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Zed is now available on Windows

zed.dev

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Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk about subpixel font rendering, but font rendering on Linux looks massively better after a patch last week: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992#issuecomme...

I'm glad there's finally some progress in that direction. If they actually implement subpixel RGB anti-aliasing, it would definitely be worth considering as an alternative. It's been surprising to see so many people praise Zed when its text rendering (of all things) has been in such a state for so long.

Tbh though, is subpixel text rendering really all that important anymore when high resolution monitors are common now and low-dpi is the exception?

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#152
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?

I keep hearing this since I've got my first Pentium 1 PC, that storage is cheap.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does having a DevContainer get you? I’m all for documenting every bit of my setup, but beyond that…

I use a devcontainer to run Claude Code on a sandbox with all tools and services installed. That way I can run YOLO mode with some safety.

That's quite unnecessary. You could just mount "all tools and services" from your base system without the complicated Dockerfile: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/ai-agent-sandbox/

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could, ya, but I'd be pretty impressed and sad if Rust didn't have really good JSON parsers/serializers by now.

What do you mean? It has exceptionally good crates for that, and has for more than a decade. Is there something you feel is missing?

Well exactly, I'm pretty sure that's what the GP is getting at — it would be a surprise if Rust didn't have good JSON support. Which it does. So it's unlikely to be the bottleneck.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#155
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.

Electron compiles NodeJS with v8's pointer compression which leads to an up to 50% decrease in memory usage, and might speed it up too.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#156
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's see.

https://web-backend.simula.no/sites/default/files/publicatio...

> At the most sensitive, our findings reveal that some perceive delays below 40 ms. However, the median threshold suggests that motorvisual delays are more likely than not to go undetected below 51-90 ms.

By this study's numbers, 20ms is somewhat below the lower limit of ~40ms, but not too far below. 100ms would be easily perceivable - though, based on the other replies, it seems that VS Code does not actually have that much latency.

Don't confuse this with human reaction time, which is indeed an order of magnitude higher, at over 200ms. For one thing, reaction time is based on unpredictable events, whereas the appearance of keystrokes is highly predictable. It's based on the user's own keypresses, which a touch typer will usually have subconsciously planned (via muscle memory) several characters in advance. So the user will also be subconsciously predicting when the text will appear, and can notice if the timing is off. Also, even when it comes to unpredictable events, humans can discern, after the fact, the time difference between two previous sensory inputs (e.g. between feeling a keyboard key press down and seeing the character on screen), for much shorter time differences than the reaction time.

Of course, just because these levels of latency are perceptible doesn't mean they're a material obstacle to getting work done. As a relatively latency-sensitive person, I'm not sure whether they're a material obstacle. I just think they're annoying. Higher levels of latency (in the hundreds of ms) can definitely get in the way though, especially when the latency is variable (like SSH over cellular connections).

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#157
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to static linking of large applications. The world moved into dynamic linking in the 1980's for a reason. It is cool to advocate for a return to static linking when it is basic CLI tools.

> The world moved into dynamic linking in the 1980's for a reason. Reasons that no longer exist. Storage is cheap, update distribution is free, time spent debugging various shared lib versions across OSes is expensive.

Storage doesn't really feel cheap. I'm considering buying a new laptop, and Apple charges $600 per TB. Sure, it's cheaper than it was in the '80s, but wasting a few gigabytes here and a few gigabytes there is quickly enough to at least force you to go from a 500GB drive to a 1TB drive, which costs $300.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#158

I've been using Zed primarily for months but I just switched back to VSCode for 2 reasons, one of which is kinda my fault and the other it's unclear where the fault is. 1. I deleted a few hours of work because I was late night coding and I decided to rename a file before check-in and delete the old version. Well I renamed it and Right-Click -> Deleted the new version by accident. It turns out Zed has both "Delete" an…

This is like when the macOS touchbar was a thing, if I recall correctly, in the commit management menu, cancel was right next to force push.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#159
post #123

Technically, Zed's Super Compete will almost never catch up with Cursor, or even as good as the free Windsurf. If you look a little closer, you will see that the cursor and cursor completion requests are not initiated by the editor itself, which only interacts with the lsp. Yes. They all come with an LSP, taking free windsurf as an example, when windsurf starts, it will start a process in /Applications/Windsurf.app/C…

Do either Windsurf or Cursor work well with local or no AI? One of the things I like about Zed is that it can, and is completely free.

Excuse me, can you read what I wrote? I didn't say zed editor is bad, I just said that zed's PREDICT EDIT isn't good enough, or at least it shouldn't charge for it.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#160
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Order of magnitude", so you're saying the neural feedback loop latency is >100ms? That seems obviously wrong.

Also you can absolutely feel the visual difference between 60Hz (~16ms) and 120Hz (~8ms), and for audio it's even more nuanced.

Just because studies don't back this up yet doesn't make it false. I imagine this is really hard to measure accurately, and focusing only on neuron activity seems misguided too. Our bodies are more than just brains.

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