I'm very happy to see work on the debugger. This is the main feature preventing me from switching full time to zed.
Unfortunately, "here" is not accurate. Not having a watch window, a stack trace view, and no mention of data breakpoints in the announcement still keeps the "beta" tag. I know those features will arrive eventually, but what is described is definitely not sufficient for 97% of my debugging sessions.
I would also have liked to see more in the announcement of multiple simultaneous debug sessions, and on how multithreaded debugging is planned. There are really cool things that can be done with multithreaded debugging further down the line that I'd be interesting in hearing about (like how RemedyBG has a DAW-like UI for freezing certain threads, or hitting one button to "solo" a thread and freeze all others).
Hey Laserbeam, I'm one of the devs that made the debugger and the one that wrote the article.
We do have a basic stack trace view that basically all debuggers support. What's coming out in the near future is a stack trace view in our multi buffer system. In fact, you can use the "show stack trace" action while in an active debug session to expand the call stack in a multi buffer, where each excerpt is a frame. It's just not up to the quality that I and several others expect from Zed, so I didn't advertise it.
There's also a PR for a watching variables/expression that is going to be merged in a couple of days. The functionality is done, but we didn't want to add a feature so close to launch that wasn't fully tested.
Support for data breakpoints will come in the near future. I can't say when because we're planning on focusing on automatic configuration for a while, but it is a priority.
We do support simultaneously debugging multiple sessions at the same time and multithreaded debugging too. There's still more to do with it, but the support is definitely there!
I am VERY confident you guys have everything I mentioned either half working or coming shortly, so I'm not worried. I just saw a "the debugger is here!" announcement, then read the announcement, and saw what's still under todo... My reaction is "well, it's not here, it'll be here in a few weeks". And that's ok ^.^
Am impressed by the under-the-hood discussion though. Keep up the great work!
The blog post mentions[1] that advanced views are in development. This initial release and announcement focuses on the underlying foundation they're building upon.
> New views: While we support all the fundamental views, we're planning on adding more advanced views such as a watch list, memory view, disassembly view, and a stack trace view
I have to try out the debugger yet. However I share your sentiment but for the Git feature. The basics are there but it is just not complete yet to fully replace my current git workflow. Hope they keep focus on that as well.
Nothing has been able to replace Magit for me, yet. Having a Zed UI for Git like Magit is my dream feature request.
With that said, Zed has effectively replaced all of Emacs for me, besides Magit. Additionally, typing in other editors feels noticeably higher latency than Zed :)
I've been daily driving Zed for almost a year now -- works best on TypeScript, Rust, and Go projects, in my opinion.
There's just so much functionality Zed has to build out to compete with modern editors (agentic coding, collaboration, debugging, edit prediction, task runners, version control). With that said, for pair-programming sessions with friends, Zed has been perfect since Linux gained screenshare support. However, there's a noticeable "pause in development" for collaboration in order to implement major features like Agentic Coding, and smaller-but-essential features like direnv integration, IME support (typing Japanese in the terminal used to be a clunky, error-prone task), dealing with the endless permutations of Python tooling so that Python files aren't a sea of red lines, etc.
It was a good time, but it always left me wondering how long it would last as it leaned heavily on community support for nearly everything useful outside a few packages
Such a situation makes me worry about it keeping up if popularity wanes. With JetBrains for example at least I know that paying for the editor it will keep getting proper updates and support even if it isn’t the most popular (though it is quite popular currently)
Leaning on community support seems ideal because it means you've built a powerful plugin API and people can implement features.
As opposed to having a weak plugin API where all progress depends on the tiny internal team.
The latter suffers more than the first if popularity wanes.
In Atom's case, its lunch was eaten by VSCode which was similar but just better. Based on web tech but with better performance and just as powerful of a plugin API. It wasn't the fact that they let people implement plugins that killed Atom, and they would have been in an even worse situation had they not had a good plugin API.
Zed is fantastic. I've been making the leap from neovim to zed lately, and it's been an great experience. Everything feels snappy, and I love how well they've integrated Vim bindings. Their agent mode is nice as well.
It's clearly an underdog to VSCode, so the extension ecosystem isn't quite there yet... but for a lot of the things I've used it for, it's sufficient. The debugger has been the big missing feature for me and I'm really glad they've built it out now - awesome work.
Every time I've encountered a vim emulator I've found it is just close enough that my fingers are doing the wrong things so often it's frustrating. Almost to the point where I would prefer a non-vimmy editor since at least then my fingers always do the wrong thing.
To me it has been the best "vim" that is not a real Vim. Way way better than the vscode plugin. I have used Vim and later Neovim since 2008 or so. Zed is the first non-vim I am truly happy with.
I love how fast Windsurf and Cursor are with the "tab-tab-tab" code auto-completion, where nearly everything suggested is spot-on and the suggestions keep on rolling, almost automating the entire task of refactoring for you. This form of autocomplete works really well with TypeScript and other scripting languages.
IntelliJ / RustRover never got anywhere close to that level of behavior you can get in Cursor and Windsurf, neither in conjunction with JetBrains own models or with Co-pilot. I chalked it up as an IDE / model / language mismatch thing. That Rust just wasn't amenable to this.
A few questions:
1) Are we to that magical tab-tab-tab and everything autocompletes fluently with Rust yet? (And does this work in Zed?)
2) How does Zed compare to Cursor and Windsurf? How does it compare to RustRover, and in particular, JetBrains' command of the Rust AST?
The LSP support for Rust has trailed JetBrains own Rust plugin, which has long since morphed into the language-specific IDE, RustRover.
RustRover has the best AST suggestions and refactoring support out there. It works in gigantic workspaces, across build scripts, proc macros, and dynamic dispatch.
The problem with RustRover has been the lackluster AI support. I've been finding AI autocomplete generally much more useful than AST understanding, though having both would be killer.
I know they’re actively working on this, they released a few updates to the AI extension to make it modular now, so you can pick your own model for example. Soon it will let you wire up your own agents, but if I recall correctly the reason it’s a bit slower there is lack of uniform interfaces
It's fantastic for Rust, it's my main IDE which I've written e.g. voltlane.net in. Fantastic software, and the LLM integration is everything you need IMO (in a good way).
Zed feels like what Lapce, Helix and Neovim couldn't achieve in the time they spent.
I started using Helix back around 2021-2022 and just couldn't get over the bugs and lack of integration. It was good, but PHP support (I was working at an older company) was bad.
Neovim felt closest to a nice editor but there were some popular community-driven plugins that were very stubborn, and alternatives were just very slow. I was also just overwhelmed by the choices I needed to make for something stable.
Lapce just felt like a VSCode clone that didn't do anything special. Looked cool, but I did not feel like it was ready for a daily driver (And it still doesn't).
Zed became a favorite in a short amount of time, and I'm extremely grateful for it every day. The debugger is a nice addition.
This might be off-topic, but I really want to use Helix. I've been using Vim keybindings for a few years now but it's so unintuitive, there's still so many things I can't do efficiently in Vim. Helix just makes so much more sense for my brain. But I don't use Vim/Neovim by itself, I always use an integration with an editor like VSCode or Obsidian (Obsidian's Vim emulation isn't great, but it's good enough). Helix just isn't there yet with VSCode or Obsidian.
I wish more "Vim successors" would focus more on integrating with existing IDEs, rather than becoming one themselves. I don't want to have to set up an entirely new workflow when I change how I edit text.
That's also why I haven't tried using Neovim as a standalone IDE. It looks like I'd really like it, but I don't want to be locked in to using Vim.
People keep forgetting the UNIX tools they love sooo much predate PHP, follow the same worse is better mentally, and trace back to 1969, but for some strange time travel reason, they are considered modern.
