Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

#111

Post by unshavedyak » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:05 PM UTC

I want to try Zed but the Helix mode seems quite young. Vim mode sounds good, but i just can't move away from Helix mode. (oh and of course, my own modifications to Helix's input config)

My difficulty in finding editors that fit my desired input scheme kinda reminds me of the old pre-LSP days. Where you'd chose an editor based on it's language features. I wonder if we need some sort of common editor interface to allow these sort of text editing primitives to work in new editors, as it seems to be considerable friction.

Re: Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

#112

Post by charcircuit » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:07 PM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #90

ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote: post #60

I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limited understanding, none of the existing alternatives offer anything (and often misses at least something) truly innovative or anything else that VSCode extension wouldn't solve. On VSCode I have about 15 different profiles setup, each with different settings and…

I am sure some would have said the same about why would anyone switch to using Linux when there was Microsoft Windows.

Especially now that Windows has WSL. You can even open GUI Linux apps just as if they were regular apps.

Re: Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

#113

Post by IshKebab » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

pimeys wrote: post #68

ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote: post #60

I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limited understanding, none of the existing alternatives offer anything (and often misses at least something) truly innovative or anything else that VSCode extension wouldn't solve. On VSCode I have about 15 different profiles setup, each with different settings and…

It's really interesting point of view. I'm one of those people who avoid using VSCode at any cost. It's slow, it's bloated, the UI is not great, and it's slowly being locked down by Microsoft. If Zed would not exist, I would be using helix, neovim, or emacs as I did before.

VSCode is actually not slow. The problem is to make it useful you need to add quite a few extensions, and those can be slow. That itself wouldn't be too bad but VSCode doesn't expose any information about what is causing the slowness. You end up with "VSCode is slow and it could be due to any one of the dozen extensions I have installed", which effectively means that VSCode is slow.

It remains to be seen if Zed can avoid that though.

Re: Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

#114

Post by IshKebab » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

mikeocool wrote: post #78

ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote: post #60

I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limited understanding, none of the existing alternatives offer anything (and often misses at least something) truly innovative or anything else that VSCode extension wouldn't solve. On VSCode I have about 15 different profiles setup, each with different settings and…

Zed's main selling point over VSCode for me is the lack of a slight delay between when I press a key and when the character appears. VSCode has always felt ever so slightly sluggish to me, and I find it maddening as I type.

Weird, I tried it recently and found it actually a bit laggier than VSCode. The rendering is much worse quality too.

Are you using Vim mode or something like that?

Re: Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

#115

Post by stuaxo » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote: post #60

I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limited understanding, none of the existing alternatives offer anything (and often misses at least something) truly innovative or anything else that VSCode extension wouldn't solve. On VSCode I have about 15 different profiles setup, each with different settings and…

I use zed when I need to quickly edit something, it pops up so fast- everything else feels sluggish.

Re: Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

#116

Post by diabllicseagull » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

mikeocool wrote: post #78

ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote: post #60

I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limited understanding, none of the existing alternatives offer anything (and often misses at least something) truly innovative or anything else that VSCode extension wouldn't solve. On VSCode I have about 15 different profiles setup, each with different settings and…

Zed's main selling point over VSCode for me is the lack of a slight delay between when I press a key and when the character appears. VSCode has always felt ever so slightly sluggish to me, and I find it maddening as I type.

vscode started to intermittently freeze my whole desktop on arch linux recently. I rage deleted it. imho, it’s a valid compromise to choose a snappy lightweight editor over vscode with all available extensions.

sadly it reminds me of how visual studio used to be and and how much of a sluggish mess it is today. I don’t think the community can fix it either. it’s an uphill battle when MS is known to lose care as soon as they reach a critical mass of users.

Re: Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

#117

Post by srid » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

Note: if you use SSH-based remote development, this doesn't work.

https://x.com/sridca/status/1963271904384401886

Re: Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

#118

Post by ilc » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

pjerem wrote: post #58

ar_lan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deal breaker for me was when they introduced support for the "delete" key. A real developer should get it right the first time.

IMHO, the delete key can still be useful for other developers "contributions".

git revert works better ;)

Re: Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

#119

Post by conartist6 » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

seanssel wrote: post #75

kenhwang wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top of my head switching between IntelliJ and Zed: - Git UI is extremely barebones with no support for other VCS - No merge tool or side-by-side diffs - Configuration is all JSON - Would be nice having a full file tree for the search editor instead of just the list; having the functionality split between a tab and the outline panel is quite clunky. - Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standa…

The IntelliJ 3-way mergetool/diff viewer is best in class. I haven't found anything else that touches it.

Me either. I thought by now it would be standard UX everywhere, but that is very much not so.

Re: Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

#120

Post by unshavedyak » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

dcre wrote: post #100

peterson_lock wrote: post #39

> Credit balance is too low I have a subscription to Claude. What gives?

When you run Claude Code it lets you pick between API key and Claude subscription login. It sounds like it found an API key in your env and is trying to use that. You may have to find a way to trigger a login to get you into your subscription account.

In the terminal based Claude Code, use /logout and /login to switch billing iirc.