One thing that still suffers is AI autocomplete. While I tried Zed's own solution and supermaven (now part of Cursor), I still find Cursor's AI autocomplete and predictions much more accurate (even pulling up a file via search is more accurate in Cursor).
I am glad to hear that Zed got a round of funding. https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed This will go a long way to creating real competition to Cursor in the form of a quality IDE not built on VSCode
hajile · 46m ago
I was somewhat surprised to find that Zed still doesn't have a way to add your own local autocomplete AI using something like Ollama. Something like Qwen 2.5 coder at a tiny 1.5b parameters will work just fine for the stuff that I want. It runs fast and works when I'm between internet connections too.
I'd also like to see a company like Zed allow me to buy a license of their autocomplete AI model to run locally rather than renting and running it on their servers.
I'd also pay for something in the 10-15b parameter range that used more limited training data focused almost entirely on programming documentation and books along with professional business writing. Something with the coding knowledge of Qwen Coder combined with the professionalism and predictability of IBM Granite 3. I'd pay quite a lot for such an agent (especially if it got updates every couple of months that worked in new documentation, bugfixes, github threads, etc to keep the answers up-to-date).
cnqso · 1h ago
What Zed lacks in code generation quality it makes up for in not-being-an-Electron-app
TiredOfLife · 13m ago
Zed includes node.js runtime and 100s of megabytes of javascript. It is essentially Electron.
shreddit · 1h ago
Does it really? At the end of the day i need it to do my job. Ideal values don’t help me doing my job. So i choose the editor best suited and the features i need. And that’s not zed at the moment.
mikepurvis · 54m ago
There's an analogue here with programming language iteration— Python, Ruby and friends showed what the semantics were that were needed, and then a decade or two later, Go and Rust took those semantics and put them in compiled, performance-oriented languages.
Electron has been a powerful tool for quickly iterating UIs and plugin architectures in VSCode, Brackets, Atom, etc, now the window is open for a modern editor to deliver that experience without the massive memory footprint and UI stalls.
No comments yet
ics · 8m ago
I agree with the main point but I am on battery often and the difference between native vs. one or multiple Electron apps in "doing my job" is easily several hours lost to battery life or interruptions for charging. Not a huge deal, but it's not my ideals that make me frown at charge cycles occurring twice as often.
scottcorgan · 47m ago
I'll third this. AI autocomplete is THE most efficient and helpful feature of Cursor, not the agents.
metadaemon · 1h ago
I'd also like to second this and probably will in every Zed post. This is the primary reason I'm not ready to switch to Zed just yet.
unshavedyak · 2h ago
I want to try Zed but the Helix mode seems quite young. Vim mode sounds good, but i just can't move away from Helix mode. (oh and of course, my own modifications to Helix's input config)
My difficulty in finding editors that fit my desired input scheme kinda reminds me of the old pre-LSP days. Where you'd chose an editor based on it's language features. I wonder if we need some sort of common editor interface to allow these sort of text editing primitives to work in new editors, as it seems to be considerable friction.
diegs · 35m ago
I agree, I've fantasized about an editor with a truly pluggable editing model which is decoupled from the other parts.
Yi was kind of designed like this, I believe. You could compile in an emacs-like model, a vim-like model, or presumably make your own model.
I've used Helix and Kakoune in addition to Emacs and Vim, but dealing with the limitations/featureset/plugin treadmill gets a little tiring.
I have been following Zed, and it seems that they have rearchitected things to enable adding Helix mode and making the editing model a bit more modular, but it's still fairly new. They are fixing bugs pretty quickly. I will have to try it again.
I prefered Kakoune to Helix (it was more consistent). But to your point, being able to swap these things out more easily would let you choose an editor based on features, and not tradeoff between features and an ergonomic editing model.
Ironically you can use Ki inside of VSCode (and I know you can use Vim that way too), but VSCode is so darn bloated and slow...
Karrot_Kream · 1h ago
Helix seems to have good LSP support from what I can tell? The only language I use at $WORK that doesn't have full support is GraphQL which lacks auto indent.
If you want to try something similar to Helix in emacs, there's meow-mode. While I'm not a helix user myself, it shouldn't be too difficult to get meow to work like helix.
chamomeal · 21m ago
I had the exact same problem. I was so stoked to try helix mode and then realized it obviously doesn’t have any of my backspace shortcuts. Duh, but still… back to helix!
ricardobeat · 14m ago
Helix itself seems quite young - and first time I’m hearing of it.
yes_but_no · 1h ago
If you are already familiar with Vim bindings is Helix's object then action really worth that much?
unshavedyak · 19m ago
For me, definitely. Plus it's quite the muscle memory switch. I switched to Kakoune ages ago, and then eventually Helix because i liked its design a bit more.
srid · 2h ago
Note: if you use SSH-based remote development, this doesn't work.
That's unfortunate. I use Zed and I'm moving towards containerising my dev environment (using SSH remote dev to connect Zed to the container) because all this agentic stuff seems like a security nightmare. At the very least I want to restrict the blast radius to my repos dir.
pimeys · 1h ago
I would give them a week or less to support this. They've been improving the debugger so fast, it will take them no time to support remote claude code connections.
achairapart · 1h ago
Any reason for this? Is it something temporary or it will never be supported?
giancarlostoro · 3h ago
Zed is my favorite editor in a long time, and thats without diving into its AI support.
atonse · 2h ago
My main issue with claude code is running multiple ones in parallel. I don't want to manually do all the git worktree stuff, I just want claude to handle it for me.
So if Zed automatically handles that (where there's a worktree per thread) I can see the appeal. Apart from that, I'm already using Tower to view the changes so I'm not really sure what the value here is.
I tried installing it, and got an error "can't load supported slash commands" – not sure what that means.
nosefurhairdo · 41m ago
I suspect Zed will aim to tackle this issue via DeltaDB:
I like Zed in concept.
I like Zed in the architectural and foundational aspects.
I want more tools like Zed to exist.
But, I find Zed challenging to adopt due to random nuances. First, settings management is a mixed bag and sometimes I just want a quick way to open the "settings.json" from the settings pane without fussing around. Then I'd like the "settings.json" to stay open (reopen) on a restart of Zed. Then I'd like the ability to use an LLM that doesn't have native tool calling support, which Zed seems to be the only app I've used that doesn't have a workaround. Then I'd like the UI to be a little easier to navigate as a new user, it feels a bit scattered and overwhelming at times.
I haven't used Zed much and I may give it another shot (soon), but it very much feels like a tool built by engineers for engineers... Which is great for power users, but seems not so great for new adopters.
I don't think the shortcomings are a blocker, but they are the reason I haven't adopted Zed. The shortcomings are just enough for me to take a step back and say "maybe I'll try again later".
honeycrispy · 56m ago
The nuance situation is rapidly improving. I had several minor issues with Zed ~6 months ago, and most of them have been patched away.
gm678 · 38m ago
For what it's worth, I think Zed now has a default keybind to open settings.json: Ctrl+,
I assume that keybind is also configurable?
skhameneh · 33m ago
Good to know, thanks!
bbor · 55m ago
I spent a while trying to set it up, as I share your general take on their ethos. Personally, I'm okay with a 'power user'-focused text editor, even! But the relative lack of syntax highlighting options got me to give up. Maybe I'm just spoiled from SublimeText's dope, complex, extensible system for specifying "contexts" in themes, but Zed was just nowhere near enough for me.
The keybinding system is also nuts if you turn on Vim mode, but I think I'd eventually get used to that. But functions need to be a different color than arguments, which need to be a different color than local variables... Just non-negotiable.
I look forward to trying it again sometime soon! The AI features seem rad, this included.
btown · 57m ago
As a VS Code + Claude Code user, I'm really excited to see progress here, because the official near-zero-config Claude Code IDE integration is... inflexible, at best.
What if I want to send a subset of my open editor panes to Claude Code? What if I want Claude Code to open diffs for its edited files in a specific area/window, and silently open that file so that I can multitask on other things without it taking focus when it's done thinking? What if I want keyboard shortcuts for specific slash commands, or to trigger a slash command from another task?
Having a robust open-source ecosystem that will let users fork and build customizable UI around coding agent experiences will make them even better, and the space will move even more quickly because the ecosystem won't split between different preferences for agent/model choice. It's an incredible time to be coding.
jryio · 1h ago
What most of these comments are missing is the attempt at standardization and unification.
There are a lot of comments that people need X feature in order to switch to Y editor. While that may be true and your particular workflow requires certain features, what is overlooked is the survival pressure for editors.
It appears that our industry is moving towards adoption, sometimes mandatory, of AI coding agents. Regardless of your feelings on the topic, having good tooling to support this effort comes down to: switching costs, compatibility with existing editors, and a strong ecosystem of third party extensions.
While Cursor/Windsurf jumped the gun on bespoke editor integrations with LLMs - the adoption of MCP and other SDKs for coding agents means it's plug and play. The full feature set will be in every editor connected to every agent.