Zed was the first editor that tempted me into using AI features. It felt solid in general and AI feels mostly like autocomplete in other editors (in terms of how much it's in your face). There's definitely a place for AI models and agents in code editors, and Zed makes me feel like it's not built around them, which is great! Zed feel like "Come to us, we are making a good fast editor that also has AI." while competition feel like "Come to us, we want AI that has an editor".
It's an unexpected position to take, though. You said you had been interested in Zed until they integrated AI. The response was "the AI is completely optional", which I'd expect would make you more likely to use Zed, since it removes your objection. But it doesn't change your position at all, which makes me suspect it's not that you're worried the AI would interfere with your workflow, but that it's there at all. So, is your position that the very fact that Zed allowed AI to touch it has infected it in some way?
So you're just here to be an AI curmudgeon with no valuable input to the debugger conversation topic whatsoever, with no experience with Zed and no intent to ever even try it? Thanks for all the relevant and useful hot takes I guess.
The way I see it, I shared thoughts on Zed, as someone who was once really interested in Zed and once tried to switch to it, in a discussion about Zed. It's not about the Zed debugger, but it's not like this thread is lacking in discussion of the debugger.
Am I an AI curmudgeon? I wouldn't necessarily use that word, but it's not entirely inaccurate.
I suspect I'm not the only one experiencing "AI fatigue" as every single piece of software grows more and more useless "AI" features I don't want and which get in the way of doing what I actually want.
Nah, its the quiet majority, and AI posts on places like HN quickly create their own echo chambers with folks patting themselves and each other on their backs.
There is AI as a useful tool, maybe, which is at most few % of current hype. Most folks seem to end up babysitting it a lot to get something useful out of it.
And then there is everything else which is mostly hype or narrow use cases.
To proper typical senior managing a team I don't see much added value. It can help juniors churn out large chunks of the code but I haven't worked in 20 years in a place that values quantity of code and quick deliveries over quality.
Also very much depends on the business and specific company. In my banking mega corp, no AI is even allowed to be used even as I write it now, all popular sites are blocked and there are strict policies against. Couldn't care less, coding is such a small part of my work I don't want to lose this creative outlet by delegating it to something I need to triple check for bugs afterwards. Also with any new stuff I learn way more by implementing it myself rather than looking at pre-made code.
> Also very much depends on the business and specific company. In my banking mega corp, no AI is even allowed to be used
This is a huge thing tbh. I don't like these AI things in general so I wouldn't use them anyway, but I just can't imagine going to my clients and asking them, "Hey is it okay with you if I routinely upload all your code to these random American venture-backed start-ups?". And I really can't imagine just doing that behind their back. I couldn't really imagine doing that with an employer's code either.
Ideally I don't even use software where accidentally toggling the wrong checkbox in some settings screen results in automatically uploading client code to these American start-ups either. Now I won't pretend that my stance against AI is purely out of some principled cybersecurity concern, but it's definitely a factor.
In any case, what I see most people doing is integrating it with Claude/Copilot/etc. The security concerns specifically obviously don't apply when running it locally.
By default Zed has a user choose what type of configuration they want. That could be something like LM Studio, Ollama, or your own API keys to a provider you're already paying for.
AI also isn't shoved in your face when using Zed, there's one small button on the button right.
Wait there's an always-present AI button in the normal text editing UI? That's way more prominent than I expected, I assumed it was just an option in a settings screen somewhere. I definitely don't want an AI button that's always on screen.
I just downloaded Zed to see this for myself and found not only one but two AI buttons in the lower right, one for integration with chat bots and one for their "prediction" AI. Both try to get you to log in to online services (even though, yes, a local chat bot is an option for one of them).
It seems like you can remove the chat bot ("agent") button through their config file, but I found no option to remove the "predictions" button.
Man this editor is pushing "AI" way harder than I imagined. As I said I genuinely assumed that it was just like iTerm2's chat bot integration where you could enable it in a settings screen.
I strongly agree about the fatigue. I have extreme levels of concern, especially when the supposed top people are shooting their mouths off saying this stuff is doing material science, biochem, a million other things.
But all that annoying madness is distracting from how amazingly awesomely useful this stuff is. It's wild how many little quick projects I can kick out in a couple hours! Ideas just come out of my head with so much less fuss; when I don't like it I ask for something different.
My point is less to convince though about AI. I appreciate your starting sentiment here, but I really don't get the follow up?
> genuinely happy it works for you. I just don't want AI in my text editor, even if you're happy with it.
I don't see why it would bother you at all? There's a tiny little button in the status bar and a few scattered menu items that feel, to me, very easy to ignore.
It feels like someone being mad that their spreadsheet has I dunno, logarithms in it, but the person hates logarithms? It feels weird to opt in to caring against. I have a generalll abnner of thought which is "your anti-feature is not a feature", and this feels like one of those situations: i don't see why someone would cling to an editor not having a feature they don't use?
And I suspect you are an extreme minority. Among senior and staff engineers I barely see them leaving behind emacs, vim and jetbrains… none of them with ai plug-ins.
I went to check out neovim and noticed it's currently sponsored by two AI products! Of course, that's one level removed from actually integrating AI in your product but, still—it's getting harder and harder to avoid altogether.
Thankfully for me, I guess, neovim broke my config about a year ago by changing the default color scheme in a way that I could not fix easily with confug. So I forked and built my own and will likely never update it.
My guess is that neovim wouldn't do a core integration of ai that ships with the editor. At most, maybe if there are ui interface gaps that would help make a better experience, they might expose more apis there that could be useful outside ai as well.
Plugins are relatively easy to write in nvim so I'd expect all ai stuff to come from there and be opt in.
The Network was a good idea fifty years ago, and it was still a good idea by the time the Internet was definitely the next network which was a few years before the DotCom bubble, both actual large language models and the "What if all human conversations in a box?" thought experiment (this definitely passes the Turing test, but, it's clearly not a person is it) are also good ideas, distinct from present "AI in everything" LLM craziness.
Just because tulips are nice doesn't make Tulip Madness a good idea. At the height of the DotCom boom consumers were buying stock at IPO prices for companies which made no sense whatsoever, because they said "Internet" or, (hence the naming) ".com"
For example Be Inc. was a vehicle for a failed Apple exec to "prove" he was the right person to run Apple, not Steve Jobs. After their runway ran out and institutions wanted nothing further to do with it, Be Inc. went IPO. They do this by saying they were an "Internet appliance" company and taking an OS with terrible networking but pretending it's good. In normal times this would attract laughter - they're offering a worse product, most likely it just tanks or never comes to market, and in the extreme case that Apple wants the CEO they're going to cut a deal with the man, not save the dead weight company. His most senior people might get parachutes but Apple has no reason to pay ordinary stock owners a penny. Sure enough those who bought at IPO rescued the institutions but were wiped out.
No, we still have software with Internet features. But Internet features went from a solution looking for a problem, to just another tool we can reach for when it's actually useful.
A whole lot of "AI" features today are in that "solution looking for a problem" category. There's a lot of "AI" in places where it really makes no sense at all. Companies and projects are afraid of missing out on what they think could be the Next Big Thing, instead of just trying to make the best software they can.
When the AI bubble bursts, it could end up like Internet features: software gets them when it genuinely makes sense, but they won't be crammed into software which has no need for it. Or it could end up like cryptocurrency: it pretty much just disappears as people realize that they don't really have any use other than to speculate on its value and to buy drugs.
