Zed is 1.0
59 points by notmeta
59 points by notmeta
I read zig first and almost had a heart attack.
I really want to like Zed but I have two issues:
Both of these are solvable, maybe I will return once there has been enough releases.
The UI is not intuitive for me
I like Zed (more or less; I have my own misgivings) but indeed felt this on the first opening. Unlike other GUI text editors where you can pick it up and go, you benefit from reading the manual before diving in.
Especially it's helpful to know Ctrl+P opens a 'command picker' that lets you search for keybinds. After you have that, you're much better off.
Especially it's helpful to know Ctrl+P opens a 'command picker' that lets you search for keybinds.
AFAIK this is inherited from Sublime Text and Atom. https://docs.sublimetext.io/guide/extensibility/command_palette.html
I switched to Zed a few years ago without too much trouble, but I was using Sublime since years, and before Sublime I used Atom, so…
It indeed sits somewhere between VS Code and vim. Most features are still very discoverable once you get past the "first contact" with Zed. Zed's UI is actually really great, because it feels like a professional tool, super efficient, like vim, but with all the advantages (included the increased discoverability) of a GUI like VS Code. I really like this and I'm actually fairly impressed by what they've achieved.
I like this comparison. At first glance, to me, Zed appears to be one of those tools that has a higher skill curve with a greater pay-off. Vim is the same way. When it comes to using tools like these, I find it difficult to make that transition during work or I will feel slower and inefficient. Perhaps using the tool outside of work to slowly adopt it seems to be the move.
I am really hoping for more extensions ported over from vscode, something that will happen as adoption grows.
I'm coming from VS Code and the transition is quite seamless. Much easier than switching to vim or Helix.
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.
I have been using Zed as my main editor for personal projects for quite some time now and I really like it. I would really like to use at work, because I would like to work in a team using Zed. This blog post was really intriguing. Sadly none of this was mentioned in the announcement video and also their stance on collaboration has changed quite a bit due to AI:
What's changed is what collaboration means while creating software. It used to mean humans working together in real time. Now it means humans and AI agents, working in the same space, on the same code.
We will see what the future brings, but I am looking forward to something new beyond Git and video call collaboration.
I try to use it regularly, but the search interface still feels a bit weird and underpowered compared to Code.
the search interface still feels a bit weird
I originally came from Jetbrains-based editors and this was a big gripe of mine which I did inevitably get over/accept, however there is a PR that adds a very similar search modal which is getting some attention from the folks at Zed
I've been using Zed for years now. Moving from using a combination of VSCode for work and Sublime for large files. The final straw for moving to Zed, well before it had extension support, was VSCode showing a loading spinner when I pasted text into a file. Despite the lack of features at the time, Zed was still a vast improvement over VSCode's poor performance with large repos & files.
As a long time Sublime Text users, Zed feels very familiar and I actually had no issues getting into. However there is just something slightly off between how ST and Zed handles multiple cursors, that it just feels wrong to me. I think there is some kind of difference in how it handles new lines and jumping to the end of an expression.
Yes, I agree with you: cmd-right on Sublime Text moves the cursors at the end of the line (as you would expect) but on Zed, when word wrapping is enabled, it moves the cursors at the end of the "virtual" line, not the actual line. I feels wrong to me.
I don't like Zed, because I don't know why you'd want all that stuff in your editor and on-screen, but I'm glad it exists. Good for them, hopefully they can monetise it in a way that doesn't make everyone move to a fork.
Zed is my daily driver for personal stuff. I love the helix-mode layer they've implemented. I have been pondering whether or not Gram is worth the switch, but I'm not totally sworn off of experimenting with agents for certain things (yet). I'm keeping my eye on it for now.
One thing I would like to see from a modern text editor/IDE would be extensibility without requiring the whole "extension" workflow that seems to have caught on post-VS Code. I haven't ever used emacs extensively, but I do sort of yearn for readily accessible editor extensibility.
for years I've read things like this and thought, that is stupid.
specifically, the "we built it like a web app" and the "we built it like a game" but now I wonder if I'm thinking aobut it wrong. my thoughts are: build it like a fucking native app. on linux, I dunno what that means, gtk/qt/or-something, but on macos it means use UIFoundation and/or swiftui My thinking is/was those are the most optimized platforms, but maybe I'm wrong, maybe they AREN'T the most optimized library/platform.
I also really prefer for an application to be built low and flat to each platform, directly using both the platform's capabilities and its UI norms.
But if you really must do a cross platform thing, I think Zed is doing it right. It's super responsive, it doesn't overuse memory, it doesn't (appear to?) bake in a web browser engine. I find Zed does not give me reasons to dislike it. It is my GUI editor of choice.
One thing I don't know about one way or the other is its accessibility support.
One thing I don't know about one way or the other is its accessibility support.
Zero accessibility with a screen reader. Tested 1.0 on Windows today.