indisputable engineering capabilities.
I hope HN can appreciate what a game changer (and paradigm shift) Zed can be.
To the Zed developers: CONGRATULATIONS! I have been following your project with great interest since your speed demo years ago. And since it’s AI-first, I’m interested to see how we can integrate it with https://safebots.ai (Safebots, Safebox, and Safecloud).
I would love to see how we might be able to increase the safety of agents in Zed, use local models like Qwen/Deepseek and we also have Grokers which can turn any codebase into a graph with tree-sitter and help your agents far more than RAG and similarity search (https://grokers.ai/deck.pdf)
What’s the best way of getting in touch? (If you want, my profile has a way of emailing me).
https://graphify.net and trail of bits’s trail mark https://github.com/trailofbits/trailmark
Both use treesitter and create knowledge graphs for llm use. It results in way less tokens spent as well.
Yes, several projects have been going in the right direction.
But also - see https://safebots.ai/grokers.html
I haven't read them because they're now buried, but whatever those top comments said can't be bad enough to warrant your vitriol. Abysmal means bad, not pessimistic. It's inappropriate for the (currently) top comment to be casting such judgment in its preface.
I don't think overly-opinionated meta-comments are inherently bad, but I don't come to this site for them. I don't even think your comment is bad; I'm mad that this is what the people of HN have decided is the most important remark on the matter. It tells me something unfortunate.
Congrats!
My daily driver is Zed developing on SSH remote servers on exe.dev.
It's crazy to think of all the dev tools I've churned through over the last 18 months but these two feel sticky.
Zed has everything I need in a unified pane. File editor, terminal, agents, SSH remotes. And it's fast and intuitive
exe.dev is the first "dev container" I've ever *loved*. The remote sandbox means `dangerously-skip-permissions` is safe. Being on the internet with good private / shared / public access saves so much time.
I also use https://conductor.build/ and GitHub but this is starting to feel clunky compared hacking directly against online live reloading apps.
I'm glad to hear the SSH remote editing is working well.
A lot of the time I'm developing on a remote server using VSCode Remote-SSH. I mostly love it. But! It consumes a lot of memory. And not only that. At times it gets stuck in some infinite loop or such, and ends up consuming all memory on the machine, preventing all traffic. Takes a few minutes for the OS to finally kill it, so I can get back in. I'm pretty this is happening due to large collections of symlinks (the subprocess eating up the memory is rg). But also just JavaScript editing at times launches up a bunch of ts-servers consuming everything and more.
This is super scary, if I'm poking around on the prod server.
Looking for alternatives. Zed is on my list.
The VSCode remote ssh implementation is a bit concerning:
https://fly.io/blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/
Any idea if zed does things differently?
Actually, inspired by this, I went ahead and installed Zed to try it out. After a couple of hours of working remotely using Zed, I'm impressed. It actually works, and the experience feels great. Only little issue was that when I first opened the remote folder, I was greeted with a blank window. I thought it was stuck loading and was about to give up, but turns out I had to open the project panel myself to see the files. Otherwise, working fine so far! Memory-wise it's practically free.
EDIT: Scrap that. After a while it starts running at 100% CPU on my macbook. I'm editing a small, simple PHP remotely over SSH. I haven't yet tested if it only happens with remote editing. Too bad... Well, at least it didn't trash the server like VSCode.
EDIT: Logs showed it was trying to do some auto suggestions every few seconds, but failed due to missing credentials. Didn't seem like something that would eat up 100%, but after disabling all AI features (I'm glad there was an option for this), the problem disappeared, and I'm happy with Zed again.
Do you happen to use the AutoImport extension? rg subprocess explosion seems related.
https://github.com/soates/Auto-Import/issues/127
I've been using the SSH remote editing on Zed too and it works great. No issues whatsoever.
The only reason I remained on vscode for so long was the remote ssh editing as I also use a dev box (M2 air + dev box = multi-day battery life) but recently got sick and tired of the vscode instability and frequent need to blow away state / reinstall plugins after updates. When I saw Zed had an ssh dev equivalent I jumped ship and haven't looked back. Here is my theme if anyone is interested, https://github.com/whalesalad/dotfiles/blob/master/zed/whale...
How does exe.dev differ from VPS + Caddy + some subdomain on a domain you already own?
For auth one can use Caddy and basic auth. Yes it takes a bit of work but it isn’t that bad. Plus zero subscription costs if your VPS is a Raspberry
Personally the main advantage is to simply spin up new ones with the same setup. You can also do that by yourself but imo it includes way more managing and time compared to exe
I have a Hetzner box with Caddy too.
The difference with exe.dev is multiple VMs. I have over 20 now with isolated apps, branches of the same app, etc.
> Yes it takes a bit of work but it isn’t that bad.
Agreed, it takes a few hours to set up everything. But just did it with Claude the other day, and I was up and running in no time! :-)
I'll have to check it out again. Last time I tried, the got integration didn't work when connecting to a remote SSH server, and ports couldn't be mapped at runtime.
Had to shut everything down, list the port, and then reconnect. A big pain when other tools just automatically figure out what needs to be forwarded, or just let you specify arbitrary ports at runtime.
"online live reloading apps" => trying to get my head around this workflow. so the disk is shared across these? so do you still have the problem of say running a "main" version of an app, and it's weird experimental version of that same app? because they still have to live in different folders/worktrees? that's where I get stuck a little trying to enable things like this for others. right now, I've got people a system we can spin up N "vms". but it's not persistent storage if the vm goes away. it's whatever version exists in their GitHub branch. hopefully if they hack the vm app they commit and push back to the repo.
Yes I’m trusting exe.dev disks and persistence.
For many apps the weird experimental version is all there is. Call it vibe coding or experiments or non-critical tools. These may not even have a GitHub repo. I trust local git and the exe.dev disks.
Then for serious apps the above is the same shape for development branches. Spin up a VM in a few seconds with the code checked out and running online and editable over an SSH mount is the magic.
Then that turns into a PR on GitHub and a normal review then CI/CD to staging and prod takes over.
Thank you for this comment! exe.dev is what I've been seeking without quite knowing it. excited to dig into it.
Using Zed with ssh is an interesting idea. I spend a lot of time mosh/ssh to VPSs, then running 'emacs -nw' locally on the server. This is a great setup since I love Emacs, but I will give Zed/ssh a try. Thanks.
Emacs has had this feature forever, and it works pretty well.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Re...
KDE also IIRC. Just works in all load and save dialogs :)
What you really want is to build a Docker container and wait for ECS deployments between iterations.
ECS really isn't scalable. imo a multi-account EKS cluster is a bare minimum. It's what I use for my todo list app, and it works great!
I really want to like Zed because they've clearly put so much work into it, but so far I've been sticking with Sublime. I have several large PHP projects that were started in the 2010-2020 era, and Zed will highlight and complain about all sorts of minor things that were standard PHP fare at the time: functions without return types, for example. My code (which works fine) looks like an ocean of red when I view it with Zed, and turning all those warnings off is not trivial.
For each kind of warning, I wish there was a button that said "don't warn me again about issues like this one in this project." Then I could keep the interesting warnings (like undeclared variable) and ditch the ridiculous ones.
> My code (which works fine) looks like an ocean of red when I view it with Zed, and turning all those warnings off is not trivial.
Isn't it just the default configuration of whatever LSP zed defaults to for PHP?
So you should be able to either configure the LSP to avoid that or disable the LSP server entirely.
Coming from Sublime, I'd never even heard of a Language Server when I first tried Zed. As I recall, disabling particular kinds of warnings required copy-pasting some pretty exotic incantations into my project config. All of it was poorly documented, and it felt like I was doing something nobody expected me to do. Instead, I should have been able to mouse over a particular warning and say "don't warn me again about things like this", at which point Zed should edit the project config for me.
Well, PHPStorm (and the other JetBrains IDEs) does it this way. You can disable a certain "inspection" globally, per project, per file, per method or just for one occurence - the last three work by inserting annotations into the code. Then again, PHPStorm costs money (not just if you want AI assistance), and is based on (drum roll) Java technology (although JetBrains don't advertise this fact a lot nowadays).
that does sound like a pretty nice ui idea to add to code actions (command + .), it already lets you one-click add an ignore comment iirc so probably not too hard to wire a global per-project option
however, i think LSP or integrated linters/typecheckers have been standard fare in editors for a while now (zed does seem to have a lot more set up by default, but i like the sane defaults most of the time). The "correct" solution would be to configure whatever lsp zed is running for the project the way you want, and reap the benefits even outside of zed. for php the tools are listed here: https://zed.dev/docs/languages/php the main one seems to be Phpactor and you should be able to configure it globally or per project https://phpactor.readthedocs.io/en/master/usage/configuratio...
but i understand the frustration, sometimes i try to navigate an ancient python codebase and it really is a sea of red
Yeah, I really can't stand every vscode has done to the ecosystem for settings. JSON as a storage format for config is entirely fine, but it's a truly awful UX for changing things. But they're successful and it's easy to build, so everyone mindlessly copies them.
Mind you that vscode does have an ui to change the settings. Also it has code completion when editing the json because of the linked json schema.
It has a UI to change some of the settings. And not even all of the settings with autocomplete help - I have no idea why those aren't equivalent to each other at least as a fallback, but they very clearly are not. And plugins frequently have major settings documentation gaps, including absolutely massively used ones like Go.
Compare that to something like a JetBrains product.
Zed is highly configurable via JSON (so already puts them in a tier above many editors) and also for some things like shortcuts provides an actual interface for editing that JSON. I imagine as time goes on they'll expose more interfaces for editing configurations. For now I'll take JSON over nothing/gui-only.
You should learn about LSPs
LSP is how all editors work today and its simplified everything so so much. you should figure them out
While this comment is overly general (some major editors ship without LSP support built in; many more do not have a sane configuration out-of-the-box), it is useful to learn about them and how your editor of choice integrates with them.
The landscape isn't generally intuitive, unfortunately, and while it's getting better, understanding the differences and interop places between LSP, Treesitter, DAP, your editor, and the underlying language-specific tooling can be a big, confusing time hog.
That said, and to be clear: LSP's been a huge boon for me. I used a minimal, kinda-broken configuration for a while with Python, then rebuilt the whole thing when I switched to Rust for work, and holy hell, this thing's awesome.
This is way too equivocating.
You are a craftsman, learn your tools. Could you imagine the equivalent from other professionals? A machinist saying, "Understanding the differences and interop places between the DRO, hand controls, and CNC controls for the lathe can be a big confusing time hog."
It takes a couple of hours, and it's a tool you use every single day. Learning how it works is the price of entry, not a mountain to overcome.
It is a fact that some useful things in the software world are a pain in the ass to learn, and that they could be better on that front.
LSP is one of those things, or at least it has been, for a while.
LSP is also something that's not necessary to writing quality code; it's absolutely a major quality-of-life boost, but before rewriting my configs after switching to Rust, my LSP usage was limited to being a slightly faster autocomplete engine more than anything. I didn't have keybinds set up for going to definitions, implementations, or references of symbols. I still put out what I think was decent code. I'm also better off now that I've adopted a more useful config.
IMO it's an important part of this industry (among others) to let developers have whatever workflow they want, within reason. If someone decides they want to invest the time into setting up LSP with their editor, that's their prerogative. If not, that's fine too. I don't know who among my present or past coworkers use LSP outside of occasionally chatting about editor configs with one or two of them, because they've usually figured out a workflow that lets them produce respectable code, and I've never had to question their tooling before questioning their methodology.
The context is a user adopting an editor that has LSP integration and is relying on the language server. That's why I said "it's a tool you use every single day".
If your tool is TextMate, you should learn how TextMate grammars work. If your tool is vi, you should learn how modal editing works. If your tool is Ed, you don't need to learn anything because "Ed is the standard text editor".[1]
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html
To be fair, vi has got its dose of "modal editing is difficult to learn" criticism for years. Why shouldn't zed receive the same treatment if configuring LSP is a pain point for many newcomers?
lol ok but where does it stop?
I got into programming long before LSPs and MCPs.
The only craftsmen are the ones at the edge of the lingo tree?
To use your own analogy, as a machinist myself : I can master the concept of the lathe and bow drill without learning simulation-driven CAM, and I would be no less a machinist than the guy pressing buttons on a brand new Haas.
If you work via notepad.exe and assembly with a compiler and linker ready in the next window, fine! the work is what matters.
It stops at the tools you use, "it's a tool you use every single day". If it's not a tool you use every day, you don't need to learn it.
If you don't use language servers, you don't engage with development environments which rely on them, you need not learn them.
If you're making chips on a Monarch 60 you don't need to learn shit about CNC. If you're pushing buttons on a Haas you do.
If you're coming from a Monarch and want to try pushing buttons on the Haas on the kids are using, you need to learn how CNC works. That's your job. If you want to switch from notepad to Zed, you need to learn how language servers work.
> If you want to switch from notepad to Zed, you need to learn how language servers work.
Can you not use Zed without knowing how language servers work?
https://notepadexe.com/
Every day we stray further from God.
Except these days companies are telling you to not be a craftsman but a supervisor.
I want to be a craftsman and know my tools and want to actually enjoy using them, but it's becoming less accepted to do so.
AI agents also use LSP to be more efficient with source code [1].
[1]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/plugins-reference#lsp-server...
Definitely not all.
If you have never used an LSP and don’t need it, you can just turn the LSP off. I do it from the UI (thunderbolt icon on bottom bar I think) for some projects which don’t have LSP typing support. There should also be a setting to turn off permanently.
you could just get your AI to configure it for you
https://xkcd.com/1172/
IIRC, Zed uses PHPactor by default. It's a mess for Kirby projects as well.
Edit for clarity: I want to fully switch to Zed, I really like it and their vision for the editor. PHP issues are a hurdle, not a turnoff to me.
I love Sublime, but I don't want to pay to upgrade from 3 to whatever version it is now, Zed is everything I wanted Sublime to be. Honestly, I wanted VS Code but fully native, and I feel like that's what I'm getting from Zed.
I feel like some people will be put off by all the "AI" mentioned by Zed, but you're sleeping on a top tier editor where you can just ignore the AI stuff if you don't want it. It's very high quality, and probably the reason I wont be renewing next year for JetBrains, unless JetBrains does something impressive, I thought by now they'd have a more native feeling IDE that handles most / any language instead of so many separate ones.
VS Code has gotten so bloated over the years. The gold standard of ST has spoiled me with simpler editors. Zed is the first time I felt like someone finally built an editor that is modern and has a rich set of features.
> I love Sublime, but I don't want to pay to upgrade from 3 to whatever version it is now
I don't know what your financial situation is, but given that the upgrade is an $80 one off payment (a new license is $99), that it's a per-user license (not per-machine), and that there were 8 years between Sublime Text 3 (2013) and Sublime Text 4 (2021) (only major versions require a new license), I personally think it's very reasonably priced.
Agreed-- Sublime is asking $99 right now, which is quite reasonable for something that you're going to use for hours a day in your professional work. Somebody gave many years of their life to make that tool the best it could be, and as a well-paid professional, I feel it's more than fair. In other high-end professions (like the legal field), I've heard of law firms paying a lot more than $99 for certain software licenses.
That said, there are a lot of reasons why someone might be struggling with money. If I was the creator, I wouldn't object to someone using an unlicensed copy forever in that case.
It is "one time" in the sense that it will never stop working, unlike a subscription model.
You are however limited to 3 years of updates, so if you want to keep up to date, it is $80 for 3 years. Which if fine for me, it is the one piece of software I used the most except for the browser and OS, I even use it to make money, $80 / 3 years is not much.
It is also the kind of software I like to support. It is... respectful in that it isn't a resource hog, runs fast, launches fast, and it doesn't try to be anything but a text editor. No ads, no subscription, no cloud, no AI, no slop, no dark patterns, no enshittification. Just an executable that does what it say it will do, and does it well. I wish it was open source, but it works well enough out of the box to not need it.
Ah, you are correct. I thought a renewal was only required for a new major version after 3 years. But it's actually any update after 3 years. Which is still pretty reasonable (but not quite such a good deal)!