Personally, my bet is that they'll end up more like cryptocurrencies. After all, "AI" doesn't just have to be a useful feature to be worth it. It has a real cost. Companies like Microsoft and Apple and Google, as well as the venture capitalists and investment funds behind the likes of Anthropic, are currently sinking VAST amounts of capital into giving "AI" away for free or heavily subsidized. At some point, it'll need to become profitable, and I don't think many people will find that the value outweighs the real, non-subsidized costs.
they are not intrusive but their entire focus changed on that instead of other features. Entire Git view feels abandoned in half done state yet they spent entire month working on AI chats, AI agents, their own AI edit (that's priced 20 per month yet they boast how light and performant it is -- why isn't it free local model then and why its priced worse than copilot?)
They're moving from "making awesome code editor" into yet another "buy our ai" product
debugger is very far from being feature-complete, I would call it MVP at the moment; lets see if they will iterate on that or will quickly go back to new shiny thing...
The fact that they have released both features within 3 months of each other is mind boggling. Their development velocity is insane. These are not trivial features.
AFAIK they added conflict resolution just recently, so it's not like non-AI features such as Git get no attention at all. And of course the debugger now.
I suspect their previous “collab editing” marketing angle was probably not a big enough draw. AI features seem to be desired by more people, or at least the hype cycle currently says so.
I'm much prefer the VS Code style when you have 2 clear sections: staged and not staged. Zed's chose the IntelliJ style which is just a bunch of checkboxes, I can see it being easier to understand for the novice, but not very intuitive from a git point of view.
Never used Git in Jetbrain IDEs or Zed (yet), but recently VS Code improved a lot the Git by making easier to stage changes in a file in a granular manner (I tried briefly edamagit extension a while ago and now use a lot gitu in the terminal, in combination with VS Code version control).
I think you're referring to autocomplete? It's much better than, say, 2 years ago when it was indeed annoying as hell. Having said I always turn it off and use agentic coding, which is not intrusive, only activate if you ask for it. This applies to all coding tools these days, autocomplete is no longer their focus.
The AI features in Zed are very easy to turn off / ignore. I agree that the AI features are probably taking development time away from other features that might be more useful.
I just tried it out again. It seems like you can disable the chat bot integration by adding this to the config:
"agent": {
"enabled": false
}
However from the documentation[1] I can't see a way to disable the "AI" predictions button (which asks you to sign in to their online "AI" service with your GitHub account). Am I missing something?
Ever since Linux support came out (2 years ago?), I go to check if they, finally, support “non-retina” “LoDPi” (a.k.a: a regular screen) yet, and sadly no :/
And do what the the few devices with perfectly fine 1080 or 1440p displays? Just throw them away?
My laptop display is fine. My desktop's 1440p is blurry, any external display at the office is blurry. So what? use Zed on my laptop when I'm using the built-in display, then switch editors if I'm switching monitors?
Zed developers themselves acknowledge the blurry font issue [1], so either you just don't notice blurry fonts or 1920x1200 on a small laptop screen is HiDPI-enough to kinda hide the blurriness.
My desktop monitor is 1920x1080. On my computer and display; Vim, Emacs and VSCode are all able to render their fonts crisply while Zed is a blurry mess.
Are you using dark mode? To me, text looks absolutely awful in light mode, but okay in dark mode. Still noticeably worse than any other editors, though.
Yes. Originally they were Mac-only, then they went open-source and the community added support for Linux and Windows, but AFAICT they've never invested in anything but Mac
It's surprisingly slow. Switching files in the tab list has a noticeable delay. Typing is higher latency than both Emacs (lsp-mode activated) and my web browser. Also uses approximately 60MiB more than my Emacs. It starts fast though!
I wouldn't complain about this stuff if it wasn't for their tagline being 'it's fast' and they're losing to Emacs Lisp (not a language amenable to being very fast) with a highly optimized C core.
I looked at their plugins, they're compiled into WASM and run in some VM. Maybe that's part of it?
How did you manage to make zed slower than emacs? From my experience, latency in zed sometimes even feels negative. Everything is instant: editing, lsp commands, file switching
In contrast, all my attempts at emacs ended up in dropping it due to latency issues (mostly because I work on remote machines)
> I looked at their plugins, they're compiled into WASM and run in some VM. Maybe that's part of it?
No. The ones I've looked just set up stuff, like launching a language server. They shouldn't be involved in typing.
I think it's related to the GPU usage. It's easy to introduce delays when you do GPU compositing, and the OS will already be doing its own.
As for emacs, IIRC they did some ugly things to update the UI directly instead of going through the normal event loop, which was causing compatibility issues later on.
I really want to switch to Zed from Cursor but the battery usage for my Python project with Pyright is unjustifiable. There are issues for this on GitHub and I'm just sad that the team isn't prioritising this more.
It’s funny you mention this because I have an issue with Cursor where if I leave it open for more than a few hours my M3 Max starts to melt, the fans spin up, and it turns out to be using most of my CPU when it should be idling.
Zed on the other hand works perfectly fine for me. Goes to show how a slightly different stack can completely change one’s experiences with a tool.
I like some of their choices, but I wouldn't say that releasing your product for a minority operating system only, then following up with yet another minority operating system much later, then stuffing AI features in there when you don't even have debugger support... The list goes on; one man's "real product development" is another's list of mistakes.
They got the baseline feature set right, IMO, but probably could've spent some more time looking at the actual, real demographics of development (and who is most likely to appreciate performance as a feature and share those ideals).
I've gone full-time with Zed for the past month or so and really like it. Love the fast start times. There was a blurry font issue on linux, but that seems to have been fixed for me. Not sure what caused it.
dear zed ppl, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE configure your language detection properly wrt C and C++! every single editor on earth makes this exact same mistake where they think all C is valid C++ (it's not, at all), and mistakenly recognises C files as C++, even when there's an accompanying compile_commands.json file that specifies a C standard and even when files contain invalid C++ (but valid C)
it's a delightful little editor if it weren't for this thing...
You can customize the rules for detecting a language by file name/path in your settings. The problem is in cases like creating a new file the editor has to guess.
It's a niche feature, but what's keeping me from switching yet is that they zed doesn't support ctrl+scroll to zoom/change font size yet.
Because I am accustomed to a non-US keyboard layout that doesn't make the regular key bindings for changing zoom easy, I got too used to doing it this way.
It's honestly looking to be a great modern IDE with almost everything I'm wishing for.
It is funny that accidental scroll while holding Ctrl changing font size is one of my most hated features in IDEs, like who the hell ever needs to change their optimal font size to any other value. It's fascinating to me that this is a dealbreakingly important feature for someone else.
Well it seems quite expected doesn't it. Different people and groups of people have different customization needs. I change my font size if I sit back or in a different position or use my standing desks.
I constantly do this when navigating large files. Zoom out for context (better than a minimap), zoom in for detail. I use the trackpad for it though, not ctrl/cmd-+. I also do it constantly in web browsers, and am consistently amazed by the way that minor changes to font sizes break the layout of any website that has had a designer near it.
I'm tempted to invest in switching to Zed full time, but there are enough small bugs with toolbars or dialog popups not working the first time that it makes me wary.
This is becoming a recurring issue; plenty of innovation being put in new and faster tooling to replace the JS-based daily drivers we've had for the past decade+, but there's a huge ecosystem of 3rd party addons to those now which is slowing adoption down; I'm also thinking of Prettier/ESLint vs Biome, the only thing stopping us from going full Biome is that we need some ESLint plugins.
That said, it's getting better; as another commenter pointed out, LSP is one of the best things to happen to this space. There should be a standard for editor plugins, too.
Zed only supports language extensions, so it is in part responsible. If you're using embedded rust then PlatformIO isn't really needed; probe-rs is extremely capable and straightforward.
I think competent software engineers should actually read the "Under the hood" section, before they lose the core understanding on how debuggers work and are integrated into editors.
