It is possible that from time to time a new AI related feature slips in that does not respect that setting, but we try our best to push fixes as soon as possible.
Bravo, I respect that VS Code has added a single setting to disable all AI features. It prioritizes user choice and agency. Considering there was a recent rebranding as "the open source AI code editor", it means a lot to new and existing users that there's a choice to not use AI.
For many companies and products it's apparently hard to do these days when LLM integration is the hot new thing pushed by management and investors. Developers, users, and citizens deserve the respect and right to opt-out from AI features as it permeates other areas of work, life, computing, commerce and governance.
I'd like to attach to this comment to say that we should support smaller companies. It doesn't matter how responsive a big company is if it controls too much surface area of the important technological salients.
Large company hegemony of our industry is bad. VSCode, Google Search + Chrome, mobile phone duopoly, Amazon/AWS/MGM/WholeFoods/TeleDoc conglomeration and cross promotion... It doesn't matter. We need more distribution of power.
I do not financially support any restaurant that has a Wall-street ticker. I wish more people would do this. There should be no reason to fund some CEO on Wall-street when we can benefit more by funding local communities.
P.S. You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and to engage with Amazon.
If I understood the history correctly, being a "shareholder" was a path to a fractional business ownership for people who could not afford to outright own a business.
It comes from the same mental position as a co-operative.
In these scenarios, a CEO is really just an employee of sorts for the shareholders.
It's quite funny that we see the CEO of a publicly traded company has worse than a sole-proprietor, when profits will go directly to a sole proprietor- but not to a shareholder CEO.
I understand how it has played out, that the largest companies on earth are publicly traded now, and that CEO compensation in those companies is crazy. But it's quite ironic in my opinion how it played out.
>It's quite funny that we see the CEO of a publicly traded company has worse than a sole-proprietor, when profits will go directly to a sole proprietor- but not to a shareholder CEO.
Speaking in the same mindset as the parent, we're fine with the profits going directly to a sole proprietor.
In fact, what we want is a name attached to the profits, and a not a role.
We're not anti-profits.
We're anti bland corporate leadership, with no reputational risk and no personal ties to the company (and often no financial risks either, see golden parachutes) - one whose only mission is to maximize profits, product and customers and legacy be damned.
As mentioned though, the irony is in that, once upon a time, the lords and landed gentry were the "bland, soulless overlords" and so buying things would improve their profits... and nobody could become them.
Then the idea of fractional ownership came about and the common man could buy in to an enterprise.
Now of course, everyone is correct that this has been weaponised- but it's often interesting to go back to the original intent (or idea) of something to see how warped it has become.
Given the top 10% holds 87% of shares, it seems clear the stock market is primarily a tool to compound wealth. Having a surplus of money is table stakes to play.
Not just that, but if it were "fractional ownership in a business" then every profitable company would pay a dividend. Now it has become normalized to not do such a thing with all sorts of fancy reasoning.
Share repurchases are also a way of returning cash-flow to owners. A stock buyback is equivalent to a dividend, just with automatic reinvestment in the default 'do-nothing' case.
Including buybacks, few large and mature companies fail to return profits to shareholders at all, and we'd ordinarily want growing or startup companies to retain earnings and invest.
You are just reciting the "fancy reasoning" that I already mentioned. All the esoteric stuff is designed to do is concentrate the wealth into the hands of the wealthy. It is a step away from fractional ownership.
There is nothing fancy about it. The reasoning is straight forward and has the exact same impact that paying dividends has, from the perspective of the shareholder. (Well, actually in some ways maybe a better impact, as it makes complying with idiotic tax laws easier)
I recently moved to Wisconsin and decided it was only appropriate to only buy local. Sure, it tastes better but I was surprised to see it was cheaper too. I guess it doesn't matter how much of your food is plastic and sawdust if you have to pay to haul it an extra hundred miles.
I’m quite aware that better options exist. I’ve dined at multiple or different 2 Michelin star restaurants, not to brag or anything.
But sometimes this “corporate bad” mentality is just vapid snobbery. I’m better than you because I don’t support big bad corporate.
Of course, companies aren’t created equal, regardless of size or status of being public or private. Some are run very well and ethically and some are not.
I am sure we can find many mom and pop businesses that do shady things that no public corporation would be caught dead doing.
Did you know, small landlords are exempt from equal housing laws? Mrs. Murphy exemption.
If I go to an Olive Garden I know I’m getting the exact same experience everywhere, I know exactly what amenities and facilities they’ll have, and I know what price I’m going to pay.
Even though Cheesecake Factory is a public company they’re doing more real kitchen prep work and in-restaurant cooking than my local bar and grille that’s reheating premade Sysco food.
Having spent years doing software dev myself and now months with the latest frontier models, I don't see a path forward in any software-development capacity that values productivity where AI is not featured.
So I hope for your sake that you and others like you are pure hobbyists. Because anyone paying you to do this job is going to be firing you pretty soon in favor of those who lean on frontier LLMs, otherwise.
When they brand themselves like that, it’s a clear sign for people who dislike “AI” not to use it. Zed having some opt-out “AI” features now was one of the reasons for me to stop even considering properly trying it again.
I recently (less than 2 months ago) did an in-depth analysis in the area of license compliance that suggests that Microsoft and many other companies that are shipping Electron apps aren't in compliance with the LGPL. (By all signs, it looks like the Electron project might not even be aware that Electron is subject to the LGPL, though they are. Even Slack, which isn't violating the license appears to be in compliance only incidentally—because they're shipping other LGPL components that they know are LGPL.)
I was set to leave the company I was at a couple weeks later (end of November), and I did, so there haven't been any developments with my investigation/findings since I departed. I haven't prepared or published a formal write-up, and I've only brought it up in a semi-public setting once. It's a pretty big deal, though. Could you raise this with Microsoft legal (not Electron/GitHub) and suggest they look into this?
I had a brief look at the docker image, and it's pretty clearly a repackaged version of OpenConnect. Debian's copyright linked to from https://packages.debian.org/sid/openconnect says it's primarily LGPL but with a plethora of other licences like the GPL.
Since there is GPL they are required to make some source available, and if they modified it they are required by the LGPL to make their modifications available. They have extended it by adding Microsoft's authentication mechanisms, but perhaps that is just a DDL mixin, and I could well believe / forgive them not being aware of the other licences.
What is not so easy to forgive is them not acknowledging the open source they used in any way. Instead they slapped as pretty standard Microsoft Licence claiming it's all theipr own work, similar to this one: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-softwar...
Scant on details, sure, but hard to parse, not really.
The problem is folks this thread seemingly taking a interlocutory approach that can be summarized as, "That which is not explicitly denied can be freely assumed to be true."
(Then throw on top of that, "Depending on how committed you are to your grandstanding, that which is explicitly denied can be conveniently ignored.")
I'm not an engineer, and no one should be getting the impression that anyone else is under the impression that HN is the place to seek an authoritative disposition about this. It is, though, an acceptable channel for the sort of collegial and informal heads-up that this is (and which is all that this is).
Correct, that was my intent - Ben isn't the proper channel as he is just an engineer responding to comments here. Stuff like this is serious and so should be escalated.
The guidance you offer here remains as necessary and is as appreciated now as it was the first time. Rest assured that I am capable and well-informed about how to proceed with these sort of things. Warm regards.
I think it would be interesting for people if your comment was a little more specific about what the issue is. Is this about ffmpeg as raised here: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/34236 ?
I'm guessing the user you're replying to is meaning that the vscode default config file is 11k lines and the AI setting just one of many lines in the file.
I don't think they meant that their own settings are that long, just the default in the app and they're commenting that it's ridiculous to expect a person to find it there.
I use emacs, so maybe they're better trained on my editor. But I've had a lot of success resolving little annoyances I have just lived with for years talking to Claude in gptel.
I can't get it to do real work for shit, but it's A+ at helping me waste time with yak-shaving. lol
Alternatively, use the single setting that was literally just given to you above. That is pretty much as easy as it gets without resurrecting Clippy to help you figure it out. It's not reasonable to expect a massive bloated gui if people have 10k+ settings they are using.
The problem is that they keep adding new ai "features" all under different names and different settings, then shuffling the settings around.
Having a "master switch" doesn't matter, since their standard operating procedure is to waffle-stomp more "features" into vscode every month that will fall under a different setting and then they'll continue to shuffle them around.
Their indifference towards their own user-hostility with regards to this is the main problem.
That, in a nutshell, is one of my biggest complaints about VS Code: there are many overlapping settings for various things, and I could never get clarity on what takes priority. Setting up things like formatters (and their settings) for various file types was a nightmare; between VS Code complaining I didn't have one set up (I did), the settings seemingly being ignored, and various other issues, I break into a cold sweat whenever I have to edit my settings file.
But more to the point, I don't understand why one would ever have to edit the file directly when there's already a settings panel that lets you search for a setting using natural language, and get back a list of matching settings. Why doesn't VS Code let you make all the changes from the settings panel, without having to mess with JSON directly?
You should really look in to the difference between opt-in and opt-out. Opt-in respects the user; opt-out is for foisting features that the user might not need or want.
The anti-AI folks should just fork everything at this point, because it's hypocritical as hell to complain about it and use a bunch of stuff built with it. Then you can opt out of society!
I'd say the percentage of stuff developed using AI now is higher than the percentage of pro athletes who use performance enhancing drugs, and there's almost as much incentive to mask it and say "made without AI"
Oh, I use coding assistants every day, just not the one that came with VSCode. Because I want to decide if/which coding assistant I want to use, not whatever VSCode forces upon me. In fact, at many companies, GitHub Copilot is explicitly forbidden.
Not the smartest argument to brand this as anti-AI.
I really like the Copilot autocomplete across multiple symbols in the file (e.g. predictive edits that you can tab through).
For most other stuff I prefer Cline/RooCode/KiloCode, but sadly it doesn’t seem like any of those offer similar autocomplete (Continue.dev did with even Ollama support for local models but the whole plugin was a buggy mess and it didn’t work well). Oh and sometimes Claude Code or Codex is nice in a terminal directly.
Personally, I don’t mind something being there by default (same as how JetBrains has their pre installed plugin and also something like Junie available), as long as it’s easy to turn off or uninstall.
Similar to how I wouldn’t scoff at a Git integration plugin even if I prefer to use Sourcetree or GitKraken.
In my experience it’s people with “agents” mass editing their code, in their 10th attempt to convince their tool to do what they want it do, are people with a disrupted workflow, in a constant struggle with their tools.
I appreciate this intent. I do wonder: do any of your team use this setting? I, too left VS Code after having to disable Copilot for the umpteenth time in a fit of frustration. I was aware of this setting and had it to disable all AI, alas.
The frustration for me is that it turned my editor into a 2000s-era popup extravaganza (not necessarily anti-AI). Every line of my editor was constantly throwing a new popup or text to the side of my cursor. I know that VS Code's design philosophy has moved toward trying to make the editor have as many pop-ups as possible, but there are still a lot of us that don't think that's a good way to focus on the work. It is beyond frustrating when every week or so your editor decides you're wrong about that.
I actually moved to Zed for AI, Claude integration is seamless and the IDE is so fast and crisp. I can use what ever agent I want, when I need them instead of being asked to use Copilot.
Except for few language related extensions, I don't have any other extensions on Zed. Which means I worry less about which of those extensions will be sold off to a malware developer.
I had more issues with official extensions on VSCode (looking at you flutter) than not having any extension on Zed and having to rely on the terminal (which feels much closer to the system than it did on VSCode).
In external agents - I have Calude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI and a custom agent for Qwen Coder via Llama.cpp [1]
In MCP - I have fetch, brave-search, puppeteer
In LLM Providers - I have configured Llama.cpp, LMStudio and OpenAI (Zed Agent can access models from any of these providers).
Workflow -
When I need LLM assist I mostly use just Claude Code for specific tasks, with thorough scaffolding. One major drawback in using external agents on Zed is that they don't support history[2], Which doesn't impact me much as I use Claude just for individual tasks. I'm not really sure on how well Zed works for someone who 'vibecodes' entire project.
VS Code is a flagship product from Microsoft. Relying on “we try our best to push fixes as soon as possible” for a global opt-out setting feels below the engineering standards we’d expect. This should be fail-safe by design, not best-effort.
Everything in the world is best-effort at best. People who tell you otherwise about their pridhct are just lying to you. Do you prefer being lied to? Criticizing people for being honest about it is a good way to be lied to more.
I’d rather someone say “we architected this poorly and are working to fix the design” than “things slip through sometimes, report them when you find them.” The former is honest AND shows they understand the problem. The latter treats a design flaw as an acceptable steady state.
Being honest about shipping bugs is good. Being honest that you’ve designed a system where the same category of bug will keep happening? That deserves criticism, not praise for honesty.
Could you perhaps one day make "chat.disableAIFeaturesMadeForShareholdersOnly"?
So that we can have the actual good stuff (copilot, chat) and leave out the mountain of features that were clearly created to force induced demand for the sake of metrics inflation?
Make it a separate build that doesn't even have any of the AI code in it because a flag can't be trusted. Especially when there's a history of resetting flags after updates.
Thanks for that setting! TBH I'd prefer for vscode not to ship any AI features and let user install them from extensions, but managers probably will not be happy, so at least that setting helps to stay sane.
I see a lot of AI features hate towards VS Code. Want to say that there are other people like me who really love these features, just want to thank you as a Copilot pro user!
Nothing. This isn't something that is even tracked. AI usage is obviously encouraged but HR has far better things to do than go gather this kind of data.
Internally, depending on what product is being worked on teams will have different development flows and different usage points of AI. For things like VSCode, teams have freedom on how they use it completely.
I've been frustrated by the constant nudges to use specific AI tools from within VS Code, but I made a different change. Rather than moving to a different editor altogether, I started using VS Codium. If you're unfamiliar, it's the open core of VS Code, without the Microsoft-branded features that make up VS Code.
I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium, and then adding in their own branded features, including all the AI pushes. If you like VS Code except for the Microsoft bits, consider VS Codium alongside other modern choices.
> I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium
Isnt vscodium a specific product built strictly from open-source VS Code source code? It's not affiliated with Microsoft, they simply build from the same base then tweak it in different ways.
This is somewhat unlike my understanding of Chromium/Chrome which is similar to what you described.
That's a good idea. I considered VSCodium but the issue is that I used VSCode's proprietary extensions such as Pylance. So it would require to switch to OSS replacements at which point I decided why wouldn't give Zed a try – it has a better feeling by not being an Electron app.
I think VSCodium is a good option if you need extensions not available in Zed.
If you are good with a slightly jank option, I have had success with just moving the extension directory from VSCode to the VSCodium directory. Works for the Oracle SQL Developer plugin I use often. It might go against the terms in the extension, but I don’t care about that.
That doesn't help with Pylance and similar extensions. Microsoft implemented checks to verify the extension is running in VS Code, you have to manually patch them out of the bundled extension code (e.g. like this[0], though that probably doesn't work for the current versions anymore).
Basedpyright is really good. I've been using it in neovim for a while. I'm currently evaluating ty. It is definitely not as good, but it is also really new.
I appreciate that we have good alternatives to pylance. While it is good, it being closed source is a travesty.
I've been using vscodium with basedpyright as I've thought it was supposed to be a open source version of pylance. I've got to say it's annoying about type errors and after changing it's setting to be less strict it still annoys me and I've even started littering my code with the their # ignore _____ .
I'm really glad the article mentioned ty as I'm going to try that today.
On zed I tried it but the font rendering hurt my eyes and UI seems to be glitchy and also doesn't support the drag and drop to insert links in markdown feature * I use all the time.
I can't say I've noticed any "nudges" to use AI tools in VS Code. I saw a prompt for Copilot but I closed it, and it hasn't been back.
I'm probably barely scratching the surface of what I can do with it, but as a code editor it works well and it's the first time I've ever actually found code completion that seems to work well with the way I think. There aren't any formatters for a couple of the languages I use on a daily basis but that's a Me Problem - the overlap between IDE users of any sort and assembly programmers is probably quite small.
Are there any MS-branded features I should care about positively or negatively?
I'm a teacher, so I help people get started setting up a programming environment on a regular basis. If you take a new system that hasn't been configured for programming work at all, and install a fresh copy of VS Code, you'll see a number of calls to action regarding AI usage. I don't want to walk people through installing an editor only to then tell them they have to disable a bunch of "features".
This isn't an anti-AI stance; I use AI tools on a daily basis. I put "features" in quotes because some of these aren't really features, they're pushes to pay for subscriptions to specific Microsoft AI services. I want to choose when to incorporate AI tools, which tools to incorporate, and not have them popping up like a mobile news site without an ad blocker.
I have been using vscodium for years, hasn't disappointed until recently (rust analyzer wont pickup changes, not sure if rust or vscode issue). I tried zed once, but just didn't do the basics I needed at the time. I'll have to give it a try again
edit: zed is working much better for me now and does not have the issue vscodioum was having (not recognizing changes/checking some code till I triggered rebuild)
I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code.
The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs. There’s an open discussion about it, though it hasn’t seen much activity recently: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770
Stronger support for GDB/LLDB and broader C/C++ tooling would also be a big win.
It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become. Huge thanks to the people behind Zed and Sublime for actively pushing in the opposite direction!
> The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs.
> It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become.
It's a bit ironic to see those two in the same message but I'd argue that right there is an example of why software becomes bloated. There is always someone who says "but it would be great to have X" that in spirit might be tangentially relevant, but it's a whole ordeal of its own.
Diffing text, for example, requires a very different set of tools and techniques than what just a plain text editor would already have. That's why there are standalone products like Meld and the very good Beyond Compare; and they tend to be much better than a jack of all trades editor (at least I was never able to like more the diff UI in e.g. VSCode than the UI of Meld or the customization features of BC).
Same for other tangential stuff like VCS integration; VSCode has something in there, but any special purpose app is miles ahead in ease of use and features.
In the end, the creators of an editor need to spend so much time adding what amounts to suplemental and peripheral features, instead of focusing on the best possible core product. Expectations are so high that the sky is the limit. Everyone wants their own pet sub-feature ("when will it integrate a Pomodoro timer?").
This is a sharp observation, and it goes even further: BeyondCompare easily allows one to hop into an editor at a specific location, while Total Commander, with its side-by-side view of the world, is n excellent trampoline into BeyondCompare.
In this kind of ecosystem (where visual tools strive to achieve some Unix-like collaboration), the super power of editors (and IDEs) is their scripting language, and in this arena it is still hard to beat Emacs (with capabilities that were present maybe 40 years ago).
I don't even need that to be built into the editor – I would pay for a fast, standalone git UI that is as good as the IntelliJ one. I use Sublime Merge right now and it's kind of ok but definitely not on the same level
I mostly use git from the terminal, but the goodness of the IntelliJ UI for cherry-picking changes is one of the things that has me maintaining my toolbox subscription. Also, IdeaVim is a really solid vim implementation, IMO.
If they factor out the VCS UI into a standalone non-IDE product that starts and runs a little faster than their IDEs and doesn't care about your project setup I'd pay a subscription even
> I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code.
Can you elaborate on when you use which editor?
I'd have imagined that there's value in learning and using one editor in-depth, instead of switching around based on use-case, so I'd love to learn more about your approach.
Different user, but I prefer to use different editors for:
- project work, i.e. GUI, multiple files, with LSP integration (zed)
- one-off/drive-by edits, i.e. terminal, small, fast, don't care much about features (vim)
- non-code writing, i. e. GUI, different theme (light), good markdown support (coteditor)
I don't like big complex software, so I stay away from IDEs; ideally, I'd like to drop zed for something simpler, without AI integration, but I haven't found anything that auto-formats as well.
