Zed is now available on Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#101

Post by adastra22 » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 4:04 AM UTC

poly2it wrote: post #41

breadwinner wrote: post #29

I watched the video on the home page and thought it is weird that they spend an inordinate amount of time on frame rate. Who picks an editor based on frame rate? If you want to talk about perf in the context of a text editor show me how big of a file you can load--especially if the file has no line breaks. Emacs has trouble here. If you load a minified js file it slows to a crawl especially if syntax highlighting is…

It's not just frame rate, but also input delay. If you're using Visual Studio Code, you might be used to waiting 100 ms for a character you typed to appear. My personal workflow is based on Kitty and Neovim, which I've configured so that it can launch within 20 ms. Working without any input delay allows me to explore and edit projects at typing speed. As such, even tiny delays really bother me and make me lose my flo…

You literally can’t tell the difference in a 20ms delay. That is an order of magnitude lower than the neural feedback loop latency. You may think that you can, but studies don’t back this up.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#102

Post by linhns » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 4:10 AM UTC

vietvu wrote: post #99

I didn't know bundling app for the most popular OS is that hard.

Not the most popular for programmers

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#103

Post by brundolf » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 4:12 AM UTC

timfsu wrote: post #31

Unfortunately, I tried to use zed as my daily driver, but the typescript experience was subpar. While the editor itself was snappy, LSP actions like "jump to declaration" were incredibly slow on our codebase compared to VS Code / Cursor.

I had the same experience and the same outcome. Zed was super fast for editing but slow for rich features, which on the net slowed me down compared with VSCode

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#104

Post by 3836293648 » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 4:12 AM UTC

Rohansi wrote: post #13

zamadatix wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size on disk is about 64x less relevant than size in RAM for me. To give Zed some credit in this area, it's statically linked and the Linux binary is half the size as the Windows one.

What could they be statically linking to have a 400MB executable?

A tonne of treesitter grammars

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#105

Post by brundolf » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 4:14 AM UTC

0x696C6961 wrote: post #49

timfsu wrote: post #31

Unfortunately, I tried to use zed as my daily driver, but the typescript experience was subpar. While the editor itself was snappy, LSP actions like "jump to declaration" were incredibly slow on our codebase compared to VS Code / Cursor.

That doesn't make sense, they both use tsserver under the hood.

I've heard that VSCode gets some special treatment and integrations with the typescript server that go deeper than normal LSP

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#106

Post by nextaccountic » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 4:14 AM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #96

zamadatix wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size on disk is about 64x less relevant than size in RAM for me. To give Zed some credit in this area, it's statically linked and the Linux binary is half the size as the Windows one.

The OS loads the entire binary into RAM.

It loads on demand, and pages you don't use don't need to be on RAM

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#107

Post by smusamashah » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 4:17 AM UTC

I am using nightly on Windows and startup time is very slow. It can take 10 seconds to boot up. To quickly edit random files, I would open notepad++ or simple notepad instead, which isn't what I expected from Zed.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#108

Post by ergocoder » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 4:21 AM UTC

It's a different tier of software engineers to be able to write a text editor, let alone the fastest one...

I worked at multiple FAANGs and can't see me or any of my colleagues capable of doing this.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#109

Post by Frannky » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 4:36 AM UTC

Zed is awesome. It does everything I need. I easily find everything I'm looking for. It's fast, and I can use forked CLI terminals from the IDE via ACP mode. This means Cerebras and Qwen code 480b for super fast and cheap incredibly smart CLI agents.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#110

Post by eviks » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 4:36 AM UTC

waterTanuki wrote: post #57

eviks wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its binary is half a gig in size, so just like a browser, nothing fresh about that.

considering how cheap storage is nowadays nitpicking about binary size is a very weird take. Are you editing code on an esp32?

Why don't you actually do some considering how mistaken this superficial dismissal is: storage is not cheap where it matters - for example, your laptop's main drive. It doesn't help you that an external hard drive can be purchased cheaply since you won't be able conveniently upgrade your main mobile system. Also, the size of various used content (games/photos /videos) has increased a lot, leaving constrains on storage in place despite the price drop.