I switched from VSCode to Zed • Hacker News Board

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#11

Post by Neywiny » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

Surac wrote: post #6

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 applicati…

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

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#12

Post by koito17 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#13

Post by bestest » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#14

Post by gdotdesign » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#15

Post by drcongo » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#16

Post by traceroute66 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#17

Post by jonkoops » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

replete wrote: post #4

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#18

Post by webdevver » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

Surac wrote: post #6

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 applicati…

i think i might be brain damaged because i actually like the eclipse ides they put out, atleast the stm32 one

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#19

Post by veidr » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

julik wrote: post #8

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?

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#20

Post by ddoolin » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

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.