My workflow isn't very common. I typically have 3-5 projects open on the local machines and 2 cloud instances - x86 and Arm. Each project has files in many programming languages (primarily C/C++/CUDA, Python, and Rust), and the average file is easily over 1'000 LOC, sometimes over 10'000 LOC.
VS Code glitches all the time, even when I keep most extensions disabled. A few times a day, I need to restart the program, as it just starts blinking/flickering. Diff views are also painfully slow. Zed handles my typical source files with ease, but lacks functionality. Sublime comes into play when I open huge codebases and multi-gigabyte dataset files.
in my case, I use zed for almost everything, and vscodium for three things:
search across all files; easier to navigate the results with the list of matching lines in the sidebar, and traversing the results with cursor up/down, giving full context
git; side-by-side diff, better handling of staging, and doesn't automatically word-wrap commit messages (I prefer doing that myself)
editing files which have a different type of indentation than what is configured in zed, since zed does not yet have autodetect
This article struck a personal chord with me: I bought a new MacBook a week ago and installed minimal software on it, specifically I did not install VSCode and I don’t miss it.
I use Emacs exclusively on my new laptop. I have about 40 years experience with Emacs and except for a treemacs automations, I am using my regular setup.
VSCode is a great project but I just didn’t feel “happy” while I was using it. I feel happy using Emacs and I only use very minimal LLM integrations with Emacs, preferring to separately running gemini-cli occasionally, or using a variety of LLMs (especially strong local models) with one-shot prompting.
Likewise, I feel happy when using Emacs in a way that other editors do not. Emacs was made for a different era of development, with different views on what productive programming looked like. Rider, VSCode, and etc are all post-NetBeans editors and it shows. Editing text buffers isn't the focus so much as refactoring projects is; and agentic AI development slots easily into that refactoring process. With Emacs, it _feels_ purposeful, manual, and dare I say it, artisanal.
Also started using emacs (doom) a couple of months ago, after realizing that jetbrains and vscode are going to be AI-shittified, and there is no turning back.
At this point, I would recommend to every coder worth his salt to just jump to vim/neovim or emacs, these editors will be around for the next 1000 years and you wont need to fight against some BS features and you wont need to switch ever egain.
The 1-2 month learning curve is worth it!
I was a long time Emacs user, spent way too much of my life in ~/.emacs.d/init.el. I don't use it for anything other than magit any more. I just tried it again, first by upgrading my packages in package.el. Of course, everything is still locked up when I `package-menu-execute` to upgrade packages. I guess in a thousand years it will still be mostly single-threaded, with almost every action locking up the UI thread.
Believe me I have tried. And already have made my config. Took me weeks, and is still no closer to getting to be up to par with what I get with helix out of the box.
It also is just super slow on windows unfortunately.
I’ve fallen in love with emacs again now that I can have an LLM tune up my config. I love emacs, I don’t love lisp. Maybe LLMs are helping me with that, too.
But I so happy with my config now. Simplified and modern.
I‘ve been happily using Doom Emacs on Linux as VSCode replacement. When I switched to macOS, I found the experience to be rather slow with significant input lag, though. (And yes, I did use native compilation.) Has something changed in that regard, or did you just accept it?
Many Emacs functions are sluggish on my work Mac, but I found out that this is because the Cisco endpoint security software stops and checks every binary that runs, every single Goddamn time, which means that things which shell out, like M-x compile and anything in magit, are noticeably slower.
I had the same issues. I mainly use Doom on my linux machine, but on mac it is distractingly slow. d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus seemed to reduce the lag, but I've had other issues with it, so have gone back to vim.
I'm also a long time emacs user (>15 years) but got tired of the endless config fiddling, with some packages breaking over emacs versions, other packages which were cool at the time slowly getting stale and need to switch to yet another similar incarnation of the same idea.
And most of all having to recover the config every time I use a new computer or just connect to a new VM.
I'm building an alternative, and I haven't opened emacs for a month now
I've been Emacsing for 30+ years at this point, but I'm frustrated at its performance in the 21st century.
By which I mean both startup time (yes, I know real Emacs people never leave the editor. I'm Not That Guy) but its single-threadedness leading to painful blocking pauses when using eglot + rust-analyzer, etc.
I bought a new basic laptop last year, with enough RAM, and little do you know, the VS Code did not feel faster on the new device. So last week, when I noticed that Zed for Windows is "stable" now, I've uninstalled VSC.
VS Code is still the better tool (imho) but I can't stand it.
Sublime is quite good. I have always been using sublime for quick edits, dumping notes etc. But lately I came to appreciate it more as a lightweight IDE. I use go (lsp and some plugins) and ST (sqltools) in addition to package manager and project manager. I like how fast it is, how well polished the editor is. And generally all plug-ins i use work nicely. Also claude helped a lot (eg writing some shortcuts for specific scenarios that I tend to use a lot).
Not to say anything against Zed though. But sublime with one session of claude can help you build your very own customized ide.
I love(d) Sublime and it's still getting updates from time to time, but unfortunately its ecosystem died five ish years ago, its package repository is a lot of "last updated 10 years ago". It's still a viable editor, but without community support it's not going to be good enough long term.
That said, ST (and its predecessor, forgot the name) set the standard for "lightweight" (lighter than IDEs) editors - Atom, VS Code, now Zed, can all trace their common patterns back to ST.
> Atom, VS Code, now Zed, can all trace their common patterns back to ST.
True, but Zed is the only spiritual successor IMO, Atom and VSCode do not care about speed or snappiness, which is the nicest thing about Sublime Text (for me.)
TextMate? It's been surprisingly influential for an editor I've never seen anyone use; maybe in the US, where people actually buy Mac, it was different.
I didn’t notice that it hasn’t been updated since ‘21 (TM2), but I still use it every day. Just a reliable, minimal, fully native (no electron, etc) editor that is flexible enough to keep adding new bundles to. I’m sad it’s not in development, but happy it’s an oasis from AI coding.
I was a big TM user who ended up on ST because I needed more of the community integrations and so on... which are now turning into a weakness of ST.
I'm still on SublimeText because I can't deal with the sluggishness of VS Code, and I'll pay for the latest version, but I am starting to worry about the future of what is still a great editor. Rust coding in particular is a bit of a nightmare.
The sad thing is that both of these were the products of business models I enthusiastically support and want to see more of: the solo dev (TM) and the small business (ST), or maybe it's solo dev pretending to be small business, I can't really tell.
I still love notepad++. Basically one of only a handful of apps I miss from when I used Windows. First release about a year before textmate, so for me it's the real og.
Eh, I don't think it's really a problem. The much-vaunted VSCode ecosystem isn't actually all that useful imo, so it doesn't bother me that people aren't making lots of Sublime plugins. There's an LSP plugin which is basically all one needs.
I don’t think people realize how easy it is to make Sublime plugins. They can be as simple as a single .py file. No dependencies install step, no meta files, no rituals to go through. Just drop the .py file in the right directory. I’ve used Gemini to build about 3-4 plugins of various complexity and they all work great
Can I drop it in the 'wrong' directory and have ST pick it up from there? I like apps that are as flexible as possible when it comes to file organization.
I believe if you are using a project workspace (working in a directory with a .sublime-project file) then you can also write plugins right there in the project. But, if you wanted, you can use symlinks. Sublime will follow symlinks. I use this to sync my settings to Dropbox so I can have the same setup on any computer
Same, I'm still using Sublime with SublimeLSP, and it works for 95% of my use cases because I tend to rely on the terminal for everything else. Although I do hope to switch to Zed eventually because of it's built-in debugger and ability to select-copy text in popups (I can't believe Sublime still doesn't allow this in 2026) -- Zed still had some rough edges last time I tried it, and Sublime still seemed to perform better.
I do love how Sublime Text doesn't even blink after getting huge file, where most other editors struggle. And overall speed and responsiveness is unbelievable. I would really like to see any other editor trying to overtake Sublime Text on those metrics.
VSCode is actually one of the best for large files. Not as good as Sublime Text, but it can happily edit million line files, and you'd be surprised how many other editors can't do that. Zed couldn't until recently (not sure if it can now; I haven't checked recently).
Once you get into the GB range there are very very few editors that can edit those files unfortunately.
I have to turn off my config (-u NONE) for large files (e.g., multi-GB JSON files), or everything slows to a crawl. I never profiled it to know what's causing the slowdown. It might be treesitter.
Can you share the plugins name/configuration for Go in Sublime. There are so many options and configurations published so its hard to find a configuration that works as good as Vscode.
I use emacs as my "lightweight" IDE in the terminal and it's not light at all. Always a big install on a new server and takes ages to start up. I wish I had learned vim instead.
This article (and holiday spare time) made me update and check zed again. I really liked it when I tried it a few months ago, but it failed miserably when doing work on remote code. It would hang, and I couldn't find any diagnostics to debug it's fairly complex remote agent to find out what went wrong.
But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote git seems to work nicely. A very nice Christmas present - thanks, Zed!
Woah, slow down there. One of your requirements to a code editor is video preview?
I didnt even know this existed.
Gonna spin up VSCode at home and find out.
I had a miserable experience with it. It could not do as simple task as discovering my python interpreter! IDEs are a dime a dozen these days — most are fast enough. But common workflows need to be air tight.
The issue there is what you expect; when Sublime Text came out and later VS Code, they intentionally didn't have the same features as IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA had. The ecosystem of those is very impressive and feature rich, but for a lot of tasks that was overkill and the performance cost was too big.
X years later and VS Code is the one with the biggest ecosystem and therefore also has the largest and most complex addons.
Zed is starting from scratch again, relying on developers to create extensions. However, I'll argue that because Zed is Rust based instead of web tech based like Code, it'll be harder to get as big an ecosystem as Code has. Same with IDEs, some of the biggest plugins have corporate backers who pay people to develop and maintain them.
Yes! I also got bitten by format_on_save when working with legacy projects with inconsistent formatting. Given another discussion I saw, the maintainers didn't think about this use case much, i.e. "why don't you want to have a proper formatting?". It can be turned off now, so not sure if they'll change the default.
It's like Excel changing .csv files after opening them so a simple load/save cycle can corrupt the file and your original copy is nowhere to be found.
I imagine the damage is smaller in case of auto-formatter but still - not something I would expect a program to do to my file in a simple "open file - close the program" cycle.
The VSCode Debugger is the only thing that keeps it installed on my work machine.
Lately I've been doing all my editing in Helix and switching over to Xcode for debugging though. It's even more consistent than VSCode, which occasionally leaks memory and blows itself up. I haven't had time to really learn lldb at the command line but it may have to be the next step.
The only other thing I miss is VSCode's Find-All/Replace-All because it maintains the include/exclude paths and Helix doesn't (that I know of)
I find myself using VS Code for "things like this" (its visual extension ecosystem).
I've grown attached to the git diff view, so I use it for reviewing PRs mostly (especially larger ones as github UI has been struggling with them as of late).
The rest of my code is written in Vim or by Claude.
I was also disappointed by the lack of Jupyter notebooks support: I ended up not using Jupyter notebooks that much anymore, and when I do, well, I run them in Jupyter
Hi, I'm the author of the post. I hope it resonates with many who got tired of VSCode and found Zed.
I'd also like to add there are many small features I miss in Zed that I don't go over in the post, e.g. autodetect and respect file's indentation (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4681). But I see Zed is actively shipping the missing features, so I believe they'll improve significantly over the next year.
Have you tried using vim? Or rather nvim? If tinkering is your thing, feel free to completely do your own setup but out of the box lazyvim is pretty sane and you may not need much to get it to your liking.
But it’s very nice to easily able to extend or modify to fit your workflow. I’m just curious what people are getting out of zed that seems like vim has available.
I use both zed and vim, but the former for 'big' work because of:
a) file tree - I really like being able to 'root' the view at a directory, explore the hierarchy, and easily open any file within it
b) LSP - Zed's auto-formatting is it's best feature, for me
I generally like a whole bunch of things the gui gives me, but I would probably drop zed if I could get these two features working as well (or, at least, almost as well) in vi.
+1 for lazyvim. I tried multiple times to switch to nvim from vscode, but lazyvim finally made it painless. love lazygit too. debugging in nvim also works like a charm.
Zed has been one of the most consequential changes to my dev tools in years. It's noticeably faster in day-to-day use than VS Code (launch time, input latency, etc.), is way less of a resource hog, and has the best Vim mode of any GUI editor I've ever used.
not sure, they do something with the GPU for sure, and because how are you going to draw anything on a monitor or screen without a rendering engine? Surely in their code base they have multiple levels of abstraction for rendering, drawing, and layout in their code base. You can see these kinds of things in other comments here and on their github without reading code.
The browser engine is itself an abstraction point that many people find agreeable on both sides, for those of us that don't have a problem with chromium/codium/electron as a technology, seeing it more so as useful and enabling
In my mind, sharing a common engine across chromium/codium/electron is like how so many things use the linux kernel. To me, the more eyes, devs, and consumers of the code makes it better in the long run
Yes, the thing is, the browser is an extremely expensive abstraction layer. It's like having a car factory where everything is built by general purpose robots - it's very versatile, but obviously if you build an assembly line using dedicated machinery, it's going to run much faster.
But you also have to build your own factory and assembly line, which isn't faster to begin with and takes a lot of effort to get their. Zed still has issues with basics like font rendering and GPU usage from excessive redraws / repaints
Meanwhile, chromium works reasonable well on billions of devices of all shapes and kinds
I've been using vim for 20 years. It's gotten me through all the evolutions of programming, from ctags, to language servers, to AI with copilot.
There's something extremely satisfying about having a dependable free software editor, available on all systems, and not having to change every time a new fad comes in, or a VC decides it's time to make money.
I went from intellij to emacs, to zed / vscode to vim... Even neovim was getting on my nerves.
For some reason I'm happy in vim. I feel I understand most of what's happening. Not sure what It is.
I still use vscode for debugging (breakpoints etc.) as it's just the easiest. Maybe there is a workflow with lldb that I could use to debug within vim...
This is interesting to me, because I see this kind of comment on almost every Zed post.
I haven't used a low-DPI monitor for like... not sure, but more than a decade, I'm pretty sure, so for me the weird blocker I have with Zed is the "OMG YOU HAVE NO GPU!!!! THIS WILL NOT END WELL!" warning (I run a lot of Incus containers via RDP, and they mostly have no GPU available).
But what kind of monitors are you low-DPI people using? Some kind of classic Sony Trinitron CRTs, or what? I'm actually curious. Or is it not the display itself, but some kind of OS thing?
Depending on the definition I'm not a low DPI user myself, but in my friend group, I seem to be the only person who cares about >160 dpi, lots of people are using 1440p displays, or >34" 4k displays. In Apple's mind, high dpi (eg retina) is > 218 dpi, so my lowly 34" 5120x2160 doesn't count for them. But it is > 160 which is my personal threshold for hi dpi.
There aren't all that many >20" displays on the market that meet Apple's definition of high dpi, and not a ton more that meet my much looser definition.
I have a 4-5 year old ultra wide monitor which is a lot of pixels but low dpi. I really like the single monitor containing two screens worth of pixels, but I wish it was high dpi. At the time there weren’t really high dpi ultra wides available, and they’re still expensive enough that upgrading isn’t a high priority for me… but I’m sure I will at some point.
Mine is 2560x1440 which is a pretty nice "sweet spot" size. A comparable 5k to 6k display still commands a substantial price, and - given that I work at two locations - would need me to have two of them. The screen I use as my current (a 3x2 BenQ) also has some amount of subsampling going on, because running it at 2x ("Retina native HiDPI") all the UI controls are too damn big, and space is not enough. Running it at 1x (everything teeeny-tiny) is just not very good for my eyesight and not very workable - and, again, with Zed bumps into the same broken antialiasing rasterizer they have.
And it is not an OS thing. The OS renders subpixel antialiased fonts just fine. But Zed uses its own font rasterizer, and it completely falters when faced with a "standard passable resolution" screen - the letters become mushy, as if they have been blurred - and rather sloppily at that.
Linux and Windows are significantly better for both 1440p and 4k monitors. Both Linux and Windows have subpixel rendering and configurable font hinting for 1440p. And they both have fractional scaling UIs for 4k. macOS on the other hand only really looks acceptable on a 5k monitor.
When people says things like "mine is 2560x1440" on HN, are they talking about the mac scaled resolution? I feel like some context is always missing from resolution discussions, and it's a topic non-technical people can weigh in on as well.
The 2560x1440 is QHD which is kind of a happy medium: high resolution enough to look really sharp, but not so high resolution that you have to scale it up like Macs do on retina displays. Having had retina Macs (and been very happy with them) since they came out, I've been using 16" and 17" QHD panels on my linux laptops for about five years... and they are actually just fine.
I actually don't understand what I'm missing. I'm using two old monitors, a 27" at 2560x1440 and a 23.5" at 1920x1080 (in addition to my high DPI Framework 13 screen). How else can I get at least 4480 across (after scaling to a font size I can read - I'm 49) and still cover that many inches? My DPI right now is about 100, so to double that, wouldn't I need 8960 across 44 inches? I don't really want to pay $1500 for resolution my eyes are probably too old to notice.
It’s okay eyes are just different. I personally enjoy 220DPI, but 60Hz looks absolutely fine. However at the workplace enough people complain about 60Hz that all the monitors at work are 120Hz. I don’t notice any additional smoothness at all so it’s all wasted on me.
Typical DPIs are still all over the place depending on the demographic. Macs have been ~200dpi forever, while cheap PCs are still mostly ~100dpi, and decent PC setups tend to land somewhere in the middle with ~150dpi displays which are pretty dense but not up to Mac Retina standards. Gamers also strongly favor that middle-ground because the ultra-dense Mac-style panels tend to be limited to 60hz.
Zed started out as a Mac-only app, and that's reflected in the way their font rendering works.
I guess that makes sense. I'm a 280ppi convert, so I judge Mac users with pity — Linux and Windows work perfectly with my 31.5" 8K display (from fuckin' 2017 btw...) but Macs can only drive it at 6K, which adds a fuzz factor.
Unless you use it at 4K, but macOS isn't really usable that way (everything way too small).
But yeah, it's 60Hz. Which has sucked ever since I accidentally got a 120Hz display, so now 60 Hz looks like 30Hz used to...
I had a chance to try that LG 45GX950A-B at Yodobashi Camera in Akihbara the other day, and... that measly 125ppi might overperform at the distance you have to put it at. But then again my 50-year-old eyeballs are starting to be like "anyway you need your glasses bro" so... YMMV
What does that mean? If the monitor only requires 15W to operate, that's a good thing, right? Unless monitors are expected to use less than that? I'm not familiar with reading monitor spec sheets.
to add on to what jsheard said, for this feature to be usable (ie, charge your laptop just by plugging in the monitor), you need this number to be about what your laptop's charger is. At 15W, even a macbook air would run out of power slowly while plugged into this monitor, assuming you don't plug a second cable into your laptop. 65W or 90W is a much more normal value for a feature like this.
That all makes sense. The only thing I was missing was that this refers to power output. It seems like kind of a niche and tenuous value-add for a monitor. Why would I want to get power from my monitor?
Both at work and at home, I can plug in my monitor to my laptop with a single cable to my monitor. That single cable charges my laptop, connects the display, and passes through a usb hub that's built into the monitor that connects my keyboard and webcam. It's _incredibly_ convenient. It's also just a lot less cabling. You can think of it like a dock, built into the monitor for free.
> It seems like kind of a niche
Different workflows/circles. It's not something you're likely to use with a desktop, mainly with a laptop. It also really only works well if you use thunderbolt. It's reasonably common but probably not a majority where I work, where 90% of dev machines are macs.
I used to have the same complaint, and recently swapped to 4k monitors. I thought that would solve my zed font problems, but text presentation is still bad. In zed, it feels like there is significantly more spacing between each line compared to vscode (or any other text editor).