I also thought that it was perpetual. Maybe they changed it. Either way, the three-year subscription is news to me.
It's perpetual for the version you buy. 3 years of updates.
And tbh, Sublime Text is pretty stable and the kind of program you could probably get away without updating for some time if you wanted to. Things like LSP support are in 3rd party packages (that are open source, not subject to the license), so you'd get updates for those anyway.
I'm using the latest free/unregistered version (4200) and I haven't experienced any limitiation so far
There isn't any other than the occasional message when you save that tells you to buy the product. It's about as close to freeware as a paid product can get.
I do suggest people pay though, it's cheap for a one-time purchase. The only reason I've ever seen the message at all is because I spent months being too lazy to dig up the license key to send to my work email. (That should also say something about how little I was being bothered by the message too)
on paid 3, i get a popup every time i try to do anything telling me i must upgrade and pay again, so i've steadily just stopped using sublime. Didn't install it on the new computer
I don't like that it upgrades to ST4 without telling you, but there's a simple workaround if you want to continue using your ST3 license. Download the latest stable build of ST3 from their website:
https://www.sublimetext.com/3
And then add
to your user settings.I can't justify upgrading Sublime if I don't even find myself using ST3 I just don't see what 4 offers that would entice me, and compared to Zed, I get way more out of it.
I tried Zed last month but found that it uses high CPU usage even when idle (up to 50% of 1 core of my i7-7500U).
This is even higher CPU usage than my vscode causes.
Sublime does not do that; in fact it has 0% CPU usage when idle:
shows that Sublime issues no syscalls when idle, as it should be.(Note, you need to either unfocus it so that the caret stops flashing, or switch from fading caret to fixed / non-fading caret, otherwise it necessarily has to do syscalls to draw itself.)
Zed spams syscalls even when its screen is entirely still:
In fact Zed makes 800 syscalls per second when completely idle and unfocused.Syscall spamming is one of the main reasons why computers get slow when many apps are running.
Good software does not do that; when idle, it should only consume RAM, not CPU.
Aside: Browsers, and Electron, seem to always syscall-spam no matter what, which is probably a key reason why people feel that all Electron apps bog down their computers. When your computer gets faster, the software just does more syscall loops per second, for unchanged misery.
I've always thought of it as lightweight, but checking it now, wow.
From what I recall they generally avoid caching anything and just try to repaint the whole UI really, really fast on every frame so I think that's the design.
It's like how a video game renders, which is their stated goal from the beginning.
I always thought their stated design goals were a bit... wonky.
I've found that some of the language servers can really grind up a storm but Zed itself is usually pretty lightweight.
Can you repro my finding?
I'm running on a Zed with only 1 empty text file in it. So language servers should not be in use.
How do you measure "pretty lightweight"?
I finally moved off Sublime a few months ago because I wanted something open source and stumbled on KDE/kate. It's been a perfect substitute.
https://github.com/kde/kate
Actually, I do like Kate, but Zed seems to give me the best of everything I want. It's like they know exactly what I want out of an editor, they provide way more than I need, but that is okay too.
I think I need to give Zed another look. A while back, it seemed like they’d shifted gears toward prioritizing AI, and I lost interest because I was looking for a more pure IDE with solid LSP support, good debugging tools, and so on.
They've prioritized supporting AI for people who want to use it, but it's highly respectful of devs who don't want to.
Kate is REALLY underrated. The UI is a bit meh, but it makes up for it in terms of features. It is actually a fantastic document editor. Don't really use it for coding.
I've tried a lot of editors, including Zed, and always come back to Sublime Text.
I use it every day. The #1 reason is because it never loses unsaved files (though I'm still working on breaking the habit of typing a few characters and pressing Ctrl-S). Column editing! Macros! Record/Playback! Configuration! Plugins! Responsiveness! Low resource utilization! Etc!
Why wouldn't I pay for it? I've bought all four versions. The author deserves to be paid.
I guess the question is: why don't you want to pay for it? Assuming here that you're a professional coder being paid a reasonable, US-equivalent salary. I understand not everyone fits that situation; plenty of us pirated software as starving college students / interns, folks in other countries don't get the same pay for the same work, etc.
We should all want to pay the authors of great software. We're on HN, which is a celebration of creating great code and awesome businesses.
"Pay him. Pay that man his money" - Teddy KGB
> never loses unsaved files
This is a big one indeed. I keep many unsaved tmp notes and pastes open all the time. Sublime Text also have it's super smooth pane and window management, so easy to select many tabs, drag and drop tabs to windows etc. Never mind what is unsaved and not. Everything always there on open anyway.
I think this is a highly requested feature in Zed as well, but not sure if they are actually working on this or not.
With Zed touting itself as an AI first editor, is it possible to completely disable all AI features so that you never have to look at the equivalent of a copilot icon ever again? I don't want to have to spend energy to actively ignore these things.
I only installed it today for the first time but yes it does have a very prominent button to completely disable all AI.
Thanks, I might give it a spin on the weekend then and see how well it performs compared to Sublime Text. If what other people say here are true - as in it uses considerable CPU and GPU resources being idle - then I'll know it's not a usable piece of software.
The AI stuff was a lot more prominent in an earlier version, but they tweaked it a bit. It's the same with Warp forcing a login at first.
Jetbrains is a heavyweight IDE, but I'm not sure if the weight is worth the features it offers anymore, at least for the things I work on.
VS Code is also an IDE, but it's a bit easier on resources depending on what plugins you use and what you allow them to do. I've had combinations of plugins that caused my whole system to freeze up with too much memory usage because it spawned several Node processes each taking up multiple GBs of memory :/.
Given the price and the fact it’s a WinRAR-style model, I really don’t mind ST being paid.
I also loved / want to love ST but it seems its ecosystem has collapsed, a lot of plugins haven't had an update in over 5 years.
Eventually Zed devs will need to get money that isn't coming out of VCs...
How much did you pay for doordash last month?
Oooh this is a thread about an IDE called Zed not a Typescript strict typing system called Zod
I was confused until here because I remember using Sublime until it went paid
Sublime Text has always been paid, it was never free.
I'm also sticking with Sublime for many years, and at this point it feels like it is some kind of old man stubbornness (like George R.R. Martin using WordStar 4.0 type thing). I don't know why its ergonomics for me have been just unbeatable. I gave others (VSCode and Zed) good weeks and months of configuring them to my liking and using them exlusively, and always returned to Sublime. All the AI stuff just runs on the side in the terminal (iTerm2 for me, but checking in on Ghostty sometimes too, waiting on them to figure out their minimal text brightness feature).
As you mentioned iTerm, you should also check out TextMate, the thing that Sublime Text was inspired by.
I used TextMate prior to Sublime, but then I became into vim mode, which TM never got I believe.
I used vim before TextMate but TM has multiple cursors where vim has none, and I use that every day. The closest thing to that in vim is "repeat edit" but your edits need to be somewhat trivial to be repeat-able. Next is vim macros but that is too complicated already.
Interesting! I tried Zed too, and not knowing Sublime, I switched to it instead after a while…
I’m not sure why though. I do not have the issue you do, but Sublime feels better.
You should be able to just turn off the language server. Go to the lightning bolt icon in the bottom bar, "Stop all servers" or just the PHP one lighting up your source code.
Had the same experience with a rails project, it injected an LSP+linter we don't use in our project and it has really annoying to figure out how to disable it in a settings. Having to debug an editor's settings JSON the first time you use it is not a good UX, it should be optional to enable it instead of assuming we want aggressive on-save linting/autoformatting (that the repo doesn't even have configuration files).
I've worked with mostly PHP from this era, or at least developers that are from this era. The code still runs fine, and not having things like return types don't make the code less able to run (just not as easy to catch bugs).
I haven't used Zed, but can you choose the PHP version, or point to a PHP executable for warnings/errors? I know in VS Code, you point to the PHP executable for the version you are using, to catch errors. I haven't created a new PHP project in quite some time, but I did work on many older PHP projects, and never had this issue with VS Code. I suspect even if you don't go about it this way, there has to be configuration to specify what is and isn't an error vs. warning.
I love Zed, but I hear you. It's a very fast and capable editor with lots of IDE features, but it's lacking comfortable ways of tuning it for specific projects. (This is a problem with every general purpose, everything-to-everyone kind of IDE versus stack "native" IDEs that are geared toward the one true way of developing for particular target.) The configuration file structure is arcane, and it certainly not clear what the boundaries are between language feature configuration, LSPs, built-in and third-party code quality tools, etc.
I eat the cost of configuring it manually when I start up something new because it's just not that big of deal, even when you're like me, working across myriad languages and frameworks and organization with varying standards. It's not ideal, but it's not deal-breaker.
I do wish that there was a better way to definitively set it up a particular way and know that it is doing what you want it to do. I want something like presets/profiles. If I'm working with typescript, I want to be able to set it up to use a specific version of tsc, eslint, prettier; I also want to be able to create a different one with biome; I want it to work correctly whether I have my source in the project root or in a sub directory or in a monorepo tree.
Fairness to Zed: it is difficult to support all of these permutations, but I do think that they ought to be able to do something better to abstract these things and make the reusable.
The standard approach these days is to have all of those declared in a config file somewhere in your project. That way, other contributors (and the CI) can lint/format consistently.
Even if it's for solo projects, it's nice that you don't have to update them in lockstep. As in, you revisit an older repo, you don't get bombarded with squiggly lines from your latest user profile, instead you can upgrade it at your leisure.
True, and not disputing that. Two points:
1. I want to be able to readily duplicate that configuration for another similar project.
2. It's not always appropriate to co-locate those specific files within the project source itself, especially within a source repository. Notable cases are if we're working on different platforms with different binary paths, or if we're not standardized on a particular editor. I should be able to configure my editor without polluting the common source.
Sidenote: Sublime remembers all tabs even those unsaved. (Software update deletes this memory.)
I use Sublime as a scratchpad and never save anything, so this is an important feature for me. It's worked flawlessly for years.
I've tried Zed several times like this and it continues to lose data.
> Software update deletes this memory.
While there was a bug where the session was lost when updating, this was fixed years ago.
Great, good to know. Thanks. I wasn’t brave enough to test, so I hope you are a human not a dog that tries to prank me :))
> Software update deletes this memory.
Are you sure? I believe Sublime preserves all your unsaved tabs even on update.
Last time I have updated (half a year ago) it deleted tabs. And since that time I haven’t been brave enough to update it again as I have too many tabs unsaved :)
i lost all the open tabs last time i upgraded sublime.
burned once, twice shy; i wouldnt update without spending an hour making up names for random junk files
I have not lost any Sublime tab in 15 years (I have tabs this old).
Sublime also saves a backup of its state files next to the state files in your home dir, so you can restore in case anything ever goes wrong (e.g. bugs in the new version).
The .sublime_session state files are JSON, easy to read for a human.
> spending an hour making up names for random junk files
That is completely unnecessary. You can just backup the '.sublime_session' file that contains all that before an upgrade if you are worried. Sublime already stores all its state in 1 file; manually spreading that across N files seems unfun busywork. A quick web search reveals that by the way.
(I perpetually have 40 Sublime windows open, each one with tens to hundreds of tabs. My 'Auto Save Session.sublime_session' is 70 MB.)
It's a shame I didn't know that. Thanks.
This is just a language server problem. I'm sure you can configure whatever language server PHP is using to disable specific warnings, etc.
> I'm sure you can configure whatever language server PHP is using to disable specific warnings, etc
You may be able to do this by editing a language server-specific config file in whatever arcane syntax they decided to offer. But there isn't any editor support for configuring languages servers, so it's a bit of a lift for a newcomer who just wants to turn off some warnings
I think the application should own its dependencies and its default config. In this case, it felt to me like no one had really looked at them.
Editors should take full responsibility of the user experience. The user should not have to care about the existence of language servers.
We use intelphense with vscode and it's only mildly red (zf1 mutant project). It also understands stubs from phpstorm. Default lsp for Zed is phpactor and it was just an inferior experience compared to intelephense (free) in vs code last time I tried. Now there's even a guide for adding intelephense to zed, but I'm yet to try it out.
I was using JetBrains for more than a decade. Then I got into Python as well and so was juggling between WebStorm, PyCharm, CLion and Intellij Idea. Zed has replaced the first three completely. Put the appropriate config file in project root for whichever LSP/linter/tool is running, and most of these warnings disappear.
Writing C in Zed is a wonderful experience. The LSPs surface errors in an manner that is very easy to view and edit.
My main issues with Zed are:
- Word-wrap: I prefer on-demand, and I haven't been able to figure out which setting triggers that. Of if it is even possible.
- Support for Devanagari and other scripts: I use it as a markdown editor to proofread old texts and it is inadequate for that purpose. Kate/Featherpad offers a superior experience for this, including the ability to zoom to see those visually difficult to parse conjunct consonants.
Going forward there will be one version of Jetbrains IDE and clion, webstorm, etc will be all just plugins.
I anticipate that Zed's rate of improvement will be faster that Jetbrains', a small team of highly competent developers always moves faster than a big business. I've been maining PyCharm/IDEA for years, but Zed has gotten so good that I already see few real reasons to come back.
is this really the case ? I thought they had given up on fleet
A bit confused - Idea supports pythong and ts/js, why the need for three?
> pythong
Glad I'm not the only one that frequently makes this typo.
You are not, I assure you.
The UI is a bit different for each and I got used to the differences I guess. I have a lot of projects and I pick one IDE for each and then do not deviate from it.
It just doesn’t play bice with PHP, I always wanted to uniform my stack before with vscode, now with zed. But PHPStorm always win.
It really there is no realy good ide or tools for php
Same, I really want to like Zed but LazyVim covers my every need
I still stick with Sublime because when I give them money they haven’t given me reason to believe they’re going to waste that money putting in AI slop features I don’t want.
Zed felt it had the right to download, install, and run node.js without any permission just to run some LSP (which I don't even use). When I mentioned it here, the devs said that they felt that was fine because their priority was to make things seamless for users such that they don't have to install the LSP manually. Sublime Text, on the other hand, has never installed anything I haven't explicitly asked it to.
I'm sticking with Sublime Text, as its developers actually respect boundaries on my computer.
> Zed felt it had the right to download, install, and run node.js without any permission just to run some LSP (which I don't even use).
Yes. This is bad. Zed keeps installing and running all sorts of random background stuff. This should be an opt-in.
If you're using zed, couldn't you use AI to fix something like that? Those copy and paste type changes over a code base is something AI assistants are really good at.
I could! I'd probably have to take it piece by piece, rather than telling an AI to edit hundreds of files in one epic session and hoping for the best. Even just reviewing a commit that large feels like it would be a bad use of time. Also, giving every variable a type (or using "mixed" everywhere), and giving every function a return type (more "mixed" or "void") would just make the code more verbose without any justification that I can see.
With Zed, I feel like I'm being dragged into a modern style guide that I never agreed to. It would be nicer if I could make it my own by turning off those parts that I disagree with and keeping the rest. I know this is technically possible, but they've certainly not made it easy.
Have you investigated if the lsp and linter is configurable
From what I can gather from a cursory glance at the docs, zed uses intelephense and its diagnostics can be disabled. The whole lsp can be disabled. At the risk of sounding like I'm saying "you're holding it wrong", I have to say that this is an OP problem and not a Zed problem. These are sensible defaults that work for almost everyone, in my opinion.
There are no "defaults that work for everyone". Well designed tooling acknowledges that and makes it easy to tune the software to your preference.
I was all for trying it until I saw this in the License Agreement:
"4.1. Zed's Use of Customer Data Customer hereby grants Zed a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable (except to service providers and Customer’s designees), non-transferable (except as set forth in Section 15.1) right to use, copy, store, disclose, transmit, transfer, display, modify, create derivative works from, collect, access, store, host, or otherwise process (“Process”) any materials that Customer inputs into or otherwise makes available to the Service (including prompts and other written content) (collectively, “Customer Data”) solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws. Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."