I think Zed wins on having the lowest switching costs for most developers. Paying down generic solutions like Agent Client Protocol (AC) now is a good strategy. It took multiple parties coming together for us to get TLS, OAuth 2.0, and ECMAScript.
I don't see why most editors should behave like hand crafted musical instruments when in reality they are much more akin to high quality knives in a kitchen (sure you have your favorite knife set and bring it from job to job, but at the end of the day you can be just as productive with a different knife when necessary).
extr · 3h ago
Zed is so great, I do wish they would focus just a little bit more on bringing the UI just a bit more up to parity with VS Code, I would switch full time.
cpuguy83 · 1h ago
Anyone running this on Linux?
I find it works fairly poorly there. To be fair, vscode is also not great for me (especially vim mode) on Linux.
neurostimulant · 52m ago
I don't notice any major issue yet, except for that freezing on wayland which seems to be fixed already.
WD-42 · 1h ago
Running on Linux here. Working great for me. If you are referring to font rendering, unfortunately the Rust ecosystem for it is still young, so there are improvements to be made.
While this is probably annoying, I have to imagine that non-hidpi displays are becoming rarer and rarer. It's probably not a great idea to spend a lot of work on a feature that will only ever see declining use.
EnPissant · 29m ago
It's not rare at all. It's more common than not for people developing on monitors.
freehorse · 1h ago
While I do not doubt that there are people who experience this on some monitor/OS combinations, I have used zed on basic 1080p and 1440p 24" monitors with no issue. Sometimes I have general issues with some monitors in macos, which is usually due to some super-resolution/sharpness setting on the monitor itself that I need to adjust, but nothing specific to zed. All I say is that these issues are far from universal with non-hidpi monitors.
EnPissant · 27m ago
You may not notice because macOS fonts look terrible (blurry) on any monitor that is not hidpi. Zed is just par for the course here.
Meanwhile on Linux and Windows, they still implement subpixel rendering so fonts look great on 1440p.
ricardobeat · 5m ago
This discussion goes back twenty years, with Apple going for preserving the original typeface appearance over crispness. It depends what you value the most and is entirely subjective.
TiredOfLife · 5m ago
At least on Arch it works fine on 13" 1080p, 24" 1440p and 27" 4k displays.
jsheard · 2h ago
That figures, their lead platform was the Mac where HiDPI is totally ubiquitous, so their renderer probably has no provisions for subpixel font rendering.
delta_p_delta_x · 2h ago
My guess: their shaders or text rendering don't account for sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which is critical to getting decent text rendering on low pixel density displays.
If they'd used Skia (which is what Electron and Chromium use), they would've got this for free. Instead they tried to reinvent the world and didn't realise how big the world was.
AlexandrB · 1h ago
I love how we just reinvent the wheel again, and again, and again, and again...
MacOS native apps have had great sub-pixel rendering all along, but I guess since we have to develop everything in Electron now it's time to reimplement all the exiting functionality.
c-hendricks · 14m ago
- As mentioned, macOS removed subpixel anti aliasing a while ago
- Zed is not an electron app
- In the linked issue you can see that this issue does not exist in Electron.
jsheard · 56m ago
> MacOS native apps have had great sub-pixel rendering all along
Apple removed subpixel anti-aliasing in Mojave, seven years ago, because it's not necessary on the HiDPI/Retina displays they ship as standard. They still do greyscale anti-aliasing but that's not the same thing as subpixel.
> because it's not necessary on the HiDPI/Retina displays they ship as standard.
I disagree. Subpixel anti-aliasing triples the available horizontal resolution, and makes text crisper. The algorithms are known and regardless of the density it should always be applied to text and vector graphics elements.
The RGB stripe layout is so useful that OLED manufacturers are moving to it in 2026, away from the long-derided PenTile where magenta/green fringing is seen even on the densest displays.
In fact rendering on macOS is completely broken, and I don't know how people stand by it. At any scaling factor selected that is not a perfect factor of the actual hardware resolution (the 'looks like' value in Settings), the final framebuffer is scaled and interpolated to the display resolution, and everything is noticeably more blurry.
Windows has had some form of hardware-independent rendering since Windows 7, and proper pixel density control arrived in Windows 8.
jsheard · 22m ago
Subpixel rendering is effective but it's also a massive pain in the ass to maintain, especially if you want to take full advantage of the GPU. Microsoft has kept it around for much longer but even they are steadily moving away, bits and pieces of the Win11 UI render with greyscale AA regardless of system settings because their newer GUI toolkits don't even attempt to support subpixel fonts.
EnPissant · 23m ago
While I agree with you that macOS font rendering is broken on standard dpi monitors (ie, 27" 1440p). I don't think I can tell the difference on a 5k monitor (ie, 27" 2800p).
It also drastically simplifies the hardware accelerated rendering pipeline to remove it.
EnPissant · 1h ago
I won't use zed for this very reason.
extr · 2h ago
People are bringing up a lot of sophisticated stuff. Honestly for me it would just be a more flexible panel system that lets me see eg: File Explorer, Git UI, AI mode, etc, all at the same time.
kenhwang · 2h ago
Top of my head switching between IntelliJ and Zed:
- Git UI is extremely barebones with no support for other VCS
- No merge tool or side-by-side diffs
- Configuration is all JSON
- Would be nice having a full file tree for the search editor instead of just the list; having the functionality split between a tab and the outline panel is quite clunky.
- Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows or other configurations (multiple docks per side, multiple copies of the same panel linked to a specific tab).
Zed is basically a slightly more featured text editor, so it does a good job when I just want to open something quickly and do small edits. So it's really replacing Sublime Text.
But I find myself hopping out to other tools when I'm using Zed which wasn't really common with IntelliJ. So I still want to use a proper IDE for proper development work.
seanssel · 2h ago
The IntelliJ 3-way mergetool/diff viewer is best in class. I haven't found anything else that touches it.
koakuma-chan · 1h ago
> I haven't found anything else that touches it.
Have Claude Code resolve merge conflicts, problem solved.
insane_dreamer · 1h ago
One area I would not trust CC
conartist6 · 2h ago
Me either. I thought by now it would be standard UX everywhere, but that is very much not so.
user432678 · 1h ago
Sublime Merge comes to mind, but I used it briefly before switching to JetBrains products.
modernerd · 2h ago
> Configuration is all JSON
Curious as someone dabbling with building an editor: what do you prefer? A different configuration language? A GUI? How do you save and sync settings? Just with JetBrains account sync?
> Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows
Is Zed's "zoom in" feature (shift-escape) that quickly maximises the active pane (excluding the file browser/git pane) enough? Or are you looking for the separate window experience of IntelliJ? (e.g. JetBrains lets you pop-out the commit window, I believe, which can be nice since once you close it you're back in the editor with nothing to switch or rearrange.)
kenhwang · 2h ago
> Curious as someone dabbling with building an editor: what do you prefer? A different configuration language? A GUI? How do you save and sync settings? Just with JetBrains account sync?
Really just a GUI for editing, the storage format can still be JSON and synced/backed up however you handle text files.
It just really nice having settings grouped by categories, with dropdowns for possible values, indicators for changes from default values or values overridden by project settings, search/hide/filters, and tooltips for what it does.
Right now the experience with Zed is: open the settings file, open the default settings file for documentation, and basically use search and copy-paste magic value strings/int/float/nulls into the right nested object/key.
> Is Zed's "zoom in" feature (shift-escape) that quickly maximises the active pane (excluding the file browser/git pane) enough? Or are you looking for the separate window experience of IntelliJ? (e.g. JetBrains lets you pop-out the commit window, I believe, which can be nice since once you close it you're back in the editor with nothing to switch or rearrange.)
Really the separate window experience (including the file browser/git pane). Really nice having the git panel just open on a window so you can quickly glance at changed files and quickly jump back to them for more editing. Or having search results able to spawn tabs in another pane/window so you don't have to keep switching back to search or rearranging the tab after opening the file from it.
Or even just expanding the workspace across monitors. Right now you can't even move tabs into its own window or across windows.
aseipp · 2h ago
Yes, a GUI for settings is nice if only for one thing: so there can be a search box that you can use to search over all the settings to find what you need in a pinch. It's a lot friendlier if I can do something like "Open Settings > Ctrl+F > 'Font'" or whatever than having to go find the manual and look it up.
I don't care about the configuration language so much personally (though JSON is of course pretty lame in a lot of ways for that task.)
ricardobeat · 2m ago
You get almost the same effect by typing “font” as a config key and going over autocomplete suggestions.
WA · 2h ago
No side-by-side diff is a deal-breaker for me unfortunately.
ricardobeat · 1m ago
This is a great divider between people who want an IDE vs a text editor - Zed explicit is the latter.
ronyeh · 2h ago
I use git icdiff (a plugin) in my terminal. I use Zed and VSCode GUI editors, but I don’t care to use their git tools. Command line git is fine.