It blows my mind that the most ubiquitous computer screen resolution worldwide is considered too niche for decent support by the Zed project. Hopefully that will change in 2026?
The gamer market while overlapping with the developer market, is not a perfect circle. And where the circle does overlap, devs often work on a different display than they game on.
I do not doubt some people experience some issues, but I have regularly used zed with 1080p and 1440p 24" monitors (on macos) and I never experienced any font rendering problem. Saying "zed does not render fonts at low dpi monitors well" is a bit of an exaggeration.
Perhaps reserve your mind being blown for situations where the GP hasn’t confused pixel count and pixel density.
Zed “supports” 1080p monitors just fine. Supports is in quotes because it doesn’t need to do anything nor care at all about the count of pixels on the screen.
If you can call the left image [1] "supporting 1080p" I guess Zed supports it. But it looks like VS Code and other editors somehow support it better without getting blurry.
Keep in mind that Zed developers [2] consider blurry fonts on low DPI displays a Priority 1 issue, and a reproducible bug that is commonly encountered.
I'm sure if there was no blurry font issue with Zed, they would just close this bug report.
Try finding a new 1080p screen small enough to count as high DPI; there aren't many! Using 218ppi from elsewhere in the thread as the threshold, you'd need a 10 inch 1920×1080 screen to achieve it, so a 1080p computer screen is almost certainly low DPI.
"1080p is the most popular screen resolution by far" for people who use Steam and therefore may be optimising for framerate or connecting to a TV, and even that's pretty meaningless without knowing the physical dimensions of the screen. 1080p is a screen resolution, DPI is screen density - 1080p on a phone is pretty high DPI.
Define low dpi. Apple's definition has been >218dpi, which is much higher than 4k@27", which is about the smallest 4k monitor one can buy (exluding 15" portable monitors)
Concur that it's a great VSCode replacement! Also note on the Author's observation of it using similar keybinds: You can, easily, swap the keybinds for other common editors too; this is a big deal for transitions. Also, I love how they're doing things the right way using a fast language... and it shows in the consistently low latency.
It is not, IMO, a replacement for Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm, Rustrover, for example). I do substitute it on my tablet sometimes, where those IDEs can be too sluggish. Unless I'm missing something with plugins I should be installing, it is not on the same level for introspection, refactoring, import adding and moving, real-time error checking, and generally understanding the code base holistically.
So, I've settled into this: Jetbrains if on a sufficiently powerful PC. (It can still bring a 9950x to its knees though...) Zed for lower-power ones.
Sublime for editing one-off files, as both JB and Zed are project-oriented.
To bad I can not change away from vs code. Most chip manufacturers use the vscode + Addons approach today to give you a toolchain to Programm for your microcontroller. They (thank god) abandon there proprietary IDE attempts and concentrate on chips and compilers again. They found VSCode and now you are required to use this. I’m very unhappy with the situation and on the job hunt to get away from embedded to application programming
Which microcontrollers? Of interest, I program STM32, ESP32 (Risc-V) and Nordic chips, and do everything in RustRover. The compiling is decoupled from the editor. (You do cargo run to build and flash with debugging, or click the Run IDE button; works just like any program) The editor is for the code structure, and should reflect that, vs the chip. There is Cube IDE which is useful for configuring clocks, memory layout data, and other periph info as a supplement to the RMs and User Manuals, but it's not required to write code.
Do you do this in a professional setting? I'm curious because I did some embedded/uC work about 10 years ago and considering the state of C/C++ SDKs (and IDE support) at the time, I would have expected it to take decades for Rust to get a foothold.
Yep; do it at work (Security-related sensors for a DoD contractor) as well as my own small business. It doesn't have a foothold, and may not ever; we will see. I think a lot of the embedded rust content you see online is makers who are more interested in doing tricks with the ownership system and Async. So, I am an exception, but... I do recommend this workflow despite its lack of popularity!
I just like rust for the overall language and tooling. (For example, the workflow I described above); don't really care about the memory safety aspect to the degree it's often presented.
The biggest downside is I have to do a lot of leg work which wouldn't be required if done in C or C++. E.g. implementing hardware interfaces from datasheets and RMs. Sometimes there will be a Rust lib available, but in my experience they are rarely in a usable state.
As a hobbyist who's written and is working on a couple of async HALs my take is that Rust is well suited to embedded work but yeah there are hurdles. It's immature so while things like Embassy are a joy to work with, they're missing a lot of (sometimes seemingly basic) features.
So I think you and the person you responded two are talking about two different things: developing software with and without a HAL.
The rise in ARM brought about quite a bit of standardization. You're no longer bound to vendor specific compilers and toolchains. Insofar as you're willing to essentially reimplement large swaths of the HAL you're able to BYO dev environment. Of course all of this is also subject to the quality of the CMSIS packs and documentation put out by vendors.
This is true with Rust as well, and in this capacity Rust is quite mature and well supported for Cortex-M stuff (and to a slightly lesser extent Xtensa and RISC-V). The tools to create thin wrappers around the registers (so called Peripheral Access Crates — PACs) are pretty well fleshed out at this point.
If you're looking for a equivalent to first party HAL to leverage (e.g. CubeMX, Atmel Studio), Rust is significantly less mature here if only because of its age. In Rust land there are multiple different HAL frameworks to work with and it's likely you'd need to use a combination of them. Embassy (a combination of an async framework and HAL components) is pretty slick if it does what you need.
I used to be a daily Emacs user (both at work and for personal projects). Since trying out Zed a little over a year ago, now I only use Emacs for Magit and the occasional IRC message through the built-in ERC client.
For VS Code users, there's actually a special feature where a subset of VS Code settings can be migrated to Zed settings. Cannot vouch for its stability, but the functionality is there.
Sorely missing a REPL for Lisp languages, but for statically-typed languages like Rust and TypeScript, Zed works pretty well. I appreciate that Zed works smoothly with Nix and Direnv, even through remote projects. I do wish the collaboration features would receive a bit more attention, though. It feels like that functionality has slowly been bitrotting, and it's always unfortunate when my friends on Linux cannot share their screen. Then there's other little regressions, like the audio bit depth being incorrect on MacBooks connected to external monitors -- they did fix this with the experimental Rodio backend, but I am not sure if that is stabilized yet.
However, AI-related features are fairly stable and it's amazing how far it has come in less than a year. That and things like the debugger UI.
As much as I love Zed, I am of the belief that VScode (and its derivatives) will remain the dominant build-your-own IDE for a really long time unless something like Zed can support web based extensions. I created a VScode extension for chip designers and I would love to port it to Zed, but I can't because it's a visualization extension with a custom webview.
I realize the irony here that Zed is fast because it's not web based, but I stand by my claim that being able to optionally display web UIs would be a really cool feature to have. It would open the door to a lot of extensions.
I am ahead of this curve, my trajectory was VSCode -> Zed -> Helix. Helix doubles my battery life from 4 to 8 hours compared to Zed. Zed is also on a bad trajectory IMO with the huge amount of updates being pushed constantly.
What is bad exactly about the trajectory? They are constantly adding features and none of feels like bloat, it just happens to be a much younger editor so iteration is rapid. I welcome it compared to the monstrosity that Jetbrains has become.
Yeah, it just reminds me of the early days of VS Code, where features were constantly added and it was fun at first, but they didn't stop and eventually it did feel more sluggish and bloated. Sometimes I'd have to spend time fixing or re-configuring something just because I opened the editor and the daily auto-update did something annoying. It might not happen with Zed, but it seems like a very similar approach to development.
Does Zed have something similar to VSCode Dev Containers ?
That is one of the few things keeping me going on VSCode.
For example, I frequently write Ansible playbooks. And with VSCode you can just fire up the Ansible-provided Dev Container with all the dependencies. Which means you don't have to clutter up your local system with them.
Thanks for the link, looks promising, even if "no separate extensions" under Known Limitations for the initial release is perhaps a little unfortunate.
It isn't 1:1 since there probably won't be ansible provided configs, but I find writing nix devshells per project to be low effort and high reward. It'll only be a couple lines if all you need is a specific version of ansible
Zed is faster and less annoying than VSCode, I hope to switch to it permanently sooner or later.
Annoyingly the only hard blocker I have right now is lack of a call-graph navigation widget. In VSCode you can bring up an expandable tree of callers for a function. Somehow I am completely dependent on this tiny little feature for reading complex code!
The annoying thing is: "can't you just use an extension for this?" No, Zed extensions are much more constrained, Zed is not a web browser. And I like it this way! But... My widget...
I also have some performance issues with searching large remote repos, but I'm pretty confident that will get fixed.
Does "Find All References opt+shift+F12" function help mitigate this for you? It opens a buffer that you can use to navigate, and it's a built-in feature not an extension.
I love Zed. I switched full time from Sublime about 8 months ago, using the preview builds, and every release has been solid. The UI design is perfect and the attention to detail is top notch - it feels comfortable, like a really ergonomic pair of slippers.
I switched to Zed from a tmux/nvim setup. I think Zed is the first editor I've tried that has a good enough Vim mode for me to switch and keep my built-up muscle memory.
I tried switching to Zed from vim / Idea Suite with IdeaVim, and I was disappointed that I could not just use my .vimrc, have they fixed it yet? It's currently the only blocker for me.
Zed is nice. I use neovim as my main code editor, but when I want a private respectful UI code editor for use AI then I go to Zed, also there is a vim mode that is not so bad.
I tried Zed for a few months but just couldn't get the JavaScript/Python syntax checking and Prettier type reformatting to work reliably. I would poke at it for a few hours, get it working and then mysteriously, a few days later, it'd stop working again.
I switched to VSCode now and whilst that piece of it seems to be much more reliable, I think overall I prefer the "feel" of Zed.
I've bookmarked the article to see if that helps me figure out how to make the settings stick.
I had the same issue a few months ago with TSX files and ended up going back to Sublime. I just found out (after reading your comment and doing some searching) that Zed has a setting to force Prettier globally.
It's kind of funny, but I had the exact opposite experience. I couldn't get VSCode to reliably format Typescript/React code across several projects. Some would work and others would not. Sometimes it would format, but with wrong settings.
Frustrated, I switched to Zed and have not had that issue since.
Zed is the only editor I've been using for maybe two months or so. But I find the extensions still sorely lacking and the API not extensive enough yet either. Still, I really love the design as well as how AI was builtin, and some more of the niche differences.
I'm happily using Zed for a few weeks now. What prompted me to evaluate it was it being written (mostly) in rust, so expected better performance and stability and I got that (UI redraws are stupid fast compared to VSCode), but I wanted to migrate my agentic code flow too.
I was pleasantly surprised to basically configure-and-use the AI part: GitHub Copilot login and use, MCP servers, custom MCP servers. VSCode made this part really annoying: Copilot would blow up every now and then, MCP server auto-starting is not there yet and you need an extension (which works for 8 things out of 10), I haven't even tried adding a custom server because I was already annoyed. In Zed I just copy-pasted the suggested custom server start-up command into the small JSON array it presents to add a custom server, and it just started the MCP server in a custom thread, no fuss. Autostart works reliably every time the editor is re-opened.
I also got tired of the bloat and also prefer working from the terminal.
I'm building Fresh [0] [1] as an alternative to VSCode that runs in your terminal, with the main goal being ease-of-use out of the box (not a vi-clone modal editor), for example supports mouse, menu, command palette, etc out of the box. LSP as well. I'm focused on making it easy to use with minimum or zero configuration.
I really love Zed, but my only issue is the Emacs keybindings they ship doesn’t seem to work as well as the VSCode Emacs extensions. Hopefully they can fix this in newer updates.
This is high praise coming from an Emacs user :) I also formerly used Emacs with much joy, but I'm even happier with Zed now.
Zed has a lot of issues in flight; maybe these are useful to you? Here are the issues that have been filed under the label "area:parity/emacs". Some also have the label "state:needs repro" (needs reproduction). I wonder if any of them scratch your itch? Weighing in might help get your pain points resolved a bit faster?
I have a similar issue with vim support, they have built-in support which I really appreciate but don't currently support pointing to my own .vimrc. This is unfortunately a dealbreaker for me.
In the same boat, I try it every few months but give up because the emacs mode still isn't good enough. It's been getting slowly, slowly better though.
I like that this article paints VSCode as bogged down by too much AI tooling and the first thing I see on the Zed website is how create it is with Sonnet 4.5 and there’s a subscription plan for AI features.
I've been running "VSCode" via code-server as a self-hosted solution so I can fire up an IDE on any device including my iPad. I still use code-server, but increasingly when I'm at my Mac/Linux desktops (yes I have both!) I have been using Zed and it's gotten really good. The only major feature I miss is a visual Git Graph, but since I can still load code-server when I need that, no biggie.
I was genuinely surprised that I can use Zed to remote into my server and it works great with Ruby tooling like Solargraph LSP and Rubocop. Everything in the UI is refreshingly minimalist and quite snappy. Good stuff.
This weekend I gave Zed another chance, this time it didn’t make me uninstall it after one hour or so. It’s much more polished, there are a few wrinkles but overall it’s finally pleasant to use. I’m actually surprised how my muscle memory from VSCode is of use, kudos to devs for making the transition easier instead of reinventing the wheel. I hope to eventually get rid of VSCode, this AI everywhere at all costs is turning the editor (that wanted to be an IDE) into something (most?) users don’t want or need.
The only thing keeping me on VSCode these days is the remote SSH development. All of my development takes place on a beefy Linux workstation in my home office. When I am not at my desk (on couch, backyard, coffee shop, traveling) I still remote-in to that box for all of my development using Tailscale + VSCode SSH. Unfortunately the open flavors like vscodium do not support this. It's a "privileged" extension like Copilot.
VSCode has really become such a nightmare to use recently I am strongly looking for a way out. Recently I had some odd corruption take place where I had to blow away essenitally my entire VSCode install on my Mac. Going from zero to hero and bootstrapping back to good state should have been trivial with a single conf file that could be used to rehydrate state (like a lockfile for bundler or node) but - particularly with the remote ssh stuff - it becomes a mess. This extension is installed locally but not remotely, this is remote but not local, ... like dude figure it out and just make it all consistent.
I should expect this from Microsoft, though. I did this to myself.
Revisiting Zed... I am glad to see they have SSH support! Going to give it the old college try today. It's absolutely insane to me that they do not have a first-class Debian/Ubuntu apt repo, though. This has been an issue for quite some time.
My only complaint regarding the Zed editor is the inability to display two panes of the sidebar one below the other. Not only is it impossible to display them together, but switching between them requires clicking a tiny button in the status bar. To make matters worse, performing a search hides the symbols and the tree view.
I'm using vscode for couple of years now. I have disabled all AI related features with "chat.disableAIFeatures" option and it worked really well in my case.
But I was convinced by this article to checkout zed mainly tempted by the promise of much better performance because it is written in native language instead of javascript. So to test it out I've opened https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/src/compil... file and zed after "ctrl + o" command frizzed. Also when scrolling this file in zed there is noticeable drop in FPS, where in vscode scroll with checker.ts file opened is very smooth.
So I guess I'm staying with vscode :)
additionally there is currently ongoing effort to make main editor to be rendered with WebGPU instead of DOM nodes, which I'm really waiting to happen.
Can you expand on how you use Zellij? I tried it and I understand you can use it for splits, and tabs similar to tmux. But I might revisit it if it allows an IDE like workflow with Helix.
Zed, VSCode, Antigravity, Sublime Text... They all have the same workflow.
For writing the code by hand I recommend Helix, batteries included, fast and efficient. For AI-assisted development it doesn't matter and you'd have to switch the app every 4 months if you want to choose the best one.
For terminal text editing I've switched everything over to helix, highly recommended. Basically no config other than I'll change the theme.
Unfortunately I'm still trying to figure out my AI workflow. Right now it's a mix of Cursor, Claude Code, and JetBrains Rider. I mainly use Cursor for the heavy AI lifting and then switch to Rider and Claude Code for tweaking and debugging. If Cursor didn't completely suck at .NET debug, I might just be able to use it alone.
Zed is great and close to being my favorite text editor over Vim but there are constant rough edges.
I spent a fair bit of time this weekend tracking down bugs in a project caused by format on save in Zed occasionally deleting the first line of Python classes.
I turned off format on save and life is good now but data loss bugs like that are pretty annoying in a text editor.
For those looking for a better language server for python, I would recommend ruff. As of v0.4.5 it's completely written in rust, and much faster than pylance.
If you've got the ruff plugin installed it should use it by default. Should be able to use it in zed as well.
I tried switching to Zed, and was even able to get it use identical themes and key mappings as my preferred ones in VSC, but ultimately I switched back due to lack of plugins that I’ve really come to depend on, not to mention some key feature differences. I didn’t notice that much of a performance boost over VSC (given that I was on an M4 with 32GB of memory), so in the end, the switch wasn’t worth it. I really want to like Zed, so I will be sure to occasionally check out any new releases. By the way, I did indeed notice that Zed was a heck of a lot faster than VSC on an old Intel-based MBP!
I would love to switch but the battery draw on my mac is just too much! I like to move around to different places in my home as I work so being able to be on battery for a while is a must for me (not to mention that I do travel occasionally)
Hmm, I found Zed to consume battery less than VScode on my M1 MBP. It's ~100 vs ~200 12h power consumption on average according to Activity Monitor. Do you compare it to VSCode?
I adore Zed, started on the day of the windows release and never looked back. My theme is perfect, the team works super hard, and I get a nice bit of satisfaction installing their frequent updates in barely over a second.
Others have echoed the same, but I also switched from VSCode to Zed, but then put in the effort to learn Neovim (Lazyvim) properly, and I haven't looked back. Writing code feels exciting again.
I recommend something like https://github.com/adomokos/Vim-Katas to accelerate muscle memory.
And also Vimium in the browser is great.
I haven't tried zed and vscode for a while, but I didn't like the amount of distractions from vscode, such as info about methods.
The problem I had with zed when I tried it is that I'm on linux with kde and zed had a hamburger menu on linux, whereas on Mac it has a proper application menu. It also didn't have keyboard shortcuts for menus that I expected, e.g. Alt-f to open file menu. This is a Windows specific convention that many applications bring to linux too. I still prefer Sublime Text for its user interface.
I really love Zed bc it’s fast and doesn’t try to run the code for you. I really dislike the “play” feature of IDEs. I learned Java in eclipse and for the linear time don’t know how to run it from the terminal. It has all the editing and highlighting features of a full ide but makes you run it from the terminal. And if you have Zellij or another muxer set up, it runs it in the Zed terminal automatically.
I'm still waiting to evaluate Zed because I work with/on my programming language which has LSP Semantic Highlighting, but Zed doesn't https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/39539 once it's merged I'll give it a go because it looks like a modern Sublime Text (which I still use). I just wish they would focus on basic editor features instead of adding AI and other non-related features.
I switched from Sublime Text (still keep for navigating huge files).
But I love the thought put into Zed and it looks great (this is important to me).
I don't use their AI features but it does come in handy when I need an quick alternate answer or perspective. I use Claude Code in a separate terminal.
One of my favorite features with zed is the really nice keyboard and window management shortcuts. I can have my terminal just be another tab, easily switch between em and the file explorer
But to the authors note, one might find a single behavior in zed really annoying. Mine is how zed appends a new line at the end of files on save. Used to be able to disable this in settings but an update broke that long ago. Maybe some can tell me its fixed but seems like I’ll need to journey down git hub issue fix but did not find one while back.
Also made the same switch and very happy. Sometimes Zed (I guess due to claude code?) would hog my CPU, but that's fine by me. Works very well. Had one crash so far due to CC.
I am not much of a programmer only fool around a bit for fun and occasional profit. I find Helix to be very good for coding. Compared to Neovim, I could get LSPs going for go, c without any effort. Only thing is I haven't figured out much of debugging which I guess is must have for a serious coder. My favorite is printf and is enough for me across go, awk, c , Excel VBA macros and JS!