Upon reading the Rust code implementing the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) in Zed, some very junior SWEs will quickly point out that they would prefer only "self-documenting code" and would go as far as to removing all comments or even believe that "If it has comments, its probably bad code".
For sophisticated software that implements a defined protocol that is architected to be scalable in any piece of complex software, I prefer these comments that explains why a particular interface is designed the way it is and how it fits into the software (Zed) in this case if it were to be widely re-used like a plugin system.
This blog post is excellent in explaining this debugger integration in the editor and it makes me want to consider using Zed; it just needs an improved extension ecosystem.
If be surprised if Zed aren't dogfooding their own AI agents to help writing some of the Zed code. The AI often put a lot of comments on the generated code, and sometimes needs a lot of comments to produce the right code.
I tried using Zed for a few months, but somehow ended up with a conclusion, that VSCode serves my needs better. Just a sum of small issues, like the need to manually re-apply coloring schemes to some files.
I've used it to install zed fine, but I haven't messed around with zed too much. I do most of my development within WSL with vscode, and zed doesn't had a great WSL2 development experience.
I've been using the unofficial builds via scoop for the last two months. It's working great so far. I use it on a Macbook as well and I haven't found any features that are missing or buggier on Win11. Really enjoying the new agent version of the AI assistant, which I use with both Claude API and devstral locally via Ollama.
For some reason I've found myself wanting a "lighter VS Code" lateley, which is ironic considering I used VS Code for the past 10 years because it is so lightweight. So I've wanted to try out Zed, but it's just ... weird to go back to a closed source editor, especially one that's so focused on imitating copilot, which seems like an odd feature to shift most focus on.
> To simplify the setup process, we've introduced locators, a system that translates build configurations into debug configurations. Meaning that you can write a build task once in tasks.json and reference it from debug.json — or, even better, rely on Zed's automatic configuration.
I wonder if they advertize the editor as the most AI-enabled, how much do they vibecode the editor themselves? /s
Jokes aside, after SublimeText as the main tool, and VSCode for Rust debugging, I'm trying this one. Now with more themes and plugins than a year ago, it can be set up to look and function a lot better.
I'm very happy to see work on the debugger. This is the main feature preventing me from switching full time to zed.
Unfortunately, "here" is not accurate. Not having a watch window, a stack trace view, and no mention of data breakpoints in the announcement still keeps the "beta" tag. I know those features will arrive eventually, but what is described is definitely not sufficient for 97% of my debugging sessions.
I would also have liked to see more in the announcement of multiple simultaneous debug sessions, and on how multithreaded debugging is planned. There are really cool things that can be done with multithreaded debugging further down the line that I'd be interesting in hearing about (like how RemedyBG has a DAW-like UI for freezing certain threads, or hitting one button to "solo" a thread and freeze all others).
Hey Laserbeam, I'm one of the devs that made the debugger and the one that wrote the article.
We do have a basic stack trace view that basically all debuggers support. What's coming out in the near future is a stack trace view in our multi buffer system. In fact, you can use the "show stack trace" action while in an active debug session to expand the call stack in a multi buffer, where each excerpt is a frame. It's just not up to the quality that I and several others expect from Zed, so I didn't advertise it.
There's also a PR for a watching variables/expression that is going to be merged in a couple of days. The functionality is done, but we didn't want to add a feature so close to launch that wasn't fully tested.
Support for data breakpoints will come in the near future. I can't say when because we're planning on focusing on automatic configuration for a while, but it is a priority.
We do support simultaneously debugging multiple sessions at the same time and multithreaded debugging too. There's still more to do with it, but the support is definitely there!
I am VERY confident you guys have everything I mentioned either half working or coming shortly, so I'm not worried. I just saw a "the debugger is here!" announcement, then read the announcement, and saw what's still under todo... My reaction is "well, it's not here, it'll be here in a few weeks". And that's ok ^.^
Am impressed by the under-the-hood discussion though. Keep up the great work!
Thank you for the positive energy and I'm glad you liked the under the hood section!
The blog post mentions[1] that advanced views are in development. This initial release and announcement focuses on the underlying foundation they're building upon.
> New views: While we support all the fundamental views, we're planning on adding more advanced views such as a watch list, memory view, disassembly view, and a stack trace view
[1] https://zed.dev/blog/debugger#whats-next
100% of my debug sessions are with plain breakpoints and stepping. So it's here for me!
I agree but at the rate the Zed team is working at, we're not far off!
Oh yeah, of course :). My argument is they're just premature in declaring readiness.
I have to try out the debugger yet. However I share your sentiment but for the Git feature. The basics are there but it is just not complete yet to fully replace my current git workflow. Hope they keep focus on that as well.
Nothing has been able to replace Magit for me, yet. Having a Zed UI for Git like Magit is my dream feature request.
With that said, Zed has effectively replaced all of Emacs for me, besides Magit. Additionally, typing in other editors feels noticeably higher latency than Zed :)
I've been daily driving Zed for almost a year now -- works best on TypeScript, Rust, and Go projects, in my opinion.
There's just so much functionality Zed has to build out to compete with modern editors (agentic coding, collaboration, debugging, edit prediction, task runners, version control). With that said, for pair-programming sessions with friends, Zed has been perfect since Linux gained screenshare support. However, there's a noticeable "pause in development" for collaboration in order to implement major features like Agentic Coding, and smaller-but-essential features like direnv integration, IME support (typing Japanese in the terminal used to be a clunky, error-prone task), dealing with the endless permutations of Python tooling so that Python files aren't a sea of red lines, etc.
Zed reminds of the days when Atom was big.
It was a good time, but it always left me wondering how long it would last as it leaned heavily on community support for nearly everything useful outside a few packages
Such a situation makes me worry about it keeping up if popularity wanes. With JetBrains for example at least I know that paying for the editor it will keep getting proper updates and support even if it isn’t the most popular (though it is quite popular currently)
Leaning on community support seems ideal because it means you've built a powerful plugin API and people can implement features.
As opposed to having a weak plugin API where all progress depends on the tiny internal team.
The latter suffers more than the first if popularity wanes.
In Atom's case, its lunch was eaten by VSCode which was similar but just better. Based on web tech but with better performance and just as powerful of a plugin API. It wasn't the fact that they let people implement plugins that killed Atom, and they would have been in an even worse situation had they not had a good plugin API.
And Sublime, BBEdit, TextMate, Notepad++, Ultraedit, Slick, vi, vim, XEmacs, Emacs, nano, joe, jEdit,....
You can pay for Zed too. I am.
Paying for zed isn’t the same as paying for extensions to be well maintained. They’re not all in house
Ahh, I see what you mean now and yeah, I agree.
Is there a tracking issue for watching variables and data breakpoints? I'd like to see that as well.
Here's the PR for variable/expression watching: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/32743
I don't think there's an issue for data breakpoints, but you can make one for us
Zed is fantastic. I've been making the leap from neovim to zed lately, and it's been an great experience. Everything feels snappy, and I love how well they've integrated Vim bindings. Their agent mode is nice as well. It's clearly an underdog to VSCode, so the extension ecosystem isn't quite there yet... but for a lot of the things I've used it for, it's sufficient. The debugger has been the big missing feature for me and I'm really glad they've built it out now - awesome work.
I'm curious about how vimmy the vim bindings are?
Every time I've encountered a vim emulator I've found it is just close enough that my fingers are doing the wrong things so often it's frustrating. Almost to the point where I would prefer a non-vimmy editor since at least then my fingers always do the wrong thing.
To me it has been the best "vim" that is not a real Vim. Way way better than the vscode plugin. I have used Vim and later Neovim since 2008 or so. Zed is the first non-vim I am truly happy with.
How is Zed with auto-completing Rust code?