I can’t really pin down the reason but somehow vscode just feels a bit more „balanced“ to me - the font sizes, little borders, icons and details, it’s more consistent.
I feel like the UI is not as smooth as VSCode. There is a slight lag when scrolling.
rtaylorgarlock · 3h ago
Wow. This might be the 1st time i've seen someone comment negatively regarding UI performance. Zed is one of the fastest programs i use. I used to laugh when seeing them market fps and such, but yeesh it's fast
hu3 · 2h ago
> Wow. This might be the 1st time i've seen someone comment negatively regarding UI performance
> I found Copilot tab completion completion to be VERY slow in Zed, for some reason.
> Zed still takes a relatively long time to start on my old desktop. I thought something was wrong but no, it is just THAT slow
> I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code.
> I mean, good AI tab completion feels like a super power. Zed’s is not that good. It’s slow and normally not at all what I want.
> Zed tab is a lot worse in comparison (partly because it’s slow)
> In my personal experience I couldn't use Zed for editing python. Firstly, when navigating in a large python repository, looking up references was extremely slow (sometimes on the order of minutes).
> All I'm saying is that contrary to what someone else said about the software being "fast" I tried it and at startup, it was unusably slow.
> Tried using zed on Linux (pop os, Nvidia) several months ago, was terribly slow, ~1s to open right click context window.
> Zed is as close as it gets, I also use it, but it is still slow and cumbersome sometimes.
I'll stop here. There are other 4 pages of comments to pick anecdotes from, in this simple search alone.
cyanf · 1h ago
The other examples you listed are valid, but A.I tab auto complete is a model & inference issue unrelated to the editor.
rvnx · 18m ago
It is a feature that they control. Whether it comes from the model, a bad prompt, a bad provider or a bug in their implementation is their responsibility (especially considering you have to pay per-request AI features).
macawfish · 3h ago
This could be an issue with GPU drivers. I experienced some incompatibility with GPU kernel drivers that allowed Zed to crash the whole window manager during text selection.
mlnj · 3h ago
Smoothness and frames per second is the core of why they were building a very optimized editor. Not sure if it is just your machine that it is not leveraging the right bits.
For me the extension ecosystems is something I really like about VSCode, but that is an entirely different matter.
Longhanks · 3h ago
Wait what? Isn't a super fast UI one of their main selling points, what led them to write their own rendering in Rust?
...and now they lose to a web app?
sapiogram · 3h ago
There's a reason everyone writes their GUI apps in Electron nowadays. Browser have spent 30 years figuring out fast rendering, it's hard to beat that, even with native code.
rvnx · 18m ago
If you listen to HN crowd, they will try to make you believe that nobody uses Electron, and that Claude Opus 4.1 is "garbage".
seanssel · 3h ago
I have no idea what they're talking about. Maybe they're used to a smooth scroll animation in VS Code or something? Zed feels snappier/lighter in just about every way to me.
sayrer · 3h ago
No kidding. It is /so/ fast. It has remote development like VS Code, and most of the features I use, so it's my main thing now. Claude Code was the only thing that made me wince, since I wondered if I was living in the dark ages. VS Code of course has many more extensions, but I don't use that many.
insane_dreamer · 1h ago
Git: IntelliJ is miles ahead. And we’re talking about essential features like three-may merge panel, diffing 2 files, diffing same file between branches, diffing folders, etc
Tests:. Zed is bare bones compared to IntelliJ (rerun failed tests, export list of failures, go to failed lines easily etc
The AI stuff is cool but it won’t get me to switch from PyCharm.
pseufaux · 2h ago
Merge tool is the big one for me
TheRoque · 3h ago
What's so great about zed ?
simonw · 3h ago
It uses a fraction of the memory of VS Code and is much faster to launch.
veber-alex · 1h ago
VScode starts very quickly for an electron app. MS did a great job there.
Memory usage of the IDE doesn't matter much when your language servers can eat 10s of gigs of RAM.
rvnx · 17m ago
+ Faster to launch but way less functionalities ?
johnisgood · 3h ago
Zed still takes a relatively long time to start on my old desktop. I thought something was wrong but no, it is just THAT slow. Emacs starts up faster than an empty Zed window, unfortunately. It is still way faster than IntelliJ but comparing it to that is a low bar.
VSCodium starts up faster for me than Zed which I compiled yesterday with release mode. Here I am referring to the time spent just on waiting for the window to start up, not the extensions and all that I am using with VSCodium, that takes time. I wonder why this is, that VSCodium shows the window quicker than Zed.
Regardless, I will give Zed a try with Go development. I assume Zed has extensions, too? Are there any extensions for Go? If so, I might replace VSCodium with Zed but only if it has similar features to VSCodium. If not, I will stick to VSCodium as there is no reason for me to change.
tracker1 · 2h ago
I'm not a Zed developer, but I'm pretty sure LSP interfaces are pretty much standardized now, in large part to VS Code's efforts, so they're pretty consistent across most editors that support them.
That doesn't mean Zed will have all the other extensions that VS Code has... Recently added the new SQL Server extension(s) and it's been at least interesting, in a way slightly better than using SMMS. It's pretty much burrowing the UI from Azure Data Studio (or whatever it was called). Haven't tried similar for PG/SQLite etc yet.
yobert · 2h ago
Zed has easy to use extensions, but also Go support is built in. (syntax highlighting, gofmt on save, and language server support)
johnisgood · 1h ago
It's builtin? Nice. I will give it a try, then!
I wonder why the startup time is slow though, may have to debug that one.
trashface · 2h ago
Do people really need that with modern computers? My computer is 10 years old and I just restarted VS in the last project I was working on. It was about 4-5 seconds before I could edit the text, which doesn't seem long. And I have 17GB available memory. Anyway it doesn't matter because I just don't restart VSCode that much. I do open projects in new windows and those can get slow, but the slow ones are mostly just rust code with rust-analyzer overhead, and when dealing with rust, slow-opening projects are only the beginning.
I don't know, it feels like Zed popularity is just people chasing the latest editor hotness, a time-honored traditional programmer ritual to be sure, but still, just a ritual. And now it seems zed devs have to put AI in front of all other initiatives, probably because of the VC funding they took.
I could see not wanting to use VSCode for other reasons, like MS pivoting back to "be evil", but at least in my little bubble, performance is not one of them.
veber-alex · 1h ago
I agree with you.
I tried Zed several times and I just don't see the point.
The main issues with VScode over something like the Jetbrains IDEs is that language servers are just not as powerful or as integrated to the IDE as the Jetbrains solution can be and Zed does nothing to solve it.
I don't think it being a native app offers much added value.
digitaltrees · 2h ago
It’s built by the team that built atom which was way better than vscode but was mothballed when Microsoft bought GitHub.
They built it from scratch and not on electron bloat so it is a much better foundation. It will take a long time to reach parity with vscode but when it does it will smoke it.
veber-alex · 1h ago
So...nothing.
robinhood · 17m ago
Your comment is as insulting as it is indicative of a complete lack of knowledge about the world of editors and software development in general.
cyanf · 59m ago
Snappiness is the primary reason for using Zed.
neurostimulant · 1h ago
It's great that Zed adding this very useful feature, but isn't this effectively cannibalize their own AI subscription plans? Why pay zed $20 when you already pay for claude code and can use it in the assistant panel? You might still want the edit prediction feature, but then why pay zed $20 when you can pay $10 github copilot and can use it to power zed's edit prediction feature?
ZpJuUuNaQ5 · 2h ago
I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limited understanding, none of the existing alternatives offer anything (and often misses at least something) truly innovative or anything else that VSCode extension wouldn't solve. On VSCode I have about 15 different profiles setup, each with different settings and dozens of extensions based on either a technology stack or a project - it would be really difficult to find a good reason to throw it all away. The idea of switching between IDEs does not appeal to me either. I do use Neovim a little bit too, but most of that usage time was spent on configuration.
pimeys · 2h ago
It's really interesting point of view. I'm one of those people who avoid using VSCode at any cost. It's slow, it's bloated, the UI is not great, and it's slowly being locked down by Microsoft.
If Zed would not exist, I would be using helix, neovim, or emacs as I did before.
IshKebab · 2h ago
VSCode is actually not slow. The problem is to make it useful you need to add quite a few extensions, and those can be slow. That itself wouldn't be too bad but VSCode doesn't expose any information about what is causing the slowness. You end up with "VSCode is slow and it could be due to any one of the dozen extensions I have installed", which effectively means that VSCode is slow.
It remains to be seen if Zed can avoid that though.
WD-42 · 2h ago
VSCode (and all Electron based editors) have undeniable input latency. Zed is built by the same team that developed Atom and Electron and one of their stated goals is to make up for the shortcomings of these technologies.
If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it.
Barrin92 · 1h ago
>If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it.