Does anyone else have issues wrapping their head around the UI and configuration of VSCode? Or is this a symptom of my losing touch with how IDEs work vs. my old habit of solo coding in Vim and running scripts?
Everything is monocolored, everything feels like it's an add-on, and settings are in weird different places rendered as json or a web page feel.
Last time I used a "real" IDE was 2008, so I may be the problem here.
Zed also pushed their AI features hard though. When it first came out it was like "your editor, but Rust / not Electron based, so fast", but two years or so ago they were pivoting hard to being an AI editor. Nowadays, thankfully, it's there but it's not intrusive.
The author also mentions missing the sidebar with files but it's one of the icons at the bottom left.
I think they added that due to some backlash... or I'm confusing this with Warp, the (also Rust based) superfast terminal application that first required a login, then pushed AI stuff.
I want to switch to Zed from JetBrains but I am too used to [1] and it seems no other editor besides JetBrains IDEs seem too interested in implementing it the way JetBrains does.
JetBrains is well thought out in terms of capabilities.
There are some core features that work so much better out of the box than with the best plugins in others.
Local History (or even for a selection) with search, stacked clipboard, recent locations, how good search is in general (text, symbols, actions etc), how in-modal buffers work, debugging experience, version control merging experience, etc etc
Old now fixed complaints:
- making plugins used to be awful
- used to have no lsp support
(Was pleasantly surprised when I built ron-lsp [1] plugin)
Long standing complaints:
- it's heavy and slow
- has weird failure modes
All that being said, still my main IDE, with neovim (well configured) used frequently.
Yep, when these new editors-wanna-be ide will focus on delivering JetBrains level debugger, global search (really global through files, actions, whatever you can imagine) then maybe I will switch.
It amazes me they all put debugging as a second class citizen. Are these people the ones who debug with printfs?
I have been using Emacs since 1989. I have seen so many editors come and go, and Emacs was never the best, but it was always good. And it has stuck to its (very broad) knitting.
There are AI tools I can incorporate into Emacs, and one day I might. But I have so much choice, it gets distressing
I tried moving from Cursor to Zed but the LLM integration still seems very early. Cursor is very far ahead in terms of DX and the various models/tokens you get is very reasonable price wise. Zed would be a good half-way point for the people using terminal LLM CLIs and prefer the more structured approach rather than a deep IDE integration.
i never understood why people like vscode. visual studio used to be great back in the day because it was really thoughtfully designed and everything was nicely integrated. vscode always felt like a hodgepodge of random features and extensions that don't really fit together all that well at all.
If you're a typescript developer the VS Code experience is great. It also has a lot of useful plugins. For other languages JetBrains products are mostly still better.
Switched to Zed from Webstorm. Only issue is Zed has no vertical tab support. Did create a PR but it got rejected as it does not align with their milestones. Well, using it by monkeypatching the dev build after every upstream sync.
This is the first time I've seen someone talk about vertical tabs in an editor, but I used to make fun of people using vertical tabs in browsers until I tried it and got used to it, so maybe I should try vertical editor tabs...
Zed is great and lightweight, one thing that stops me from it becoming my daily driver is the weak git integration (specifically, the lack of a history tree). From what I understand, eventually those features will get there.
Before getting into Zed, I had fallen in love with Helix. that one doesn't even have plugins xD
Getting used to splitting my Wezterm and launching lazygit on a second pane kind of made me forget about my dependence on JetBrains git integration prior to helix :P
Just tried this out for the first time and found their implementation of the "Outline Panel" (Ctrl+Shift+B) to be very useful, at least for the C++ code base I tried it with.
To do this, I had to switch to Rust first which means I had to change my entire career. I love to switch to linux desktop now but before that I'm gonna need to clear some time. Which probably means I have to retire?
NeoVim, Yazi, and Tmux are my go-to tools. When I need AI and Agents, I create multiple instances of Claude Code or Codex. However, I don’t let them interfere with my workflow if I don’t need them.
I switched from VSCode back to Sublime Text lol. If I want AI involved I use claude-code or other cli in a terminal. Its been nicer and less distracting
Vs code became unusable on a not so big monorepo on a MacBook Pro M4, which is concerning. Zed has been much smoother, even there are a couple of extensions or features that I miss.
I also recently made the jump from VSCode to Zed on my personal laptop. I've never thought VSCode to be slow, but I have appreciated the responsiveness of Zed.
I love the minimalism and speed of Zed.
The Zed Agent is exceptional!
It doesn't easily allow for parallel work like Claude Code in a Terminal but for a single session it is just as good plus it makes it really easy to switch between models. I also find it super useful when I'm working on our large monorepo, the minimal and fast ui makes it super easy to pull in the right context of folders, files, snippets etc to help the Agent.
This yeah I'm switching from JetBrains to Zed after being with them nearly 10 years now. I just can't justify my yearly subscription now that they've bundled AI that I can't justify paying for if I can just use Claude Code directly. At least Zed has richer Claude Code integration than JetBrains. If I even bother to renew it will be only if they announce something worth my while.
I am finding that AI assisted coding is greatly reducing my interest and reliance on "IDE" type features.
A back and forth "conversation" with Gemini with extreme amounts of copying/pasting/executing in Geany (a relatively simple editor) is now faster than whatever I was trying to do before, hopping between emacs and vim and IDES, etc.
I wish AI had more access IDE-type features such as renaming or moving methods to another class. Claude often makes mistakes here because it doesn't have all the fancy tooling and indexing that IntelliJ has.
For such an incomplete product, Zed sure is popular among devs. I guess they love to waste time working with a tool missing key features. I can forgive all that but Zed has one of the worst UIs I’ve experienced in a long time.
Do you mean a terminal-based editor, like emacs, vim, neovim, or helix? (I quite like the latter, after having used all the former to some degree.)
Or do you mean line-editors? They have gotten impressively good. See rustyline (based on linenoise) and reedline (not a typo; developed by the Nushell team) for example. Way better than one might expect!
I love it. I have 40 files open in it right now - most of them .c source files with LSP and Treesitter running and it uses 250MB of RAM. Everything works instantly, Telescope is imo the new standard for file navigation (and navigation in general: grep, symbols even neovim shortcuts). Git integration is fantastic as well.
I have spent some time configuring it and probably will spend more when I start including more languages but imo it's worth it. You can configure everything but you can also find very nice defaults by running Kickstarter (or some heavier neovim "distro").
Microsoft has done great work with LSPs - I can now get great navigation/autocompletion/formatting/inline errors/warning combined with neovim navigation, light weight and fantastic tools/extensions.
One thing I haven't integrated yet is a debugger (gdb from the terminal is good enough for me), maybe that's something people are missing in neovim?
I'm a very early Zed adopter, and have gotten much more confident in it in the last 6 months mainly because of their AI plans. Note that my strongly positive opinion on this actually has very little to due with the _utility_ of their ai functionality, but rather in that it appears to be a sustainable funding model.
My biggest worry with Zed since I started using it (again, early adopter) was that it would eventually need to be monetized, and likely enshittified. I'm not at all a fan of subscription software, but probably would've happily handed over $20-$50 for a one time purchase (or, maybe $20 for a 1 time purchase of a major version, with another $20 at least 3+ years out or something).
In the last year, Zed has become a sort of AI reseller. You can buy their 'pro' plan, get so many openai/anthropic/gemini tokens, and set a max budget.
For me, this is probably as good of a business model gets in terms of staving off enshittiffication. Zed can happily take a cut, I can preview a bunch of different services, and if you don't care about ai at all, well the core editor is still free. My only worry about this model is that I think I'd have a hard time getting my employer to pay for a Zed pro plan over copilot, so I think they may have trouble monetizing enterprise users with this plan.
In any case, seeing an obvious/relatively innocuous method of sustainable dev has been a tremendous relief to me (and I'm sure the Zed devs as well).
Its biggest remaining flaws IMO remain its small extension ecosystem which hopefully is simply a matter of momentum. I'm sure they could do something like provide richer examples of how to port an extension from vscode, so it's not an intractable problem.
I also continue to have concerns re: the security of their chat/cooperative editing system as it's currently difficult (impossible?) to self host, but perhaps that will also be improved.
Microsoft trying to push copilot on me is just the kind of thing that would drive me to investigate alternatives. This is the same kind of annoying as all those cookie pop-ups which more and more often lead me to think "fuck it, I'm not actually that interested in this content" and close the browser.
I wish Microsoft would make software that just respects that I do not want to use copilot rather than enshittifying VSCode.
Not GP, but he's absolutely right, it's been pissing me off for years now. Only thing I can remember off the top of my head is nested selectors still not highlighting properly. They partially fixed this a few months ago but that's it. I guess we're all waiting on GHCP to prioritize and fix it now?
I feel bad about this comment as of today's news. I love tailwind and feel like it has supercharged my ability to be productive with CSS, but recognize that it can be overprescribed.
Not OP but I remember working on a team that just put up with nonhighlighted nonintelligent CSS because it was embedded in a handlebars template. Of course there is an extension that's supposed to fix this but it was flaky and broke often. An easy fix was to move CSS to a separate file for import but that was a big change for these guys.
If that ever gets fixed then I'd look at replacing Sublime (which is still my go-to for quick editing) and then see if it can handle more advanced coding (which one the rotating list of various vscode forks handle today)
So, it's been one year since I use Zed daily, and I didn't encounter this issue, or any other issue for instance, everything is smooth and I never encountered a failure or a crash.
I work on large (everything is relative, though) monorepos, that would probably qualify for this limit, and I remember already did the kind of "workaround" discussed in this issue years ago on this device. I think it's hard to blame the software when the default file limit is so low depending on the languages you work with.
Anyway, if you would encounter this problem, you would have already encountered it with other tools, or else this is fine.
Have you tried BBEdit recently? It's incredibly configurable, AI features are entirely opt-in, and it supports LSPs now. It's my go-to for basically all text editing these days.
My daily driver is JetBrains. I never liked VS Code, or rather VS Codium. I use it as text editor and only when i want to open a directory i do not care about(ie. some old or foreign code) or really need syntax highlighting. I had high hopes for Zed, despite that built-in AI crap, but after I tried it I still could not configure my syntax highlighting theme, like i can in jetbrains, and for some reason going to definitions in std libraries does not work(i tested with odin). I am not fan of JetBrains and their pricing policies or their new ui changes. So i am working on my own editor/ide right now and I just wanted to mention that zed was the final nudge for me to do it.
We maintain a single VS Code setting that allows you to opt out of the AI features provided in VS Code: "chat.disableAIFeatures" (see also: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_104#_hide-and-disab...). If you can still find AI features appearing after you have configured this setting, then please report an issue at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode and we are happy to take a look.
It is possible that from time to time a new AI related feature slips in that does not respect that setting, but we try our best to push fixes as soon as possible.
Thanks! Ben (VS Code Team)
Bravo, I respect that VS Code has added a single setting to disable all AI features. It prioritizes user choice and agency. Considering there was a recent rebranding as "the open source AI code editor", it means a lot to new and existing users that there's a choice to not use AI.
For many companies and products it's apparently hard to do these days when LLM integration is the hot new thing pushed by management and investors. Developers, users, and citizens deserve the respect and right to opt-out from AI features as it permeates other areas of work, life, computing, commerce and governance.
I'd like to attach to this comment to say that we should support smaller companies. It doesn't matter how responsive a big company is if it controls too much surface area of the important technological salients.
Large company hegemony of our industry is bad. VSCode, Google Search + Chrome, mobile phone duopoly, Amazon/AWS/MGM/WholeFoods/TeleDoc conglomeration and cross promotion... It doesn't matter. We need more distribution of power.
Fun fact.
I do not financially support any restaurant that has a Wall-street ticker. I wish more people would do this. There should be no reason to fund some CEO on Wall-street when we can benefit more by funding local communities.
P.S. You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and to engage with Amazon.
I think this is quite ironic actually.
If I understood the history correctly, being a "shareholder" was a path to a fractional business ownership for people who could not afford to outright own a business.
It comes from the same mental position as a co-operative.
In these scenarios, a CEO is really just an employee of sorts for the shareholders.
It's quite funny that we see the CEO of a publicly traded company has worse than a sole-proprietor, when profits will go directly to a sole proprietor- but not to a shareholder CEO.
I understand how it has played out, that the largest companies on earth are publicly traded now, and that CEO compensation in those companies is crazy. But it's quite ironic in my opinion how it played out.
>It's quite funny that we see the CEO of a publicly traded company has worse than a sole-proprietor, when profits will go directly to a sole proprietor- but not to a shareholder CEO.
Speaking in the same mindset as the parent, we're fine with the profits going directly to a sole proprietor.
In fact, what we want is a name attached to the profits, and a not a role.
We're not anti-profits.
We're anti bland corporate leadership, with no reputational risk and no personal ties to the company (and often no financial risks either, see golden parachutes) - one whose only mission is to maximize profits, product and customers and legacy be damned.
This is a totally fair point to make.
As mentioned though, the irony is in that, once upon a time, the lords and landed gentry were the "bland, soulless overlords" and so buying things would improve their profits... and nobody could become them.
Then the idea of fractional ownership came about and the common man could buy in to an enterprise.
Now of course, everyone is correct that this has been weaponised- but it's often interesting to go back to the original intent (or idea) of something to see how warped it has become.
Given the top 10% holds 87% of shares, it seems clear the stock market is primarily a tool to compound wealth. Having a surplus of money is table stakes to play.
Not just that, but if it were "fractional ownership in a business" then every profitable company would pay a dividend. Now it has become normalized to not do such a thing with all sorts of fancy reasoning.
Share repurchases are also a way of returning cash-flow to owners. A stock buyback is equivalent to a dividend, just with automatic reinvestment in the default 'do-nothing' case.
Including buybacks, few large and mature companies fail to return profits to shareholders at all, and we'd ordinarily want growing or startup companies to retain earnings and invest.
You are just reciting the "fancy reasoning" that I already mentioned. All the esoteric stuff is designed to do is concentrate the wealth into the hands of the wealthy. It is a step away from fractional ownership.
There is nothing fancy about it. The reasoning is straight forward and has the exact same impact that paying dividends has, from the perspective of the shareholder. (Well, actually in some ways maybe a better impact, as it makes complying with idiotic tax laws easier)
I recently moved to Wisconsin and decided it was only appropriate to only buy local. Sure, it tastes better but I was surprised to see it was cheaper too. I guess it doesn't matter how much of your food is plastic and sawdust if you have to pay to haul it an extra hundred miles.
At first, I thought you meant restaurants which had a big scrolling ticker along the wall so patrons could watch the market while they dine.
Just my preference, but I'd like to know where said restaurant is, lol
You can pry Cheesecake Factory brown bread and Olive Garden breadsticks out of my cold dead hands.
Wouldn't it be a shame dying with those in one's cold dead hands, without ever learning how much better options exist?
I’m quite aware that better options exist. I’ve dined at multiple or different 2 Michelin star restaurants, not to brag or anything.
But sometimes this “corporate bad” mentality is just vapid snobbery. I’m better than you because I don’t support big bad corporate.
Of course, companies aren’t created equal, regardless of size or status of being public or private. Some are run very well and ethically and some are not.
I am sure we can find many mom and pop businesses that do shady things that no public corporation would be caught dead doing.
Did you know, small landlords are exempt from equal housing laws? Mrs. Murphy exemption.
If I go to an Olive Garden I know I’m getting the exact same experience everywhere, I know exactly what amenities and facilities they’ll have, and I know what price I’m going to pay.
Even though Cheesecake Factory is a public company they’re doing more real kitchen prep work and in-restaurant cooking than my local bar and grille that’s reheating premade Sysco food.
It's not about "corporate bad", it's about those two doing exemplary bad food. That's beyond any shady practices or whatever (not our topic anyway).
At least Olive Garden, Cheesecake Factory does better.
tell me something tastier than olive garden breadsticks
The breadsticks are also dairy free! Shocking but amazing for my poor lactase free stomach
Dipping them in a never-ending choice of marinara, five cheese, and Alfredo dip.
Garlic bread at any half-decent Italian restaurant?
Having spent years doing software dev myself and now months with the latest frontier models, I don't see a path forward in any software-development capacity that values productivity where AI is not featured.
So I hope for your sake that you and others like you are pure hobbyists. Because anyone paying you to do this job is going to be firing you pretty soon in favor of those who lean on frontier LLMs, otherwise.
When they brand themselves like that, it’s a clear sign for people who dislike “AI” not to use it. Zed having some opt-out “AI” features now was one of the reasons for me to stop even considering properly trying it again.
Emacs it is, still.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46534071
Hey, Ben.
I recently (less than 2 months ago) did an in-depth analysis in the area of license compliance that suggests that Microsoft and many other companies that are shipping Electron apps aren't in compliance with the LGPL. (By all signs, it looks like the Electron project might not even be aware that Electron is subject to the LGPL, though they are. Even Slack, which isn't violating the license appears to be in compliance only incidentally—because they're shipping other LGPL components that they know are LGPL.)
I was set to leave the company I was at a couple weeks later (end of November), and I did, so there haven't been any developments with my investigation/findings since I departed. I haven't prepared or published a formal write-up, and I've only brought it up in a semi-public setting once. It's a pretty big deal, though. Could you raise this with Microsoft legal (not Electron/GitHub) and suggest they look into this?
Assuming this is real and you have the authority to share your work from previous location; you should reach out and contact Microsoft Legal directly.
A random engineer on Hacker News is not the proper channel.
Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/compliance/sbc/report-...
I'll give you another example. The "Microsoft Tunnel Gateway" is a end point for Microsoft's InTune VPN downloadable as a docker image for Linux from here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/intune-service/prot...
I had a brief look at the docker image, and it's pretty clearly a repackaged version of OpenConnect. Debian's copyright linked to from https://packages.debian.org/sid/openconnect says it's primarily LGPL but with a plethora of other licences like the GPL.
Since there is GPL they are required to make some source available, and if they modified it they are required by the LGPL to make their modifications available. They have extended it by adding Microsoft's authentication mechanisms, but perhaps that is just a DDL mixin, and I could well believe / forgive them not being aware of the other licences.
What is not so easy to forgive is them not acknowledging the open source they used in any way. Instead they slapped as pretty standard Microsoft Licence claiming it's all theipr own work, similar to this one: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-softwar...
This is just attention seeking, hard to imagine that after having worked there their best contact is a random person on HN.
GGP didn't say they worked at Microsoft, the comment is a bit hard to parse, but they wrote "I left the company I worked at".
Scant on details, sure, but hard to parse, not really.
The problem is folks this thread seemingly taking a interlocutory approach that can be summarized as, "That which is not explicitly denied can be freely assumed to be true."
(Then throw on top of that, "Depending on how committed you are to your grandstanding, that which is explicitly denied can be conveniently ignored.")
I'm not an engineer, and no one should be getting the impression that anyone else is under the impression that HN is the place to seek an authoritative disposition about this. It is, though, an acceptable channel for the sort of collegial and informal heads-up that this is (and which is all that this is).
Your desire to condescend, however, is noted.
You’re not the random engineer. Ben, the commenter you’re replying to, is.
You were given helpful advice and a link. I don’t see this being condescending.
Correct, that was my intent - Ben isn't the proper channel as he is just an engineer responding to comments here. Stuff like this is serious and so should be escalated.
Compliance with FOSS licenses isn't a joke.
You misunderstand.
Ben is a random engineer, he is definitely not the proper point of contact. FOSS compliance is serious, so if this is real, do escalate it.
The guidance you offer here remains as necessary and is as appreciated now as it was the first time. Rest assured that I am capable and well-informed about how to proceed with these sort of things. Warm regards.
I think it would be interesting for people if your comment was a little more specific about what the issue is. Is this about ffmpeg as raised here: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/34236 ?