Sorry, no I don't agree to make my source code and the product I am working to give you "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable (except to service providers and Customer’s designees), non-transferable (except as set forth in Section 15.1) right to use, copy, store, disclose, transmit, transfer, display, modify, create derivative works from, collect, access, store, host, or otherwise process (“Process”) any materials that Customer inputs into or otherwise makes available to the Service (including prompts and other written content)"
Aren't you forgetting the part that says "solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws. Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."
Seems like legalese to be able to take that data for support reasons, telemetry, and local laws that require that data be sent to them. I think ignoring this portion is a little uncharitable to them.
>Aren't you forgetting the part that says "solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws
None of the above I like, and (a) is so vague as to be useless, including if you read the obligations.
>Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."
Companies still do it all the time despite "applicable laws". And when the company is sold, all bets are off.
I'd rather they don't get, or keep, any to begin with.
Apparently you can do:
The telemetry section of the TOS explicitly clarifies that that does not restrict their ability to use the data that is sent to them.
> Customer may configure the Software to opt out of the collection of certain Telemetry Processed locally by the Software itself, but Zed may still collect, generate, and Process Telemetry on Zed’s servers.
Note that they have (or did have, I haven't used their editor in awhile) an AI tab completion feature... it's safe to assume that all of the code you edit is sent to them at least when that is enabled.
What I understand reading this is that if you use their online services, incl AI-agents, llm based tab-completion, auto-updates etc, you send data to their servers, and on that part they run analytics. Frankly, this is what I would expect anyway, ie if I disable telemetry locally, it would affect what I do locally, ie no data about how I use my software locally would leave the machine, but if I sent data to some server I would not expect people not to run analytics on their servers.
> AI tab completion feature... it's safe to assume that all of the code you edit is sent to them
Yes, this is quite obvious, how else could they provide AI tab completion? I hope anybody understands this before using sth like this. They do specify that "[...] telemetry expressly does not include Customer Data" though.
>The telemetry section of the TOS explicitly clarifies that that does not restrict their ability to use the data that is sent to them.
Hopefully it does restrict them being sent to them in the first place.
I also found there are a couple of "Chromium" style builds.
>Note that they have (or did have, I haven't used their editor in awhile) an AI tab completion feature... it's safe to assume that all of the code you edit is sent to them at least when that is enabled.
There's also an option to turn ai features off. At which point of course, nvim is just as good :)
That should be off by default. That alone is a "I won't use this" for me.
I was willing to give it another go. Now I read on this thread that it installs tons of node packages (so much for Rust native code) and even Go packages, and gets many extra processes running along with it.
This is a bad faith take. The terms are modifiable without the customer's consent or knowledge so "pursuant to these terms" is meaningless.
No one needs all those rights to do what this block says it's going to do. Any one would require that block to be changed in any contract between equals. But this is a contract of adhesion, so it's uncharitable for you to demand charity where they withhold their charity
Can you cite the passage that authorizes Zed to modify the terms without the user's consent? Before I retired, my job was, inter alia, writing software licenses. I was GC for a tech company. I'd like to validate what you're saying, bc I'm the author of a Zed plugin and I wrote a language grammar that another plugin uses.
I don't use Zed, but I occasionally consider switching.
16.4
What makes you think it's bad faith?
I had the same thought but if you chase down the definition of "Telemetry" as well as unilateral amendment rights pointed out in sibling comments, there's some broad authority implied.
None of that would require the "create derivative works" part.
I honestly can't see any legitimate reason why they'd have the right to derivate work from yours, and you don't insert that kind of terms by mistake.
Probably 'we reserve the right to train our next version of smart autocomplete based on the text you send to the current version of smart autocomplete'
Which is not different in kind from “we use your source code to improve our products” and is functionally identical to “we own your output because you use our editor.”
How do people continually fall for this. Refusing to look at the playbook that has been run time and time again and then getting offended when it is too late.
AI tab completion and agentic edits are often derivative works.
But should they own any rights on these outputs and edits done to your source code?
They don't. Paragraph 4.2, "Customer's Ownership of Output" [0]. I recite verbatim below for the sake of clarity.
These are about processing the data, not owning it. They need to process the data eg to provide llm-based tab-completion. A completion is derivative work, and it is also owned by the customer, as it says below.
[0] https://zed.dev/terms#42-customers-ownership-of-output
> The Service may generate specifically for, and make available to, Customer text and written content based on or in response to Customer Data input into the Service (collectively, “Output”), including through the use of technologies that incorporate or rely upon artificial intelligence, machine learning techniques, and other similar technology and features. As between the Parties, to the greatest extent permitted by applicable Laws, Customer owns all Output and Zed hereby irrevocably assigns to Customer all right, title, and interest in and to the Output that Zed may possess. For the avoidance of doubt, Zed and its AI Providers will not retain or use Customer Data for the purpose of improving or training the Service or any AI Provider products, except to the extent Customer explicitly opts-in on Zed’s specific feature to allow training and/or such improvement (such as fine-tuning) and is solely for the benefit of Customer.
Why do you need to see what I'm writing in my IDE for telemetry?
I had a long conversation about this with Gemini this morning. I described the telemetry practices and Gemini told me about all the local and federal laws that were being violated. Then I mentioned it was telemetry, and it turned on a dime and said it was fine because the user agreed to it in the TOS. Disgusting.
I'm not a lawyer, but the only part of this that seems objectionable is the "telemetry" bit, the rest of it basically seems to say "we can use things you send us to do the things you asked us to do, including for support purposes. We can comply with the law as necessary (e.g. responding to warrants)".
That said the definition of "telemetry" is so broad that I think it would include training a LLM and the like. Telemetry is defined in section 4.4 as
> Zed may collect, generate, and Process information, including technical logs, metrics, and data and learnings, related to the Software and Service (“Telemetry”) to improve and support the Services and for other lawful business purposes.
I guess that it's so opaque is also objectionable. Contracts don't have to be inscrutable.
Wow, so why not just write that instead of the legalese? Reads like an overjustification to me.
The problem is that I don’t send them anything. So it’s “we can use whatever of yours that the application we wrote sends to us”.
"Other lawful business purposes" sounds awfully close to "all lawful use".
wait, there's more [copied from the top comment of their youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Bns1T77HM)] -
1. Mandatory arbitration by default. You waive your right to a jury trial and cannot join class action lawsuits. You have only 30 days to opt out after agreeing to the terms.
2. 1-year statute of limitations. You must file any legal claim within one year, which is much shorter than the default period under most state laws.
3. Zed can terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with no liability. No notice is required, and they owe you nothing if they pull the plug.
4. Autocomplete sends your code to AI providers in the background unless you turn it off. Worth knowing if you're working on proprietary or sensitive code.
5. No guarantees about data retention. If your payment lapses, they reserve the right to delete your account and all associated data with no liability.
6. All fees are non-refundable except where required by law, with one narrow exception for disagreeing with modified terms.
7. Zed can modify the terms at any time. For existing users, material changes take effect after just 30 days, and continued use counts as acceptance.
8. Zed can use your name, logo, and brand in their marketing without asking. You'd have to send a written request to stop them.
9. No warranties whatsoever. The service is "as is", they disclaim all responsibility for errors, data loss, or AI-generated output being inaccurate or harmful.
10. Liability is capped very low, at most, whatever you paid in the last 12 months, or $100, whichever is higher.
Some of these are questionable, but 3 and 5 stick out. Being included makes it sound like whoever wrote this list doesn’t really know what Zed is?
It’s a local text editor. The only thing an account gives you is access to their specific flavour of coding agent and a collaboration server.
> If your payment lapses, they reserve the right to delete your account and all associated data with no liability.
Pretty much the only associated data is your payment info.
Why does a text editor have such a defensive license? This is extreme and reckless levels of paranoia.
Zed devs reading this: just release it as GPL. It will be better for literally everyone.
Yeah, screw that.
I am literally shopping for a new editor. A once-a-decade thing for me. I want something that can effectively sandbox local models for code gen.
So I was looking at Zed yesterday. Cloned the repo. Then I noticed they were funded by our favorite VCs.
Between this and CVE-2026-31431 ("Copy Fail"), it seems like I dodged a bullet.
I think that's why fork "Gram" exists. It strips all the weird parts and leaves just the editor.
What I do is to have two things, a simple editor, I use helix for normal editing. And in a second terminal a docker container solution where I put opencode or claude in https://git.jeena.net/jeena/agent-container
By sandbox you mean limit to certain files, certain actions, or both?
I've been wanting to look into better emacs integration for agents. Imagine an agent making direct elisp function calls, or using macros... One could limit which functions are allowed to run similar to how cli harnesses work, but plug straight into LSP and etc.
These are all fairly standard terms.... nothing crazy
If that’s the case, and it certainly isn’t for Emacs, my preferred editor, then it should become non-standard.
lol those are extremely anti-consumer and anti-human behaviors. Some of us don't want to live in a corporate hell holes.
Yes, but the companies want to reserve the right to turn evil later.
Is it? My editor's terms of service seem much more user friendly:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
Zed is also released under GPL 3:
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/LICENSE-GPL
I understand that differently. The last part of the statement is important I think. It reads as if this grants them the right to "Process" "Customer Data": 1. to perform its obligations, including support obligations, 2. to perform telemetry, 3. when required by law.
This is sensible, no?
> when required by law
Suggests there's a longer term storage, available for hackers.
There doesn't have to be storage, NSA could always just force them to add it in later without telling you. Like every single USA company.
Can't you just build the source and run it without giving them any information? Or does the editor itself require information and phone home while running?
Initializing the http client is one of the very first things this text editor does in "app.run()": https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/a7c9c24f40d7e9169... Line 497 suggests it fails without it.
There are hundreds of references to http requests in the source tree, though most seem associated with calling particular AI model providers.
This looks to be the telemetry struct: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/a7c9c24f40d7e9169...
It appears to crawl your worktrees collecting an inventory of the types of projects you have and is interested in certain named files specificaly: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/a7c9c24f40d7e9169...
1. Yes, Zed is open source, you can build it yourself.
2. Telemetry defaults to on. So turn off telemetry as explained at https://zed.dev/docs/telemetry#configuring-telemetry-setting...
You made me curious. Found this fork https://github.com/zedless-editor/zedless Wdyt?
Wasn't that legalize the reason Gram got created?
https://gram.liten.app/
Is Zed open source or not?
If it's open source it can't have a license agreement to use the software itself
Or is this an agreement to use some cloud service? Supposedly you can opt to not use it
Elsewhere people said that "even if you disable telemetry, Zed can still collect telemetry" but, it being open source means you're still in control
No open source license can force you to run misfeatures
> The Terms of Service and the open source editor are separate. Zed's editor is licensed under GPL v3 (with Apache 2.0 for certain components). Those licenses govern the software itself and haven't changed. The Terms of Service apply when you create a Zed account and use our hosted services. If you use the editor without signing in, the open source licenses are the only thing that applies, and the new terms codify this more clearly than the old.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/50568#issuecomm...
Oof. Is this for the software itself or their add-on LLM subscription?
Why would they have your code in the first place?
Curious, how does this compare to the editor you use?
Yeah this really makes you wonder... now, they are to best of my knowledge fantastic people, so I guess some lawyer slipped this in. I would love to hear some clarification and will always give them benefit of the doubt.
So far they've been great and product is fantastic as you know.
> now, they are to best of my knowledge fantastic people,
They could be the next "don't do evil" people but practice shows that doesn't last for long. And then the messy license terms become very handy for what comes next.
If they went to the trouble to specify all of their rights over your data, their glossing over about what they can do with it is a solid reason to push for complete clarity or pull out completely.
I encourage you to mail them specifically about this concern.
If it is a matter of communication, they can fix and clarify it. If it's genuinely scummy, they can change their approach now that they know they were caught in the act
wouldn't touch this editor with a 10 foot pole. no i am not giving them the rights to use my code for their product. hell no. thanks for highlighting this. people need to making a bigger deal about it. maybe they will rethink their tos.
Any local editor that includes any sort of telemetry whatsoever is an instant nonstarter for me.
What’s local stays entirely and totally local, always and every time, otherwise what’s the point?
This language fits common SaaS templates. Let me illustrate by removing chunks and labeling them:
IANAL, but the term "solely" seems essential to understanding this. Pivotal. As in "if you get it wrong, you'll be wearing a tinfoil hat" essential.Also see "4.4. Telemetry: .... For avoidance of doubt, Telemetry expressly does not include Customer Data."
My two cents: I'm not worried about Zed's contract here. Much more important to pay attention to when your data goes to third-party AI providers: read _their_ contract language.
Meta-comment: Don't let a well-meaning comment like the above trigger a panic. Better to get familiar with typical contracts and/or build your personal network for legal advice.
P.S. Look out for shameless legal slop on the Web, I "promise.legal" it is out there.
Oh no.. fuck them, not this shit again..
With AI being so good why isn't someone making fully open source alternatives to all this crap by now?
Oh Zed is open source, maybe Codex/Claude can make a VSCodium-like fork off it?
> With AI being so good why isn't someone...
It baffles me that people ask this question all the time and it never occurs to them that perhaps the answer is "because it isn't".
> perhaps the answer is "because it isn't"
I'm sure it can handle "remove all instances of telemetry"
The comment above has started a sh-tstorm. Please, slow down and learn about the details before jumping to conclusions. Most of us here did NOT "go pro" in the law. [1] For those that want to educate themselves, you could do worse than immediately leave HN and go _learn_:
1. SaaS Agreements: Key Contractual Provisions https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/bu...
2. Cornell Law School's Wex: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex
3. Coursera : American Contract Law I (Yale prof): https://www.coursera.org/learn/contracts-1
4. Software as a Service (SaaS) Agreements: Thomson Reuters/Westlaw (paywalled; trial available) https://content.next.westlaw.com/practical-law/document/I61c...
If anyone has good detailed resources that are free, please add.
[1] IANAL but I wasn't that far from going down that path. I've worked for a legal-tech startup, did really well in an undergrad Constitutional Law class, incorporated several small companies, managed lots of contractor agreements. So, I know from experience: legal language is weird and specific in ways you may not realize. So be intellectually humble and defer judgment until you talk to a legal expert. Hopefully people more experienced than I can weigh in with more specifics.
> my text editor has a SaaS license agreement
Please don't be a buzz kill. Probably agreed to something 10 times worse just by using this website and whatever device you're visiting on.
I tried Zed for a few days and loved it, but had to switch back to Cursor because I've become dependent on Cursor Tab.
The problem is that Cursor Tab seems kinda psychic, and I didn't realise how conditioned I'd become to just expressing a few keystrokes in the right place and have Tab pick up my intentions. If you're refactoring, you can move between files and it'll remember what you just did in a tab you just closed, and work out how to make the same changes here.
It's also really good at picking up patterns and the right imports from the whole repo. It seems to be working with a much larger, more persistent context.
I tried Zed AI, Copilot, and Mercury. All three seemed forgetful after a year of Cursor Tab. I wish there was a fix because literally everything else about Zed was an improvement.
Too bad they did not include better search UI into this release.
When you search, Zed opens a new tab, which I hate. Sometimes I just want to have a quick glance at some code and close the search using escape.
Telescope style search in vim, helix or JetBrains tools is so much better.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/46478
Huh, I absolutely love Zed’s search UI. I just navigate back to my previous tab with ctrl-o when I’m done
Same, and then sometimes I navigate back to it again when I need it. The multi-cursor edit in the search results is a thing a beauty as well.
I love it too, but instantly knew it would be polarizing the first time I used it :)
Whereas I'm not a great fan of modals for anything where I'd like to refer back to what I'm working on. I guess I'd just prefer some tabs to open as a split by default and close with esc, maybe call them something like "ephemeral tabs"? Basically, steal some ideas from emacs.
in emacs with embark you can export the contents of an ephemeral buffer into a persistent one, which is the best of both worlds and more besides
for file search, edit in the persistent buffer can rename files
for grep, edits in the persistent buffer edit across files
and so on
Tabs will still be supported. Also, when you search for references, it also opens a new tab, even when all references are in the same file.