I don't think this is a fair claim. When you start doing an apples to apples comparison, that is to say make full use of IDE and auto-completion features it's difficult to see a difference given that the latency and speed of the plugins starts to dominate any millisecond difference in input latency or rendering speed.
WD-42 · 1h ago
No. When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately. All other IDE features like auto-completion happen asynchronously.
SAI_Peregrinus · 1h ago
> When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately.
Seems to work the same for me in VSCode, CLion, and nvim. I don't doubt that you have issues with it (I've experienced slow editors & laggy input, it sucks) but I don't think it's inherent to VSCode. Doesn't mean it's not a bug, but if I had that issue I'd try with no extensions to verify, then binary search disabling the extensions I want until I find the one causing the lag.
Barrin92 · 1h ago
>All other IDE features like auto-completion happen asynchronously
in the technical sense, but you as a developer don't use auto-completion asynchronously. It's not like you autocomplete and continue typing and then come back to the completion. When you complete at point you have wait. Whether that keypress takes 2 or 3 milliseconds isn't going to make a difference when the inter-process communication of your editor and its services is magnitudes slower. It's not like programming is like playing an FPS game. You're not in any meaningful sense limited by your mechanical input speed.
manuhabitela · 1h ago
vscode is noticeably slow compared to sublime text or zed, even without any extension. You instantly notice it when switching files or typing things that trigger auto-completions.
In the end the feeling is drastically different. It weirdly makes for a more peaceful experience to have such a snappy editor.
vscode wins thanks to all its extensions, where basically every language is supported and most features you can think of are there. But it's kinda like modern react. You know better alternatives exist, like solid or svelte, but the community is so big, it stays the easier choice in the end.
hu3 · 2h ago
Interestingly I disagree with all your points about VSCode.
It's fast, barebones by default, UI is minimal and it's Open Source enough that competitors forked from it.
I guess YMMV because there is a comment in this post from another user about Zed being sluggish.
pimeys · 2h ago
I tried VSCode many times in my life and just hated the experience so much. It put me away from GUI editors for years, didn't want to try any of them. So ugly and so sluggish.
Zed was the first one that put me to rethink my position. It is so snappy on my Linux workstation and I don't have any issues with it's GUI. I finally switched from vim et.al.
But I know I have "weird" opinions, I also really dislike Apple products and their software.
timeon · 1h ago
Even not counting the LSP, for a text editor, it eats quite large amount of RAM.
kace91 · 2h ago
It’s not at all slow when compared to IntelliJ products or similar. It doesn’t compete with editors, it competes with IDEs.
mikeocool · 2h ago
Zed's main selling point over VSCode for me is the lack of a slight delay between when I press a key and when the character appears.
VSCode has always felt ever so slightly sluggish to me, and I find it maddening as I type.
veber-alex · 59m ago
Strange.
I just opened the same project in Cursor and Zed and started typing around, and I can't tell any difference. I am usually very sensitive to this stuff; for example, I can detect when my Mac drops below 20% battery because ProMotion is disabled and the screen refresh rate drops to 60Hz.
pmg101 · 2h ago
So glad to hear I'm not alone! I continue to use SublimeText for this reason. Yet it doesn't seem to bother others.
WD-42 · 2h ago
I think a lot of people forget how long ago Electron/Atom were released, and the subsequent Cambrian explosion of Electron based apps and editors like VSCode. There's probably a huge amount of developers that haven't used anything else.
pkorzeniewski · 1h ago
Same here, still using Sublime Text due to its general snappiness, but can't wait for Zed to be released on Windows, it feels like a modern successor to ST that just keeps getting better.
jkkola · 2h ago
This is why I cannot switch to neovim despite my attempts. I love the workflow, but the delay is too noticeable for me, and nothing helps. It's not a long delay, but long enough for me to feel like I have to wait for hours compared to Zed.
diabllicseagull · 2h ago
vscode started to intermittently freeze my whole desktop on arch linux recently. I rage deleted it. imho, it’s a valid compromise to choose a snappy lightweight editor over vscode with all available extensions.
sadly it reminds me of how visual studio used to be and and how much of a sluggish mess it is today. I don’t think the community can fix it either. it’s an uphill battle when MS is known to lose care as soon as they reach a critical mass of users.
zorked · 2h ago
VS Code is sluggish for me as well and crashes. I have minimal expansions, this is just a poor excuse for a lousy editor. Zed is much better, neovim is much better. My only real concern with Zed is what bait-and-switch is awaiting for us when they decide to make money. But it's a fantastic editor, no question about that.
IshKebab · 2h ago
Weird, I tried it recently and found it actually a bit laggier than VSCode. The rendering is much worse quality too.
Are you using Vim mode or something like that?
mikeocool · 1h ago
I begrudgingly gave up vim mode in vscode a few years ago, because that seemed to make it so much more sluggish.
the__alchemist · 7m ago
It sounds like you haven't tried Jetbrains IDEs. I understand still preferring VsCode in that case, but I think you would be saying "I prefer VsCode" vs "I don't see a reason". A big con with JB is they are very slow. The upside is that they manage multi-file projects, refactoring, and introspection far better than VsCode.
Karrot_Kream · 1h ago
I wanted to like VSCode but it has enough input latency on my machines that it's not that enjoyable when I'm "locked in". Also if I'm running a bunch of services in Docker on MacOS (which means they're running VMs sigh) the overhead of VSCode is just too much and the system starts swapping constantly grinding the whole thing to a halt. I also find configuring it a pain. Every configuration pane feels ad-hoc and not part of a holistic, configurable system. Emacs has lots of crusty bits and an annoying event loop that you have to really work around but is designed a lot more holistically than VSCode.
Zed to me feels like a great batteries-included editor and I still run it as my non-emacs alternate editor. I wish its configuration was a bit more discoverable (especially with configuring linters/formatters), but it's 95% of what I need 95% of the time.
LocalPCGuy · 2h ago
There is always a "better mousetrap", and there are those that continue to use the old one because they "know how it works and it's set up just the way I like it". And there are others that try every new mousetrap that hits the market. (and that's ok, not slighting either one)
I will say that I personally have never really gelled with VSCode no matter how much I try to customize it, it still is just a bit off. For me, it's like it's too much to be a simple editor like SublimeText or NeoVim, but not quite enough to be an IDE like IntelliJ or Visual Studio (full). It does just enough that I expect a bit more of it and it often fails to deliver. Right now I tend to just use 2 editors - one very simple one for viewing/editing text files and one IDE (currently IntelliJ) for coding in a project.
On topic - Zed is actually a really nice editor. It had some rough edges last time I tried it, but it's probably about time to give it another go.
jryio · 1h ago
Zed succeeds at reducing the switching cost. I used NeoVim for ten years daily and configured it way back in college days.
I thought I would be unable to move to a GUI editor and it turns out that the speed and efficiency of Zed plus the almost one-to-one mapping of Vim features means that I am extremely productive in Zed.
kiney · 2h ago
I had to use VSCode for some projects in the past because it was what was available on the clients workstations...
I can't imagine having to use that laggy electron abomination all the time. For me Zed is sent from heaven, because my previously preferred editor (geany) hast basically zero developtment nowadays.
meowface · 2h ago
I normally care a ton about latency and in the main project I work on I put extreme focus on reducing input latency in text input fields, but...
I've used VS Code for ages. I tried Zed. I don't really feel a difference. It's smoother but VS Code is more than smooth enough for me and has tons of features I rely on that don't exist in dev.
Meanwhile, when I tried Ghostty I noticed a significant improvement in "typefeel" compared to iTerm. So I'm not immune to detecting such a difference.
I will try Zed again though.
42lux · 2h ago
>>I don't really feel a difference.
>>It's smoother but...
monstrado · 2h ago
I think the point of ACP being an open protocol is so that other editors (e.g. VSCode, Neovim) can implement it as a receiver and integration with ClaudeCode/GeminiCLI/... would just work.
kombine · 2h ago
I switched to Neovim a year ago, and while I did spend a significant amount of time on configuring it, I haven't touched my config for months now - and I'm perfectly happy with it. There's things I can improve, but it does what I want.
californical · 2h ago
I’m in the same boat. I spent a lot of nights for a couple weeks getting everything tuned just right, in the beginning. But now, several years later, it really doesn’t take much. I spend maybe 2-3 hours once every few months, and that’s usually just adding a bunch of features that sound nice to make my life better. I’ve easily gone 6+ months without touching neovim config, if not longer, because it’s unnecessary. It only matters if you want to further improve your editor
stuaxo · 2h ago
I use zed when I need to quickly edit something, it pops up so fast- everything else feels sluggish.
SubiculumCode · 2h ago
I am sure some would have said the same about why would anyone switch to using Linux when there was Microsoft Windows.
charcircuit · 2h ago
Especially now that Windows has WSL. You can even open GUI Linux apps just as if they were regular apps.