Make it opt-in only at welcome page, and we have a deal.
(Of course, I know that's never going to happen.)
I really don’t get this attitude. What deal do you mean? You using VS Code? Why not change the setting simply?
> Why not change the setting simply?
My default settings are stored in a 11922 line json file.
Am I expected to read that entire file to find the setting I'm after?
Am I expected to do so when I don't know what the setting is called?
The reason you can't simply change the setting is because the setting isn't simple.
It's essentially a hidden setting, cloaked behind an ambiguous name in a user-hostile manner.
> My default settings are stored in a 11922 line json file.
And I thought my 50 lines settings.json is getting unmanageable and needs some cutting. WoW.
I'm guessing the user you're replying to is meaning that the vscode default config file is 11k lines and the AI setting just one of many lines in the file.
I don't think they meant that their own settings are that long, just the default in the app and they're commenting that it's ridiculous to expect a person to find it there.
Ah, well, I found this AI setting via github issues browsing, LoL, so yeah it's kind of hidden. May be there are better ways.
It's a tool for programmers. Use google + ctrl+f. Not a hill to die on.
How is googling it meant to work when they keep changing what the AI settings are called each month?
LLMs are pretty good at this sort of thing.
I use emacs, so maybe they're better trained on my editor. But I've had a lot of success resolving little annoyances I have just lived with for years talking to Claude in gptel.
I can't get it to do real work for shit, but it's A+ at helping me waste time with yak-shaving. lol
Alternatively, use the single setting that was literally just given to you above. That is pretty much as easy as it gets without resurrecting Clippy to help you figure it out. It's not reasonable to expect a massive bloated gui if people have 10k+ settings they are using.
The problem is that they keep adding new ai "features" all under different names and different settings, then shuffling the settings around.
Having a "master switch" doesn't matter, since their standard operating procedure is to waffle-stomp more "features" into vscode every month that will fall under a different setting and then they'll continue to shuffle them around.
Their indifference towards their own user-hostility with regards to this is the main problem.
> My default settings are stored in a 11922 line json file. Am I expected to read that entire file to find the setting I'm after?
That’s what AI is for. Have it turn itself off.
Ah, but if AI was correct, I wouldn't need to turn it off.
That, in a nutshell, is one of my biggest complaints about VS Code: there are many overlapping settings for various things, and I could never get clarity on what takes priority. Setting up things like formatters (and their settings) for various file types was a nightmare; between VS Code complaining I didn't have one set up (I did), the settings seemingly being ignored, and various other issues, I break into a cold sweat whenever I have to edit my settings file.
But more to the point, I don't understand why one would ever have to edit the file directly when there's already a settings panel that lets you search for a setting using natural language, and get back a list of matching settings. Why doesn't VS Code let you make all the changes from the settings panel, without having to mess with JSON directly?
You should really look in to the difference between opt-in and opt-out. Opt-in respects the user; opt-out is for foisting features that the user might not need or want.
Flip it around: a new user might be confused why the AI features that all their friends told them about are not available.
It's a tradeoff
If it is opt-in for everybody, then their friends would also tell them that they have to opt-in to get it.
If it means more users aren't using Gen AI, I'll happily take that tradeoff!
The anti-AI folks should just fork everything at this point, because it's hypocritical as hell to complain about it and use a bunch of stuff built with it. Then you can opt out of society!
Oh no, just think of all the good AI-produced things we'll be missing out on.
...are there any?
I'd say the percentage of stuff developed using AI now is higher than the percentage of pro athletes who use performance enhancing drugs, and there's almost as much incentive to mask it and say "made without AI"
Because the point is just to loudly proclaim how virtuously anti-AI you are, how disruptive it actually is to your workflow is irrelevant.
Oh, I use coding assistants every day, just not the one that came with VSCode. Because I want to decide if/which coding assistant I want to use, not whatever VSCode forces upon me. In fact, at many companies, GitHub Copilot is explicitly forbidden.
Not the smartest argument to brand this as anti-AI.
I really like the Copilot autocomplete across multiple symbols in the file (e.g. predictive edits that you can tab through).
For most other stuff I prefer Cline/RooCode/KiloCode, but sadly it doesn’t seem like any of those offer similar autocomplete (Continue.dev did with even Ollama support for local models but the whole plugin was a buggy mess and it didn’t work well). Oh and sometimes Claude Code or Codex is nice in a terminal directly.
Personally, I don’t mind something being there by default (same as how JetBrains has their pre installed plugin and also something like Junie available), as long as it’s easy to turn off or uninstall.
Similar to how I wouldn’t scoff at a Git integration plugin even if I prefer to use Sourcetree or GitKraken.
> as long as it’s easy to turn off or uninstall
That's the issue here.
The "disable all AI features" option isn't really easy to find.
glances at Windows 11
No, I think the point is to escape encroaching monetization that dilutes the value of local on-device text editing.
In my experience it’s people with “agents” mass editing their code, in their 10th attempt to convince their tool to do what they want it do, are people with a disrupted workflow, in a constant struggle with their tools.
I appreciate this intent. I do wonder: do any of your team use this setting? I, too left VS Code after having to disable Copilot for the umpteenth time in a fit of frustration. I was aware of this setting and had it to disable all AI, alas.
The frustration for me is that it turned my editor into a 2000s-era popup extravaganza (not necessarily anti-AI). Every line of my editor was constantly throwing a new popup or text to the side of my cursor. I know that VS Code's design philosophy has moved toward trying to make the editor have as many pop-ups as possible, but there are still a lot of us that don't think that's a good way to focus on the work. It is beyond frustrating when every week or so your editor decides you're wrong about that.
I'm just so extremely uninterested in a text editor whose main selling point is that it's an "AI code editor".
I actually moved to Zed for AI, Claude integration is seamless and the IDE is so fast and crisp. I can use what ever agent I want, when I need them instead of being asked to use Copilot.
Except for few language related extensions, I don't have any other extensions on Zed. Which means I worry less about which of those extensions will be sold off to a malware developer.
I had more issues with official extensions on VSCode (looking at you flutter) than not having any extension on Zed and having to rely on the terminal (which feels much closer to the system than it did on VSCode).
Could you provide some detail on how you use it (the AI features)?
I just have a minimalist setup.
Configuration -
In external agents - I have Calude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI and a custom agent for Qwen Coder via Llama.cpp [1]
In MCP - I have fetch, brave-search, puppeteer
In LLM Providers - I have configured Llama.cpp, LMStudio and OpenAI (Zed Agent can access models from any of these providers).
Workflow -
When I need LLM assist I mostly use just Claude Code for specific tasks, with thorough scaffolding. One major drawback in using external agents on Zed is that they don't support history[2], Which doesn't impact me much as I use Claude just for individual tasks. I'm not really sure on how well Zed works for someone who 'vibecodes' entire project.
[1] https://zed.dev/docs/ai/external-agents
[2] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/37074
Thank you!
VS Code is a flagship product from Microsoft. Relying on “we try our best to push fixes as soon as possible” for a global opt-out setting feels below the engineering standards we’d expect. This should be fail-safe by design, not best-effort.
Everything in the world is best-effort at best. People who tell you otherwise about their pridhct are just lying to you. Do you prefer being lied to? Criticizing people for being honest about it is a good way to be lied to more.
I’d rather someone say “we architected this poorly and are working to fix the design” than “things slip through sometimes, report them when you find them.” The former is honest AND shows they understand the problem. The latter treats a design flaw as an acceptable steady state.
Being honest about shipping bugs is good. Being honest that you’ve designed a system where the same category of bug will keep happening? That deserves criticism, not praise for honesty.
Could you perhaps one day make "chat.disableAIFeaturesMadeForShareholdersOnly"?
So that we can have the actual good stuff (copilot, chat) and leave out the mountain of features that were clearly created to force induced demand for the sake of metrics inflation?
You can probably phrase this question as
* Can we enable the only features we want by toggling chat.disableAIfeatures and only selectively enabling copilot and chat?
Make it a separate build that doesn't even have any of the AI code in it because a flag can't be trusted. Especially when there's a history of resetting flags after updates.
Btw, Zed has a similar setting to turn off all AI features :)
And I'm sure they'll never forget to connect an AI feature to it.
Your point here being? In that case people will complain, and the next release will have it included into the setting
Thanks Ben, I wasn't aware of that.
just wanted to let you know that this comment is the only reason why i'm using vs code again after about 9 months of not using it at all.
Thanks for that setting! TBH I'd prefer for vscode not to ship any AI features and let user install them from extensions, but managers probably will not be happy, so at least that setting helps to stay sane.
> It is possible that from time to time a new AI related feature slips in that does not respect that setting
You mean marketing forces you to "accidentally" slip it in? Just in case it sticks this time?
I don't know about marketing but if code reviews are done right I would love to know how something like 'AI feature' just slips in.
If the code looks correct, why not?
Perhaps people pushing AI slop are not that great at doing good code reviews; which is a shame, really.
They have the "AI" do the code review of course.
And don't imagine the LLMs are sentient, the directive to cram "AI" features down the users' throats is in the prompt.
I see a lot of AI features hate towards VS Code. Want to say that there are other people like me who really love these features, just want to thank you as a Copilot pro user!
Would love to know what happens in perf review for MSFT employees that flip this switch.
Nothing. This isn't something that is even tracked. AI usage is obviously encouraged but HR has far better things to do than go gather this kind of data.
Internally, depending on what product is being worked on teams will have different development flows and different usage points of AI. For things like VSCode, teams have freedom on how they use it completely.
This is not true company wide. I’ve personally been reprimanded for low GitHub copilot usage by my orgs leadership, not HR.
Whoops!! Pesky mistake. An AI feature bypassed the AI opt-out setting yet again. What are we gonna do with all this data now??
[dead]
[flagged]
Couldn't this be asked with more kindness on GitHub in an issue or something?
I've been frustrated by the constant nudges to use specific AI tools from within VS Code, but I made a different change. Rather than moving to a different editor altogether, I started using VS Codium. If you're unfamiliar, it's the open core of VS Code, without the Microsoft-branded features that make up VS Code.
I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium, and then adding in their own branded features, including all the AI pushes. If you like VS Code except for the Microsoft bits, consider VS Codium alongside other modern choices.
https://vscodium.com
> I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium
Isnt vscodium a specific product built strictly from open-source VS Code source code? It's not affiliated with Microsoft, they simply build from the same base then tweak it in different ways.
This is somewhat unlike my understanding of Chromium/Chrome which is similar to what you described.
The clearest explanation I've seen is on VSCodium's Why page:
https://vscodium.com/#why
You might be misunderstanding, you said in your comment:
> I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium, and then adding in their own branded features
This part isn't true, MS and VSCodium both build their releases upon https://github.com/microsoft/vscode, but MS does not build VSCodium at all.
That's a good idea. I considered VSCodium but the issue is that I used VSCode's proprietary extensions such as Pylance. So it would require to switch to OSS replacements at which point I decided why wouldn't give Zed a try – it has a better feeling by not being an Electron app.
I think VSCodium is a good option if you need extensions not available in Zed.
If you are good with a slightly jank option, I have had success with just moving the extension directory from VSCode to the VSCodium directory. Works for the Oracle SQL Developer plugin I use often. It might go against the terms in the extension, but I don’t care about that.
That doesn't help with Pylance and similar extensions. Microsoft implemented checks to verify the extension is running in VS Code, you have to manually patch them out of the bundled extension code (e.g. like this[0], though that probably doesn't work for the current versions anymore).
[0]: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/discussions/1641#discus...
Basedpyright and ty should both work under vscodium.
Basedpyright is really good. I've been using it in neovim for a while. I'm currently evaluating ty. It is definitely not as good, but it is also really new.
I appreciate that we have good alternatives to pylance. While it is good, it being closed source is a travesty.
I've been using vscodium with basedpyright as I've thought it was supposed to be a open source version of pylance. I've got to say it's annoying about type errors and after changing it's setting to be less strict it still annoys me and I've even started littering my code with the their # ignore _____ .
I'm really glad the article mentioned ty as I'm going to try that today.
On zed I tried it but the font rendering hurt my eyes and UI seems to be glitchy and also doesn't support the drag and drop to insert links in markdown feature * I use all the time.
* https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages/markdown#_inser...
I can't say I've noticed any "nudges" to use AI tools in VS Code. I saw a prompt for Copilot but I closed it, and it hasn't been back.
I'm probably barely scratching the surface of what I can do with it, but as a code editor it works well and it's the first time I've ever actually found code completion that seems to work well with the way I think. There aren't any formatters for a couple of the languages I use on a daily basis but that's a Me Problem - the overlap between IDE users of any sort and assembly programmers is probably quite small.
Are there any MS-branded features I should care about positively or negatively?
I'm a teacher, so I help people get started setting up a programming environment on a regular basis. If you take a new system that hasn't been configured for programming work at all, and install a fresh copy of VS Code, you'll see a number of calls to action regarding AI usage. I don't want to walk people through installing an editor only to then tell them they have to disable a bunch of "features".
This isn't an anti-AI stance; I use AI tools on a daily basis. I put "features" in quotes because some of these aren't really features, they're pushes to pay for subscriptions to specific Microsoft AI services. I want to choose when to incorporate AI tools, which tools to incorporate, and not have them popping up like a mobile news site without an ad blocker.
What are those constant nudges to use AI tools? Sounds a bit strange.
I have been using vscodium for years, hasn't disappointed until recently (rust analyzer wont pickup changes, not sure if rust or vscode issue). I tried zed once, but just didn't do the basics I needed at the time. I'll have to give it a try again
edit: zed is working much better for me now and does not have the issue vscodioum was having (not recognizing changes/checking some code till I triggered rebuild)
I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code.
The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs. There’s an open discussion about it, though it hasn’t seen much activity recently: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770
Stronger support for GDB/LLDB and broader C/C++ tooling would also be a big win.
It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become. Huge thanks to the people behind Zed and Sublime for actively pushing in the opposite direction!
> The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs.
> It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become.
It's a bit ironic to see those two in the same message but I'd argue that right there is an example of why software becomes bloated. There is always someone who says "but it would be great to have X" that in spirit might be tangentially relevant, but it's a whole ordeal of its own.
Diffing text, for example, requires a very different set of tools and techniques than what just a plain text editor would already have. That's why there are standalone products like Meld and the very good Beyond Compare; and they tend to be much better than a jack of all trades editor (at least I was never able to like more the diff UI in e.g. VSCode than the UI of Meld or the customization features of BC).
Same for other tangential stuff like VCS integration; VSCode has something in there, but any special purpose app is miles ahead in ease of use and features.
In the end, the creators of an editor need to spend so much time adding what amounts to suplemental and peripheral features, instead of focusing on the best possible core product. Expectations are so high that the sky is the limit. Everyone wants their own pet sub-feature ("when will it integrate a Pomodoro timer?").
This is a sharp observation, and it goes even further: BeyondCompare easily allows one to hop into an editor at a specific location, while Total Commander, with its side-by-side view of the world, is n excellent trampoline into BeyondCompare. In this kind of ecosystem (where visual tools strive to achieve some Unix-like collaboration), the super power of editors (and IDEs) is their scripting language, and in this arena it is still hard to beat Emacs (with capabilities that were present maybe 40 years ago).
Fully agree.
People call "bloat" the features they don't need, and "deal breakers" the lack of features they want besides good text editing.
I agree with that comment chain about the intelliJ diff view so much
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...
I don't even need that to be built into the editor – I would pay for a fast, standalone git UI that is as good as the IntelliJ one. I use Sublime Merge right now and it's kind of ok but definitely not on the same level
I dunno if you are aware, but you can use the diff/merge standalone. My gift to you:
I mostly use git from the terminal, but the goodness of the IntelliJ UI for cherry-picking changes is one of the things that has me maintaining my toolbox subscription. Also, IdeaVim is a really solid vim implementation, IMO.
If they factor out the VCS UI into a standalone non-IDE product that starts and runs a little faster than their IDEs and doesn't care about your project setup I'd pay a subscription even
> I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code.
Can you elaborate on when you use which editor? I'd have imagined that there's value in learning and using one editor in-depth, instead of switching around based on use-case, so I'd love to learn more about your approach.
Different user, but I prefer to use different editors for:
- project work, i.e. GUI, multiple files, with LSP integration (zed)
- one-off/drive-by edits, i.e. terminal, small, fast, don't care much about features (vim)
- non-code writing, i. e. GUI, different theme (light), good markdown support (coteditor)
I don't like big complex software, so I stay away from IDEs; ideally, I'd like to drop zed for something simpler, without AI integration, but I haven't found anything that auto-formats as well.
My workflow isn't very common. I typically have 3-5 projects open on the local machines and 2 cloud instances - x86 and Arm. Each project has files in many programming languages (primarily C/C++/CUDA, Python, and Rust), and the average file is easily over 1'000 LOC, sometimes over 10'000 LOC.
VS Code glitches all the time, even when I keep most extensions disabled. A few times a day, I need to restart the program, as it just starts blinking/flickering. Diff views are also painfully slow. Zed handles my typical source files with ease, but lacks functionality. Sublime comes into play when I open huge codebases and multi-gigabyte dataset files.
in my case, I use zed for almost everything, and vscodium for three things:
search across all files; easier to navigate the results with the list of matching lines in the sidebar, and traversing the results with cursor up/down, giving full context
git; side-by-side diff, better handling of staging, and doesn't automatically word-wrap commit messages (I prefer doing that myself)
editing files which have a different type of indentation than what is configured in zed, since zed does not yet have autodetect
It looks like the most recent thread has noted an early feature flag for testing that!
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...
Specifically https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...
Have you looked at the size of Zed binary lately? How is it pushing against bloat, especially compared to Sublime?
This article struck a personal chord with me: I bought a new MacBook a week ago and installed minimal software on it, specifically I did not install VSCode and I don’t miss it.
I use Emacs exclusively on my new laptop. I have about 40 years experience with Emacs and except for a treemacs automations, I am using my regular setup.
VSCode is a great project but I just didn’t feel “happy” while I was using it. I feel happy using Emacs and I only use very minimal LLM integrations with Emacs, preferring to separately running gemini-cli occasionally, or using a variety of LLMs (especially strong local models) with one-shot prompting.
Likewise, I feel happy when using Emacs in a way that other editors do not. Emacs was made for a different era of development, with different views on what productive programming looked like. Rider, VSCode, and etc are all post-NetBeans editors and it shows. Editing text buffers isn't the focus so much as refactoring projects is; and agentic AI development slots easily into that refactoring process. With Emacs, it _feels_ purposeful, manual, and dare I say it, artisanal.
Also started using emacs (doom) a couple of months ago, after realizing that jetbrains and vscode are going to be AI-shittified, and there is no turning back.
At this point, I would recommend to every coder worth his salt to just jump to vim/neovim or emacs, these editors will be around for the next 1000 years and you wont need to fight against some BS features and you wont need to switch ever egain. The 1-2 month learning curve is worth it!
I set a calendar appointment for 1000 years in the future to fact check this claim
I was a long time Emacs user, spent way too much of my life in ~/.emacs.d/init.el. I don't use it for anything other than magit any more. I just tried it again, first by upgrading my packages in package.el. Of course, everything is still locked up when I `package-menu-execute` to upgrade packages. I guess in a thousand years it will still be mostly single-threaded, with almost every action locking up the UI thread.
We don't all have
- 40 years experience with Emacs
- the ability to predict that 20 years from when we started we would fall in love with Emacs
- the fortitude of will to overcome the mountainous project that it is to turn Emacs, The text editor "toolkit", into the perfect text editor for you.
You may be surprised how short a path it is to the perfect emacs config for you.
Believe me I have tried. And already have made my config. Took me weeks, and is still no closer to getting to be up to par with what I get with helix out of the box.
It also is just super slow on windows unfortunately.