That definitely sounds subpar to me. I suppose there's still a reason to keep paying for an IDEA Ultimate subscription.
This. I tried Zed for an entire month, but this "search thing" drove me nuts. It is also slow. If you work in a large project search is absolutely essential. Too bad.. Back to Visual Studio Code.
They both use ripgrep, weird for it to be slower? Especially with the multibuffer it's more pleasant to use
I think VSCode use ripgrep and Zed has its own ripgrep-like search. Zed likely still do more work per match due to the multibuffer. A normal nested tree-based result should be faster.
I think multibuffer can be good in edit/renaming use cases, but it's very annoying for fast lookups/navigation across different files (as mentioned elsewhere).
IDK if both use ripgrep it is even more strange why it's so slow in Zed.
Personally I don't hate tab. Sometimes even it's more convenient to have a tab on the side with all the state, instead of reopening modal.
What I hate though is really unintuitive and "non-standard"[1] shortcuts in search tab.
For example "find in project": cmd+shift+f
Whereas for "find and replace in project" I'd expect: cmd+shift+r , but it's: first toggle find, then toggle find and replace. Ok, absolutely fine, but the keyboard shortcut to toggle is: cmd+shift+h - I never can remember it.
When already searching, for my "convenience", if I'd like to adjust my search or search for something new, I click cmd+shift+f and I am focused back to find input, but here's the kicker. Input have automatically changed to what word was under my cursor. So if I was looking for some long or weird string, I need to retype it again or find and copy/paste it again.
#first-world-problems though.
I got tired of babysitting vim/neovim and all it's plugins and use Zed for most of my editing. It has pretty good vim binding support and maybe I just need to remap some key bindings to have better search experience. Zed is much better at emulating vim than Cursor/VSCode.
[1] there's no standard obviously, but some things are the same/similar across most programs.
They have presets from other IDEs and editors. I use a weird combination of Jetbrains and helix shortcuts with helix mode. Because I used them the most.
I love the search in zed. If it was up to me it would open a new tab on every search rather than reusing the same tab, so that I didn't have to redo past searches.
The multibuffer result is so nice for "hands-on" search and replace.
I also disliked that and discovered you can toggle it with config now :).
I use the television task described here (https://zed.dev/blog/hidden-gems-part-2) for that experience :)
Agreed, this is the main reason why I keep switching back to other editors.
> Sometimes I just want to have a quick glance at some code and close the search using escape.
How else are you going to have “a quick glance at code” *across* project files without using a new view for that? It sounds like you’re describing something impossible.
Zed’s across files search solves this in a similar way as other tools. Except that in zed you can also edit the code where your search results show up. Zed also has within file search.
Look at how Jetbrains IDEs do it. It's a solved UX problem, as far as I'm concerned.
Jetbrains opens up a lightweight floating panel which can also be docked. So you can choose how to view the results. Like Zed, the results view is live editable, even when searching across multiple files.
The floating panel mode is good because you can do a quick search, look at it, and just whisk it away with one key. Opening results as a tab isn't terrible, but mixes one UI (search, very ephemeral) with another (editing, less ephemeral). (Zed also has this thing where search results also show in the right-hand side panel, which I've always found confusing.)
Another thing Jetbrains does better here is to remember your search settings. Your last search is always the default, whereas Zed forgets it every time. Jetbrains also has really nice file scoping via a dropdown, so it's very quick to search all non-test files, for example.
Zed keeps stealing great features from Jetbrains, so I'm sure it's just a matter of time before this gets better.
> How else are you going to have “a quick glance at code” across project files without using a new view for that?
By showing the text around match inline with the search result in the tree. Especially useful if you do not expect to edit every search result. If you do expect to edit every search result, then Zed's multibuffer is arguably better/ faster.
Just look at the PR, it's shows how it will look like. It's modal instead of a persistent tab.
I can’t relate to that, I’ve also struggled with this decision for quite some time, but I’ve gotten used to it. What I hate is that it doesn’t open several search tabs if I need to look for several things at once.
> When you search, Zed opens a new tab, which I hate.
You also have to validate the search, it doesn't start off immediately on its own, which annoys me a lot more.
I know not much about Zed and I am curious, can such changes be implemented via extensions?
No, Zed's extension API is very limited at the moment. In particular, it does not allow adding any new GUI elements.
That was og sublime/textmate behavior that I grew to miss with vscode, so was pleasantly surprised to see it exists in Zed.
I feel you. Same here.
yeah its quite silly they decided to mess around with this universally standard behaviour. The search is the reason why i always end up going back to other vs code based IDEs for real work. I open zed for perf reasons and something quick.
Also now they've introduced this "agent first" layout which i cannot undo. They're strength is in perf, idk why try to reinvent the wheel w.r.t DX.
> Also now they've introduced this "agent first" layout which i cannot undo
You can just collapse the sidebar with the agentic stuff.
I'd love to see the Alacritty terminal backend swapped out with libghostty (or more likely libghostty-rs). The work Mitchell is doing with Ghostty and the approach Zed has taken seem super aligned.
And Mitchell definitely seems to want to make Alacritty an easy target for conversion, he was just talking about being open to help support Warp with it: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2049159764261925005
Looks like Mitchell said he's already on it https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2049514540505964549
He gave me a quick response, should have checked back before posting here
What is Ghostty's advantage over Alacritty?
I think Mitchell outlined his vision for libghostty pretty well here: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming
Alacritty is already pretty performant (relative to a lot of the other terminal emulators), but my read is Ghostty has been going hard over performance/standards/protocols (like Kitty).
The maintainer doesn’t have bad temper.
I did consider that. I remember nope-ing out of alacritty in the early days after seeing the developers response to people requesting a scrollback buffer. It amounted to something like "I use tmux, and if you don't, you use the terminal wrong." It left a bad taste in my mouth.
One would be support for ligatures
Ligatures are a renderer issue, so using alacritty as a lib wouldn't have this issue (it does demonstrate their hardline stance). Another example that would translate is how long it took them to support disambiguation of key combinations: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6378 (2019-2023). Of course, the maintainers are free to do whatever they want with the project - but such things do make alacritty-as-a-lib an exceptionally bad choice for situations where you want things to just work.
The Zed terminal already supports ligatures.
I quite like Zed, I've consistently driven it for months at a time. But there are two things that add enough friction that over that month or so I end up bailing back to one of my other editors (vscode/neovim). The search experience being a new tab with no sidebar option and the diff viewer being a multibuffer view with no option to see the entire contents of a file you are diffing.
That being said, I love the software and will continue to check back on it with the hopes that it sticks one day. Congrats on the 1.0!!
These are also two of my primary gripes.
There has been substantial improvement, but the search and symbol follow UX is really bad. Hoping the fix that.
Not trying to promote too much I don't even get anything out of it, but I've been using a slopfork for a while now and it's great. A few flaws obviously since slopped over the weekend, but it's good enough.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/26560#issuecomm...
The only thing that bothers me about Zed is the theme. It's so bland it actually gives me reading difficulties. I'd be surprised if some of the color combinations don't pose an accessibility issue. Grey text on grey background is quite the choice.
I do agree that Zed's default themes aren't great. They look too 'plain' for my taste. Bit more contrast can't hurt either.
BUT: It's very easy to just choose a different theme and there are plenty to choose from by now. It's even possible to make your own theme and they even have a first-party theme editor (https://zed.dev/theme-builder) which works great. They should maybe include some descriptions for each color instead of just the name but that's the only negative thing I can say right now.
I'd even say that it's easier to theme Zed than VSCode because there are fewer variables.
Thank you for the tips. I didn't know it was possible to install other themes as extensions.
There is also https://zed-themes.com/ with theme previews.
And the icons are too small. It's vaguely a mystery meat navigation.
As far as I can tell you can theme nearly everything in the app. I've got custom colors for diffs and some syntax, and my base theme is ripped from Monokai.
Cursor has the best default dark theme IMO
It also has a much better edit prediction model than Zed
Personally Cursor feels like a vibe coded slop these days, I canceled the subscription and went back to vscode with AI features off. Claude Code is my third hand and that's it. I need to try Zed though, I remember Atom changed the way I use text editors, I'm certain Zed will provide the same experience.
I've tried switching from JetBrains IDEs just a few days ago. The speed and memory footprint are very impressive. I ended up badly missing refactorings and some other features and configuring a debugging session looked like something that needs more time than I had on my hands. So went back for now. I hope they add more IDE features eventually. There's not much a pure text editor can offer over Emacs after all. But this announcement sounds like they are prioritizing agents integration - the same thing that seemingly made JetBrains drop the ball on their core advantages.
no emacs key bindings??? Makes me taking this is another hipster text editor that isn’t “an ide” (vscode)
Was in the same boat. I ended up not using Zed because it had a bunch of minor quirks that annoyed me but I moved to vscode. I primarily write Typescript and C# these days. I was a JetBrains fanboy for years and it feels way too bloated now, stuff notoriously hangs or takes too long on my M3 Pro. I also love Claude Code integration with vscode just a bit too much to give it up for CLI.
Zed's CC integration is really good now.
JetBrains should really start investing into porting to Rust/C++ over their bootleg Java.
Seriously. I love the IDE but given that my idle workload of Electron apps and Docker Desktop VM brings my discretionary allotment of RAM down from 32GB to 8GB, I have absolutely no headroom when running JetBrains IDEs so I keep them closed unless there's a specific feature I want.
You might find OrbStack useful here as a replacement for Docker Desktop. So much faster and uses way less resources: https://orbstack.dev/
What OS are you running? I currently have three Jetbrains IDEs open on my MacBook (M3 Max/36GB) and don’t notice any issue (although I don’t have any electron apps running which probably helps).
MacOS. I have Slack, Teams (different clients use different chat apps), Notion, Docker Desktop VM, several browser tabs, some corporate machine management stuff, and probably some things I'm forgetting about, all open all the time.
Looks much better than when I last tried it! But I couldn't get it to work as well as Cursor for AI development, maybe I just need to get more used to it?
- I tried to use the Cursor Agent via ACP, it worked but it seemed markedly stupider than when I would use Cursor directly (saying that i18n strings were being used when they weren't, editing code differently than what I asked for, also when it is running terminal commands it seems to just say "Run Command: Terminal" and has no information on what's going on). Maybe I just need to not use Cursor Agent, but my company pays for it already so that's what I tried.
- Providing context is also cludgier - In cursor I often highlight specific chunks of code and add it to the AI context via Cmd+L, but I couldn't figure out any specific way of doing that with a keyboard in Zed besides clicking a tiny + button to add "Selection" to context, which got old fast.
- Maybe I just need to get used to it but reviewing code with the git integration is just hard for me to follow; one giant editor with every change in it is just harder for me to grok than showing each file one by one; so it was tiring to review the big changes produced by LLMs. Also, when you stage changes the file just stays where it is with a barely noticeable check in the checkbox in the sidebar - I prefer the behavior of Cursor where it actually moves the staged files to a separate section, but some kind of more obvious visual indication besides that perhaps would help. I did like the tree view, though!
- The tsgo and oxlint LSP servers kept crashing, which was frustrating. GraphQL LSP server also couldn't understand graphql.config.mjs, which is strange as that's supported out of box by graphql-config and works fine in Cursor/VSCode.
- I tried using a few of the different Edit Suggestion LLM options, but unfortunately Cursor is just way too good compared to any of them (slow, and just not very helpful in comparison).
- Just in general figuring out how to configure them is confusing, there's like 3-4 different places to configure agents and LLMs for different purposes, I found it very fragmented and confusing and the docs didn't make it particularly easy to set things up.
That all said, the performance was muuuuch better than Cursor. But the UX issues and general bugginess of ACP and these LSP plugins were impeding my workflow too much for me to tolerate it so back to Cursor for me. If anyone has tips on how I might make some of these better that would be cool, but if it's just inherent limitations then maybe I'll try again in 6 months or something.
I really respect the people who have the sanity and patience to start the development of a new editor.
People are sooo picky when it comes to editors. Guaranteed they will not be satisfied. Too fast? Then it is not doing a lot. Too many features? Well now it is too heavy. Does it use sane key bindings? FU we want vim shortcuts.
Anyway, congrats on the launch folks. Hope you keep delivering excellent software despite the noisy feedback.
I want to try Zed, but it's just too much of a supply chain attack waiting to happen. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589
I did install it in a VM with virtio-gpu, but it was absurdly slow, so I wasn't able to try it.
Had similar concerns, but just noticed they seem to be taking this more seriously now: https://zed.dev/blog/secure-by-default
Is that directly related to the GitHub issue? Or you just mean that they're taking security more seriously?
I was searching the article you linked to see if it addresses the GH issue in any way, but it seems to not.
I've been using the editor since the early days and have always been a fan of its visual look and feel, so I was pretty happy to see its UI library open sourced.
I wish GPUI could become the go-to Rust UI library and not just an editor backend.
For that, a couple of changes would be highly desirable: being able to switch the GPU backend from Metal to wgpu (so it could be mixed with vello, for instance), and the ability to integrate into an existing event loop like egui allows you to. If this were easy to do, I would switch from egui in a heartbeat.
They seem to have stopped developing GPUI (or maybe just the public version)?
One of the staff forked it into a community edition https://github.com/gpui-ce/gpui-ce
Does anyone have more details about the state of it?
> I wish GPUI could become the go-to Rust UI library and not just an editor backend.
In case you find it useful, I recently stumbled upon this project:
https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component
"UI components for building fantastic desktop applications using GPUI."
I took a look at gpui-component a while ago when assessing GPUI for a project I was working on. IANAL but was dissuaded because it's almost certainly not compliant with the Zed license--gpui-component "borrows" gpui code patterns lifted straight from the main zed repo, which therefore must be AGPL/GPL (unlike the gpui-only which is Apache IIRC). Caveat emptor (caveat user?).
There's never going to be one GUI library to rule them all, but I find iced the best Rust library at the moment and likely for the foreseeable future.
I'm beating a dead horse here but the challenge is a11y. Chromium wrappers get a11y for free; bespoke UI frameworks must implement accesskit (or something) which is a lot of work and something that (imo sadly) many small teams decide is not worth the investment.
What's so good about GPUI?
I haven't used it, but it caught my attention when I read the Text Rendering section of this post:
https://zed.dev/blog/videogame#text-rendering
It looks like their approach could nicely solve a problem that's shared by almost every new GUI toolkit I've tried: text looks terrible, or at least out of place when surrounded by applications built with the desktop's native toolkit.
Clean and polished design, concise Tailwind-style API, and last but not least sustained 120 FPS across complex UI.
Shortcuts still don't work on non-Latin keyboard layouts on Linux. For people who use languages with non-Latin writing systems, this is a show-stopper.
(there is, of course, a rich tradition of text editors with the same issue, including Vim and Emacs. They 1) have an excuse; 2) provide both workarounds and their own input method systems. Having this in a new program is nuts.)
This was reported for Blender/Wayland, they might be able to use a fix like this: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/eaf63a35...
Yes that was the primary issue I had when testing Zed in the past. Keyboard layout not working properly, shortcuts being unusable or un-remappable. Sad to see it's still the case for 1.0
Been following zed for at least a year now.
Tried switching multiple times from vscode but it's just not feature complete for my use cases. Off top:
- no expanding tabs to fill the window until another one is clicked
- file picker hides .gitignored files
- vertical terminal tabs would be nice
- restart doesn't automatically load the previous window (most recent project)
- while faster/more responsive than vscode on large codebases, still pretty heavy compared to its AI-averse fork, gram; thus I can't use it on the macbook neo
Until some/all of that is improved, it's just uncanny valley territory with no particular killer feature to migrate. Appreciate all the work they've put into it (especially remote ssh parity!) though and like what they're doing in broad strokes
1. I'm pretty sure setting "Maximum Tabs" does what you want, but not positive.
2. Uncheck "Hide .gitignore" setting and it won't do this.
3. Agreed
4. This is configured in the "Restore on Startup" setting (I think you want "Last Session")
3. There's "workspace: new center terminal" command that opens terminal as a normal tab.
Just downloaded it and installed the C# language plugin because I need to use that for work. For some unknown reason the program grinds to an absolute halt. I cannot even close it properly anymore. If I type something it appends roughly one character per second.