SubiculumCode · 2h ago
Yeah, but you still have to deal with all the other Windows shit.
koakuma-chan · 3h ago
I just installed it and it seems changing mode is unsupported? I can't figure out how to switch to plan mode.
Aeolun · 3h ago
I think the article mentions this not yet being supported by the SDK, and therefore by the editor.
adastra22 · 3h ago
Ah, if it is using the SDK, that is a big limitation. The SDK is nice, but it is meant to provide support for backend use of Claude Code, not integrating an interactive session.
It's interesting that VSCode has its own Claude code extension which works well and does most of this.
Zed has a lot of these micro-battles ahead where it has to spend money building solutions that VSCode's community shipped without their core team putting in any effort at all.
josefrichter · 57m ago
Does it? Or do you mean the integration when you run Claude Code from the terminal opened in VSCode? (which is already pretty good)
skeptrune · 19m ago
It does, there's an extension you can install which is even a bit better.
csar · 2h ago
Really excited for this. I'm not sure if it supports ESC-ESC (and whether the SDK supports it) but I'm excited to try. If not, I hope Anthropic will add it soon since that's a key feature for fixing mistakes.
Yhippa · 2h ago
Naive question: is using Claude Code from the command line or in these tools like VSC or Zed different from using it in the native app on a desktop? Is that because it has access to your codebase?
josefrichter · 52m ago
In Elixir/Rails (and newly React) world you can connect Clade Desktop to Tidewave, which gives you pretty close integration with codebase and CLI tools. That makes the experience somewhat similar to running Claude Code in editor's terminal, or now directly connected in Zed.
I think basically all these tools are trying to integrate all the stuff together and find the best way to do that, so that you don't need to be copy-pasting stuff around, jumping between tools, etc.
dostick · 2h ago
After having troubles with Claude desktop not properly updating canvas document, I found that apparently Claude Code is same as desktop one plus you can use it not just for code but documents in VS Code.
ascorbic · 2h ago
Not tried with Zed yet, but in VS Code it's mostly the same except you can view the diffs in the editor, and can give context from the open file. I think it can also see errors from the editor.
james_marks · 2h ago
Not just your codebase, but also a wide range of *nix tooling. Night and day to working on the CLI vs an IDE.
bicijay · 2h ago
The only reason i didnt move to zed from jetbrains yet is the lack of a more mature Git UI. Other than that, great editor, very fast.
pzmarzly · 1h ago
After moving to Zed I also missed good Git integration that I had in VSCode with GitLens.
That pushed me to finally try Jujutsu instead of Git, since it has a CLI (and TUI and GUI, if that's your thing) that are perfectly usable by mere mortals. Now I feel as fast as when I had the Git integration, despite using the terminal.
But if I had stuck to Git, trying GitButler or Sublime Merge was the next option on my TODO list.
brabel · 2h ago
Is it really comparable?? I use JB IDEs heavily and when I tried Zed a few months ago it felt more like Notepad than IntelliJ. Maybe that’s what you’re looking for and I am sure that’s fast, but they seem to have quite different use cases.
jm4 · 2h ago
Not sure if anyone from Zed is here. I tried this out and got the following error:
- Start a new Claude Code Thread, which will kick off the background download of the new Claude Code ACP adapter.
- Wait a few seconds, then start another Claude Code Thread. The new thread will use the updated one.
We're working on a nicer UX for getting updated versions, which we'll definitely ship before Claude Code support leaves beta!
jm4 · 14m ago
Thanks! It successfully installed this time, but now I have a new error:
Internal error: {
"details": "Failed to intialize Claude Code.\n\nThis may be caused by incorrect MCP server configuration, try disabling them."
}
I logged in via Claude CLI using my subscription.
cmclaughlin · 1h ago
I got this error too.
Tried restarting zed and restarting my computer, but neither resolved it.
kreutz · 2h ago
I got this same error. I restarted Zed, and it fixed itself.
jm4 · 2h ago
Thanks. I tried that. Didn't work.
pram · 2h ago
Same!
FabHK · 2h ago
Funny, when I read
> Escape the Terminal
it does not sound like a good thing to me: a) the terminal is fine; b) AI should not escape anything.
faangguyindia · 3h ago
Does anyone have python library for ACP? Looking to integrate my agent with this.
peterson_lock · 3h ago
> Credit balance is too low
I have a subscription to Claude. What gives?
dcre · 2h ago
When you run Claude Code it lets you pick between API key and Claude subscription login. It sounds like it found an API key in your env and is trying to use that. You may have to find a way to trigger a login to get you into your subscription account.
peterson_lock · 50m ago
Yep, that was it. I had an Anthropic API Key set in Zed. Resetting that (after typing /login in the agent window) did the trick!
unshavedyak · 2h ago
In the terminal based Claude Code, use /logout and /login to switch billing iirc.
ncdlek · 3h ago
I wish someone integrate qwen-coder as well
shallow-mind · 2h ago
I actually works already, just add new agent definition:
Zed "just works" with ollama, so if you install a qwen modal locally you're set.
eli · 3h ago
Is that much different from just using the Zed agent with Qwen via API?
vitorgrs · 2h ago
Qwen-Coder is free.
jimmydoe · 3h ago
qwen keep rebase gemeni so I guess just wait?
pbd · 3h ago
agreed. waiting for qwen here as well.
benbristow · 2h ago
Still no Windows support for Zed, meh.
yobert · 2h ago
It will come! Linux support is only recently getting good. They'll get there.
apwell23 · 3h ago
what i am missing by using claude cli with nvim. i don't understand why editor integration needed.
nertzy · 3h ago
The editor treats edits from Claude Code as a first class citizen. You can easily review, approve, rollback, etc. Claude's changes in a curated experience that is much faster than digging around in diffs or needing to approve each edit as it is proposed.
Yea, having tried claude code a lot over the last couple months reviewing code is the #1 job in my view. Any tool that helps you do that more quickly and easily is essential to guarding from slop slip through. What a world heh.
apwell23 · 2h ago
i open my nvim on a socket and tell calude code cli about it.
my claude.md has a line "look for lsp errors when you are done editing" so it communicates with neovim on the socket and gets whatever it needs from editor.
manojlds · 3h ago
It's just about polish and tightness of integration or may even be lack of it. Claude Code for VSCode is basically Claude Code running in VSCode terminal with some integrations for open file, selections and diffs.
EXHades · 2h ago
zed extension is too bad to be used as a full-fledged extensible editor, as many features and interfaces are missing.
not_your_vase · 2h ago
I just installed it on my EndeavourOS box. I opened it, it asked my which theme I want. I couldn't click, and suddenly it went into unresponsive mode. A minute later I killed it and uninstalled it.
I keep trying this editor every few months ever since it was announced, but I always have similar experiences. I remember once I managed to start actually editing something before the GUI started to disappear.
But hey, it has AI.
jitl · 2h ago
This is why I try to avoid building/supporting desktop Linux gui apps
throwawa14223 · 3h ago
Zed used to be a good editor but it is increasingly LLM infested.
simonw · 3h ago
I know what you mean. I used to like Emacs but then they added syntax highlighting for Rust and I don't use Rust so I'll never touch that editor ever again.
ar_lan · 3h ago
The deal breaker for me was when they introduced support for the "delete" key. A real developer should get it right the first time.
pjerem · 2h ago
IMHO, the delete key can still be useful for other developers "contributions".
ilc · 2h ago
git revert works better ;)
Karrot_Kream · 2h ago
Can you believe they had the gall to even run code that allowed those vim heathens to feel comfortable in emacs? The horror /s
Sparkle-san · 3h ago
Just disable it. It seems like they've made is as simple as possible to do so while also being realistic about what it takes to make a successful (read: profitable) IDE the year 2025.
stavros · 2h ago
I've found that the sort of people who complain about AI or cryptocurrency don't care if it can be disabled. The mere fact that such functionality exists taints the product for them. I can't say I understand the reasons (I like AI functionality), but that's what I've noticed.
microflash · 45m ago
I do care that it can be disabled. My problem with such functionality is that it becomes the sole focus of the development team, drifting their attention away from improving core experiences, such as language and plugin support, polishing ergonomics, and pruning papercuts.
stavros · 44m ago
The focus of the team is gone. Their target now is not to make a great product, but to make an engaging product that makes money however they can.
The AI is a symptom of the problem. If it weren't AI, it would be something else.
runarberg · 3h ago
Given the state of information technology in 2025 I think your parent has a good reason to believe AI features ruins everything. It is common in well funded (read VC funded) technology to start with an easy toggle to disable, and then slowly make opt-out ever harder to completely accomplish. Disable 3rd party tracking ads on google platforms used to be a simple toggle as well.
stavros · 2h ago
You can think that AI ruins everything, or that tracking ads ruin everything, but the reality is that VC investment ruins everything, because it turns you from the customer to the product.
I guess the eventual culprit is capitalism, where profit is the ultimate goal for everything, so there will never be a single product that is not enshittified in this way.
