alt Hacker NewsThe Zed editor seems kind of silly to me. I would rather my editor works in many possible environments maybe even one that only has a tty interface.
What advantages are people finding with this editor other then high fidelity scrolling.
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A lot of people use VSCode. Zed's value proposition is being basically that but with fully native code, so without the madness that is Electron. If you're not a fan of this kind of tooling, it's totally fine, but many people see the value in having an extensible graphical code editor
It's not clear to me why you would want your editor to run in as many environments as possible unless you're a system administrator? Generally, most of us do our serious coding work on the major OS platforms and we would want a native editor that takes advantage of those platforms and the hardware they tend to run on maximally; if we need to edit something on some other box elsewhere, we could either use Zed's remote development system or just use MicroEmaca Nano or VI depending on which key bindings were used to.
The advantage I find personally, at least compared to something like emacs, is not just that you get high fidelity scrolling, but that the editor can open 60,000 line code files instantaneously syntax highlight all of it using trees that are and be butter smooth and responsive the entire time I'm searching through making multi-cursor edits or moving through the file. As well as being able to open for instance log files that are multi-megabytes large without having to worry about anything.
Plus, Zed has a lot of refinements and features over other editors, even if you discount the benefits of GPUI. I've spoken at length before about why I think its approach to coding agents is the best at sort of enhancing the human in the loop and keeping you in a flow state and preventing skill degradation[0], but I also think the range and design of the editing actions are better than almost all modern text editors, closer to what something like Emacs provides, and the UI is overall more streamlined and pleasant to use than something like VS Code, even though it's generally the same philosophy. There's also the collaboration features and the edit predictions.
I wanted to check the hype, so I installed Zed and opened a go project.
Ram usage:
VS Code 580 MB
Zed 410 MB
I don't see a reason yet to switch away from VS Code, more feature complete and I don't care about scroll speed, it's good enough in vs code.
I came from nvim after using vim for decades. For me, you could approximate Zed with endless hours of tinkering in nvim, or I could just use Zed.
Things that keep me: fast. Easy project wide search that is fast. Easy file completion that is fast. Easy ability to add/remove line numbers from a gutter. Vi keys that... kinda mostly work. Sorta. Code collapsing that I didn't have to spend hours fidgeting with that also mostly works with Ruby (except for rescue clauses / end-of-function exception handling which collapses weirdly.)
Early Zed user here.
There’s a lot of small things you’ll hit if you use Zed where it’s a subtlety nicer design point, but one of the big ones for me is project-wide search. Zed’s multibuffers are SO much better than VS Code’s equivalent.
If I’m debugging something on a coworkers laptop, VSCode is mostly usable until I hit that.
If you’re a craftsman, it’s worth trying different tools!