Not sure if it is the plugin or something else, but unfortunately makes it very hard to try out for me.
Over the years I’ve tried plenty of fast, "snappy" code editors, but always found myself returning to Sublime.
Zed is the first one that got me to actually migrate. It does a great job of staying out of your way. Search and replace works seamlessly across multiple files with regex, and the extremely fast editing experience feels immediately familiar if you’re coming from Sublime. Being open source also gives confidence in its long-term viability.
Kudos to the team building Zed.
I am posting this because I want to like and use Zed because it's so fast and responsive (Especially on my tablet, which JB turns into a space heater), and has neat functionality like being able to switch to whatever set of hotkeys you use. And I greatly respect the small binary/download size and fast install. From experimenting in Python and rust:
Overall: It is taking a superficial view of the code base, and treating it more as text than a cohesive structure.edit: Thank you very much for those who have pointed out I needed to disable restricted mode. This has added some introspection and in-line error handling. Some of my concerns are partially-mitigated. It seems when introspection and in-line editing/complete/data appears is inconsistent (But working in many cases), and I do not yet know what rules define this. Refactoring tools like moving are still absent. I will continue to use Zed on my tablet with the LSPs enabled, and observe.
I suspect you may be operating in "Restricted mode," aka it doesn't know if it can trust the directory. In that mode, the main tools like Rust analyzer are quite restricted. All of your complaints should be resolved once Rust Analyzer/basedpyrite are up and running.
I do think they should have a more obvious warning that the current directory is untrusted, right now the little green warning in the corner is way too unobtrusive and will result in many people having the same issue as you.
Nailed it! I will do some more experiments and report back.
You should edit your original comment since it was user-error not the app being inferior.
Done; ty.
I thought Zed was using tree-sitter: https://zed.dev/blog/syntax-aware-editing? Shouldn't it address all of these issues? Does tree-sitter not understand Python (basically the most popular language out there) and Rust "beyond superficial syntax"? I thought its whole point was that it understands everything about a language's syntax because it builds a concrete syntax tree?
TreeSitter is an amazing tool but is (purposefully) quite limited compared to an IDE--it doesn't even cross file boundaries, so go to definition is a non-starter. Zed uses LSPs like Rust Analyzer to fill that role.
Did you market the project as trusted? Récent update (à few month) requises the trust to reenable the analyses feature It took me a while to understand lol At Somme point I though that the parker were broken in my codebase xD
I did not. Ty. I will look into doing this.
> And I greatly respect the small binary/download size
The latest x86_64 Linux build is 136MB. (https://zed.dev/docs/linux#downloading-manually)
As for your list of grievances, they all seem to boil down to the respective LSPs not doing their job? Does Ctrl-Alt-l (lowercase L, not Shift+i) include the language's server in the context menu, and are there any errors reported for it if it does?
Ctrl + alt + l in Zed is not causing any observable effect.
It sounds like LSP isn’t working for you for some reason. Have you installed the extensions for those languages? These things are definitely supported via LSP
> Overall: It is taking a superficial view of the code base, and treating it more as text than a cohesive structure.
That is the part that makes the space heater
I want to love Zed. I really do. I like how fast and performant it is. Few UI things are a nightmare, though:
1. Zed insists on opening files in the active panel AND Terminal opens in a panel -> I constantly open files over my terminal. Arghh.
2. On macOS, when I open another workspace (e.g. by drag and dropping to the app in the dock but also from CLI), it opens in one of the existing windows in a sort of workspace-level tab (?). I want a window per workspace. No way to configure that (or it is so unclear that I could never find it).
Bonus: I want code in a light scheme and terminal in a dark scheme. It is stupid, but my eyes just start hurting otherwise. I created a custom color scheme for that and it sort of works, BUT Zed seem to do some additional post-processing to colors based on the scheme-wide light/dark setting, so I cannot get the colors quite right. If I set scheme to "light" – terminal colors are a bit off. If I set to "dark" – code editor is off, cannot get it fixed with scheme level overrides.
Congratz to the team. I really like zed and started using it quite early, loved the text threads and was using them a lot as I don't think llms fit in a box of only agents, they were a nice way to manage conversations, work through them, edit responses to lead the agent better, copy-paste full text, sad to see them go (text threads).
I'm trying right now the ACP with my own agent and I'm of mixed opinions but that's maybe because I care how my agent works. I believe that for the agent view a plain buffer with small ui elements would be the best ui for an agent conversation but I may have been spoiled by their text threads. I may spin a personal fork but the thought of tens of mins of compile time isn't that attractive.
Edit: I realized I started moving to terminal based editors like helix due to agents: claude -> codex -> custom pi, with the open sourcing of warp I was considering making a native integration for warp + pi but now I'm thinking zed's text threads (~17k lines) + pi might be a better way, any thoughts or ideas?
I love Zed and have been using it for years. I’ve been especially excited about multi-agent support—it feels like it could be a genuinely powerful model.
That said, the current UX is pretty confusing.
There’s a mismatch in visual hierarchy: selecting an agent in the sidebar appears to change the entire editor’s worktree/branch, but the worktree/branch selector lives in the window titlebar, which strongly implies it controls the whole window. So it’s unclear which is the source of truth—the agent or the window.
That ambiguity shows up in the workflow too. If I want to create a new branch/worktree and then start an agent on it, I can’t do that directly. I have to:
1. create an agent 2. start a conversation (to instantiate it) 3. then switch the branch/worktree
That ordering feels backwards—I’d expect to define the context first, then start the agent.
Even basic navigation is unclear. If I switch the branch in the titlebar, does that affect the current agent, or the whole window? If I want to return to a previous worktree, is that tied to the agent or not? I still don’t have a solid mental model.
It feels like there are two competing concepts:
* agents as independent workspaces * the window as the workspace
Right now they overlap in a way that’s hard to reason about.
The feature has a lot of promise, but the current UX makes it difficult to predict what’s going to happen, which makes it hard to rely on.
I do like the new UI, it beats having a window per workspace, IMO. But personally I'd rather the workspace switcher be based on the project explorer than the conversation history.
Congrats on the 1.0 release to the team!
I tried Zed once, but unfortunately had to give up because of:
Does a native UI experience have no value these days? I mean--amazing achievement building an alternate GPU-accelerated UI framework from scratch, and I do love the responsiveness, but this leaves you with a non-native app that doesn't follow OS conventions and will not get appearance and behavior updates going forward without a lot of additional effort.
The value depends entirely on specific conventions, but you've mentioned none. There is also value in consistent UI across platforms (which native UI don't support) as for some conventions you'd prefer to ignore the OS defaults.
Not OP but I have a similar complaint.
The two primary OS items that turn me off of zed are not being able to have a title bar and the fact that menus open on hover and not on click.
VSCode, and IntelliJ let me turn on OS level title bars so I can handle the window without needing to try and find the magic spot not filled by some other app based nonsense as well as making it easier to see what window is active.
Menus can be unrolled from the hamburger but now pop open if I just swing my cursor through. I've no idea what convention that was pulled from but I think they just took the hamburger menu event triggers and left them as they were instead of changing them to act like an OS menu is expected to function.
I'm sure there are others that I'd find using the app but just those two was enough of a personal issue for me to just not bother.
Unfortunately the reality nowadays seems to be that besides the dated QT, there are no good or popular cross-platform UI libraries for these use cases. It's bold that they built their own.
Electron has basically killed this practice sadly. Which Microsoft modern app follows Windows native UI these days? Teams? Settings? Office? All dramatically different.
TBH, Microsoft has made such a huge mess of UI on Windows, that even if you wanted to use the "native" UI you would have difficulties figuring out what that is, exactly, right now.
Having said that - Teams is a piece of #$%^&; and MS Office has dropped the ball with its UI switching to ribbons in 2007 and has languished in the land of bad UI ever since. Settings makes me want to just use Control Panel like a human being.
You have, what, WinForms, WinUI, MAUI, and WPF for Windows currently. And that's not counting Win32 or Qt.
And what cross platform code editor does that nowadays? vscode is electron, jetbrains has swing, ...
Maybe what I'm saying is that people shouldn't use cross-platform UI solutions. (write-once-suck-everywhere)
The old ones, and the ones that use Qt.
If you are on macOS, there is https://nova.app/
And soon™, https://hackerman.ai/
So, the S and P in LSP stands for Server and Protocol. The Protocol is to exchange JSON-RPC messages with a server. So to add a new language to Zed, we should just be able to direct Zed to the server to talk to right? No. You have to write an extension in Rust. https://zed.dev/docs/extensions/languages#language-servers.
Or am I missing something?
I get what you mean, but to be fair it seems like you can get away with copy pasting what's in the doc your linked pretty much if you don't care to customize any further.
Just tried it out and it works great and is really fast! It's a breath of fresh air compared to VS Code. Lots of other editors are fast, but this seems feature complete as well as fast.
Migrating from VS Code was also super simple and integrations with AI assistant seem to just work.
I can definitely appreciate the engineering work that went into it. Loving it so far! Thanks!
I'm rather happy with Zed.
I use it for Elixir and ansible stuff. I may eventually be open to using it instead of PyCharm for python and/or Nova for C.
If there's one area I still feel that Zed lets me down is in pane management. Maybe I need to just learn more key shortcuts. But I spend a bit of time "managing" the secondary panes and having to switch back and forth between outline, files, search. I'm not sure what the solution is. Just wish the secondary panes weren't a scarce resource that had to be mux'ed betwixt.
I really like(d) the agent integration, but we're currently experimenting with Claude Code Desktop, and I really miss not having the tight integration. My guess is that I'm going to switch back to using the Pro subsidized version. I was getting by with ~$40-$50 a month. Now the company is paying $125 for Claude Team premium seat, and it's a lesser experience.
Zed is a durable piece of software, rather than the current trend of cheap disposable software. Regardless of whether humans or agents use a tool like this, durability is a benefit for both.
Congrats to the team
It has only been around for a few years.
They've been in development longer than the product has been public.
1-3 in stealth if I remember correctly
I tried Zed several times, and still VS Code + Sublime win.
1. In Zed, all my Rust files are reformatted on save. (I also code in Go, and don't like this approach at all.)
2. It takes ages to find out where to configure the language servers, and find those little options several layers deep, that I need to switch. (E.g. turn of rustfmt, or turn off some PEP8 checks.)
3. Zed is still missing the killer feature of Rust in VS Code -- underlining the mutable vars. (TBH, VS Code custom themes also lack this, and it's unclear how to turn that feature on, but at least the default ones have it.)
For comparison, I have bought all 4 Sublime editions. I tried Pycharm, and still preferred Sublime. VS Code came when I needed interactive debugger for Rust.
1. That's a pref, turn off "format on save" lots of editors and IDEs have it. Maybe they should default to off but it's not an unheard of option with no way to turn off.
I downloaded it, tried opening one of my Java/Springboot projects. When I opened a Java file it had no text highlighting but offered to install a Java extension. Clicking it just made the prompt disappear and seemingly did nothing.
I found the Extensions screen, searched "Java" and tried installing the most popular extension. Clicking "Install" makes the button gray out for a second but does nothing before the button becomes clickable again. Not sure how to proceed from here. (On a work-managed MacBook)
Zed got me off of Emacs for the most part, which is about the highest praise I can offer. I've never used an editor that 1. closely mapped to how I think about code, and 2. is easily extensible enough that it's broadly supported with a gazillion third-party packets, and 3. is lightning fast. Emacs does 1 and 2. VSCode excels at 2. Sublime is good for 2 and 3, and Vim, and BBEdit 2 too. Zed's the only one I've ever tried that nailed all 3, plus excellent out of the box defaults.
I think it's fantastic. I still keep my Emacs chops up because it's 50 years old and I know it'll be here another 50 years from now, but Zed's open on my desktop more than any other app.
Hopefully Neomacs, “A GPU-powered Emacs written in Rust with a modern display engine … starting with the display engine and expanding to the core“, will succeed.
https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs
I know there've been a couple of stabs at this in the past, but I hope beyond hope that one of these catches on now. Given some extra LLM boost for the grunt work, I'm more confident today than before. Crossing my fingers!
I was an early adopter of Zed (private alpha mid-2022) and it's crazy how far they have come in a relatively short space of time. Sadly I stopped using Zed when the push of AI features started to happen (same with Warp terminal) and have since used Gram more. I may have to give Zed another run as I believe you can turn all the AI features off now?
Congrats to the team on 1.0!
yes there is a single toggle to disable all AI
Zed seems to have many fans on HN.
But it is not for me. Multiple issues on Linux and high memory usage makes it a worse alternative to vscode and jetbrains.
Maybe it's better on OSX, but I dont use that anymore and why use an editor that treats your platform as a second class citizen?
On MacOS I never really felt there was a noticeable performance difference to using Zed vs VSCode. I still like the idea of it being Rust/GPU based but just like those GPU optimized terminals (Kitty, Alacritty, etc) the difference is usually pretty marginal for day to day stuff.
The only time VSCode gets slow is if you use a bunch of poorly written plugins, which hasn't been an issue for me in years. It's just like Chrome, chrome is extremely fast as a base but you can mess it up by not being careful with what you add to it.
I still plan to revisit Zed in another year or so once it progresses further, as I find it's still behind Cursor in many ways.
This is exactly how I feel.
Cursor works just fine for me. I just don't have the incentive to learn a new tool even though I think Zed is cool.
So I'm not so sure how you arrived at your conclusion of Zed having higher memory use than VSCODE but in testing just now that's not at all close to true.
Zed for me on my Linux machine opened to a massive C++ project (the Ladybird browser if you were curious) is (not including LSP or extension processes) using around 480MB of memory.
VSCode on the other hand with nothing open but a 20 line JSON file is (again not including any LSP or extension processes) using around 920MB of memory as reported by its own builtin task manager thing.
I suppose 480MB for a text editor might be a tad high but calling it worse than VSCode is a massive stretch.
If editors own memory usage is your main concern then you should use emacs or even better mg or vi.
The editor + its plugins + it's LSP server is what counts. I dont care if zed is written in rust and uses 400MB when it spawns a multi GB nodejs process when I work on my tiny golang project.
I mean all 3 of those also support LSP plugins, so would also spawn "multi GB nodeJS processes" with your tiny golang projects if you enable them.
Yeah but other editors do not foolishly choose to install and run those things out of the box.
I've personally found it uses significantly less memory on large projects than VSCode. VSCode has historically been nigh-unusable for me on Linux, it gets incredibly sluggish.
Any benchmarks? Scrolling is using 16% of my GPU (vs 5% in Sublime). Also things like mouse-down to activate a tab (vs mouse-up in Zed) make Sublime feel faster.
I recently tested input latency on Mac Mini M2 Pro, keypress to visible pixel (p95 value).
- Zed 36.8ms (26.3 avg) - Sublime 33.5ms (25.9 avg) - VSCode 31.7ms (20.6 avg) - Hackerman Text 15.3ms (12.5 avg)
All editors tested as stripped down as possible, minimal UI etc., empty file, no syntax highlighting. Mostly surprised by VSCode tbh.
Testing on sqlite3.c (with syntax highlighting): Zed 60.5ms, Sublime 37.1ms, VSCode 22.0ms, and Hackerman Text 18.4ms.
If I saw this editor a year ago I would have jumped on it. In today's AI focused development it's not worth the hassle for me to learn new shortcuts and UI layout.
The demo video voice felt super AI generated. Which it many ways felt like it was going against the target audience, people that still code by using an editor and it's shortcuts.
The best thing about Zed is GPUI
Can you fix the CLI on Windows? You broke it a few versions ago. 'zed --version' and all the other flags don't work. Maybe broken command parser or something, im not sure. Zed with zero flags still launches it. I particularly want to be able to pass it filenames for quick opening and --new and --wait. Used to work. Thanks!