The best part? If you don't like it, there's nothing you can do! It's the whole culture.
jsheard · 3h ago
It was always going to be infested with something or other, you don't raise $42M for just a text editor. Could be worse, a few years earlier it probably would have incorporated blockchains somehow.
cameroncooper · 2h ago
Seems like a reasonable trade-off to me. I'm happy for them to have a sustainable business model and people seem quite willing to pay monthly for AI. As long as they keep the free version and the ability to disable AI features then I think everyone wins.
jmull · 2h ago
> As long as they keep...
The thing is, they will have to switch to maximizing monetization (or die trying). Those investors are ultimately in control, and while they are happy to gain market share for now, that's what they will demand in the future.
They will keep a free version for as long as it's working for them, but you will be monetized, one way or another, sooner or later, and you might not enjoy it.
cameroncooper · 1h ago
Agreed, but Zed is open source so I think that does offer some long term protection to users who like the editor and don't want AI.
maleldil · 3h ago
How does the existence of LLM features impact the quality of the rest of the editor? It's a single toggle to disable everything [1].
VSCode has 60k+ extensions vs Zed's 744. I'm pretty sure there's a clear winner here.
tylergetsay · 2h ago
VSCode has ~60k extensions last I checked
lvl155 · 2h ago
I tried so many times to switch but I’ve reached a conclusion that Zed sucks. It doesn’t even properly support Python out of the box. UI is crap.
zelphirkalt · 3h ago
Recently I set up a virtual machine running GNU/Linux on Windows, so that I can continue to use Emacs and all my usual tools for developing software, while I am waiting for a friend to make a move in a turn based game. I decided to give Doom Emacs a try. Well, I like the keybindings so far. However, it got issues. When I use neotree, it gets confused with windows (the Emacs term "window", not desktop windows, or the OS). Also it has already crashed twice. Once I even lost some code, which I had to write again. Unacceptable. Why was there not even an Emacs backup file for the file I was editing? Anyway, today I thought: "Why not try one of these other editors in that VM and see, if I like any?"
Yesterday I looked again at LunarVim's website. While LunarVim seems to look pretty, it has a lot of dependencies, including pip, npm, and more. Seems like it is installing stuff from everywhere. Not so confidence inspiring, especially pip and npm installs.
And just now I see this Zed blog post linked on HN! But, unfortunately the website is not inspiring much confidence either. Can anyone explain to me, why I cannot see any _text_ on all of zed.dev, without running JS? I mean, I probably know the answer, or some possible answers, but man, that's already such a turnoff, I already doubt the editor is any good now. Would be good, if they could fix their website, and make simple text, simple text again, accessible and all that. Please get some craftsmanship into this website.
EDIT: 'pparently I said something some people don't want to hear, lol.
Karrot_Kream · 2h ago
I recently un-borked my emacs config and re-downloaded elisp into my brain so I'd be happy to help walking you through the emacs stuff. I haven't used emacs on Windows natively in a long time but I did it for years and found it worked quite well so you may want to try that again.
FWIW emacs these days has native LSP support (eglot) and native tree-sitter supported, but you'll need to grab tree-sitter libraries and LSP servers. For MacOS I found just using brew to install most of these works great, and I wonder if Windows can't work the same way. If you're in a VM you should just be able to have your package manager do the work.
LLM support in emacs is still a bit primitive but there are packages like emacs claude-code that are changing things. Personally I wrote an elisp function which grabs the filename of the emacs window relative to the project root and copies it so that I can just paste it into claude code and have it ask questions or do things.
```
(defun copy-buffer-file-name-from-project-root ()
"Copy the relative path of the buffer in this project to the kill ring"
(interactive)
(kill-new (file-relative-name (buffer-file-name (current-buffer)) (project-root (project-current)))))
```
if you're curious but depending on how you have your clipboards setup with the kill ring, you may need to modify this.
---
As far as fighting the JS fight on the Zed website, well, I think this thread isn't one of those upvote-anti-JS-rant threads that spring up on this site all the time so shrug.
partdavid · 2h ago
I'm extremely interested in pushing along these fronts even in a performative way, because I don't want to get bogged down in "switch away from Emacs" conversations with coworkers. I've done a lot of modernizing on my Emacs setup this year but I would love a current take on "getting close to cursor" that gets me beyond what I'd had set up with copilot and lsp.
Karrot_Kream · 1h ago
Having tried a bit of Cursor and some Zed I still find Claude Code a lot better than the rest (though maybe now the Claude Code Zed Beta will change things.) That means what I'm mostly doing is keeping Claude Code up in the terminal and having it do things. Claude Code has an option to view diffs in your editor which you can configure and works fine with emacs and its various diff modes (and looks great too.)
I usually always make sure everything in my branch is committed before letting Claude Code loose on my code so I can view the changes normally as a magit diff and then choose whether I want to edit any of its changes (90% of the time) or commit as is (10% of the time.) I can also restore files selectively this way and have all of my git tools available if needed.
If you want deep Claude Code integration Cursor style, then check out https://github.com/manzaltu/claude-code-ide.el . The latest releases of emacs support using `vc` blocks to specify packages so you can grab the elisp package straight from the repo and get it working within your emacs.
If you want a chat style interface, GPTel exists but requires some config (not much but not zero either) before it becomes usable as a general chat tool like Claude Desktop or ChatGPT. I'm working on an elisp package to recreate a chat interface atop GPTel and decrease the config burden.
zelphirkalt · 2h ago
I mean, I am using standard Emacs daily for some 8y or so. It is just in that VM, that tried Doom Emacs, which crashed twice. Normal Emacs doesn't do that to me. And since I have the VM, I also don't need Emacs on Windows. The VM runs just fine.
That VM runs a Fedora OS and has vanilla Doom Emacs installed, with a few packages activated in the doom config. So it is about as vanilla doom Emacs as it gets.
Karrot_Kream · 1h ago
The main reason I suggest running it natively is the big speed boost. Elisp supports native compilation now and native compiled elisp running natively on your platform is quite fast.
rvnx · 2h ago
Lucky you because for me, for some reason, their website is randomly down when I click to change page: Web server (host) is returning an unknown error Error code 520.
One thing that still suffers is AI autocomplete. While I tried Zed's own solution and supermaven (now part of Cursor), I still find Cursor's AI autocomplete and predictions much more accurate (even pulling up a file via search is more accurate in Cursor).
I am glad to hear that Zed got a round of funding. https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed This will go a long way to creating real competition to Cursor in the form of a quality IDE not built on VSCode
I'd also like to see a company like Zed allow me to buy a license of their autocomplete AI model to run locally rather than renting and running it on their servers.
I'd also pay for something in the 10-15b parameter range that used more limited training data focused almost entirely on programming documentation and books along with professional business writing. Something with the coding knowledge of Qwen Coder combined with the professionalism and predictability of IBM Granite 3. I'd pay quite a lot for such an agent (especially if it got updates every couple of months that worked in new documentation, bugfixes, github threads, etc to keep the answers up-to-date).
Electron has been a powerful tool for quickly iterating UIs and plugin architectures in VSCode, Brackets, Atom, etc, now the window is open for a modern editor to deliver that experience without the massive memory footprint and UI stalls.
No comments yet
My difficulty in finding editors that fit my desired input scheme kinda reminds me of the old pre-LSP days. Where you'd chose an editor based on it's language features. I wonder if we need some sort of common editor interface to allow these sort of text editing primitives to work in new editors, as it seems to be considerable friction.
Yi was kind of designed like this, I believe. You could compile in an emacs-like model, a vim-like model, or presumably make your own model.
I've used Helix and Kakoune in addition to Emacs and Vim, but dealing with the limitations/featureset/plugin treadmill gets a little tiring.
I have been following Zed, and it seems that they have rearchitected things to enable adding Helix mode and making the editing model a bit more modular, but it's still fairly new. They are fixing bugs pretty quickly. I will have to try it again.
They have a nice discussion here:
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/6447
They reference Ki, which also looks cool, and they out some of Helix's inconsistencies in their comparison: https://ki-editor.github.io/ki-editor/docs/comparisons/
I prefered Kakoune to Helix (it was more consistent). But to your point, being able to swap these things out more easily would let you choose an editor based on features, and not tradeoff between features and an ergonomic editing model.
Ironically you can use Ki inside of VSCode (and I know you can use Vim that way too), but VSCode is so darn bloated and slow...
If you want to try something similar to Helix in emacs, there's meow-mode. While I'm not a helix user myself, it shouldn't be too difficult to get meow to work like helix.
https://x.com/sridca/status/1963271904384401886
So if Zed automatically handles that (where there's a worktree per thread) I can see the appeal. Apart from that, I'm already using Tower to view the changes so I'm not really sure what the value here is.
I tried installing it, and got an error "can't load supported slash commands" – not sure what that means.
https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed#introducing-deltadb-o...