I love how fast Windsurf and Cursor are with the "tab-tab-tab" code auto-completion, where nearly everything suggested is spot-on and the suggestions keep on rolling, almost automating the entire task of refactoring for you. This form of autocomplete works really well with TypeScript and other scripting languages.
IntelliJ / RustRover never got anywhere close to that level of behavior you can get in Cursor and Windsurf, neither in conjunction with JetBrains own models or with Co-pilot. I chalked it up as an IDE / model / language mismatch thing. That Rust just wasn't amenable to this.
A few questions:
1) Are we to that magical tab-tab-tab and everything autocompletes fluently with Rust yet? (And does this work in Zed?)
2) How does Zed compare to Cursor and Windsurf? How does it compare to RustRover, and in particular, JetBrains' command of the Rust AST?
Zed is written in Rust by a bunch of Rust lovers so it's really got first class support for it.
> How is Zed with auto-completing Rust code?
I think they all use LSP, so whether you use neovim or Zed there shouldn't be a difference? (not 100% sure, but that's my basic understanding of LSP).
The LSP support for Rust has trailed JetBrains own Rust plugin, which has long since morphed into the language-specific IDE, RustRover.
RustRover has the best AST suggestions and refactoring support out there. It works in gigantic workspaces, across build scripts, proc macros, and dynamic dispatch.
The problem with RustRover has been the lackluster AI support. I've been finding AI autocomplete generally much more useful than AST understanding, though having both would be killer.
I know they’re actively working on this, they released a few updates to the AI extension to make it modular now, so you can pick your own model for example. Soon it will let you wire up your own agents, but if I recall correctly the reason it’s a bit slower there is lack of uniform interfaces
It's fantastic for Rust, it's my main IDE which I've written e.g. voltlane.net in. Fantastic software, and the LLM integration is everything you need IMO (in a good way).
Zed feels like what Lapce, Helix and Neovim couldn't achieve in the time they spent.
I started using Helix back around 2021-2022 and just couldn't get over the bugs and lack of integration. It was good, but PHP support (I was working at an older company) was bad.
Neovim felt closest to a nice editor but there were some popular community-driven plugins that were very stubborn, and alternatives were just very slow. I was also just overwhelmed by the choices I needed to make for something stable.
Lapce just felt like a VSCode clone that didn't do anything special. Looked cool, but I did not feel like it was ready for a daily driver (And it still doesn't).
Zed became a favorite in a short amount of time, and I'm extremely grateful for it every day. The debugger is a nice addition.
This might be off-topic, but I really want to use Helix. I've been using Vim keybindings for a few years now but it's so unintuitive, there's still so many things I can't do efficiently in Vim. Helix just makes so much more sense for my brain. But I don't use Vim/Neovim by itself, I always use an integration with an editor like VSCode or Obsidian (Obsidian's Vim emulation isn't great, but it's good enough). Helix just isn't there yet with VSCode or Obsidian.
I wish more "Vim successors" would focus more on integrating with existing IDEs, rather than becoming one themselves. I don't want to have to set up an entirely new workflow when I change how I edit text.
That's also why I haven't tried using Neovim as a standalone IDE. It looks like I'd really like it, but I don't want to be locked in to using Vim.
> PHP support (I was working at an older company)
Not sure why PHP needs a qualifier like this.
People keep forgetting the UNIX tools they love sooo much predate PHP, follow the same worse is better mentally, and trace back to 1969, but for some strange time travel reason, they are considered modern.
> ...like a VSCode clone that didn't do anything special.
Interesting way to qualify the most popular editor of human history.
They said that Lapce didn't do anything special (over VSCode). Not that VSCode is nothing special, as you seem to have interpreted it.
Fair enough. I understand what you meant now.
I was interested in Zed, but lost all interest when they started integrating "AI". I'm tired of "AI" everywhere.
I'll just stick with Neovim until something better comes around. Which probably won't happen until after the "AI" bubble bursts.
Zed was the first editor that tempted me into using AI features. It felt solid in general and AI feels mostly like autocomplete in other editors (in terms of how much it's in your face). There's definitely a place for AI models and agents in code editors, and Zed makes me feel like it's not built around them, which is great! Zed feel like "Come to us, we are making a good fast editor that also has AI." while competition feel like "Come to us, we want AI that has an editor".
I'm genuinely happy it works for you. I just don't want AI in my text editor, even if you're happy with it.
Then don't use it? It's completely optional and works perfectly fine without AI
Thanks for the tip, but I was already not using it
It's an unexpected position to take, though. You said you had been interested in Zed until they integrated AI. The response was "the AI is completely optional", which I'd expect would make you more likely to use Zed, since it removes your objection. But it doesn't change your position at all, which makes me suspect it's not that you're worried the AI would interfere with your workflow, but that it's there at all. So, is your position that the very fact that Zed allowed AI to touch it has infected it in some way?
I'm not interested in using text editors with chat bot integration, hope this clarifies things
Not at all!
So you're just here to be an AI curmudgeon with no valuable input to the debugger conversation topic whatsoever, with no experience with Zed and no intent to ever even try it? Thanks for all the relevant and useful hot takes I guess.
The way I see it, I shared thoughts on Zed, as someone who was once really interested in Zed and once tried to switch to it, in a discussion about Zed. It's not about the Zed debugger, but it's not like this thread is lacking in discussion of the debugger.
Am I an AI curmudgeon? I wouldn't necessarily use that word, but it's not entirely inaccurate.
I suspect you’ll be an extreme minority.
I won’t go near a code editor anymore without AI integrated deeply.
I suspect I'm not the only one experiencing "AI fatigue" as every single piece of software grows more and more useless "AI" features I don't want and which get in the way of doing what I actually want.
Yep, I was on mailing list etc. Unsubscribed when they did the AI announcement. Its not for me.
Nah, its the quiet majority, and AI posts on places like HN quickly create their own echo chambers with folks patting themselves and each other on their backs.
There is AI as a useful tool, maybe, which is at most few % of current hype. Most folks seem to end up babysitting it a lot to get something useful out of it. And then there is everything else which is mostly hype or narrow use cases. To proper typical senior managing a team I don't see much added value. It can help juniors churn out large chunks of the code but I haven't worked in 20 years in a place that values quantity of code and quick deliveries over quality.
Also very much depends on the business and specific company. In my banking mega corp, no AI is even allowed to be used even as I write it now, all popular sites are blocked and there are strict policies against. Couldn't care less, coding is such a small part of my work I don't want to lose this creative outlet by delegating it to something I need to triple check for bugs afterwards. Also with any new stuff I learn way more by implementing it myself rather than looking at pre-made code.
> Also very much depends on the business and specific company. In my banking mega corp, no AI is even allowed to be used
This is a huge thing tbh. I don't like these AI things in general so I wouldn't use them anyway, but I just can't imagine going to my clients and asking them, "Hey is it okay with you if I routinely upload all your code to these random American venture-backed start-ups?". And I really can't imagine just doing that behind their back. I couldn't really imagine doing that with an employer's code either.
Ideally I don't even use software where accidentally toggling the wrong checkbox in some settings screen results in automatically uploading client code to these American start-ups either. Now I won't pretend that my stance against AI is purely out of some principled cybersecurity concern, but it's definitely a factor.
You can use local LLMs.
Is that what Zed's integration does by default?
In any case, what I see most people doing is integrating it with Claude/Copilot/etc. The security concerns specifically obviously don't apply when running it locally.
By default Zed has a user choose what type of configuration they want. That could be something like LM Studio, Ollama, or your own API keys to a provider you're already paying for.
AI also isn't shoved in your face when using Zed, there's one small button on the button right.
> there's one small button on the [bottom] right.
