alt Hacker NewsZed 1.0
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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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!!
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'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.
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)
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.
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.)
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
"language_servers": [
"...",
"!tailwindcss-language-server"
]1.0 and Zed still won't appear until I touch my mouse or press a key after it's been started...
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
Does anybody have experience running Claude Code or Codex in Zed?
I love how snappy Zed is. Well done, folks. You should be proud of your work.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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)"