But, I find Zed challenging to adopt due to random nuances. First, settings management is a mixed bag and sometimes I just want a quick way to open the "settings.json" from the settings pane without fussing around. Then I'd like the "settings.json" to stay open (reopen) on a restart of Zed. Then I'd like the ability to use an LLM that doesn't have native tool calling support, which Zed seems to be the only app I've used that doesn't have a workaround. Then I'd like the UI to be a little easier to navigate as a new user, it feels a bit scattered and overwhelming at times.
I haven't used Zed much and I may give it another shot (soon), but it very much feels like a tool built by engineers for engineers... Which is great for power users, but seems not so great for new adopters.
I don't think the shortcomings are a blocker, but they are the reason I haven't adopted Zed. The shortcomings are just enough for me to take a step back and say "maybe I'll try again later".
I assume that keybind is also configurable?
The keybinding system is also nuts if you turn on Vim mode, but I think I'd eventually get used to that. But functions need to be a different color than arguments, which need to be a different color than local variables... Just non-negotiable.
I look forward to trying it again sometime soon! The AI features seem rad, this included.
What if I want to send a subset of my open editor panes to Claude Code? What if I want Claude Code to open diffs for its edited files in a specific area/window, and silently open that file so that I can multitask on other things without it taking focus when it's done thinking? What if I want keyboard shortcuts for specific slash commands, or to trigger a slash command from another task?
Having a robust open-source ecosystem that will let users fork and build customizable UI around coding agent experiences will make them even better, and the space will move even more quickly because the ecosystem won't split between different preferences for agent/model choice. It's an incredible time to be coding.
There are a lot of comments that people need X feature in order to switch to Y editor. While that may be true and your particular workflow requires certain features, what is overlooked is the survival pressure for editors.
It appears that our industry is moving towards adoption, sometimes mandatory, of AI coding agents. Regardless of your feelings on the topic, having good tooling to support this effort comes down to: switching costs, compatibility with existing editors, and a strong ecosystem of third party extensions.
While Cursor/Windsurf jumped the gun on bespoke editor integrations with LLMs - the adoption of MCP and other SDKs for coding agents means it's plug and play. The full feature set will be in every editor connected to every agent.
I think Zed wins on having the lowest switching costs for most developers. Paying down generic solutions like Agent Client Protocol (AC) now is a good strategy. It took multiple parties coming together for us to get TLS, OAuth 2.0, and ECMAScript.
I don't see why most editors should behave like hand crafted musical instruments when in reality they are much more akin to high quality knives in a kitchen (sure you have your favorite knife set and bring it from job to job, but at the end of the day you can be just as productive with a different knife when necessary).
Meanwhile on Linux and Windows, they still implement subpixel rendering so fonts look great on 1440p.
If they'd used Skia (which is what Electron and Chromium use), they would've got this for free. Instead they tried to reinvent the world and didn't realise how big the world was.
MacOS native apps have had great sub-pixel rendering all along, but I guess since we have to develop everything in Electron now it's time to reimplement all the exiting functionality.
- Zed is not an electron app
- In the linked issue you can see that this issue does not exist in Electron.
Apple removed subpixel anti-aliasing in Mojave, seven years ago, because it's not necessary on the HiDPI/Retina displays they ship as standard. They still do greyscale anti-aliasing but that's not the same thing as subpixel.
Discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476873
I disagree. Subpixel anti-aliasing triples the available horizontal resolution, and makes text crisper. The algorithms are known and regardless of the density it should always be applied to text and vector graphics elements.
The RGB stripe layout is so useful that OLED manufacturers are moving to it in 2026, away from the long-derided PenTile where magenta/green fringing is seen even on the densest displays.
In fact rendering on macOS is completely broken, and I don't know how people stand by it. At any scaling factor selected that is not a perfect factor of the actual hardware resolution (the 'looks like' value in Settings), the final framebuffer is scaled and interpolated to the display resolution, and everything is noticeably more blurry.
Windows has had some form of hardware-independent rendering since Windows 7, and proper pixel density control arrived in Windows 8.
It also drastically simplifies the hardware accelerated rendering pipeline to remove it.
- Git UI is extremely barebones with no support for other VCS
- No merge tool or side-by-side diffs
- Configuration is all JSON
- Would be nice having a full file tree for the search editor instead of just the list; having the functionality split between a tab and the outline panel is quite clunky.
- Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows or other configurations (multiple docks per side, multiple copies of the same panel linked to a specific tab).
Zed is basically a slightly more featured text editor, so it does a good job when I just want to open something quickly and do small edits. So it's really replacing Sublime Text.
But I find myself hopping out to other tools when I'm using Zed which wasn't really common with IntelliJ. So I still want to use a proper IDE for proper development work.
Have Claude Code resolve merge conflicts, problem solved.
Curious as someone dabbling with building an editor: what do you prefer? A different configuration language? A GUI? How do you save and sync settings? Just with JetBrains account sync?
> Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows
Is Zed's "zoom in" feature (shift-escape) that quickly maximises the active pane (excluding the file browser/git pane) enough? Or are you looking for the separate window experience of IntelliJ? (e.g. JetBrains lets you pop-out the commit window, I believe, which can be nice since once you close it you're back in the editor with nothing to switch or rearrange.)
Really just a GUI for editing, the storage format can still be JSON and synced/backed up however you handle text files.
It just really nice having settings grouped by categories, with dropdowns for possible values, indicators for changes from default values or values overridden by project settings, search/hide/filters, and tooltips for what it does.
Right now the experience with Zed is: open the settings file, open the default settings file for documentation, and basically use search and copy-paste magic value strings/int/float/nulls into the right nested object/key.
> Is Zed's "zoom in" feature (shift-escape) that quickly maximises the active pane (excluding the file browser/git pane) enough? Or are you looking for the separate window experience of IntelliJ? (e.g. JetBrains lets you pop-out the commit window, I believe, which can be nice since once you close it you're back in the editor with nothing to switch or rearrange.)
Really the separate window experience (including the file browser/git pane). Really nice having the git panel just open on a window so you can quickly glance at changed files and quickly jump back to them for more editing. Or having search results able to spawn tabs in another pane/window so you don't have to keep switching back to search or rearranging the tab after opening the file from it.
Or even just expanding the workspace across monitors. Right now you can't even move tabs into its own window or across windows.
I don't care about the configuration language so much personally (though JSON is of course pretty lame in a lot of ways for that task.)
https://www.jefftk.com/icdiff
Here you go: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> I found Copilot tab completion completion to be VERY slow in Zed, for some reason.
> Zed still takes a relatively long time to start on my old desktop. I thought something was wrong but no, it is just THAT slow
> I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code.
> I mean, good AI tab completion feels like a super power. Zed’s is not that good. It’s slow and normally not at all what I want.
> Zed tab is a lot worse in comparison (partly because it’s slow)
> In my personal experience I couldn't use Zed for editing python. Firstly, when navigating in a large python repository, looking up references was extremely slow (sometimes on the order of minutes).
> All I'm saying is that contrary to what someone else said about the software being "fast" I tried it and at startup, it was unusably slow.
> Tried using zed on Linux (pop os, Nvidia) several months ago, was terribly slow, ~1s to open right click context window.
> Zed is as close as it gets, I also use it, but it is still slow and cumbersome sometimes.
I'll stop here. There are other 4 pages of comments to pick anecdotes from, in this simple search alone.
For me the extension ecosystems is something I really like about VSCode, but that is an entirely different matter.
...and now they lose to a web app?
Tests:. Zed is bare bones compared to IntelliJ (rerun failed tests, export list of failures, go to failed lines easily etc
The AI stuff is cool but it won’t get me to switch from PyCharm.
Memory usage of the IDE doesn't matter much when your language servers can eat 10s of gigs of RAM.
VSCodium starts up faster for me than Zed which I compiled yesterday with release mode. Here I am referring to the time spent just on waiting for the window to start up, not the extensions and all that I am using with VSCodium, that takes time. I wonder why this is, that VSCodium shows the window quicker than Zed.
Regardless, I will give Zed a try with Go development. I assume Zed has extensions, too? Are there any extensions for Go? If so, I might replace VSCodium with Zed but only if it has similar features to VSCodium. If not, I will stick to VSCodium as there is no reason for me to change.
That doesn't mean Zed will have all the other extensions that VS Code has... Recently added the new SQL Server extension(s) and it's been at least interesting, in a way slightly better than using SMMS. It's pretty much burrowing the UI from Azure Data Studio (or whatever it was called). Haven't tried similar for PG/SQLite etc yet.
I wonder why the startup time is slow though, may have to debug that one.
I don't know, it feels like Zed popularity is just people chasing the latest editor hotness, a time-honored traditional programmer ritual to be sure, but still, just a ritual. And now it seems zed devs have to put AI in front of all other initiatives, probably because of the VC funding they took.
I could see not wanting to use VSCode for other reasons, like MS pivoting back to "be evil", but at least in my little bubble, performance is not one of them.
