Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor • Hacker News Board

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#131

Post by SafeDusk » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

slowmovintarget wrote: post #103

SafeDusk wrote: post #84

Tried Zed and Cursor, but they always felt too magical to me. I ended up building a minimal agent framework that only uses seven tools (even for code edits): read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, and think. These simple, composable tools can be utilized well enough by increasingly powerful LLM(s), especially Gemini 2.5 pro to achieve most tasks in a consistent, understandable way. More importantly - I can just swi…

Sounds similar to gptel[1] for Emacs. It provides a solid foundation for more complex compositions like gptel-aibo[2] or mcp.el [3]. Yours is the full agent, though... Nice. [1] https://github.com/karthink/gptel [2] https://github.com/dolmens/gptel-aibo [3] https://github.com/lizqwerscott/mcp.el

For sure! I'm surprised myself how far one can get with just seven tools: read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, and think.

It's like lisp's original seven operators: quote, atom, eq, car, cdr, cons and cond.

And I still can't stop smiling just watching the agent go full turbo mode when I disable the `ask` tool.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#132

Post by rckt » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

I'm using it without any AI stuff, just turned everything off. I like it. But in day-to-day usage I don't really see any difference with VSCode. And I'm using it out of pure curiosity and interest to try something new.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#133

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

LeafItAlone wrote: post #46

A bit off topic: For work I mostly develop on Python and Typescript. I’ve been using PyCharm Professional for over a decade (after an even longer time with emacs). I keep trying to switch to vscode, Cursor, etc. as they seem to be well liked by their users. Recently I’ve also tried Zed. But the Jetbrains suite of tools for refactoring, debugging, and general “intelligence” keep me going back. I know I’m not the only…

[deleted]

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#134

Post by lemontheme » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:48 PM UTC

divan wrote: post #22

Meanwhile I'm checking Helix editor every 6 month to see if authors became any less hostile to the idea of thinking about considering of starting thinking about potentially adding copilot support. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037

Interestingly enough, this is exactly why I've started using Zed – while simultaneously eagerly waiting for Helix PR #8675 (Steel plugin system) to get merged. It's not far off, but then again, many Helix PRs seem that way, only to stay in limbo for months if not years.

These last two months I've been trialing both Neovim and Zed alongside Helix. I know I should probably just use Neovim since, once set up properly, it can do anything and everything. But configuring it has brought little joy. And once set up to do the same as Helix out of the box, it's noticeably slower.

Zed is the first editor I've tried that actually feels as fast as Helix while also offering AI tooling. I like how integrated everything is. The inline assistant uses context from the chat assistant. Code blocks are easy to copy from the chat panel to a buffer. The changes made by the coding agent can be individually reviewed and accepted or rejected. It's a lot of small details done right that add up to a tool that I'm genuinely becoming confident about using.

Also, there's a Helix keymap, although it doesn't seem as complete as the Vim keymap, which is what I've been using.

Still, I hope there will come a time when Helix users can have more than just Helix + Aider, because I prefer my editor inside a terminal (Helix) rather than my terminal inside an editor (Zed).

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#135

Post by sashank_1509 » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

Here’s what I want, a keyboard only code editor, (ideally with all the vim keybindings and features) that also has in built lsp for popular languages like C, C++, Go and just works out of the box (even better if it has good code completion with copilot or something similar). I can’t seem to get this anywhere. I’m still sticking with neovim for now but it’s code complete doesn’t work well that I’ve turned it off and I have to maintain its config every few months.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#136

Post by leonidasv » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

LeafItAlone wrote: post #46

A bit off topic: For work I mostly develop on Python and Typescript. I’ve been using PyCharm Professional for over a decade (after an even longer time with emacs). I keep trying to switch to vscode, Cursor, etc. as they seem to be well liked by their users. Recently I’ve also tried Zed. But the Jetbrains suite of tools for refactoring, debugging, and general “intelligence” keep me going back. I know I’m not the only…

Not exactly answering your question, but as a user of JetBrains IDEs the Windsurf Plugin with Cascade[0] for JB IDEs is the best solution I've found so far to get a good agentic AI integration without giving up JetBrains goodies.

[0] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/20540-windsurf-plugin-f...

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#137

Post by duped » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

samtheprogram wrote: post #111

duped wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but no other application or editor has this problem. If all other apps work but Zed doesn't then it sounds like a Zed has an issue. EDIT: just gave it a shot and I get "unsupported GPU" as an error, informing me that my GPU needs Vulkan support. Their detection must be wrong because this is not true. And like I said, other applications don't have this problem.

You should report an issue with your specs, not just say “other applications don’t have this problem” — especially as a Linux user. For one, not all applications are GPU accelerated. Two, their UX may need to be improved for a specific hardware configuration. I have used Zed with good performance on Intel dGPU, AMD dGPU, and Intel iGPU without issue — my guess is a missing dependency?

Meh, it's not worth the trouble. I don't care enough about using Zed to fix their Linux distribution problems or debug something for them. This isn't some volunteer backed FOSS project where they get a free pass or free QA work from me.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#138

Post by curt15 » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

duped wrote: post #54

volkk wrote: post #23

Zed is exactly how software should be made. Granted, I don't agree with all of their UX decisions (i think the AI panel is really bad compared to Cursor's), but good lord is the thing fast. These guys are the real deal. They built a rendering system (GPUI) in Rust before building Zed on top of it, and so it is one of the fastest (if not the fastest) pieces of software that resides on my computer. I can't wait until G…

Is it only fast on MacOS? I tried it on Linux and it was unusably slow. Seconds per frame instead of frames per second.

Linux user here. I find Zed lightning fast compared to VSCode.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#139

Post by ksec » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

volkk wrote: post #23

Zed is exactly how software should be made. Granted, I don't agree with all of their UX decisions (i think the AI panel is really bad compared to Cursor's), but good lord is the thing fast. These guys are the real deal. They built a rendering system (GPUI) in Rust before building Zed on top of it, and so it is one of the fastest (if not the fastest) pieces of software that resides on my computer. I can't wait until G…

I am thinking if Firefox could adopt any of these.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#140

Post by rtfeldman » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:52 PM UTC

freehorse wrote: post #107

I tried the agent mode with sonnet 3.7 (not the thinking one). When it started trying to create a file, it kept getting a "Failed to connect to API: 400 Bad Request" error. After a few attempts to create files, it "touch"ed a file and tried to edit this, which also failed. It checked permissions with "ls -la", then it tried to "cat" the code into it but failed because of syntax errors (to do with quoting). Then it tr…

Zed employee here - that sounds like a bug, sorry about that!

If you're okay sharing the conversation with us, would you mind pressing the thumbs-down button at the bottom of the thread so that we can see what input led to the 400?

(We can't see the contents of the thread unless you opt into sharing it with the thumbs-down button.)