I switched from VSCode to Zed • Hacker News Board

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#101

Post by Cthulhu_ » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#102

Post by Cthulhu_ » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

adonese wrote: post #93

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 specif…

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#103

Post by dleslie » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #57

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 hap…

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#104

Post by honeycrispy » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #101

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#105

Post by Cthulhu_ » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

throwfaraway135 wrote: post #70

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

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#106

Post by Cthulhu_ » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

honeycrispy wrote: post #104

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #101

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#107

Post by jrm4 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#108

Post by jeorb » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:11 PM UTC

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#109

Post by jasonjmcghee » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #106

honeycrispy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#110

Post by jasonjmcghee » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

Matl wrote: post #60

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.

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[1]: https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/ron-lsp/tree/main/jetbrains-...