But one day, one day I'll switch
No one reaches the perfect emacs config. It's an asymptote.
I’ve fallen in love with emacs again now that I can have an LLM tune up my config. I love emacs, I don’t love lisp. Maybe LLMs are helping me with that, too.
But I so happy with my config now. Simplified and modern.
Ha! My elisp is almost non existent, and so I’ve been using ChatGPT and Claude to help me rewrite my perfect setup - and it’s glorious!
I‘ve been happily using Doom Emacs on Linux as VSCode replacement. When I switched to macOS, I found the experience to be rather slow with significant input lag, though. (And yes, I did use native compilation.) Has something changed in that regard, or did you just accept it?
Many Emacs functions are sluggish on my work Mac, but I found out that this is because the Cisco endpoint security software stops and checks every binary that runs, every single Goddamn time, which means that things which shell out, like M-x compile and anything in magit, are noticeably slower.
I had the same issues. I mainly use Doom on my linux machine, but on mac it is distractingly slow. d12frosted/homebrew-emacs-plus seemed to reduce the lag, but I've had other issues with it, so have gone back to vim.
I'm also a long time emacs user (>15 years) but got tired of the endless config fiddling, with some packages breaking over emacs versions, other packages which were cool at the time slowly getting stale and need to switch to yet another similar incarnation of the same idea. And most of all having to recover the config every time I use a new computer or just connect to a new VM.
I'm building an alternative, and I haven't opened emacs for a month now
I've been Emacsing for 30+ years at this point, but I'm frustrated at its performance in the 21st century.
By which I mean both startup time (yes, I know real Emacs people never leave the editor. I'm Not That Guy) but its single-threadedness leading to painful blocking pauses when using eglot + rust-analyzer, etc.
I bought a new basic laptop last year, with enough RAM, and little do you know, the VS Code did not feel faster on the new device. So last week, when I noticed that Zed for Windows is "stable" now, I've uninstalled VSC.
VS Code is still the better tool (imho) but I can't stand it.
I knew I was right to stick it out with Emacs, despite the world telling me literally everyone was using VS Code now. Emacs bros unite!
Emacs what?? Let's start an editor flame war, under a completely different editor wars :)) Yes i am a VI man.
Just joking, I really mis the org-mode.
Sublime is quite good. I have always been using sublime for quick edits, dumping notes etc. But lately I came to appreciate it more as a lightweight IDE. I use go (lsp and some plugins) and ST (sqltools) in addition to package manager and project manager. I like how fast it is, how well polished the editor is. And generally all plug-ins i use work nicely. Also claude helped a lot (eg writing some shortcuts for specific scenarios that I tend to use a lot).
Not to say anything against Zed though. But sublime with one session of claude can help you build your very own customized ide.
I love(d) Sublime and it's still getting updates from time to time, but unfortunately its ecosystem died five ish years ago, its package repository is a lot of "last updated 10 years ago". It's still a viable editor, but without community support it's not going to be good enough long term.
That said, ST (and its predecessor, forgot the name) set the standard for "lightweight" (lighter than IDEs) editors - Atom, VS Code, now Zed, can all trace their common patterns back to ST.
> Atom, VS Code, now Zed, can all trace their common patterns back to ST.
True, but Zed is the only spiritual successor IMO, Atom and VSCode do not care about speed or snappiness, which is the nicest thing about Sublime Text (for me.)
> and its predecessor, forgot the name
TextMate? It's been surprisingly influential for an editor I've never seen anyone use; maybe in the US, where people actually buy Mac, it was different.
I didn’t notice that it hasn’t been updated since ‘21 (TM2), but I still use it every day. Just a reliable, minimal, fully native (no electron, etc) editor that is flexible enough to keep adding new bundles to. I’m sad it’s not in development, but happy it’s an oasis from AI coding.
I was a big TM user who ended up on ST because I needed more of the community integrations and so on... which are now turning into a weakness of ST.
I'm still on SublimeText because I can't deal with the sluggishness of VS Code, and I'll pay for the latest version, but I am starting to worry about the future of what is still a great editor. Rust coding in particular is a bit of a nightmare.
The sad thing is that both of these were the products of business models I enthusiastically support and want to see more of: the solo dev (TM) and the small business (ST), or maybe it's solo dev pretending to be small business, I can't really tell.
> or maybe it's solo dev pretending to be small business, I can't really tell.
Certainly small business :)
> last updated 10 years ago
Only a problem if the software has broken in that time period
I still love notepad++. Basically one of only a handful of apps I miss from when I used Windows. First release about a year before textmate, so for me it's the real og.
Eh, I don't think it's really a problem. The much-vaunted VSCode ecosystem isn't actually all that useful imo, so it doesn't bother me that people aren't making lots of Sublime plugins. There's an LSP plugin which is basically all one needs.
I don’t think people realize how easy it is to make Sublime plugins. They can be as simple as a single .py file. No dependencies install step, no meta files, no rituals to go through. Just drop the .py file in the right directory. I’ve used Gemini to build about 3-4 plugins of various complexity and they all work great
> Just drop the .py file in the right directory.
Can I drop it in the 'wrong' directory and have ST pick it up from there? I like apps that are as flexible as possible when it comes to file organization.
I believe if you are using a project workspace (working in a directory with a .sublime-project file) then you can also write plugins right there in the project. But, if you wanted, you can use symlinks. Sublime will follow symlinks. I use this to sync my settings to Dropbox so I can have the same setup on any computer
Same, I'm still using Sublime with SublimeLSP, and it works for 95% of my use cases because I tend to rely on the terminal for everything else. Although I do hope to switch to Zed eventually because of it's built-in debugger and ability to select-copy text in popups (I can't believe Sublime still doesn't allow this in 2026) -- Zed still had some rough edges last time I tried it, and Sublime still seemed to perform better.
I do love how Sublime Text doesn't even blink after getting huge file, where most other editors struggle. And overall speed and responsiveness is unbelievable. I would really like to see any other editor trying to overtake Sublime Text on those metrics.
VSCode is actually one of the best for large files. Not as good as Sublime Text, but it can happily edit million line files, and you'd be surprised how many other editors can't do that. Zed couldn't until recently (not sure if it can now; I haven't checked recently).
Once you get into the GB range there are very very few editors that can edit those files unfortunately.
Vim, neovim, and helix all handle multiple-GB files fine!
> neovim
I have to turn off my config (-u NONE) for large files (e.g., multi-GB JSON files), or everything slows to a crawl. I never profiled it to know what's causing the slowdown. It might be treesitter.
syntax hi-lighting is the usual culprit in regular vim when pasting or piping a big blob of json i’ve found
Yeah but then you have to use Vim-style editing which I hate.
You can compare speed of ST with CudaText.
Can you share the plugins name/configuration for Go in Sublime. There are so many options and configurations published so its hard to find a configuration that works as good as Vscode.
I use emacs as my "lightweight" IDE in the terminal and it's not light at all. Always a big install on a new server and takes ages to start up. I wish I had learned vim instead.
How do you refactor code?
This article (and holiday spare time) made me update and check zed again. I really liked it when I tried it a few months ago, but it failed miserably when doing work on remote code. It would hang, and I couldn't find any diagnostics to debug it's fairly complex remote agent to find out what went wrong.
But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote git seems to work nicely. A very nice Christmas present - thanks, Zed!
Good job Zed!
Funny, I switched to Zed after VS Code remotes kept hanging!
I tried switching from VScode to Zed but unfortunately it doesn't have Jupyter notebooks and image/video preview which are deal brakers for me.
Other pain points:
- Format on save by default: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/29395
- VSCode Debugger UX seams to be much better
I have added Jupyter support and Panning/Zooming for Zed, waiting for them to merge. But I have a version that I use, you can build it if ya want! The PRs: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/43553, https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/43944
My-Zed branch with both the features: https://github.com/MostlyKIGuess/zed/tree/my-zed
Woah, slow down there. One of your requirements to a code editor is video preview? I didnt even know this existed. Gonna spin up VSCode at home and find out.
I had a miserable experience with it. It could not do as simple task as discovering my python interpreter! IDEs are a dime a dozen these days — most are fast enough. But common workflows need to be air tight.
The issue there is what you expect; when Sublime Text came out and later VS Code, they intentionally didn't have the same features as IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA had. The ecosystem of those is very impressive and feature rich, but for a lot of tasks that was overkill and the performance cost was too big.
X years later and VS Code is the one with the biggest ecosystem and therefore also has the largest and most complex addons.
Zed is starting from scratch again, relying on developers to create extensions. However, I'll argue that because Zed is Rust based instead of web tech based like Code, it'll be harder to get as big an ecosystem as Code has. Same with IDEs, some of the biggest plugins have corporate backers who pay people to develop and maintain them.
Yes! I also got bitten by format_on_save when working with legacy projects with inconsistent formatting. Given another discussion I saw, the maintainers didn't think about this use case much, i.e. "why don't you want to have a proper formatting?". It can be turned off now, so not sure if they'll change the default.
It's like Excel changing .csv files after opening them so a simple load/save cycle can corrupt the file and your original copy is nowhere to be found. I imagine the damage is smaller in case of auto-formatter but still - not something I would expect a program to do to my file in a simple "open file - close the program" cycle.
The VSCode Debugger is the only thing that keeps it installed on my work machine. Lately I've been doing all my editing in Helix and switching over to Xcode for debugging though. It's even more consistent than VSCode, which occasionally leaks memory and blows itself up. I haven't had time to really learn lldb at the command line but it may have to be the next step. The only other thing I miss is VSCode's Find-All/Replace-All because it maintains the include/exclude paths and Helix doesn't (that I know of)
Doesn't Helix support debuggers via the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP)?
I find myself using VS Code for "things like this" (its visual extension ecosystem).
I've grown attached to the git diff view, so I use it for reviewing PRs mostly (especially larger ones as github UI has been struggling with them as of late).
The rest of my code is written in Vim or by Claude.
Zed has built in REPL for several languages, which does have image preview [0]
It uses the Jupytext format [1], for Python at least. Which frankly, is much more friendly to VCS than notebooks.
I agree on the 'format on save' as undesirable default, but disabling that was as easy as flicking a switch.
[0]: https://zed.dev/docs/repl [1]: https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
I was also disappointed by the lack of Jupyter notebooks support: I ended up not using Jupyter notebooks that much anymore, and when I do, well, I run them in Jupyter
Hi, I'm the author of the post. I hope it resonates with many who got tired of VSCode and found Zed.
I'd also like to add there are many small features I miss in Zed that I don't go over in the post, e.g. autodetect and respect file's indentation (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4681). But I see Zed is actively shipping the missing features, so I believe they'll improve significantly over the next year.
Your blog appears to have been hugged to death. I look forward to reading it someday.
https://archive.is/aaJh4
Have you tried using vim? Or rather nvim? If tinkering is your thing, feel free to completely do your own setup but out of the box lazyvim is pretty sane and you may not need much to get it to your liking.
But it’s very nice to easily able to extend or modify to fit your workflow. I’m just curious what people are getting out of zed that seems like vim has available.
I use both zed and vim, but the former for 'big' work because of:
a) file tree - I really like being able to 'root' the view at a directory, explore the hierarchy, and easily open any file within it
b) LSP - Zed's auto-formatting is it's best feature, for me
I generally like a whole bunch of things the gui gives me, but I would probably drop zed if I could get these two features working as well (or, at least, almost as well) in vi.
If it helps, I use the NERDTree plugin which gives a very decent file tree to vim.
+1 for lazyvim. I tried multiple times to switch to nvim from vscode, but lazyvim finally made it painless. love lazygit too. debugging in nvim also works like a charm.
Zed has been one of the most consequential changes to my dev tools in years. It's noticeably faster in day-to-day use than VS Code (launch time, input latency, etc.), is way less of a resource hog, and has the best Vim mode of any GUI editor I've ever used.
I agree. It's a joy to use, and feels like it was built by people who care about it.
Let's see if that holds up when it has better feature parity. Things always run faster when you have less to do
Zed doesn’t need to run a web browser so I kinda doubt it will ever have “as much to do”
Zed still has to implement a rendering engine, if anything they miss out in several ways by not sharing the same rendering engine
but I mean actual features you see people here asking for because they are missing, those will require CPU cycles and memory
What kind of rendering engine and why Zed has to build it?
not sure, they do something with the GPU for sure, and because how are you going to draw anything on a monitor or screen without a rendering engine? Surely in their code base they have multiple levels of abstraction for rendering, drawing, and layout in their code base. You can see these kinds of things in other comments here and on their github without reading code.
The browser engine is itself an abstraction point that many people find agreeable on both sides, for those of us that don't have a problem with chromium/codium/electron as a technology, seeing it more so as useful and enabling
In my mind, sharing a common engine across chromium/codium/electron is like how so many things use the linux kernel. To me, the more eyes, devs, and consumers of the code makes it better in the long run
Yes, the thing is, the browser is an extremely expensive abstraction layer. It's like having a car factory where everything is built by general purpose robots - it's very versatile, but obviously if you build an assembly line using dedicated machinery, it's going to run much faster.
But you also have to build your own factory and assembly line, which isn't faster to begin with and takes a lot of effort to get their. Zed still has issues with basics like font rendering and GPU usage from excessive redraws / repaints
Meanwhile, chromium works reasonable well on billions of devices of all shapes and kinds
This is why Electron is so popular. Building entire factory is very expensive.
I've been using vim for 20 years. It's gotten me through all the evolutions of programming, from ctags, to language servers, to AI with copilot.
There's something extremely satisfying about having a dependable free software editor, available on all systems, and not having to change every time a new fad comes in, or a VC decides it's time to make money.
I went from intellij to emacs, to zed / vscode to vim... Even neovim was getting on my nerves.
For some reason I'm happy in vim. I feel I understand most of what's happening. Not sure what It is.
I still use vscode for debugging (breakpoints etc.) as it's just the easiest. Maybe there is a workflow with lldb that I could use to debug within vim...
The more advanced AI related workflows are the reason I finally switched away from neovim as my main coding IDE - for now.
The existing AI plugins for neovim aren't great.
I would have switched in a pinch if Zed had their low-DPI font rendering in order. At the moment it just looks bad.
This is interesting to me, because I see this kind of comment on almost every Zed post.
I haven't used a low-DPI monitor for like... not sure, but more than a decade, I'm pretty sure, so for me the weird blocker I have with Zed is the "OMG YOU HAVE NO GPU!!!! THIS WILL NOT END WELL!" warning (I run a lot of Incus containers via RDP, and they mostly have no GPU available).
But what kind of monitors are you low-DPI people using? Some kind of classic Sony Trinitron CRTs, or what? I'm actually curious. Or is it not the display itself, but some kind of OS thing?
Depending on the definition I'm not a low DPI user myself, but in my friend group, I seem to be the only person who cares about >160 dpi, lots of people are using 1440p displays, or >34" 4k displays. In Apple's mind, high dpi (eg retina) is > 218 dpi, so my lowly 34" 5120x2160 doesn't count for them. But it is > 160 which is my personal threshold for hi dpi.
There aren't all that many >20" displays on the market that meet Apple's definition of high dpi, and not a ton more that meet my much looser definition.
I was imagining 72dpi like old CRT monitors, but yeah, I'd agree that 160 feels like a fair threshold.
I have a 4-5 year old ultra wide monitor which is a lot of pixels but low dpi. I really like the single monitor containing two screens worth of pixels, but I wish it was high dpi. At the time there weren’t really high dpi ultra wides available, and they’re still expensive enough that upgrading isn’t a high priority for me… but I’m sure I will at some point.
Mine is 2560x1440 which is a pretty nice "sweet spot" size. A comparable 5k to 6k display still commands a substantial price, and - given that I work at two locations - would need me to have two of them. The screen I use as my current (a 3x2 BenQ) also has some amount of subsampling going on, because running it at 2x ("Retina native HiDPI") all the UI controls are too damn big, and space is not enough. Running it at 1x (everything teeeny-tiny) is just not very good for my eyesight and not very workable - and, again, with Zed bumps into the same broken antialiasing rasterizer they have.
And it is not an OS thing. The OS renders subpixel antialiased fonts just fine. But Zed uses its own font rasterizer, and it completely falters when faced with a "standard passable resolution" screen - the letters become mushy, as if they have been blurred - and rather sloppily at that.
It depends on your OS.
Linux and Windows are significantly better for both 1440p and 4k monitors. Both Linux and Windows have subpixel rendering and configurable font hinting for 1440p. And they both have fractional scaling UIs for 4k. macOS on the other hand only really looks acceptable on a 5k monitor.
When people says things like "mine is 2560x1440" on HN, are they talking about the mac scaled resolution? I feel like some context is always missing from resolution discussions, and it's a topic non-technical people can weigh in on as well.
The 2560x1440 is QHD which is kind of a happy medium: high resolution enough to look really sharp, but not so high resolution that you have to scale it up like Macs do on retina displays. Having had retina Macs (and been very happy with them) since they came out, I've been using 16" and 17" QHD panels on my linux laptops for about five years... and they are actually just fine.
I actually don't understand what I'm missing. I'm using two old monitors, a 27" at 2560x1440 and a 23.5" at 1920x1080 (in addition to my high DPI Framework 13 screen). How else can I get at least 4480 across (after scaling to a font size I can read - I'm 49) and still cover that many inches? My DPI right now is about 100, so to double that, wouldn't I need 8960 across 44 inches? I don't really want to pay $1500 for resolution my eyes are probably too old to notice.
It’s okay eyes are just different. I personally enjoy 220DPI, but 60Hz looks absolutely fine. However at the workplace enough people complain about 60Hz that all the monitors at work are 120Hz. I don’t notice any additional smoothness at all so it’s all wasted on me.
Regular HD LCD monitors are typical office fare.
> But what kind of monitors are you low-DPI people using?
They’re still pretty common in enterprise. So cheap. At this point most desks probably cost more than the PCs on top of them.
TBF, enterprise probably still has to deal with ancient apps that can’t handle higher resolution well.
Typical DPIs are still all over the place depending on the demographic. Macs have been ~200dpi forever, while cheap PCs are still mostly ~100dpi, and decent PC setups tend to land somewhere in the middle with ~150dpi displays which are pretty dense but not up to Mac Retina standards. Gamers also strongly favor that middle-ground because the ultra-dense Mac-style panels tend to be limited to 60hz.
Zed started out as a Mac-only app, and that's reflected in the way their font rendering works.
I guess that makes sense. I'm a 280ppi convert, so I judge Mac users with pity — Linux and Windows work perfectly with my 31.5" 8K display (from fuckin' 2017 btw...) but Macs can only drive it at 6K, which adds a fuzz factor.
Unless you use it at 4K, but macOS isn't really usable that way (everything way too small).
But yeah, it's 60Hz. Which has sucked ever since I accidentally got a 120Hz display, so now 60 Hz looks like 30Hz used to...
P.S.I had a chance to try that LG 45GX950A-B at Yodobashi Camera in Akihbara the other day, and... that measly 125ppi might overperform at the distance you have to put it at. But then again my 50-year-old eyeballs are starting to be like "anyway you need your glasses bro" so... YMMV
There are actually 218ppi 180hz panels coming soon, although they will no doubt cost a kidney for the first few years.
https://rog.asus.com/monitors/27-to-31-5-inches/rog-strix-5k...
Looks good overall, but:
> USB-C with 15W power delivery for maximum compatibility
I am hoping that is a typo.
Yeah that's... not great if correct. LGs version has 90W PD.
https://tftcentral.co.uk/news/lg-27gm950b-5k-monitor-announc...
What does that mean? If the monitor only requires 15W to operate, that's a good thing, right? Unless monitors are expected to use less than that? I'm not familiar with reading monitor spec sheets.
to add on to what jsheard said, for this feature to be usable (ie, charge your laptop just by plugging in the monitor), you need this number to be about what your laptop's charger is. At 15W, even a macbook air would run out of power slowly while plugged into this monitor, assuming you don't plug a second cable into your laptop. 65W or 90W is a much more normal value for a feature like this.