Thank you, Zed team, for creating Zed. It’s clearly a labor of love, and I really want Zed to work for me. It seems like a quality project, it’s fast, and the base editor is easy to use.
I gave it weeks though, and the surrounding UI just never clicked for me. The various AI panels are confusing, the global search is awkward, and something about the type rendering just didn’t ever look right (maybe I’m hallucinating this?). I use VS Code only grudgingly, but I do think its ergonomics are actually pretty reasonable. I came from Sublime before that. I’ll keep trying Zed, and I hope you succeed.
I'm loving it.
Just opened my current TS/TSX project and everything is working as expected.
Performance is fantastic. I used Sublime for a decade and always missed its native performance after switching to VSCode due to needing first class Svelte, Vue, or Astro support.
The only thing that bothered me is that it enabled the Tailwind LSP even though I'm not using TW and I couldn't stop it. Had to disable that LSP completely in the settings:
Does anybody have experience running Claude Code or Codex in Zed?
Yes - the Claude ACP is nice, as I like to have a view of the code while chatting. Using just the terminal for dense/long running work feels like a handicap imo. It would be great if it supported more commands though!
> It would be great if it supported more commands though!
What does it not support? I want to try and figure out if its shortcomings in the ACP/Claude SDK or if it's just features that Zed has yet to support?
I feel like it doesn't support some of the commands that manage Claude itself so think `/mcp` `/plugins` etc. Most of the common ones are configured to work though from what I've seen but the ones that do more configuration of Claude seem to be blocked.
That is likely a drawback to their ACP wrapper scheme, it helps exposes IDE functionality but they have to keep up with Claude Code functionality in the other direction. VSCode's Claude code plugin is just like using the CLI.
Entirely right it's a limitation to the ACP side. They're in the middle of adding functionality where you can have terminal/CLI threads and ACP threads too. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/54729
Context length is not shown and I dont think you can paste images? Havent tried though
Context usage is in an open PR now! https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/54881 give it a week or two depending on if you want to use stable vs preview releases. I haven't tried pasting images yet either but I have used their context menu that lets you add images.
It works 'well' with Claude Code, but you're going to be missing a lot of features. There's no display for sub-agents/teams, no ability to clear the context without starting a whole new thread window, no ability to view the current context or usage, etc. There's also no built-in ability to view or change the model's current effort level, which I think is a current limitation with the SDK.
I tried it for a bit and it was definitely usable and I got a few features built out, but I eventually moved back to using CC in the terminal. I'm sure they're working on it, though.
It works well but there are a lot of missing features * skill auto complete * custom agents * sub agents * background process management
Does "local Ollama" or OpenRouter count? I fell into using Zed because there was zero sign-up friction when trying to set up a connection to a local Ollama LLM. Literally "drop-down, select the model you want"
Once I got that running on my machine it was also easy (literally a drop-down+ API key) to switch and explore using models on OpenRouter.
I just run it in the terminal, every time I tried their integration it was missing a feature or it was easier to read on a terminal
They both work very well. My only complaint is that you can't use them to generate commit messages using the Git Panel (have to do it inside the Agent Thread instead), and /compact seems to have issues so you will often need to start a new thread (this wasn't an issue in the past so hopefully it will get fixed soon).
I used to run Claude code on terminal on zed. But the memory usage would balloon eating all my ram 128gb and have to kill the session every other day. I moved back to vscode. I don’t know if they addressed it
I use it a lot with Claude Code.
It lacks a lot of features, but IMO feels less "busy" than the terminal version, which I like.
Very recently Zed also gained support for parallel sessions, which is nice. In general it's very obvious that a lot of effort goes into improving it, and it gets better with every release.
Works very well - whats your question?
both support ACP. works really well!
I'm really thankful for Zed. I claim it's a better VI successor than vim/neovim. The fact that it comes with batteries included is a huge win. Multi buffer is super useful. I'd prefer if it was NOT written like a game engine, not depend on GPU, but I can't have everything.
Congratulations! I’ve been very happy with Zed for the past year or so.
I’m hoping the roadmap contains support for even more things that extensions can do, such as rendering images or Markdown in-editor.
Generating images inside the agent threads would be huge. I always feel sad when I have to open ChatGPT to generate my images.
If the idea of hiding extra Markdown elements or making it more WYSIWYG appeals to you, maybe we can put more eyes on some kind of feature request. I've seeing several comments come at this from different angles: ?id=47950471 ?id=47950748
Have they made a way to move those tiny icons in the lower left (aka "activity bar") to larger icons on the upper left like VsCode? As it stands, I can barely see them on my 4K screen and selecting them with a mouse cursor is like a pixel hunting contest. No go for me until they offer a way to change that. Beyond that it seems like a decent editor, but if I can't switch modes back and forth, that is a deal breaker.
UPDATE: Looks like they haven't yet, bummer, and doesn't seem to have much traction either. They redirect to discord, but AFAIK that doesn't have a way to make a feature request directly?
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/47593
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/48098
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/47626
While larger icons might be ideal, note that (according to those linked discussions) those icons also have associated keyboard shortcuts, which are displayed when you hover over each icon. If you memorized those shortcuts, you would no longer have to “pixel hunt” to switch modes.
Zed's strongest argument has always been that editor performance still matters. It is easy to forget how much a fast, quiet tool changes the feel of a full workday.
Congrats to the team! Fantastic editor, it really brought me joy after years of VSCode/Cursor. I love how it's crafted, you can feel the soul behind each decision.
What I love:
- the speed, of course
- the high consistency between features, tabs, and panes, while Cursor looks like a crumbly assemblage of plugins. At first I was worried about the lack of plugins, but Zed made me realize you don't need many
- the visual elegance: the padding, the proportions... It reminds me of the best of JetBrains (though I haven't used their products in years). It feels closer to the IDEs I used in the past (for Java or C#), in the sense that it seems to encompass everything you need, without the heaviness.
- the numerous keyboard shortcuts, often displayed visibly, which makes them easier to remember
- the transparency of their roadmap and their velocity: now that we finally have the vertical git diff as promised, my doubts are gone!
Truly one of my favorite pieces of dev software in 15 years.
I’ve tried it multiple times, but the performance issues on different Macs are too significant to ignore. I appreciate responsive UI, but I also prioritize sufficient battery life.
Interesting because it tripled my mac’s battery life vs cursor
Which Macs, hardware, OS's? What's your baseline comparison?
Air M2, MBP 16 2019 on Intel. Created bug report where I can’t even use it on Intel sometimes because of 100% GPU usage. On M2 it’s not so bad, but still see 50% GPU usage where other editors with also smooth scrolling are much less GPU hungry, even PyCharm. Just search “CPU” or “GPU” in their issues on GH, there are a lot of them.
My biggest gripe with Zed right now (it seems they had changed the default force-formatting of source code) is that it is non-extensible.
I just wanted a custom action when I right click on a file (or multiple files) in the file tree - uh-oh, sorry, you can't have that.
Basically all text editors should be extensible. Emacs and vim, Notepad++ or Sublime - this is one of their core features. Do I need to explain this to the HN crowd?
GPU acceleration is nice, and in general, the whole basic editing experience is quite nice. But lack of extensibility is just a punch below the belt.
Maybe Zed 2.0 will be worth another look.
Not gonna lie, I kinda hate this attitude.
There’s tons of extensions for Zed, but you’re asking for particular extension hooks that don’t exist yet.
I expect the reason they don’t is that Zed sandboxes extensions quite aggressively (they’re essentially WASM running under wasmtime), which is fantastic for both security and performance, and it means they don’t break when the app updates, but it also means that a bit more care needs to be put into designing extension points.
I’m sure it’ll come.
> There’s tons of extensions for Zed
There can't be without those "particular" hooks. Editors with them have tons, Zed is limited to kilos
fwiw i agree - i mean, i just want to add a button. it's a bit shocking that's literally not possible
I would use zed, but I can't get over tabs for terminals and the file explorer doesn't refresh when new files are added from external sources, outside of that it's pretty good.
Could anyone tell me what’s the point of this when you have neovim?
This will never be an IDE like Jetbrains Rider if you use a language like C# where those guys excel at: sheer volume of refactorings, static and dynamic analysis, cpu and memory analysis, what have you.
And for a scratchpad: is this really better than neovim?
Agreed on the language IDE points.
As for scratchpad: I’ve actually been going back and forth between Zed and neovim. Imo Zed is a good graphical editor with sane defaults and preconfigured tools (and excellent vim emulation). It will never beat neovim's configurability but it’s a smooth experience ootb.
Nowadays I just use both but default to Zed because it can be used both for Windows (for work, don’t @ me) and WSL. Neovim for quick file edits outside my main workspace, editing change descriptions, etc. - $EDITOR stuff.
I could probably get away with plain vim as $EDITOR, but throwing away a perfectly valid neovim config seems silly.
Wait… Neovim also works on windows no?
Well, if one isn't a vim fan, then neovim isn't going to be a good option.
Well done on this milestone! Gave zed a decent chance last week and it wins on many fronts to replace my now scattered setup. 1. For me to use it I need to apply prettier formatting of the current project (maybe there is a way? i could not find it) 2. I need to run the claude cli, not an agent interface. or allow me to place the terminal on the left in the agent view or something.
for the everything else it was a win. will give it another chance in a month or three to see if it can do, excited to have a setup that easily navigates code diffs.
Just wanted to mention they added amp jump to helix mode in preview 1.1.2!! Aka "gw" in helix. And it's AMAZING!!! Seems silly but this was the only thing keeping me from fully switching. It's such a snappy editor, and the helix mode is surprisingly faithful. Expand/shrink selection, multiple cursors from searching in a selection, amp jump... it's just amazing.
Helix lovers who are dying waiting for helix plugins, please try this out
Congrats to the Zed team. I love that there's such a powerful and blazingly fast editor out there for us.
While it's been hard to use zed when the pull of claude/chatgpt desktop and terminal apps feel more full featured and take up more of the share of daily work, I continue to use Zed any time I do need to explore a codebase or review a markdown plan from an agent.
I hope that there can be improvements to the markdown preview because at least in my case, I'm using that feature a LOT these days.
I just upgraded to the latest to try it out. It's like Visual Studio Code and I like that. But both are VERY LLM focused and I am not using that at all. If it bothers me with LLM stuf I will switch to https://gram.liten.app/
Congrats to the Zed team! I've been using a combination of Zed + Gram [1] (which I predict may lag behind this 1.0 release in features/fixes). They are both nice, fast editors. However, I switched to Sublime Text 4 again recently and... I'm surprised to see how much clunkier Zed feels than Sublime. I can't put my finger on it, but Sublime, although lacking in features, feels considerably more polished and performant.
[1] https://gram.liten.app/
It's all in the details, eg. in sublime if you use the goto panel and highlight a file it will immediately show a preview, in zed you have to click on it, so you lose the snappy feeling.
Bravo! I've enjoyed using Zed and seeing its progress. Still waiting on python notebook support.
I actually downloaded and tried Zed first time about a week ago, because I needed a text editor that looks and behaves almost identically with Windows/macOS/Linux, so there is minimal switching hassle between developing for all these three OSs. And vims/emacs are no-choice for me, because if I don't use them for a while, I have to google how to exit/save etc. Not a choice for CEO.
I have now one week experience, and I like it very much. Some settings take a bit time to get right for my taste, and themes doesn't look polished, but otherwise it is excellent choice (even when thinking Sublime, which I considered the best of all). AI-things can be disabled for now, so let's hope it stays that way.
I also tried VSCode, and omg, I can't understand who want to use that... It is almost Visual Studio grade bad. At least by default settings. It couldn't even open 900 kb text file without freezing (Zed/Sublime had no problem, like 2026 computers/software shouldn't have with 1 mb file).
I used the fastest editor I've ever used, and the UI design was also very good, but the Git interface didn't show the commit history, which was a bit like JetBrains' Git interface.
I tried zed a couple of times, it's something I'd like to play more because the feeling is fantastic ... but for python development pycharm is still superior.
PS: One thing I'm really missing is the ctrl+shift+f equivalent
1.0 and Zed still won't appear until I touch my mouse or press a key after it's been started...
I love Zed. I was a fan of Sublime Text, and could never get used to VSCode. I thought I'd try Zed a try when it was still extremely raw, before the AI integration, and I loved the simplicity and speed almost immediately. When they added better python linting features, I switched, and haven't used anything else. I know that there are many anti-AI folks here, but I feel lucky that we they added the Zed Agent, and all the integration. It's been great not having to switch back to VSCode for copilot.
Congrats! I have been using Zed for many years now, arguably the best piece of software I have ever used, and the main reason I switched to macOS.
The editor is so good it has been defining how I work - at first I would quickly copy relevant files into multiple AI chat apps using Text Threads (was quite annoyed when it was replaced by the Agent Panel which at the time made it very awkward to add relevant context and copy text), and now I really can't imagine living without the new Threads Sidebar.
It's not perfect, but whenever something is broken then I know it's just a matter of time before it gets fixed or improved.
Seems like a de-webbed fork of this is a no brainer. its crazy what they think people will just take lying down from a open source project.
Zed is a great editor. I think they have done an excellent job and hope they are successful. That said, I do not feel compelled to switch to it. For a pure text editing experience, I've always felt most comfortable with Geany. When I want to extend the editor, I reach for Emacs. AFAICT, extending Zed means using Rust, and that's never going to happen.
I like Zed but as a user of Scala it is not open-enough of a platform to be useful beyond small projects.
e.g. its "run" gutter icons rely on context free grammar queries, but of course Scala allows to define main methods via inheritance from a class. Zed's extension api should let the extension report entry points via whatever internal mechanism it needs.
This also goes for the various testing libraries in Scala that because only tree-sitter queries are supported therefore need a custom pattern match for each library as they have their own mechanisms, rather than letting the extension provide its own test harness (easily handled by build tools automatically) - Zed should provide something similar to VS Code's Test Explorer and Testing API interface.
Also extensions can't add new UI, so you are stuck fitting to the recipe Zed team provides for you to plug into, and often enough this is not satisfactory.
> Also extensions can't add new UI, so you are stuck fitting to the recipe Zed team provides for you to plug into, and often enough this is not satisfactory.
What did you have in mind for "new UI"? I'm hoping to see basic text transformation myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950471
i have been a zed junkie since it came out. i feel very happy for the team. and they seem to be very focused and disciplined about what they are building. it makes me feel like i am making the right bet!
I really want to use Zed, their technical approach and product design seem great. However, I had to stop using it after a few months because the Typescript LSP was just unbearably slow. An order of magnitude slower than VSCode, often more than 10 seconds to typecheck a change. More worrying is that this has been a known issue for more than two years
Still, congrats to the team. Hopefully this launch means more money to fix issues so I can start using it again.
Congratulations! I recall there used to be difficulties handling non-ASCII characters in the built-in terminal, but now I can use it without any problems regarding Japanese input. Providing a stable, real-time, stateful application like an editor is incredibly difficult.I appreciate the efforts of the team and contributors.
I love zed. What CLI agent and model do you use with it? I am looking for something on par with CC+Opus4.6, possibly subscription-based
i've been a zed user for almost 6 months. i've encountered maaany bugs which i reported, or that were already reported. they're still there. meanwhile, every single update shipped a feature or bugfix for "ai agents".
not sure how 1.0 ships with that massive pile of bugs. but ai agents are the first-class citizen in this editor, and developer experience is not a priority.
funny thing is i uninstalled zed right before the 1.0 release. kinda relieved i didn't miss anything.
Nice! I might try it, it seems genuinely innovative.
I don't need much from an editor. Instant cold start, sane colors, sane folding in origami style , like "kent folding" allows to do on vim ( https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=416 ).
Not much, but it seems all modern editors fail to do good origami folding.
Does Zed do this?
Still absolutely no support for screen readers?
Despite promising it for years and every comparable product having it.
Well, just fired it up on Windows, and already dislike it. And I went in with a positive attitude, because I would welcome a better tool than VS Code.