I tried Zed several times and I just don't see the point.
The main issues with VScode over something like the Jetbrains IDEs is that language servers are just not as powerful or as integrated to the IDE as the Jetbrains solution can be and Zed does nothing to solve it.
I don't think it being a native app offers much added value.
They built it from scratch and not on electron bloat so it is a much better foundation. It will take a long time to reach parity with vscode but when it does it will smoke it.
If Zed would not exist, I would be using helix, neovim, or emacs as I did before.
It remains to be seen if Zed can avoid that though.
If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it.
I don't think this is a fair claim. When you start doing an apples to apples comparison, that is to say make full use of IDE and auto-completion features it's difficult to see a difference given that the latency and speed of the plugins starts to dominate any millisecond difference in input latency or rendering speed.
Seems to work the same for me in VSCode, CLion, and nvim. I don't doubt that you have issues with it (I've experienced slow editors & laggy input, it sucks) but I don't think it's inherent to VSCode. Doesn't mean it's not a bug, but if I had that issue I'd try with no extensions to verify, then binary search disabling the extensions I want until I find the one causing the lag.
in the technical sense, but you as a developer don't use auto-completion asynchronously. It's not like you autocomplete and continue typing and then come back to the completion. When you complete at point you have wait. Whether that keypress takes 2 or 3 milliseconds isn't going to make a difference when the inter-process communication of your editor and its services is magnitudes slower. It's not like programming is like playing an FPS game. You're not in any meaningful sense limited by your mechanical input speed.
In the end the feeling is drastically different. It weirdly makes for a more peaceful experience to have such a snappy editor.
vscode wins thanks to all its extensions, where basically every language is supported and most features you can think of are there. But it's kinda like modern react. You know better alternatives exist, like solid or svelte, but the community is so big, it stays the easier choice in the end.
It's fast, barebones by default, UI is minimal and it's Open Source enough that competitors forked from it.
I guess YMMV because there is a comment in this post from another user about Zed being sluggish.
Zed was the first one that put me to rethink my position. It is so snappy on my Linux workstation and I don't have any issues with it's GUI. I finally switched from vim et.al.
But I know I have "weird" opinions, I also really dislike Apple products and their software.
VSCode has always felt ever so slightly sluggish to me, and I find it maddening as I type.
I just opened the same project in Cursor and Zed and started typing around, and I can't tell any difference. I am usually very sensitive to this stuff; for example, I can detect when my Mac drops below 20% battery because ProMotion is disabled and the screen refresh rate drops to 60Hz.
sadly it reminds me of how visual studio used to be and and how much of a sluggish mess it is today. I don’t think the community can fix it either. it’s an uphill battle when MS is known to lose care as soon as they reach a critical mass of users.
Are you using Vim mode or something like that?
Zed to me feels like a great batteries-included editor and I still run it as my non-emacs alternate editor. I wish its configuration was a bit more discoverable (especially with configuring linters/formatters), but it's 95% of what I need 95% of the time.
I will say that I personally have never really gelled with VSCode no matter how much I try to customize it, it still is just a bit off. For me, it's like it's too much to be a simple editor like SublimeText or NeoVim, but not quite enough to be an IDE like IntelliJ or Visual Studio (full). It does just enough that I expect a bit more of it and it often fails to deliver. Right now I tend to just use 2 editors - one very simple one for viewing/editing text files and one IDE (currently IntelliJ) for coding in a project.
On topic - Zed is actually a really nice editor. It had some rough edges last time I tried it, but it's probably about time to give it another go.
I thought I would be unable to move to a GUI editor and it turns out that the speed and efficiency of Zed plus the almost one-to-one mapping of Vim features means that I am extremely productive in Zed.
I've used VS Code for ages. I tried Zed. I don't really feel a difference. It's smoother but VS Code is more than smooth enough for me and has tons of features I rely on that don't exist in dev.
Meanwhile, when I tried Ghostty I noticed a significant improvement in "typefeel" compared to iTerm. So I'm not immune to detecting such a difference.
I will try Zed again though.
>>It's smoother but...
Agent Client Protocol (ACP) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45074147 - Aug 2025 (93 comments)
Zed has a lot of these micro-battles ahead where it has to spend money building solutions that VSCode's community shipped without their core team putting in any effort at all.
I think basically all these tools are trying to integrate all the stuff together and find the best way to do that, so that you don't need to be copy-pasting stuff around, jumping between tools, etc.
That pushed me to finally try Jujutsu instead of Git, since it has a CLI (and TUI and GUI, if that's your thing) that are perfectly usable by mere mortals. Now I feel as fast as when I had the Git integration, despite using the terminal.
But if I had stuck to Git, trying GitButler or Sublime Merge was the next option on my TODO list.
Internal error: { "details": "can't load supported slash commands" }
- Start a new Claude Code Thread, which will kick off the background download of the new Claude Code ACP adapter.
- Wait a few seconds, then start another Claude Code Thread. The new thread will use the updated one.
We're working on a nicer UX for getting updated versions, which we'll definitely ship before Claude Code support leaves beta!
Internal error: { "details": "Failed to intialize Claude Code.\n\nThis may be caused by incorrect MCP server configuration, try disabling them." }
I logged in via Claude CLI using my subscription.
Tried restarting zed and restarting my computer, but neither resolved it.
> Escape the Terminal
it does not sound like a good thing to me: a) the terminal is fine; b) AI should not escape anything.
I have a subscription to Claude. What gives?
--- "Local QWEN": { "command": "/usr/local/bin/qwen", "args": [ "--experimental-acp" ], "env": {} }, ---
https://zed.dev/agentic
I keep trying this editor every few months ever since it was announced, but I always have similar experiences. I remember once I managed to start actually editing something before the GUI started to disappear.
But hey, it has AI.
The AI is a symptom of the problem. If it weren't AI, it would be something else.
I guess the eventual culprit is capitalism, where profit is the ultimate goal for everything, so there will never be a single product that is not enshittified in this way.
The best part? If you don't like it, there's nothing you can do! It's the whole culture.
The thing is, they will have to switch to maximizing monetization (or die trying). Those investors are ultimately in control, and while they are happy to gain market share for now, that's what they will demand in the future.
They will keep a free version for as long as it's working for them, but you will be monetized, one way or another, sooner or later, and you might not enjoy it.
[1] https://zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-features
https://zed.dev/blog/disable-ai-features
Yesterday I looked again at LunarVim's website. While LunarVim seems to look pretty, it has a lot of dependencies, including pip, npm, and more. Seems like it is installing stuff from everywhere. Not so confidence inspiring, especially pip and npm installs.
And just now I see this Zed blog post linked on HN! But, unfortunately the website is not inspiring much confidence either. Can anyone explain to me, why I cannot see any _text_ on all of zed.dev, without running JS? I mean, I probably know the answer, or some possible answers, but man, that's already such a turnoff, I already doubt the editor is any good now. Would be good, if they could fix their website, and make simple text, simple text again, accessible and all that. Please get some craftsmanship into this website.
EDIT: 'pparently I said something some people don't want to hear, lol.
FWIW emacs these days has native LSP support (eglot) and native tree-sitter supported, but you'll need to grab tree-sitter libraries and LSP servers. For MacOS I found just using brew to install most of these works great, and I wonder if Windows can't work the same way. If you're in a VM you should just be able to have your package manager do the work.
LLM support in emacs is still a bit primitive but there are packages like emacs claude-code that are changing things. Personally I wrote an elisp function which grabs the filename of the emacs window relative to the project root and copies it so that I can just paste it into claude code and have it ask questions or do things.
```
(defun copy-buffer-file-name-from-project-root () "Copy the relative path of the buffer in this project to the kill ring" (interactive) (kill-new (file-relative-name (buffer-file-name (current-buffer)) (project-root (project-current)))))
```
if you're curious but depending on how you have your clipboards setup with the kill ring, you may need to modify this.
---
As far as fighting the JS fight on the Zed website, well, I think this thread isn't one of those upvote-anti-JS-rant threads that spring up on this site all the time so shrug.
I usually always make sure everything in my branch is committed before letting Claude Code loose on my code so I can view the changes normally as a magit diff and then choose whether I want to edit any of its changes (90% of the time) or commit as is (10% of the time.) I can also restore files selectively this way and have all of my git tools available if needed.
If you want deep Claude Code integration Cursor style, then check out https://github.com/manzaltu/claude-code-ide.el . The latest releases of emacs support using `vc` blocks to specify packages so you can grab the elisp package straight from the repo and get it working within your emacs.
If you want a chat style interface, GPTel exists but requires some config (not much but not zero either) before it becomes usable as a general chat tool like Claude Desktop or ChatGPT. I'm working on an elisp package to recreate a chat interface atop GPTel and decrease the config burden.
That VM runs a Fedora OS and has vanilla Doom Emacs installed, with a few packages activated in the doom config. So it is about as vanilla doom Emacs as it gets.