Wait there's an always-present AI button in the normal text editing UI? That's way more prominent than I expected, I assumed it was just an option in a settings screen somewhere. I definitely don't want an AI button that's always on screen.
I just downloaded Zed to see this for myself and found not only one but two AI buttons in the lower right, one for integration with chat bots and one for their "prediction" AI. Both try to get you to log in to online services (even though, yes, a local chat bot is an option for one of them).
It seems like you can remove the chat bot ("agent") button through their config file, but I found no option to remove the "predictions" button.
Man this editor is pushing "AI" way harder than I imagined. As I said I genuinely assumed that it was just like iTerm2's chat bot integration where you could enable it in a settings screen.
I strongly agree about the fatigue. I have extreme levels of concern, especially when the supposed top people are shooting their mouths off saying this stuff is doing material science, biochem, a million other things.
But all that annoying madness is distracting from how amazingly awesomely useful this stuff is. It's wild how many little quick projects I can kick out in a couple hours! Ideas just come out of my head with so much less fuss; when I don't like it I ask for something different.
My point is less to convince though about AI. I appreciate your starting sentiment here, but I really don't get the follow up?
> genuinely happy it works for you. I just don't want AI in my text editor, even if you're happy with it.
I don't see why it would bother you at all? There's a tiny little button in the status bar and a few scattered menu items that feel, to me, very easy to ignore.
It feels like someone being mad that their spreadsheet has I dunno, logarithms in it, but the person hates logarithms? It feels weird to opt in to caring against. I have a generalll abnner of thought which is "your anti-feature is not a feature", and this feels like one of those situations: i don't see why someone would cling to an editor not having a feature they don't use?
And I suspect you are an extreme minority. Among senior and staff engineers I barely see them leaving behind emacs, vim and jetbrains… none of them with ai plug-ins.
Let me clarify. Things are only going in one direction.
So if you’re not in the minority now, you will be in time.
This is not a “tech bro” thing (as someone else said). There is real substance to it.
I suspect GP will not be an extreme minority.
Nope, not a minority at all. Quite the opposite outside the tech bro side of things.
I went to check out neovim and noticed it's currently sponsored by two AI products! Of course, that's one level removed from actually integrating AI in your product but, still—it's getting harder and harder to avoid altogether.
Thankfully for me, I guess, neovim broke my config about a year ago by changing the default color scheme in a way that I could not fix easily with confug. So I forked and built my own and will likely never update it.
Oh wow, I hadn't noticed that.
I guess it's always possible to return to Vim if Neovim starts showing signs of being steered by its sponsors.
My guess is that neovim wouldn't do a core integration of ai that ships with the editor. At most, maybe if there are ui interface gaps that would help make a better experience, they might expose more apis there that could be useful outside ai as well.
Plugins are relatively easy to write in nvim so I'd expect all ai stuff to come from there and be opt in.
At this rate you're going to be cooking over a campfire and living in a cave in a few years.
Nah, the AI bubble will have popped in a few years and projects will stop sprouting AI features left and right.
Did the dot com crash cause software to stop integrating internet features?
The Network was a good idea fifty years ago, and it was still a good idea by the time the Internet was definitely the next network which was a few years before the DotCom bubble, both actual large language models and the "What if all human conversations in a box?" thought experiment (this definitely passes the Turing test, but, it's clearly not a person is it) are also good ideas, distinct from present "AI in everything" LLM craziness.
Just because tulips are nice doesn't make Tulip Madness a good idea. At the height of the DotCom boom consumers were buying stock at IPO prices for companies which made no sense whatsoever, because they said "Internet" or, (hence the naming) ".com"
For example Be Inc. was a vehicle for a failed Apple exec to "prove" he was the right person to run Apple, not Steve Jobs. After their runway ran out and institutions wanted nothing further to do with it, Be Inc. went IPO. They do this by saying they were an "Internet appliance" company and taking an OS with terrible networking but pretending it's good. In normal times this would attract laughter - they're offering a worse product, most likely it just tanks or never comes to market, and in the extreme case that Apple wants the CEO they're going to cut a deal with the man, not save the dead weight company. His most senior people might get parachutes but Apple has no reason to pay ordinary stock owners a penny. Sure enough those who bought at IPO rescued the institutions but were wiped out.
No, we still have software with Internet features. But Internet features went from a solution looking for a problem, to just another tool we can reach for when it's actually useful.
A whole lot of "AI" features today are in that "solution looking for a problem" category. There's a lot of "AI" in places where it really makes no sense at all. Companies and projects are afraid of missing out on what they think could be the Next Big Thing, instead of just trying to make the best software they can.
When the AI bubble bursts, it could end up like Internet features: software gets them when it genuinely makes sense, but they won't be crammed into software which has no need for it. Or it could end up like cryptocurrency: it pretty much just disappears as people realize that they don't really have any use other than to speculate on its value and to buy drugs.
Personally, my bet is that they'll end up more like cryptocurrencies. After all, "AI" doesn't just have to be a useful feature to be worth it. It has a real cost. Companies like Microsoft and Apple and Google, as well as the venture capitalists and investment funds behind the likes of Anthropic, are currently sinking VAST amounts of capital into giving "AI" away for free or heavily subsidized. At some point, it'll need to become profitable, and I don't think many people will find that the value outweighs the real, non-subsidized costs.
But we'll see.
I just disabled everything AI related. It's a nice editor. But I still have to jump into VSCode to resolve merge conflicts.
Recently the Zed team added some tools to help with merge conflicts: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4964#issuecomme...
Yeah, but still it's not as comfortable as with VSCode or for example Meld.
I didn't tried Zed in a while, are really intrusive the AI features? Can't it be just disabled with some configuration?
they are not intrusive but their entire focus changed on that instead of other features. Entire Git view feels abandoned in half done state yet they spent entire month working on AI chats, AI agents, their own AI edit (that's priced 20 per month yet they boast how light and performant it is -- why isn't it free local model then and why its priced worse than copilot?)
They're moving from "making awesome code editor" into yet another "buy our ai" product
Wouldn’t the addition of the debugger disprove this slant? Huge feature that has nothing to do with AI.
debugger is very far from being feature-complete, I would call it MVP at the moment; lets see if they will iterate on that or will quickly go back to new shiny thing...
The fact that they have released both features within 3 months of each other is mind boggling. Their development velocity is insane. These are not trivial features.
Give them some time to polish, jeez.
Copying a buffer into a network call, reading a response, writing the buffer. Not trivial per se, but table stakes for an experienced developer.
Rust probably slows them down here, but working correctly early is preferable imho.
Over simplify much?
Which computer science frontiers are being pushed here at the user interface level, do you think?
(This is referring to their recent integration work. The acceleration layer was usable a year or more ago.)
AFAIK they added conflict resolution just recently, so it's not like non-AI features such as Git get no attention at all. And of course the debugger now.
We have multiple teams at Zed each with their own focus. In fact, you can see all the projects we're working on if you view our channel notes.
We're going to be adding more features to the debugger for a while
I suspect their previous “collab editing” marketing angle was probably not a big enough draw. AI features seem to be desired by more people, or at least the hype cycle currently says so.
I'm much prefer the VS Code style when you have 2 clear sections: staged and not staged. Zed's chose the IntelliJ style which is just a bunch of checkboxes, I can see it being easier to understand for the novice, but not very intuitive from a git point of view.
Never used Git in Jetbrain IDEs or Zed (yet), but recently VS Code improved a lot the Git by making easier to stage changes in a file in a granular manner (I tried briefly edamagit extension a while ago and now use a lot gitu in the terminal, in combination with VS Code version control).
I don't know, I just uninstalled Zed when I read those features got added
I think you're referring to autocomplete? It's much better than, say, 2 years ago when it was indeed annoying as hell. Having said I always turn it off and use agentic coding, which is not intrusive, only activate if you ask for it. This applies to all coding tools these days, autocomplete is no longer their focus.