Main problem: No menu. Where are the settings? The first thing I wanted to do was move the file treeview to the left side; I don't know what country the authors live in, but in Western countries we read from left to right. But nope, there's no View menu or anything of the sort.
Then I examined every other little button around the UI, to no avail. I want to get stuff done; not play with an Advent calendar, hunting for goodies.
> There's no View menu
Control + , > Window & Layout > Show Menus = true
This unhides the menu instead of hiding everything behind a burger. This should be the default. The defaults are awful in many ways and they've only gotten worse with the recent panel rearrangement.
Why on earth would anyone guess that? That is absurd.
I had the same problem and there's not even a burger anywhere.
But... thank you for posting that.
I like Zed for the same reason I liked Atom: it's very light. These past few months my workflow has basically consisted of me running Codex + Gemini CLI in the terminal panel and hopping through files in another. Easy-peasy.
It's a nice departure from the visual overstimulation I get while in VS Code (for which I have to take some blame as I need to remove some installed plugins).
There are a couple of features shown in the v1.0 video that I was unaware of and am keen to check out.
Feature-wise, Zed is still far from VS Code, but for me, the change has been worth it for the performance increase alone. I'm really happy with Zed, and I think it has a bright future ahead. Congratulations on the 1.0 release!
Good for them, but I wish they'd hurry up and catch up on some of the big missing features. Really hoping they'll accept my PR to add the missing call hierarchy feature before the GitHub issue turns 2 years old :)
I switched to Zed for the first time over the weekend on a somewhat complex mixed C/rust project. I was able to set the whole thing up in about an hour to my liking and it is a really nice IDE, coming from bloated VS Code. I think they have a really nice AI-assisted coding setup, I think that the "file review pane, in line with IDE" UX is correct for AI tools. I'm skeptical that terminal or "agent" based AI programming is viable long-term.
Congtats for reaching 1.0
Gotta say farewell to Sublime. Now Zed is my general purposed text editor. For doing most of my coding work, still use VSCode and nvim.
I'm trying it out, looks pretty decent.
For better or worse, my current workflow is to do most things through WSL on Windows 11. VSCode supports running the editor natively on Windows, but then having an agent or something inside WSL that lets me remote control what's going on there. Does Zed do anything similar?
Currently I'm just access the workspace in Zed via Windows Explorer, but I wonder if that's going to kneecap some of the integrations.
EDIT: nm, Zed supports exactly the same kind of remote editor session, via hamburger -> File -> Open Remote
Best editor ever.
Congratulations to the team, big milestone. Aside from an occasional drop to Positron for dataframe visualization, I haven't had a need to open any other IDEs like PyCharm/IDEA or VSCode in a long time, and I've been using them for over five years at this point. Zed's internals is software engineering at its finest, and I hope GPUI will eventually become the go-to Rust GUI library.
Can anyone comment on the inline AI tab completion performance of Zed compared to Cursor? Hoping to move away from Cursor as it seems like they break my settings every time they push an update and Vim motions stop working at random.
The only thing stopping me from leaving Cursor is their tab completion, which is honestly just incredible.
It's okay -- usable but definitely a downgrade from Cursor. Basic pattern matching completion works pretty well, but you won't be zipping around the codebase in the same way as with Cursor, which always seems to be thinking a few steps ahead.
Zed is a really good editor in an age that every other editor has forgotten to be about *editing* and wants to be a wrapper around coding agents.
On the agent side, I really like their ACP approach but for now it seems buggy and limited in functionality (previous message editing, occasionally never-ending work, ...)
Congrats on shipping !
I love that most of my (small but important) set of keyboard shortcuts from VSCode jsut works.
- Terminal - Ctrl + P (and siblings).
Suggestion (minor):
To me, font size is as import these days as dark/light mode. Would be cool if basic font-size (ui panel etc, were part of default/first-run config)
Also like that AI is a "first class citizen" it seems on Zed.
Well done guys :)
I have been following zed for quite some time and I use it daily alongside nvim (haven’t yet tried zed vim mode, planning to). I really like the performance and control zed provides, as well as the reduced UI clutter compared to alternatives. The collaborator functionality is not talked enough by the community but I believe it’s an ambitious idea worth pursuing. Wishing the team all the best.
Nobody in the post or the comment talked about how it is built on top of / similarly to Godot Engine. Congrats to the Zed team!
Zed is my daily driver for the last couple of month. I tried it a few times before but had to switch to various other editors for different projects. But my plan was to finally ditch VSCode as my normal file editor. I really love how fast the editor fires up. I also love the fact that it has great vim binding not just in the editor pane.
Ever since agents came out I had been lost trying to figure out what I should replace my heavy IntelliJ with. I switched fully over to Zed once they shipped the git graph in stable [0] and couldn't be happier. Congrats on 1.0!
[0] https://zed.dev/releases/stable/0.231.1
Unrelated to the actual editor but this is one of the best looking and most responsive websites I've ever used
Congrats to the Zed! I've been using zed since their first launch on HN. They did not even have a search + replace function at that time! I now use zed all_the_time.
What an awesome journey!
I want to use Zed but last time I tried it was spawning node processes, i guess for lsp. (I develop in Go)
This is a solid release and first time, I feel like it is pretty good for the use case of decent sized Typescript mono repos. I can jump around codebase quicker.
PS: Pretty daring move to think of building an editor when there's already sublime, textmate, Jetbrains and VSCode.
I want to like and use Zed, but in my mind there was some odd commerce, or 3rd party share decision that was made which had me avoid it for security reasons. Like... Zed was endorsed as the only editor for something... can anyone remember or elaborate? I cannot!
I think you mean their terms of service which are pretty restrictive and involve(d) a clause that lets them revoke your access to the editor at any time for any reason.
I would really love to see an iOS remote control app for zed. I am using it on throw away microvms via ssh. Would love to have the zed server running there, control agents via phone and occasionally use my Mac to connect to the server and use the desktop app as normal for review and hand coding
Does it work on Ubuntu yet?
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14237
The issue is tracked elsewhere and that one is closed as fixed so it seems likely. Last time I tried to run it on Ubuntu a month ago it worked, though I use a newer version than the one in the linked issue.
Just downloaded, installed, turns out it doesn't have pdf preview capability
Congrats on the launch. I have been using zed since 2026 exclusively. I moved from JetBrains and am genuinely happy. Missing the compare with clipboard though.
Congrats on 1.0!
Though it's a pretty big bummer to see that extension improvements were removed from the roadmap.
Congrats! I just started playing with Zed last week. Changelog notes, for the curious: https://zed.dev/releases/stable/1.0.0.
Zed is the only editor I use on a daily basis and VIM. It is fast and renders nicely. I do not need to configure it much, few extra plugins but most of the things are working out of the box.
Congrats on reaching your first major
Massive congratulations to the team and the community. Thanks for the solid product. It's fast and native on Linux with Wayland. I don't use any of the AI stuff, though, so I'm glad there is a switch to disable it.
This editor sounds awesome, but it's sad they didn't make the UI accessible.
"Instead of building Zed like a web page, we built it like a video game, --", uh, what.
and then the whole telemetry bit.
bye.
Congrats to the Zed team! I really like your editor and it works surprisingly well, althought there are a few rough edges still with the python experience.
The debugger in Python FastAPI and mainly Django is not working as expected. Hopefully soon will be fixed.
It has replaced VS Code for my for my work and side projects.
I don't use AI tools in 90% of the projects.
It's snappy, fast, everything just works. I have the vim mode turned on while editing.
Why does signing up through Github require the "act on behalf" permission?
That seems risky.
1.0 and still has the wrong colours when ran in Wayland and lacks bitmap font support.
> 1.0 doesn't mean "done". It also doesn't mean "perfect"
Create issue in the Zed Github repository?
Don't need to create an issue, both have had issues for them for 2 years.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/9057 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12629
Sort of a recurring theme, I find. They have 600+ issues that have been open for over a year, was hoping they'd drive down the backlog a bit before declaring victory
Go look at any large project, they have 500+/1000+ issues and many are ancient. Chrome, Firefox, you name it. I wouldn't be surprised if many issues have even been solved or need new reproduction steps but there's a difficulty to triaging all the issues as well.
I really like Zed but it's most recent big changes to Git integration and Parallel Agents has forced me to disable both of those features as the way they work just didn't suit me and my workflow
Congratulations to the Zed team! What a great project.
The newer layout that came along with the parallel agents feature is very nice; even without using parallel agents regularly, this is a breath of fresh air.
Just installed it and used it for a bit, Great Editor. It sometimes lags and slows down but overall good experience, all these things can be fixed in later patches.
I switched to Zed about three months ago, and honestly, I’m loving it. It just works, it doesn’t lag, and it doesn’t eat all my RAM. Thanks, and congrats!
After hearing Zed has vim mode, I might give it a try. Currently my workflow is just opencode + nvim/opencode
does this support plugins? How does it integrate with cmake projects?
i investigated this yesterday and there is one cmake extension. It gives basic support to cmake. Not as neat as vscode/jetbrains/qt/vs but it works. It is depends on CMakePresets.json and has no gui etc.
I hate to dismiss Zed for such a stupid reason, but I have tried to use Zed seriously many times and every time I stop because I can't get over the theme. I've tried basically every single theme I can find that is reasonably popular and they are all equally poor. VSCode and Cursor have vastly better default themes.
Does anyone have any suggestions here? I would love to use Zed more.
Does it really not let you change the colors? Am very unhappy at the modern trend to allow only canned themes.
You could just use the VSCode theme in Zed.
I use "Melange Light". Feels simple and clean, if you like light themes at all.
What's your favorite theme, maybe we can point you to something close? If you have any special needs or usability issues (colorblindness is common), that's probably relevant too.
I use the default theme + the Catppuccin Icon Theme : https://github.com/catppuccin/zed-icons
I really like the default Cursor theme - One Dark is also OK.
I like Zed, I had only a few issues switching from VSCode. And I love the responsiveness of the crew in the repo! Keep it up, you're my default!
Congrats to the Zed team for abandoning zero-based versioning!
https://0ver.org/
Been loving Zed for the last few months. The Dev Containers were the last thing I needed to switch over and been steady ever since.
Congratulations to the team, I've been on Zed exclusively for a couple of years and it has been nothing but great on macOS and Linux.
I use zed as a quick editor for stuff using usaved files.
I don't like how it loses the session when I reopen it randomly (and not randomly every upgrade).
Congrats Zed! GPUI has been a huge inspiration.
Whenever I think to myself “yikes that sounds too hard”, my next thought is “well, Zed team could probably do it”.
I feel like the last time I looked at Zed it didn't support windows, looks like it does now but it sure scared windows defender.
I love how snappy Zed is. Well done, folks. You should be proud of your work.
I switched to Zed as my main editor about a year ago, and I’m not going back! What a great product!
I seriously hate this “choose your adventure” way with new IDEs. Just install the language plugin, then spend hours making it work, and then it has crazy bugs anyway. Maybe just ptsd from the Java language server, but I’ve also somehow made editing json files laggy and unresponsive by installing the json language server.
Jetbrains “just worked”, but work isn’t paying for the license anymore because AI so I’ll just bang my head against these plugins.
daily driver has been zed ever since they introduced helix more. still super excited to see how far it can go. congrats to them
They added "gw" (amp jump) in 1.1.2 preview! It's just amazing. It was the last thing I needed before totally switching over lol
Great product! Would love to see some search (tree view) and git (staged vs unstaged diffs) improvements in the future!
I haven’t booted up an editor in a long time but I’ve written lots of software recently (mostly with codex).
Interesting times…
Congrats to the Zed team! Great to see people continuing to work on important tooling like editors these days.
the best modern editor ever
Would not recommend getting attached to an editor that's VC funded by Sequoia.
Once there was Vim, and then there is Zed. In between I just found useless UI bloats.
Simply love it!
I've been using Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA as my main IDE for Go, Rust, TypeScript, etc. for the last 3 years, and this Christmas I switched to Zed, and I'm not looking back.
I was admittedly skeptical of Zed in the beginning, because they started out with so few features, and it seemed impossible to really switch permanently to it and still be as productive. The Jetbrains platform has got such an amazingly rich set of features and an uncanny ability to just nail the editor experience. It seems almost unthinkable that anyone would be able to compete, and for a long time Zed was very far behind, but this year I feel they're finally a viable alternative.
What ultimately pushed me towards Zed was performance and the sheer amount of work-stopping bugs. I would have days where Jetbrains would get unresponsive or extremely sluggish. Suddenly "undo" would stop working (!). Major and minor upgrades often introduced perplexing performance degradation. In short, I've wasted insane amounts of time on bugs and on filing detailed bug reports that are never looked at. That undo bug has been open for maybe a year now.
For all the bells and whistles, I think Jetbrains faces an intractable problem. It's just utterly unrealistic that they'll be able to solve everything unless they stopped all development to focus on just stability. The product is too big, too complex, too unwieldy, and too bloated. I was always allocating 16GB RAM to Jetbrains, and often had it sit there consuming 1000% (!) CPU. Zed chews up a couple of gigs at most, and rarely uses much CPU. There's a tendency for editors to get bloated as they evolve. This certainly happens with Atom. I'm really hoping Zed will stay lean.
Serious question, is there any advantage to Zed if one does not use LLM assisted coding?
It is somewhat faster and a fair bit less memory hungry than vscode?
It's normal text editor like VSCode or Sublime. It's fast. The out of the box experience is good (auto configured LSP, tree sitter etc.)
VSCode is draining my battery, looking forward to trying this
Tried using Zed but for some reason the AI can't open the browser?
Tried it yesterday. HUGE fan of how the agents work and how the editor feels.
I'd love to try Zed out but I'm locked out unless they deliver a build without any AI integration, or deliver the build tools so that I can build my own editor on their foundation.
Either is fine by me, but I have zero interest until one of those things happen.
That actually exists. I initially avoided Zed for similar reasons, then someone pointed me to Gram. It does come with all the drawbacks of disabling AI, telemetry, phone-home and attempting to protect your privacy. It is hard to get started with than Zed, but it's a nice editor.
https://gram.liten.app
They have a single switch that will remove all AI features from the interface. Why do you need more than that? This is not a rhetorical question. I genuinely don't understand it — if you can get all of those features completely out of sight, deactivated, with no trace of them left except that one switch, why is that not enough? Is it as though any kind of AI integration like contaminates the purity of the code or something?
I need more than that because I have no guarantee that its true. I need the source. Or I at least need them to provide a build that they promise doesn't have that stuff in it at all, so that if any analysis was done on a decompilation, there would be some level of certainty that they were telling the truth. Anything that leaves any of it in complicates that effort and makes the certainty that less certain.
RESPONSE EDIT (clear and intentional rate-limit evasion): It's not paranoia; I'm not concerned if they "take" my content. I write open source, CC0 licensed software. I couldn't give a fuck about anyone doing literally anything they want to do with the code I write. Literally take it and call it your own, for all I care. If I can return the interrogation, why are you so concerned with ownership? Why was that the first place your mind jumped to? Paraphrasing: where is the need for this insane level of "if you've got nothing to hide..." submission?
Like I said: it's about trust. They want me to trust them. You, for some inexplicable reason, seem really upset that I won't trust them. Neither of the parties have given me any reason to trust them. Just insistence that I should, if I want to use their product. And while I entirely agree with that rationale, I don't understand why I get clapbacks for stating that I intend to adhere to that agreement entirely! Won't use the product because they won't give me what I need to trust them. That should be making everyone happy, right? I know I'm happy with the arrangement, at least.
Aside from all that, and far more relevant to my actual comments: another user pointed out the repository where they DO offer the transparency that I'm asking for. So your entire hissy fit is moot when you could have just pointed out that I was wrong in my understanding of what they offered. I mean, that would have gotten in the way of your sycophantic leap to the defense of the company I was so hellaciously attacking, so I understand why a good capitalist bootlicker might not think of that first, but at least now we both know!
You still haven't explained literally anything. Yeah, okay, if there's a switch, you can't be sure that every single AI related code path is fully disabled.