That all makes sense. The only thing I was missing was that this refers to power output. It seems like kind of a niche and tenuous value-add for a monitor. Why would I want to get power from my monitor?
> Why would I want to get power from my monitor?
Both at work and at home, I can plug in my monitor to my laptop with a single cable to my monitor. That single cable charges my laptop, connects the display, and passes through a usb hub that's built into the monitor that connects my keyboard and webcam. It's _incredibly_ convenient. It's also just a lot less cabling. You can think of it like a dock, built into the monitor for free.
> It seems like kind of a niche
Different workflows/circles. It's not something you're likely to use with a desktop, mainly with a laptop. It also really only works well if you use thunderbolt. It's reasonably common but probably not a majority where I work, where 90% of dev machines are macs.
Charging and video on the same cable is super cool. I take it all back.
That's output power. USB-C monitors can charge your laptop while it's connected through a single cable.
My 42.5" 4k LG monitor is 104 DPI being Low by macOS conventions.
I used to have the same complaint, and recently swapped to 4k monitors. I thought that would solve my zed font problems, but text presentation is still bad. In zed, it feels like there is significantly more spacing between each line compared to vscode (or any other text editor).
Is it on linux?
Yes. And Windows.
https://zed.dev/docs/linux
Mind explaining how / why you have a low DPI monitor? I haven't even seen one in maybe a decade.
1080p is the most popular screen resolution by far, and on regular monitors 1080p is "low DPI".
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
It blows my mind that the most ubiquitous computer screen resolution worldwide is considered too niche for decent support by the Zed project. Hopefully that will change in 2026?
The gamer market while overlapping with the developer market, is not a perfect circle. And where the circle does overlap, devs often work on a different display than they game on.
I do not doubt some people experience some issues, but I have regularly used zed with 1080p and 1440p 24" monitors (on macos) and I never experienced any font rendering problem. Saying "zed does not render fonts at low dpi monitors well" is a bit of an exaggeration.
Perhaps reserve your mind being blown for situations where the GP hasn’t confused pixel count and pixel density.
Zed “supports” 1080p monitors just fine. Supports is in quotes because it doesn’t need to do anything nor care at all about the count of pixels on the screen.
If you can call the left image [1] "supporting 1080p" I guess Zed supports it. But it looks like VS Code and other editors somehow support it better without getting blurry.
Keep in mind that Zed developers [2] consider blurry fonts on low DPI displays a Priority 1 issue, and a reproducible bug that is commonly encountered.
I'm sure if there was no blurry font issue with Zed, they would just close this bug report.
[1]: https://ibb.co/zVS0Qz6z
[2]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
Low DPI fonts and 1080p resolution are orthogonal concerns. Pixel count and pixel density are not the same thing.
1080p is neither high nor low DPI (dots per inch). DPI requires knowing the physical size of a screen, not simply the number of pixels.
Try finding a new 1080p screen small enough to count as high DPI; there aren't many! Using 218ppi from elsewhere in the thread as the threshold, you'd need a 10 inch 1920×1080 screen to achieve it, so a 1080p computer screen is almost certainly low DPI.
"1080p is the most popular screen resolution by far" for people who use Steam and therefore may be optimising for framerate or connecting to a TV, and even that's pretty meaningless without knowing the physical dimensions of the screen. 1080p is a screen resolution, DPI is screen density - 1080p on a phone is pretty high DPI.
Many people call 1080p/24" "low DPI" these days. Though no idea what OP actually has.
Define low dpi. Apple's definition has been >218dpi, which is much higher than 4k@27", which is about the smallest 4k monitor one can buy (exluding 15" portable monitors)
Perhaps you have a 49'' screen
Concur that it's a great VSCode replacement! Also note on the Author's observation of it using similar keybinds: You can, easily, swap the keybinds for other common editors too; this is a big deal for transitions. Also, I love how they're doing things the right way using a fast language... and it shows in the consistently low latency.
It is not, IMO, a replacement for Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm, Rustrover, for example). I do substitute it on my tablet sometimes, where those IDEs can be too sluggish. Unless I'm missing something with plugins I should be installing, it is not on the same level for introspection, refactoring, import adding and moving, real-time error checking, and generally understanding the code base holistically.
So, I've settled into this: Jetbrains if on a sufficiently powerful PC. (It can still bring a 9950x to its knees though...) Zed for lower-power ones.
Sublime for editing one-off files, as both JB and Zed are project-oriented.
To bad I can not change away from vs code. Most chip manufacturers use the vscode + Addons approach today to give you a toolchain to Programm for your microcontroller. They (thank god) abandon there proprietary IDE attempts and concentrate on chips and compilers again. They found VSCode and now you are required to use this. I’m very unhappy with the situation and on the job hunt to get away from embedded to application programming
Which microcontrollers? Of interest, I program STM32, ESP32 (Risc-V) and Nordic chips, and do everything in RustRover. The compiling is decoupled from the editor. (You do cargo run to build and flash with debugging, or click the Run IDE button; works just like any program) The editor is for the code structure, and should reflect that, vs the chip. There is Cube IDE which is useful for configuring clocks, memory layout data, and other periph info as a supplement to the RMs and User Manuals, but it's not required to write code.
Do you do this in a professional setting? I'm curious because I did some embedded/uC work about 10 years ago and considering the state of C/C++ SDKs (and IDE support) at the time, I would have expected it to take decades for Rust to get a foothold.
Yep; do it at work (Security-related sensors for a DoD contractor) as well as my own small business. It doesn't have a foothold, and may not ever; we will see. I think a lot of the embedded rust content you see online is makers who are more interested in doing tricks with the ownership system and Async. So, I am an exception, but... I do recommend this workflow despite its lack of popularity!
I just like rust for the overall language and tooling. (For example, the workflow I described above); don't really care about the memory safety aspect to the degree it's often presented.
The biggest downside is I have to do a lot of leg work which wouldn't be required if done in C or C++. E.g. implementing hardware interfaces from datasheets and RMs. Sometimes there will be a Rust lib available, but in my experience they are rarely in a usable state.
As a hobbyist who's written and is working on a couple of async HALs my take is that Rust is well suited to embedded work but yeah there are hurdles. It's immature so while things like Embassy are a joy to work with, they're missing a lot of (sometimes seemingly basic) features.
Mostly Arm systems using CMSIS from TI.
So I think you and the person you responded two are talking about two different things: developing software with and without a HAL.
The rise in ARM brought about quite a bit of standardization. You're no longer bound to vendor specific compilers and toolchains. Insofar as you're willing to essentially reimplement large swaths of the HAL you're able to BYO dev environment. Of course all of this is also subject to the quality of the CMSIS packs and documentation put out by vendors.
This is true with Rust as well, and in this capacity Rust is quite mature and well supported for Cortex-M stuff (and to a slightly lesser extent Xtensa and RISC-V). The tools to create thin wrappers around the registers (so called Peripheral Access Crates — PACs) are pretty well fleshed out at this point.
If you're looking for a equivalent to first party HAL to leverage (e.g. CubeMX, Atmel Studio), Rust is significantly less mature here if only because of its age. In Rust land there are multiple different HAL frameworks to work with and it's likely you'd need to use a combination of them. Embassy (a combination of an async framework and HAL components) is pretty slick if it does what you need.
i think i might be brain damaged because i actually like the eclipse ides they put out, atleast the stm32 one
I very much recommend smt32cubeMX.
Lol here I am moving them on my own when vendors won't or do it wrong. Sad to see a fellow embedded leaving. We certainly need all the help we can get
I used to be a daily Emacs user (both at work and for personal projects). Since trying out Zed a little over a year ago, now I only use Emacs for Magit and the occasional IRC message through the built-in ERC client.
For VS Code users, there's actually a special feature where a subset of VS Code settings can be migrated to Zed settings. Cannot vouch for its stability, but the functionality is there.
Sorely missing a REPL for Lisp languages, but for statically-typed languages like Rust and TypeScript, Zed works pretty well. I appreciate that Zed works smoothly with Nix and Direnv, even through remote projects. I do wish the collaboration features would receive a bit more attention, though. It feels like that functionality has slowly been bitrotting, and it's always unfortunate when my friends on Linux cannot share their screen. Then there's other little regressions, like the audio bit depth being incorrect on MacBooks connected to external monitors -- they did fix this with the experimental Rodio backend, but I am not sure if that is stabilized yet.
However, AI-related features are fairly stable and it's amazing how far it has come in less than a year. That and things like the debugger UI.
> now I only use Emacs for Magit
have you tried lazygit? that's my go-to. Can even run in in a panel inside Zed.
As much as I love Zed, I am of the belief that VScode (and its derivatives) will remain the dominant build-your-own IDE for a really long time unless something like Zed can support web based extensions. I created a VScode extension for chip designers and I would love to port it to Zed, but I can't because it's a visualization extension with a custom webview.
I realize the irony here that Zed is fast because it's not web based, but I stand by my claim that being able to optionally display web UIs would be a really cool feature to have. It would open the door to a lot of extensions.
I am ahead of this curve, my trajectory was VSCode -> Zed -> Helix. Helix doubles my battery life from 4 to 8 hours compared to Zed. Zed is also on a bad trajectory IMO with the huge amount of updates being pushed constantly.
What is bad exactly about the trajectory? They are constantly adding features and none of feels like bloat, it just happens to be a much younger editor so iteration is rapid. I welcome it compared to the monstrosity that Jetbrains has become.
Yeah, it just reminds me of the early days of VS Code, where features were constantly added and it was fun at first, but they didn't stop and eventually it did feel more sluggish and bloated. Sometimes I'd have to spend time fixing or re-configuring something just because I opened the editor and the daily auto-update did something annoying. It might not happen with Zed, but it seems like a very similar approach to development.
Does Zed have something similar to VSCode Dev Containers ?
That is one of the few things keeping me going on VSCode.
For example, I frequently write Ansible playbooks. And with VSCode you can just fire up the Ansible-provided Dev Container with all the dependencies. Which means you don't have to clutter up your local system with them.
DevContainers support in coming in the following weeks, it's actually in beta
They seem to be working on it, but so far it's only available in preview builds? https://zed.dev/docs/dev-containers
Thanks for the link, looks promising, even if "no separate extensions" under Known Limitations for the initial release is perhaps a little unfortunate.
This falls under the "something similar" category but it's direnv support is great https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#direnv-integration
It isn't 1:1 since there probably won't be ansible provided configs, but I find writing nix devshells per project to be low effort and high reward. It'll only be a couple lines if all you need is a specific version of ansible
People want containers, not nix, ansible, or devenv
Why don't they do the real portable thing and use OCI?
[dead]
Zed is faster and less annoying than VSCode, I hope to switch to it permanently sooner or later.
Annoyingly the only hard blocker I have right now is lack of a call-graph navigation widget. In VSCode you can bring up an expandable tree of callers for a function. Somehow I am completely dependent on this tiny little feature for reading complex code!
The annoying thing is: "can't you just use an extension for this?" No, Zed extensions are much more constrained, Zed is not a web browser. And I like it this way! But... My widget...
I also have some performance issues with searching large remote repos, but I'm pretty confident that will get fixed.
Does "Find All References opt+shift+F12" function help mitigate this for you? It opens a buffer that you can use to navigate, and it's a built-in feature not an extension.
Or do you want a more graphical tree view?
Yeah need a tree view. Find all references, and references to references and so on.
I love Zed. I switched full time from Sublime about 8 months ago, using the preview builds, and every release has been solid. The UI design is perfect and the attention to detail is top notch - it feels comfortable, like a really ergonomic pair of slippers.
I switched to Zed from a tmux/nvim setup. I think Zed is the first editor I've tried that has a good enough Vim mode for me to switch and keep my built-up muscle memory.
I tried switching to Zed from vim / Idea Suite with IdeaVim, and I was disappointed that I could not just use my .vimrc, have they fixed it yet? It's currently the only blocker for me.
Zed is nice. I use neovim as my main code editor, but when I want a private respectful UI code editor for use AI then I go to Zed, also there is a vim mode that is not so bad.
Slashdotted :)
Here's a copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260105144155/https://tenthousa...
Working now? It's a 1cpu/1gb VPS – maybe too small to handle hn hugs.
The website repo is public, so it's also available on github: https://github.com/r4victor/tenthousandmeters/blob/master/we...
Weird it's a static site that still got hugged to death.
Something is going on, it's still timing out for me 20 hours later.
Confirmed it works from AWS but not from my residential ISP. IPv6 is not setup so perhaps too much traffic out of the CGNAT IP got us blocked.
I tried Zed for a few months but just couldn't get the JavaScript/Python syntax checking and Prettier type reformatting to work reliably. I would poke at it for a few hours, get it working and then mysteriously, a few days later, it'd stop working again.
I switched to VSCode now and whilst that piece of it seems to be much more reliable, I think overall I prefer the "feel" of Zed.
I've bookmarked the article to see if that helps me figure out how to make the settings stick.
I had the same issue a few months ago with TSX files and ended up going back to Sublime. I just found out (after reading your comment and doing some searching) that Zed has a setting to force Prettier globally.
Might be helpful:
I'll try that - thank you.
It's kind of funny, but I had the exact opposite experience. I couldn't get VSCode to reliably format Typescript/React code across several projects. Some would work and others would not. Sometimes it would format, but with wrong settings.
Frustrated, I switched to Zed and have not had that issue since.
Fascinating. Can you share your non-private Zed config? I still have mine from before the switch - I'd like to compare.
Zed is the only editor I've been using for maybe two months or so. But I find the extensions still sorely lacking and the API not extensive enough yet either. Still, I really love the design as well as how AI was builtin, and some more of the niche differences.
Few people seem to recall that MS is making tsc, the typescript compiler, faster, and as a result VSCode: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/typescript-native-...
If you are a TypeScript developer, this is typescript inference and compilation performance, not the compiled code at runtime.
I'm happily using Zed for a few weeks now. What prompted me to evaluate it was it being written (mostly) in rust, so expected better performance and stability and I got that (UI redraws are stupid fast compared to VSCode), but I wanted to migrate my agentic code flow too.
I was pleasantly surprised to basically configure-and-use the AI part: GitHub Copilot login and use, MCP servers, custom MCP servers. VSCode made this part really annoying: Copilot would blow up every now and then, MCP server auto-starting is not there yet and you need an extension (which works for 8 things out of 10), I haven't even tried adding a custom server because I was already annoyed. In Zed I just copy-pasted the suggested custom server start-up command into the small JSON array it presents to add a custom server, and it just started the MCP server in a custom thread, no fuss. Autostart works reliably every time the editor is re-opened.
I also got tired of the bloat and also prefer working from the terminal.
I'm building Fresh [0] [1] as an alternative to VSCode that runs in your terminal, with the main goal being ease-of-use out of the box (not a vi-clone modal editor), for example supports mouse, menu, command palette, etc out of the box. LSP as well. I'm focused on making it easy to use with minimum or zero configuration.
[0] https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh [1] https://sinelaw.github.io/fresh/
Just discovered Fresh recently. IT'S AMAZING. gives a real sublime+turbo pascal vibe. All shortcuts work perfectly. Thank you!
I really love Zed, but my only issue is the Emacs keybindings they ship doesn’t seem to work as well as the VSCode Emacs extensions. Hopefully they can fix this in newer updates.
This is high praise coming from an Emacs user :) I also formerly used Emacs with much joy, but I'm even happier with Zed now.
Zed has a lot of issues in flight; maybe these are useful to you? Here are the issues that have been filed under the label "area:parity/emacs". Some also have the label "state:needs repro" (needs reproduction). I wonder if any of them scratch your itch? Weighing in might help get your pain points resolved a bit faster?
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20...
Thank you! I’ll look into this!
I have a similar issue with vim support, they have built-in support which I really appreciate but don't currently support pointing to my own .vimrc. This is unfortunately a dealbreaker for me.
In the same boat, I try it every few months but give up because the emacs mode still isn't good enough. It's been getting slowly, slowly better though.
I like that this article paints VSCode as bogged down by too much AI tooling and the first thing I see on the Zed website is how create it is with Sonnet 4.5 and there’s a subscription plan for AI features.
I've been running "VSCode" via code-server as a self-hosted solution so I can fire up an IDE on any device including my iPad. I still use code-server, but increasingly when I'm at my Mac/Linux desktops (yes I have both!) I have been using Zed and it's gotten really good. The only major feature I miss is a visual Git Graph, but since I can still load code-server when I need that, no biggie.
I was genuinely surprised that I can use Zed to remote into my server and it works great with Ruby tooling like Solargraph LSP and Rubocop. Everything in the UI is refreshingly minimalist and quite snappy. Good stuff.
This weekend I gave Zed another chance, this time it didn’t make me uninstall it after one hour or so. It’s much more polished, there are a few wrinkles but overall it’s finally pleasant to use. I’m actually surprised how my muscle memory from VSCode is of use, kudos to devs for making the transition easier instead of reinventing the wheel. I hope to eventually get rid of VSCode, this AI everywhere at all costs is turning the editor (that wanted to be an IDE) into something (most?) users don’t want or need.
The only thing keeping me on VSCode these days is the remote SSH development. All of my development takes place on a beefy Linux workstation in my home office. When I am not at my desk (on couch, backyard, coffee shop, traveling) I still remote-in to that box for all of my development using Tailscale + VSCode SSH. Unfortunately the open flavors like vscodium do not support this. It's a "privileged" extension like Copilot.
VSCode has really become such a nightmare to use recently I am strongly looking for a way out. Recently I had some odd corruption take place where I had to blow away essenitally my entire VSCode install on my Mac. Going from zero to hero and bootstrapping back to good state should have been trivial with a single conf file that could be used to rehydrate state (like a lockfile for bundler or node) but - particularly with the remote ssh stuff - it becomes a mess. This extension is installed locally but not remotely, this is remote but not local, ... like dude figure it out and just make it all consistent.
I should expect this from Microsoft, though. I did this to myself.
Revisiting Zed... I am glad to see they have SSH support! Going to give it the old college try today. It's absolutely insane to me that they do not have a first-class Debian/Ubuntu apt repo, though. This has been an issue for quite some time.
My only complaint regarding the Zed editor is the inability to display two panes of the sidebar one below the other. Not only is it impossible to display them together, but switching between them requires clicking a tiny button in the status bar. To make matters worse, performing a search hides the symbols and the tree view.
So right now I'm sticking to Emacs.
I'm using vscode for couple of years now. I have disabled all AI related features with "chat.disableAIFeatures" option and it worked really well in my case. But I was convinced by this article to checkout zed mainly tempted by the promise of much better performance because it is written in native language instead of javascript. So to test it out I've opened https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/src/compil... file and zed after "ctrl + o" command frizzed. Also when scrolling this file in zed there is noticeable drop in FPS, where in vscode scroll with checker.ts file opened is very smooth. So I guess I'm staying with vscode :)
additionally there is currently ongoing effort to make main editor to be rendered with WebGPU instead of DOM nodes, which I'm really waiting to happen.
this is the issue that tracks that effort https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/221145
I switched to Helix and ZelliJ, ZelliJ really allows you to setup some IDE features and helix is like the surface layer of Vi.
Combined it becomes a very powerful setup!
Can you expand on how you use Zellij? I tried it and I understand you can use it for splits, and tabs similar to tmux. But I might revisit it if it allows an IDE like workflow with Helix.
Zed, VSCode, Antigravity, Sublime Text... They all have the same workflow. For writing the code by hand I recommend Helix, batteries included, fast and efficient. For AI-assisted development it doesn't matter and you'd have to switch the app every 4 months if you want to choose the best one.
For terminal text editing I've switched everything over to helix, highly recommended. Basically no config other than I'll change the theme.