I find it very easy to avoid the AI feature in every day Zed usage. Sometimes they do come in handy though. But nog often.
I don't want an editor where I have to avoid the AI features, I want an editor without AI features
Just like I want a terminal without AI features, which is why I'm no longer using iTerm2
I didn't even notice iTerm has AI features? Where?
It seems like they've since removed it from the core app and put it in a separate plug-in: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/-/issues/11470#note_19176...
Anyway, I'm happy with Ghostty since I switched away from iTerm2 and haven't paid attention to iTerm2 development much.
The developer of Ghostty is using AI for development. Better quickly delete it!
As long as he doesn't get tempted to add AI features into Ghostty I'm not too concerned
You can disable AI.
Furthermore, Zed Agents are currently my favorite way of using LLM's during programming
Relevant GH issue: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/6756
The AI features in Zed are very easy to turn off / ignore. I agree that the AI features are probably taking development time away from other features that might be more useful.
It's trivial to disable it. I wouldn't let that hold you back from using an amazing editor!
I just tried it out again. It seems like you can disable the chat bot integration by adding this to the config:
However from the documentation[1] I can't see a way to disable the "AI" predictions button (which asks you to sign in to their online "AI" service with your GitHub account). Am I missing something?[1] https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#edit-predictions
Setting this to none should remove that button. "features": { "edit_prediction_provider": "none" }
Really? That's not mentioned in the documentation, it seems like the whole "features" object is missing. Thanks anyway.
Me too. I don't want AI, and if it's there, I want to be able to completely remove it. Zed is forcing it, so I'm staying on VSCodium.
What's forcing AI in Zed though?
agent.enabled = false and it's gone, no?
Probably also requires an api key, no? So would be difficult to force.
I have a firewall, OpenSnitch, so don’t have to worry much about programs trying to connect. But definitely would prefer they don’t unless directed.
How does zed handle it?
There's a pair of config settings to turn off all of the AI features:
features.edit_prediction_provider=none agent.enabled=false
There's additional config to set if inline assistance is automatic, only when the user presses a key, fully disabled, etc.
I’d prefer an option at first start perhaps, to turn it on.
That might be how it works, I haven't been through the new user flow in a while.
how does editor neovim connect to debugger in the post?
I’m thrilled to see Zed evolve into a featured, lightweight IDE.
IMHO Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) and Language Server Protocol (LSP) are the best things happened to programming tooling in the last decade.
(I wrote this comment in another thread about the same link but didn't hit the frontpage)
Ever since Linux support came out (2 years ago?), I go to check if they, finally, support “non-retina” “LoDPi” (a.k.a: a regular screen) yet, and sadly no :/
It's so incredibly frustrating. Text rendering is the primary feature of a code editor, but no one on the Zed team seems to use a non-retina screen.
Github issue for context: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
> but no one on the Zed team seems to use a non-retina screen
This is not that surprising to me. Surely no-one wants to spend their day looking at the pixels?
If nice monitors were free, sure. Sadly nice monitors cost money. When I worked office jobs, hidpi displays were rarely available.
I like looking at pixels as long as those pixels look good. Zed's pixels look awful.
And do what the the few devices with perfectly fine 1080 or 1440p displays? Just throw them away?
My laptop display is fine. My desktop's 1440p is blurry, any external display at the office is blurry. So what? use Zed on my laptop when I'm using the built-in display, then switch editors if I'm switching monitors?
It's an ugly workaround, but if you install BetterDisplay (it's a free tool) and set your LoDPI screen to HiDPI, text rendering looks good.
Oh I'll have to try that. Zed looks woeful on my 1440p monitor when I was trying it at work, which is a shame because I quite like it otherwise.
In what way? I e been using it on my 1440p for over a year and it looks fine. Am I missing something?
On my system (Linux, 4k display without scaling) the fonts look awful, but bumping up the font weight more or less fixes it.
Using it daily on my 1920x1200 laptop screen in Linux and works just fine.
Zed developers themselves acknowledge the blurry font issue [1], so either you just don't notice blurry fonts or 1920x1200 on a small laptop screen is HiDPI-enough to kinda hide the blurriness.
My desktop monitor is 1920x1080. On my computer and display; Vim, Emacs and VSCode are all able to render their fonts crisply while Zed is a blurry mess.
[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
Are you using dark mode? To me, text looks absolutely awful in light mode, but okay in dark mode. Still noticeably worse than any other editors, though.
This may be it.
I use it in dark mode and I am considerably less picky about font rendering than many people commenting on such threads.
Combined, while I can see a difference if I look closely, it doesn't bother me.
Lucky you. It's very blurry. For me I open any other text editor next to it and immediately realize where that headache was coming from.
They don’t support windows, they don’t support regular screens on Linux… are they a Mac shop basically?
Using it with regular screen in Linux, works just fine.
The unofficial builds for Windows are good.
https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds
Installing the 'stable' build with scoop works a treat.
Via Scoop:
It works really well on Windows, haven't had any problems, nor with any extensions.Yes. Originally they were Mac-only, then they went open-source and the community added support for Linux and Windows, but AFAICT they've never invested in anything but Mac
The core team built Linux support and we're starting to work on Windows as well
Most startups are
It's surprisingly slow. Switching files in the tab list has a noticeable delay. Typing is higher latency than both Emacs (lsp-mode activated) and my web browser. Also uses approximately 60MiB more than my Emacs. It starts fast though!
I wouldn't complain about this stuff if it wasn't for their tagline being 'it's fast' and they're losing to Emacs Lisp (not a language amenable to being very fast) with a highly optimized C core.
I looked at their plugins, they're compiled into WASM and run in some VM. Maybe that's part of it?
How did you manage to make zed slower than emacs? From my experience, latency in zed sometimes even feels negative. Everything is instant: editing, lsp commands, file switching
In contrast, all my attempts at emacs ended up in dropping it due to latency issues (mostly because I work on remote machines)
I think you answered how you managed to induce latency in Emacs :).
> I looked at their plugins, they're compiled into WASM and run in some VM. Maybe that's part of it?
No. The ones I've looked just set up stuff, like launching a language server. They shouldn't be involved in typing.
I think it's related to the GPU usage. It's easy to introduce delays when you do GPU compositing, and the OS will already be doing its own.
As for emacs, IIRC they did some ugly things to update the UI directly instead of going through the normal event loop, which was causing compatibility issues later on.
Talking of Emacs, there is a very well designed DAP-based debugger available as the 'dape' package.
https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/dape.html
The way it's designed (incl. having no dependencies) suggests that they will be angling for it to be included with stock Emacs at some point.
It's probably something in the rendering pipeline. What operating system?
Fedora 41, KDE Plasma 6.3.5, kernel 6.14.5, Wayland, Mesa Intel Iris Xe Graphics.
I really want to switch to Zed from Cursor but the battery usage for my Python project with Pyright is unjustifiable. There are issues for this on GitHub and I'm just sad that the team isn't prioritising this more.
It’s funny you mention this because I have an issue with Cursor where if I leave it open for more than a few hours my M3 Max starts to melt, the fans spin up, and it turns out to be using most of my CPU when it should be idling.
Zed on the other hand works perfectly fine for me. Goes to show how a slightly different stack can completely change one’s experiences with a tool.
Zed is what real product development looks like.
So nice to have an option that doesn’t repackage the whole damn chromium engine (again)
I like some of their choices, but I wouldn't say that releasing your product for a minority operating system only, then following up with yet another minority operating system much later, then stuffing AI features in there when you don't even have debugger support... The list goes on; one man's "real product development" is another's list of mistakes.