But if you flip the switch and there isn't any AI integration visible in the interface anymore to bother you, why does it matter whether the code is there or not, or technically active or not? Raw integration points and settings windows don't send data literally anywhere at all until you explicitly configure an API key and a URL or sign in to an AI provider or whatever. It'd have nowhere to go, and AI inference costs money. It's just local code providing a set of integrations. Where is the need for this insane level of paranoia?
So you trust a build they say doesn't have AI features, but not a switch that they say turns off the AI features? Doesn't seem like a logically consistent stance to me.
Plus, you can just packet sniff and see if they're doing anything AI related when the switch is off.
RESPONSE TO EDIT:
You still haven't even answered my question.
Why are you so concerned by there being AI code in the editor that you need this level of trust?
The point I have been attempting to make is that needing this level of trust and verification when you can't even explain or articulate what you're worried about at all is weird and confusing and unjustified, and I've been trying to get you to explain what you're so concerned about.
Required trust/verification should be proportional to what you're concerned about happening.
> Paraphrasing: where is the need for this insane level of ... submission?
It is not an "insane level of submission" to point out that trusting that a toggle does what it's supposed to do, when the possible consequences are basically nonexistent — as I said, without a connection to an AI provider set up, where is it going to be sending your data? No one is doing AI inference for free; and now you've even knocked the concern about code ownership out, so again, what really is the concern? — is probably reasonable.
Also, this is not remotely the equivalent of the old "if you've got nothing to hide" canard, because "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about" is a justification for surveillance of your personal life; this is literally not doing surveillance. Also, even worrying about surveillance needs to be justified with an actual explanation of what negative things you expect to happen; with surveillance that's obvious; with this, it is not, which is why I'm asking you to explain it.
> Like I said: it's about trust. They want me to trust them. You, for some inexplicable reason, seem really upset that I won't trust them. Neither of the parties have given me any reason to trust them. Just insistence that I should, if I want to use their product. And while I entirely agree with that rationale, I don't understand why I get clapbacks for stating that I intend to adhere to that agreement entirely! Won't use the product because they won't give me what I need to trust them. That should be making everyone happy, right? I know I'm happy with the arrangement, at least.
I'm annoyed, because your standards for trust are insane when you can't even articulate what you're trying to guard against. You're getting clapbacks not because you won't use their product if you don't trust them, but because your standards for trust are extremely high and you seem to be completely unable to explain why to any degree, instead just getting irrationally angry at me for just asking you why.
> So your entire hissy fit is moot when you could have just pointed out that I was wrong in my understanding of what they offered
You're very clearly the one having a hissy fit lol.
> I mean, that would have gotten in the way of your sycophantic leap to the defense of the company I was so hellaciously attacking, so I understand why a good capitalist bootlicker might not think of that first, but at least now we both know!
Ah, and now we get to the personal attacks. Of course.
I've only tried Zed like a year ago, and personally have no need for an editor I cannot run in the terminal, but couldn't you just like turn off those features and/or not use those features?
As mentioned, I don't know how much in the way they get, if you don't use them, do they get in the way or something of "normal" usage?
It's mostly a trust thing. You're asking why I don't trust that if I "turn it off" it will be off. So the answer to that is: every US company I've ever dealt with (eventually, in some cases). I don't want to trust you. I don't want you to trust me. I want to provide you with pure transparency, and I want you to provide me with that. And, if they did that, I would trust them more. Maybe even enough to install something that they swear turns off, if I tell it to (and won't ever, even accidentally, even across sessions/devices/locations/etc). But without that transparency, I don't trust them any more than I trust facebook or google, and I consider any prompting to "just trust them, bro" as simp shit. you trust them. I'm good.
That's silly. Turn it off if you don't want to use it, but don't expect anyone to build a special fork for you.
I don't. I'm asking them to let me make my own fork, like I can do with VSCode.
RESPONSE EDIT (clear and intentional rate-limit evasion): hey thanks! that changes things quite a bit! Now I'm curious how well Claude could vibe-code the AI out of that project. Mostly just for the irony of it, but I can't deny that it would probably be faster than doing it myself - at least to start.
anyway, I appreciate the simple and straightforward solution without getting side-tracked by how my ignorance and misunderstandings made you feel.
You can do that, from their repo it seems it's licensed as GPL3. I'd expect someone to do a fork in the same vein of vscodium or ungoogled-chromium. Maybe call it unzedium.
Congrats to the entire team!
Congratulations from me too — it quickly became my go-to editor (sorry, VSCode)
zeds dead baby
Why do I get a warning when trying to run this on Windows 11?
windows makes it really hard to distribute applications now.
everything gets a warning until the app has some minimum count of installs
>everything gets a warning until the app has some minimum count of installs
Unless the devs sign their app
So then the question is, why haven't they?
Because it's a huge pain in the ass to get set up (and requires paying Microsoft and providing them with all sorts of personal information). After initial setup it's not too bad, we have a few signed apps at my current employer.
Can I replace Vim with Zed? Is there a vim mode?
https://youtu.be/ltE30UmsBlY
2.3k issues says enough. License as mentioned by others here equally belongs in the trash. Shameful
Zed is one of my fav. piece of software of the last years :)
Love zed, prepared to love it moreee
As a heavy (n)vim user for the last decade, what does zed give me i wont get with vim?
Is it targeted for IDE people or vscode users, or is there something else i can benefit from coming from vim?
Wow! So much yes!!!
Huge congratulations to the Zed team!
Such a pity remote dev containers are critical for me. I guess some SSH tunneling could help with it...
Umm… zed supports remote dev over ssh… what’s your concern?
And Zed even supports Dev Container
It seems not both at the same time, I just tried to open a dev container over ssh with 1.0 and didn't work
How is their emacs keymap support? I tried VSCode for a while but switched back to emacs because it was so slow and the keymap was not very good. I've been intending to try Zed but emacs is working well enough so the motivation isn't really there yet..
I've got emacs keybinds in my muscle memory and Zed works well for me, although there's no kill ring and the macro system is nothing like emacs. The former will be added at some point (there's an open PR), but I do not expect the latter will ever be comparable.
Thanks for the info. Kill ring support is definitely a must for me, I care a lot less about macros. I'll keep an eye out for it!
Congrats guys! I've been using zed since a few months ago, I would consider myself a "light" user but I do enjoy the experience. My only sour point would be the not so smooth integration with claude code. But I've learmt to live with it for now
An editor that sends all your input to the U.S. and consumes 50% of your CPU while idle, and still gets praised to high heaven. We truly live in the age of enshittification.
Sorry, I am not going to use and get attached to a code editor that is VC funded. You know the enshittification will happen sooner or later.
it's also gpl v3 licensed, you can just take a copy, won't cost you shit
No thanks.
Strange, I'm on 2.4.1 already. Oh wait...this isn't about ZFS.
Sorry, can't help it, every time I see Zed i think of the ZFS Event Daemon
Now that Zed supports remote development, I really hope they can release it for tablets (iOS/Android) so that we can use it as a client for a remote development machine. That would be delightful!
> We're also launching Zed for Business. Companies have been asking us for a way to roll out Zed to their engineering teams, and very soon they can, with centralized billing, role-based access controls, and team management.
Regardless of everything else being said, does anyone actually still do it? I thought this practice more or less died with Eclipse, where proprietary editors often shipped as Eclipse plugin and then the ops of a company that bought the plugin would have to configure it for every developer, set up with home-made automation etc.
I haven't seen anything like this in the last ten years at least and assumed the practice was dead, and, instead, developers were allowed to use whatever editor they want, while committing editor-specific (configuration) files, for example, would be considered a noobie mistake.
Or was I just happily living in the world where the long arm of the corporate was unable to reach me?
I'm using it and i fail to see what is the difference between this and VSCode
I try Zed every few months. I does not yet have everything I need yet, but at some point I think it's going to be the best code editor out there.
Well done. I've been using Zed pretty much full-time for about 6 months now, and am happy with the experience.
There are still a few things PyCharm does better (debugging, for one), but overall Zed is very good and I haven't used PyCharm in months.
I still use CC in the terminal instead of inside Zed, and lazygit for reviewing git changes and other git actions (though Zed now does a decent job of the basics).
Here is a top-level comment for people who want to post the things they wish Zed had.
Request: please be sincere if you claim "the one thing that keeps me from using Zed is X" ... because let's face it, there is probably more than one thing. Editor ecosystems are complex beasts, and it is ok if people are slow to switch, but the "one thing" claims are rarely credible to me. Anyhow, such comments are rarely consistent with how human nature works. People find rationalizations, and that's fine. It would just be nice if people were a little more self-aware. Changing editors is harder for some people more than others.
My suggestion: if you want to make Zed better for your use case, please smart by explaining who you are as a developer, what you've used, what your expectations are. And be intellectually honest about the last time you've made a big change to your development workflow. End soapbox.
I use two text manipulation plugins in sublime text all the time. I did not manage to have the functionality in zed, which made be renounce to use it:
- Evaluate, a plugin that evaluates the selections as python expressions and replaces them by their respective results. I added "iota" as a variable in the evaluation context, that gives me the current selection index (like iota in go). With that, so many math or text manipulations can be done in bulk.
- Alignment, to align all my cursor into a vertical column by adding spaces.
alternatively:
what do i actually need from a text editor that i dont already have? Sublime's killer feature was column editing, and vscode's was kinda typescript and kinda language servers.
... and why do i want an actual text editor as the primary view, vs a side view to agent TUI? from what Ive experienced, the editor is now a secondary interface to the text, rather than the primary one
if i am picking up a new editor, i think i want it to be focused on how to better understand llm outputs, and how to give really structured feedback without having to write a ton of imprecise text.
how does zed make it easy to have agents build several proposals for a solution, and help me choose which one is actually the best?
I wish Zed had built-in APIs for extension developers to allow for more customizable text transformations. In particular, I want to write tools that have more control over what a buffer displays. Imagine a Markdown extension that gives Zed something close to the WYSIWG experience of Obsidian. To make this happen, I think something like a customizable presentation layer to transform the buffer's contents and adjust cursor movement would be a great start. Vim has a 'conceal' feature that could serve as an inspiration or reference point. [1]
I have no affiliation with Zed, though I have applied to work there, so I'm hardly neutral. I've been an enthusiastic user for probably two years. I don't expect perfect alignment with what I want, and sometimes the team doesn't respond how I would like with particular issues. But man, in a pretty suboptimal world right now, Zed is an amazing thing to have: open source, regular updates, extensions, nice settings. In the past I've used BBEdit, Eclipse, TextEdit, Sublime, Emacs, VS Code, Jetbrains, Helix. Zed is my favorite by far, probably because of the latency. It is an intangible feeling that just clicked immediately for me.
Personally, as a mostly independent developer/researcher, I go through bursts of re-evaluating my tools. To give some context about my newer tools over the last few years: Ghostty, Nushell, Podman, Nix, Mochi, Monodraw, Swish (window manager for macOS), Base (macOS SQLite editor by Menial), LM Studio, (probably obviously) Claude Code. So for a "seasoned" developer, I'm probably more open to new tools than most? Oh, totally off-topic but I think some of the lesser appreciated new open source tools / formats / conventions are: KDL (https://kdl.dev), Typst, and (evaluating) Djot, Cocogitto (Conventional Commits, took me long enough).
[1] https://alok.github.io/2018/04/26/using-vim-s-conceal-to-mak...
Zed is a very polished and nice product. I tried hard to use it, especially when I decided to migrate away from Emacs. But NeoVim gives me everything I was looking for in Zed: Speed, a polished UI, quick startup, not overloaded. So between Zed and NeoVim I decided for the latter. I use Neovide in GUI and neovim in terminal. I don’t use AI alongside nvim, but claude code helps me configure my config file in lua. So my neovim has a 10k lines config spread of several files. It is my simple text editor with super fast movements, and it can become a full blown programmable interface for my Obsidian, for my journal writing, for coding, writing documentation. It can be as complex as I need it to be. And it’s super fast.
bro why build a new IDE, just use IntelliJ or any other flavor of these for your favorite language. You would have saved years and 37.000 commits
I've installed it from flatpak and it has improved somewhat but won't use it because it doesn't remember the window size and position. Resizing the window is a pain in the ass, the arrows don't show up until you match the border pixels and it doesn't even try to mimic the native UI stuff, uses round corners. Vertical resize doesn't work, it just moves the window up and down so you have to use the corner resize. Good luck doing that with round corners. If the editor doesn't start up as I've left it, then I'll keep using my pinned (because M$ like to randomly add annoying shit that breaks my workflow) VSCodium. Also, the "Sign in" drop down on the title bar. Sign in where? I don't want to sign in anywhere, let me remove that. Maybe keep the dropdown for the settings and other stuff a small icon in front of it and about "Sign in". That should be an entry in the dropdown menu, the last one on the list. In fact let me remove the widgets that I deem useless from the main UI just like the browsers do. I haven't even got to check if it has syntax highlighting for Perl, Ruby and Racket yet because these things annoyed me so much that I uninstalled it. Good stuff: one can disable AI and Git integration, athough I'd appreciate if the further options would just go away when you switched the whole thing off. Atom, Sublime and VSCode keymaps are also nice because I don't have to remap. Will check again at 1.5, I guess. At least it has improved somewhat since that last time I've tried it, I think 0.13 or so.
their website kick my fan up, what gives? CPU sweating just to display this??
Can't run it. Vulkan as a dependency for a text editor is beyond retarded.
Vulkan, DX11, or Metal, I'm curious which environment has the ability render a GUI desktop but doesn't have access to a modern renderer pipeline. VirtualBox I guess?
AMD https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/50996
This looks to me like the issue is that Zed is using too many buffer objects, it should be querying the Vulkan context to see what's the max and sticking to it. So it seems like Zed's not doing it right, or maybe the AMD driver is failing to report it correctly?
It is a problem though, the GPU apis are pretty terrible. But with such large modern displays it feels important to have a GPU accelerated path. Maybe sticking with OpenGL would be better.
Testing it now ... it is absurdly efficient with tokens. Probably order of magnitude better than opencode for a couple of tasks.
Looking at Zed (and Brave in another thread) I'm really firming up this idea that the "big funded private company model" for essential tech software is just most often idea. They don't know how to add features without also adding bloat and BS.
This is why I say Docker is the only real "success" story here. And note, I mean a success story for the users; Docker tries real hard to enshittify and fails, and that's good.
> Zed is also an AI-native editor.
My editor is dumb. No AI anywhere.
The only unusual thing is that I use ruby as primary glue language to everything, so in a way that editor (no longer maintained, similar to Linus' editor) is just a wrapper over ruby as such, and functionality in these scripts.
I have also found that it is not the editor that slows me down, but the need to have to think. This is also one reason why I try to make the specification as useful as possible. For instance, in one project that I use to compile everything from source, I use a ton of simple, mostly smallish .yml files that describe everything - allowed keys, allowed values, settings that are mostly just a pointer to where to fetch the source, how, how to compile it then and so forth. The ruby code then is mostly just a glue over that data. And that approach, while very simple, works quite well. Users can also modify settings, by modifying the .yml file or via commandline flags. And if need be, I could also use and populate a SQL database with that data (but for the most part, yaml actually suffices; I don't understand why people are so upset about yaml, and then only point at use cases where folks use mega-nested yaml files. These guys don't understand why simplicity is a benefit; admittedly yaml is not a perfect format either, I notice this when I have a long .yml file and then some forgotten ":" or "," due to manual copy/paste error, then it takes me a few seconds to notice what's wrong).
Zed has a "turn off all AI features" checkbox if you want to use that
> recreates makefiles from scratch
> "These guys don't understand why simplicity is a benefit"
I'm not really criticizing, clearly your system works for you. Ironically, as I've been using AI more, I've been rolling more systems that work for me instead of relying on existing ones. It's very freeing.
Is what?
I tried zed sometime ago, and the limiting factor was devcontainer support. It looks like they’ve made some progress there https://zed.dev/docs/dev-containers
Yes, same. This feature is a must have - especially when running tools like Claude Code etc.