Unfortunately I'm still trying to figure out my AI workflow. Right now it's a mix of Cursor, Claude Code, and JetBrains Rider. I mainly use Cursor for the heavy AI lifting and then switch to Rider and Claude Code for tweaking and debugging. If Cursor didn't completely suck at .NET debug, I might just be able to use it alone.
Zed is great and close to being my favorite text editor over Vim but there are constant rough edges.
I spent a fair bit of time this weekend tracking down bugs in a project caused by format on save in Zed occasionally deleting the first line of Python classes.
I turned off format on save and life is good now but data loss bugs like that are pretty annoying in a text editor.
For those looking for a better language server for python, I would recommend ruff. As of v0.4.5 it's completely written in rust, and much faster than pylance.
If you've got the ruff plugin installed it should use it by default. Should be able to use it in zed as well.
I tried switching to Zed, and was even able to get it use identical themes and key mappings as my preferred ones in VSC, but ultimately I switched back due to lack of plugins that I’ve really come to depend on, not to mention some key feature differences. I didn’t notice that much of a performance boost over VSC (given that I was on an M4 with 32GB of memory), so in the end, the switch wasn’t worth it. I really want to like Zed, so I will be sure to occasionally check out any new releases. By the way, I did indeed notice that Zed was a heck of a lot faster than VSC on an old Intel-based MBP!
So did I. I was just curious if it would really be noticeable faster and … wow yes it is. It’s really nice to use.
VSCode is still more polished and I’m going to keep it installed, but I’ve been using Zed for a month now and loving it.
I would love to switch but the battery draw on my mac is just too much! I like to move around to different places in my home as I work so being able to be on battery for a while is a must for me (not to mention that I do travel occasionally)
Hmm, I found Zed to consume battery less than VScode on my M1 MBP. It's ~100 vs ~200 12h power consumption on average according to Activity Monitor. Do you compare it to VSCode?
Yes VSCode uses far less power than Zed on my machine. I believe it is probably related to these issues:
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/21146 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/8043
I adore Zed, started on the day of the windows release and never looked back. My theme is perfect, the team works super hard, and I get a nice bit of satisfaction installing their frequent updates in barely over a second.
Others have echoed the same, but I also switched from VSCode to Zed, but then put in the effort to learn Neovim (Lazyvim) properly, and I haven't looked back. Writing code feels exciting again. I recommend something like https://github.com/adomokos/Vim-Katas to accelerate muscle memory. And also Vimium in the browser is great.
I haven't tried zed and vscode for a while, but I didn't like the amount of distractions from vscode, such as info about methods.
The problem I had with zed when I tried it is that I'm on linux with kde and zed had a hamburger menu on linux, whereas on Mac it has a proper application menu. It also didn't have keyboard shortcuts for menus that I expected, e.g. Alt-f to open file menu. This is a Windows specific convention that many applications bring to linux too. I still prefer Sublime Text for its user interface.
I really love Zed bc it’s fast and doesn’t try to run the code for you. I really dislike the “play” feature of IDEs. I learned Java in eclipse and for the linear time don’t know how to run it from the terminal. It has all the editing and highlighting features of a full ide but makes you run it from the terminal. And if you have Zellij or another muxer set up, it runs it in the Zed terminal automatically.
I'm still waiting to evaluate Zed because I work with/on my programming language which has LSP Semantic Highlighting, but Zed doesn't https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/39539 once it's merged I'll give it a go because it looks like a modern Sublime Text (which I still use). I just wish they would focus on basic editor features instead of adding AI and other non-related features.
I switched from Sublime Text (still keep for navigating huge files).
But I love the thought put into Zed and it looks great (this is important to me).
I don't use their AI features but it does come in handy when I need an quick alternate answer or perspective. I use Claude Code in a separate terminal.
> With Python, it wasn't so smooth, and I had to spent half a day to get it working. Next is boring details that I wish I knew from the start.
that's not unusual for python. in fact, that is why I avoid python.
One of my favorite features with zed is the really nice keyboard and window management shortcuts. I can have my terminal just be another tab, easily switch between em and the file explorer
But to the authors note, one might find a single behavior in zed really annoying. Mine is how zed appends a new line at the end of files on save. Used to be able to disable this in settings but an update broke that long ago. Maybe some can tell me its fixed but seems like I’ll need to journey down git hub issue fix but did not find one while back.
Zed feels way snappier to me than VSCode and I love the vim mode too.
Also made the same switch and very happy. Sometimes Zed (I guess due to claude code?) would hog my CPU, but that's fine by me. Works very well. Had one crash so far due to CC.
I am not much of a programmer only fool around a bit for fun and occasional profit. I find Helix to be very good for coding. Compared to Neovim, I could get LSPs going for go, c without any effort. Only thing is I haven't figured out much of debugging which I guess is must have for a serious coder. My favorite is printf and is enough for me across go, awk, c , Excel VBA macros and JS!
Does anyone else have issues wrapping their head around the UI and configuration of VSCode? Or is this a symptom of my losing touch with how IDEs work vs. my old habit of solo coding in Vim and running scripts?
Everything is monocolored, everything feels like it's an add-on, and settings are in weird different places rendered as json or a web page feel.
Last time I used a "real" IDE was 2008, so I may be the problem here.
You can change the layout and theme so it makes sense for you. There are buttons in the title bar and you can drag panels around at will
Does Zed still have an unremovable login button right in the window title? It’s been a constant eyesore for me last time I’ve tried it.
Huh, I've been using Zed for awhile now and never even noticed it until you mentioned it. Fortunately there's a setting to remove it.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed
Zed also pushed their AI features hard though. When it first came out it was like "your editor, but Rust / not Electron based, so fast", but two years or so ago they were pivoting hard to being an AI editor. Nowadays, thankfully, it's there but it's not intrusive.
The author also mentions missing the sidebar with files but it's one of the icons at the bottom left.
You can disable all ai features with "disable_ai": true in the config.
I think they added that due to some backlash... or I'm confusing this with Warp, the (also Rust based) superfast terminal application that first required a login, then pushed AI stuff.
No you were right the first time- that was Zed. I think Warp's core user base are AI users and classically low/non-terminal users.
Visual Studio Code has a similar global AI opt out option.
An easy switch for an individual, for an organization the ecosystem is typically too much to give up. Hopefully this changes in a few years.
Organizations are composed of individuals, if your organization is tied to a specific IDE to be able to function, that seems like a huge problem.
Ecosystem.
If your organization's "ecosystem" is tied to a specific editor, your organization has major issues.
Do some companies/orgs mandate which editor to use? Is this usually big companies? Which countries?
I want to switch to Zed from JetBrains but I am too used to [1] and it seems no other editor besides JetBrains IDEs seem too interested in implementing it the way JetBrains does.
1 - https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7721
JetBrains is well thought out in terms of capabilities.
There are some core features that work so much better out of the box than with the best plugins in others.
Local History (or even for a selection) with search, stacked clipboard, recent locations, how good search is in general (text, symbols, actions etc), how in-modal buffers work, debugging experience, version control merging experience, etc etc
Old now fixed complaints:
- making plugins used to be awful
- used to have no lsp support
(Was pleasantly surprised when I built ron-lsp [1] plugin)
Long standing complaints:
- it's heavy and slow
- has weird failure modes
All that being said, still my main IDE, with neovim (well configured) used frequently.
---
[1]: https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/ron-lsp/tree/main/jetbrains-...
Yep, when these new editors-wanna-be ide will focus on delivering JetBrains level debugger, global search (really global through files, actions, whatever you can imagine) then maybe I will switch.
It amazes me they all put debugging as a second class citizen. Are these people the ones who debug with printfs?
Golly
I have been using Emacs since 1989. I have seen so many editors come and go, and Emacs was never the best, but it was always good. And it has stuck to its (very broad) knitting.
There are AI tools I can incorporate into Emacs, and one day I might. But I have so much choice, it gets distressing
Articles like this remind me why I keep loyal....
I'd love to read articles like "I didn't switch editors because mine is perfect, neovim btw"
I tried moving from Cursor to Zed but the LLM integration still seems very early. Cursor is very far ahead in terms of DX and the various models/tokens you get is very reasonable price wise. Zed would be a good half-way point for the people using terminal LLM CLIs and prefer the more structured approach rather than a deep IDE integration.
I just love how Zed is used to develop Zed. For this reason I'm thinking it could emerge as the Rust editor of choice.
I also switched my editor to Zed recently, from Cursor, and brought my custom theme along too: https://zed-themes.com/themes/ldw3jOWS7edS-gifHtZg9?name=Dar...
i never understood why people like vscode. visual studio used to be great back in the day because it was really thoughtfully designed and everything was nicely integrated. vscode always felt like a hodgepodge of random features and extensions that don't really fit together all that well at all.
If you're a typescript developer the VS Code experience is great. It also has a lot of useful plugins. For other languages JetBrains products are mostly still better.
Switched to Zed from Webstorm. Only issue is Zed has no vertical tab support. Did create a PR but it got rejected as it does not align with their milestones. Well, using it by monkeypatching the dev build after every upstream sync.
I must admit I'm rather ignorant of the vertical tab workflow. I'm curious: when did it click for you? Was VS Code your gateway drug? A web browser?
This is the first time I've seen someone talk about vertical tabs in an editor, but I used to make fun of people using vertical tabs in browsers until I tried it and got used to it, so maybe I should try vertical editor tabs...
Zed is great and lightweight, one thing that stops me from it becoming my daily driver is the weak git integration (specifically, the lack of a history tree). From what I understand, eventually those features will get there.
Before getting into Zed, I had fallen in love with Helix. that one doesn't even have plugins xD Getting used to splitting my Wezterm and launching lazygit on a second pane kind of made me forget about my dependence on JetBrains git integration prior to helix :P
I find Zed's inline git diff confusing. I want a side-by-side comparison of the entire file. That's currently a dealbreaker for me.
same for me. i can not understand zed git diff
same here. pycharm is still miles ahead in this regard. I use lazygit which plugs the holes (though pycharm is still the best that I have used).
Just tried this out for the first time and found their implementation of the "Outline Panel" (Ctrl+Shift+B) to be very useful, at least for the C++ code base I tried it with.
To do this, I had to switch to Rust first which means I had to change my entire career. I love to switch to linux desktop now but before that I'm gonna need to clear some time. Which probably means I have to retire?
NeoVim, Yazi, and Tmux are my go-to tools. When I need AI and Agents, I create multiple instances of Claude Code or Codex. However, I don’t let them interfere with my workflow if I don’t need them.
I switched from VSCode back to Sublime Text lol. If I want AI involved I use claude-code or other cli in a terminal. Its been nicer and less distracting
Sadly momentum scrolling doesn't work on Zed for Linux. This is a big reason I haven't jumped ship.
It's also a reason I still use Firefox based browsers instead of chromium based browsers.
Vs code became unusable on a not so big monorepo on a MacBook Pro M4, which is concerning. Zed has been much smoother, even there are a couple of extensions or features that I miss.
Sounds like an extension issue. Why would the codebase size matter otherwise.
VSCode's plugin architecture is a security nightmare and an extremely juicy target for supply chain attacks.
Does Zed address this in any meaningful way?
I also recently made the jump from VSCode to Zed on my personal laptop. I've never thought VSCode to be slow, but I have appreciated the responsiveness of Zed.
vscode's become a laggy mess (admittedly only when i have 2 games open in the background, but c'mon!). i'll give zed a try.
I like zed. I just wish they’d support running multiple agents at once + chat history. If they did, I’d pay for zed just to support them.
I use Zed only for million line json log dumps. Everything else stuggles to scroll or ctrl+f but those are instant in Zed.
This is the same reason I switched to it. It’s just lightweight and fast, I don’t see why a text editor should not be like this
I love the minimalism and speed of Zed. The Zed Agent is exceptional!
It doesn't easily allow for parallel work like Claude Code in a Terminal but for a single session it is just as good plus it makes it really easy to switch between models. I also find it super useful when I'm working on our large monorepo, the minimal and fast ui makes it super easy to pull in the right context of folders, files, snippets etc to help the Agent.
This yeah I'm switching from JetBrains to Zed after being with them nearly 10 years now. I just can't justify my yearly subscription now that they've bundled AI that I can't justify paying for if I can just use Claude Code directly. At least Zed has richer Claude Code integration than JetBrains. If I even bother to renew it will be only if they announce something worth my while.
Zed is nice. When I need AI features I use it. Otherwise I am using Neovim.
I am finding that AI assisted coding is greatly reducing my interest and reliance on "IDE" type features.
A back and forth "conversation" with Gemini with extreme amounts of copying/pasting/executing in Geany (a relatively simple editor) is now faster than whatever I was trying to do before, hopping between emacs and vim and IDES, etc.
I wish AI had more access IDE-type features such as renaming or moving methods to another class. Claude often makes mistakes here because it doesn't have all the fancy tooling and indexing that IntelliJ has.
Claude recently got LSP plugins
Ah, thank you. I missed this over Christmas.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355165
I just don't turn on those features Thanks for making me look! You can actually also `Disable AI` altogether!
I switched from VSCode to Zed and clicked the "disable AI" button so gd fast. Bliss.
Here's a good, 1.5 year old podcast interview with the Zed founder, https://shows.acast.com/software-unscripted/episodes/664fde4....
For such an incomplete product, Zed sure is popular among devs. I guess they love to waste time working with a tool missing key features. I can forgive all that but Zed has one of the worst UIs I’ve experienced in a long time.
What specifically are you missing from Zed? (not a Zed user but curious to know)
No CMake support (VSCode, emacs, nvim all have it).
I have switched to terminal
Do you mean a terminal-based editor, like emacs, vim, neovim, or helix? (I quite like the latter, after having used all the former to some degree.)
Or do you mean line-editors? They have gotten impressively good. See rustyline (based on linenoise) and reedline (not a typo; developed by the Nushell team) for example. Way better than one might expect!
[1]: https://github.com/kkawakam/rustyline
[2]: https://github.com/antirez/linenoise
[3]: https://github.com/nushell/reedline
Sorry to disappoint. But purely codex and claude code
am I the only one who is just fine with neovim?
I love it. I have 40 files open in it right now - most of them .c source files with LSP and Treesitter running and it uses 250MB of RAM. Everything works instantly, Telescope is imo the new standard for file navigation (and navigation in general: grep, symbols even neovim shortcuts). Git integration is fantastic as well.
I have spent some time configuring it and probably will spend more when I start including more languages but imo it's worth it. You can configure everything but you can also find very nice defaults by running Kickstarter (or some heavier neovim "distro").
Microsoft has done great work with LSPs - I can now get great navigation/autocompletion/formatting/inline errors/warning combined with neovim navigation, light weight and fantastic tools/extensions.
One thing I haven't integrated yet is a debugger (gdb from the terminal is good enough for me), maybe that's something people are missing in neovim?
I use Astronvim and it has a not-so-bad debugger support, when it works...
I switched Zed to neovim, I had a blast on speed and productivity.
I'm a very early Zed adopter, and have gotten much more confident in it in the last 6 months mainly because of their AI plans. Note that my strongly positive opinion on this actually has very little to due with the _utility_ of their ai functionality, but rather in that it appears to be a sustainable funding model.
My biggest worry with Zed since I started using it (again, early adopter) was that it would eventually need to be monetized, and likely enshittified. I'm not at all a fan of subscription software, but probably would've happily handed over $20-$50 for a one time purchase (or, maybe $20 for a 1 time purchase of a major version, with another $20 at least 3+ years out or something).
In the last year, Zed has become a sort of AI reseller. You can buy their 'pro' plan, get so many openai/anthropic/gemini tokens, and set a max budget.
For me, this is probably as good of a business model gets in terms of staving off enshittiffication. Zed can happily take a cut, I can preview a bunch of different services, and if you don't care about ai at all, well the core editor is still free. My only worry about this model is that I think I'd have a hard time getting my employer to pay for a Zed pro plan over copilot, so I think they may have trouble monetizing enterprise users with this plan.
In any case, seeing an obvious/relatively innocuous method of sustainable dev has been a tremendous relief to me (and I'm sure the Zed devs as well).
Its biggest remaining flaws IMO remain its small extension ecosystem which hopefully is simply a matter of momentum. I'm sure they could do something like provide richer examples of how to port an extension from vscode, so it's not an intractable problem.
I also continue to have concerns re: the security of their chat/cooperative editing system as it's currently difficult (impossible?) to self host, but perhaps that will also be improved.
Same. I did long time ago and won’t go back.
What country is Zed based in?
Zed is basically the new Sublime.
Sublime is the new Sublime. It's still just as great as it ever was.
do you use ANY AI tools like Claude Code etc? if not, why not?
Microsoft trying to push copilot on me is just the kind of thing that would drive me to investigate alternatives. This is the same kind of annoying as all those cookie pop-ups which more and more often lead me to think "fuck it, I'm not actually that interested in this content" and close the browser.
I wish Microsoft would make software that just respects that I do not want to use copilot rather than enshittifying VSCode.
Good luck. It cannot even preserve unsaved files across restarts. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/15098
Agents are going to kill IDEs. A good editor is all you need.
Don’t tell bro about SublimeText
me 2 brother
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css syntax highlighting has been broken in vs code for years now.
how in the world is this possible in THE web dev editor?
How is it broken? I'm looking at it working fine right now.
Not GP, but he's absolutely right, it's been pissing me off for years now. Only thing I can remember off the top of my head is nested selectors still not highlighting properly. They partially fixed this a few months ago but that's it. I guess we're all waiting on GHCP to prioritize and fix it now?
nested is the main one, however i remember cases where a rule couldn't be parsed and the rest of the file went fuckidy
this is pathetic, and really shows how much of a shitter css tooling currently resides in
Insert obnoxious tailwind comment
I feel bad about this comment as of today's news. I love tailwind and feel like it has supercharged my ability to be productive with CSS, but recognize that it can be overprescribed.
Not OP but I remember working on a team that just put up with nonhighlighted nonintelligent CSS because it was embedded in a handlebars template. Of course there is an extension that's supposed to fix this but it was flaky and broke often. An easy fix was to move CSS to a separate file for import but that was a big change for these guys.
Obligatory Zed takes money from bigots: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
Thanks for pointing it out. Ignore the vice signalers.
Nice. Just signed up for their pro plan.
I'd love to try Zed, but it's unusable on MacOS (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/20806 seems to be the issue).
If that ever gets fixed then I'd look at replacing Sublime (which is still my go-to for quick editing) and then see if it can handle more advanced coding (which one the rotating list of various vscode forks handle today)
So, it's been one year since I use Zed daily, and I didn't encounter this issue, or any other issue for instance, everything is smooth and I never encountered a failure or a crash.
I work on large (everything is relative, though) monorepos, that would probably qualify for this limit, and I remember already did the kind of "workaround" discussed in this issue years ago on this device. I think it's hard to blame the software when the default file limit is so low depending on the languages you work with.
Anyway, if you would encounter this problem, you would have already encountered it with other tools, or else this is fine.
I use other tools (sublime, vscode, cursor, antigravity, emacs) none have run into this out of the box.
Have you tried BBEdit recently? It's incredibly configurable, AI features are entirely opt-in, and it supports LSPs now. It's my go-to for basically all text editing these days.
My daily driver is JetBrains. I never liked VS Code, or rather VS Codium. I use it as text editor and only when i want to open a directory i do not care about(ie. some old or foreign code) or really need syntax highlighting. I had high hopes for Zed, despite that built-in AI crap, but after I tried it I still could not configure my syntax highlighting theme, like i can in jetbrains, and for some reason going to definitions in std libraries does not work(i tested with odin). I am not fan of JetBrains and their pricing policies or their new ui changes. So i am working on my own editor/ide right now and I just wanted to mention that zed was the final nudge for me to do it.