They got the baseline feature set right, IMO, but probably could've spent some more time looking at the actual, real demographics of development (and who is most likely to appreciate performance as a feature and share those ideals).
I've gone full-time with Zed for the past month or so and really like it. Love the fast start times. There was a blurry font issue on linux, but that seems to have been fixed for me. Not sure what caused it.
dear zed ppl, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE configure your language detection properly wrt C and C++! every single editor on earth makes this exact same mistake where they think all C is valid C++ (it's not, at all), and mistakenly recognises C files as C++, even when there's an accompanying compile_commands.json file that specifies a C standard and even when files contain invalid C++ (but valid C)
it's a delightful little editor if it weren't for this thing...
You can customize the rules for detecting a language by file name/path in your settings. The problem is in cases like creating a new file the editor has to guess.
I can't get past the fact that an IDE has a "login" button on it.
Jetbrains and Visual Studio Code also have login buttons.
In Zed, login is only required for internet features like some of the commercially hosted LLMs, and the multiplayer editing feature.
How prominent? Can you remove it from main window?
Not in the official builds.
It's a niche feature, but what's keeping me from switching yet is that they zed doesn't support ctrl+scroll to zoom/change font size yet.
Because I am accustomed to a non-US keyboard layout that doesn't make the regular key bindings for changing zoom easy, I got too used to doing it this way.
It's honestly looking to be a great modern IDE with almost everything I'm wishing for.
It is funny that accidental scroll while holding Ctrl changing font size is one of my most hated features in IDEs, like who the hell ever needs to change their optimal font size to any other value. It's fascinating to me that this is a dealbreakingly important feature for someone else.
You use them in pair programming, when you peer sit a little bit further
Well it seems quite expected doesn't it. Different people and groups of people have different customization needs. I change my font size if I sit back or in a different position or use my standing desks.
Live coding during a presentation or on stream is another use case in addition to the sibling comments.
I often use it when sharing my screen. I like the feature quite a lot.
I constantly do this when navigating large files. Zoom out for context (better than a minimap), zoom in for detail. I use the trackpad for it though, not ctrl/cmd-+. I also do it constantly in web browsers, and am consistently amazed by the way that minor changes to font sizes break the layout of any website that has had a designer near it.
May I ask which layout is that? On most that I have encountered (using hr daily), + and - don't require modifiers.
It's a swiss french layout and the problem is mainly +. But it's also that + and - are quite far apart so the mouse wheel is just easier.
I'm tempted to invest in switching to Zed full time, but there are enough small bugs with toolbars or dialog popups not working the first time that it makes me wary.
Not Zed's fault but I'm still stuck with VSCode because Zed doesn't support PLatformIO (or rather PlatformIO doesn't support Zed).
I'm guessing that this extension support problem will continue to be a barrier to uptake for a while.
This is becoming a recurring issue; plenty of innovation being put in new and faster tooling to replace the JS-based daily drivers we've had for the past decade+, but there's a huge ecosystem of 3rd party addons to those now which is slowing adoption down; I'm also thinking of Prettier/ESLint vs Biome, the only thing stopping us from going full Biome is that we need some ESLint plugins.
That said, it's getting better; as another commenter pointed out, LSP is one of the best things to happen to this space. There should be a standard for editor plugins, too.
> Not Zed's fault
Zed only supports language extensions, so it is in part responsible. If you're using embedded rust then PlatformIO isn't really needed; probe-rs is extremely capable and straightforward.
I'm going to go ask the Zed AI now if it can port my massive 10 year old C++ project to Rust and see what happens. Gotta keep moving forward
Otherwise maybe the platformio cli might be enough
I think competent software engineers should actually read the "Under the hood" section, before they lose the core understanding on how debuggers work and are integrated into editors.
Upon reading the Rust code implementing the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) in Zed, some very junior SWEs will quickly point out that they would prefer only "self-documenting code" and would go as far as to removing all comments or even believe that "If it has comments, its probably bad code".
For sophisticated software that implements a defined protocol that is architected to be scalable in any piece of complex software, I prefer these comments that explains why a particular interface is designed the way it is and how it fits into the software (Zed) in this case if it were to be widely re-used like a plugin system.
This blog post is excellent in explaining this debugger integration in the editor and it makes me want to consider using Zed; it just needs an improved extension ecosystem.
[0] https://zed.dev/blog/debugger#under-the-hood
If be surprised if Zed aren't dogfooding their own AI agents to help writing some of the Zed code. The AI often put a lot of comments on the generated code, and sometimes needs a lot of comments to produce the right code.
They literally do this in their AI Agent demo - they add a feature to Zed using Zed's agent.
Love zed, wish it would work with Claude max. It’s amazing
Is this not doable with its MCP configuration? Today I tried this and wrote it down after it worked well for me if Zed allows similar usage and config https://www.bobbby.online/post/a-clever-hack-claude-code-as-...
Until zed doesn't work on windows (publicly) unfortunately can't use it in my working computer
Non official builds for Windows:
https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds/releases
The opengl one fails on my PC but the "regular one" (?) zed.exe seems to work. Didn't test much as I have discovered that today :-)
I tried using Zed for a few months, but somehow ended up with a conclusion, that VSCode serves my needs better. Just a sum of small issues, like the need to manually re-apply coloring schemes to some files.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44311958
Still waiting for a Windows build.
https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds
Is it usable?
I've used it to install zed fine, but I haven't messed around with zed too much. I do most of my development within WSL with vscode, and zed doesn't had a great WSL2 development experience.
[delayed]
I havent's keep up with Zed, how's the Windows version coming along? Is anyone here using it?
I've been using the unofficial builds via scoop for the last two months. It's working great so far. I use it on a Macbook as well and I haven't found any features that are missing or buggier on Win11. Really enjoying the new agent version of the AI assistant, which I use with both Claude API and devstral locally via Ollama.
https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds
There’s no build available yet but there is a doc on how to build it https://zed.dev/docs/development/windows
zed remote ssh on windows would push me to it instantly, unfortunately it relies upon this pr being merged (I think, would love more input): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/29145
It is finally at the review stage, I really hope it can get merged soon!
Turbo Pascal as ideal IDE...
For some reason I've found myself wanting a "lighter VS Code" lateley, which is ironic considering I used VS Code for the past 10 years because it is so lightweight. So I've wanted to try out Zed, but it's just ... weird to go back to a closed source editor, especially one that's so focused on imitating copilot, which seems like an odd feature to shift most focus on.
Am I missing someone, or didn't they go open source last year?
https://zed.dev/blog/zed-is-now-open-source
Ah right, you're right.
It's that it doesn't have an installer for Windows. That's what I was stuck on.
I could just build it... I guess.
There's also community builds for Windows: https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds
Zed is FOSS: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed
> To simplify the setup process, we've introduced locators, a system that translates build configurations into debug configurations. Meaning that you can write a build task once in tasks.json and reference it from debug.json — or, even better, rely on Zed's automatic configuration.
Does that work if my build is Docker based?
Sorta. IIRC you would need to make a version of your container that serves DAP on a port for the editor to connect to?
I wonder if they advertize the editor as the most AI-enabled, how much do they vibecode the editor themselves? /s
Jokes aside, after SublimeText as the main tool, and VSCode for Rust debugging, I'm trying this one. Now with more themes and plugins than a year ago, it can be set up to look and function a lot better.
I did not know the Zed editor before.
Now, seeing that it's a GUI application, why would I use it, given that it seems to:
1. have no menus,
2. have no toolbars,
3. be AI-focused?
It has menus, a toolbar, and the AI integration is opt-in.
I wish Zed can better support claude code, like offering native IDE integration. with Claude code SDK this seems doable?