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Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

zed.dev

171–180 of 447 posts

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#171
post #12

I was using Zed up until a few months ago. I got fed up with the entire AI panel being an editable area, so sometimes I ended up clobbering it. I switched to Cursor, but now I don't "trust" the the editor and its undo stack, I've lost code as a result of it, particularly when you're in mid-review of an agentic edit, but decide to edit the edit. The undo/redo gets difficult to track, I wish there was some heirarchical…

Worry not, for it is being built. You will not catch me using the words "agentic IDE" to describe what I'm doing because its primary purpose isn't to be used by AI any more than the primary purpose of a car is to drive itself. But yes, what I am doing is creating an IDE where the primary integration surface for humans, scripts, and AIs is not the 2D text buffer, but the embedded tree structure of the code. Zed almost…

Representing undo/redo history as a tree is quite different from representing the code structure as a tree. On the one hand I'm surprised no one seems to care that a response has nothing to do with the question... on the other hand, these AI tooling threads are always full of people talking right past each other and being very excited about it, so I guess it fits.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#172
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 can't wait until GPUI becomes a bit more mature/stable so I can build on top of it

I wouldn’t hold my breath. GPUI is built specifically for Zed. It is in its monorepo without separate releases and lots of breaking changes all the time. It is pretty tailored to making a text editor rather than being a reusable GUI framework.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#173
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native 1440p, never used retina nor 4k. (not parent commenter, but hold same opinion)

Same here... 1440p 32" is optimal for me, the only improvement I'd consider right now is 1600p equivalent.

Biggest draw for me with 1440p 32" is being the same DPI as a 1080p 24". I like to have one big monitor and then 2 small flank vertical monitors and having them all be the same DPI just makes headaches go away on every operating system I use them with.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#174
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 can't wait until GPUI becomes a bit more mature/stable so I can build on top of it Man, so true. I tried this out a while back and it was pretty miserable to find docs, apis, etc. IIRC they even practice a lot of bulk reexports and glob imports and so it was super difficult to find where the hell things come from, and thus find docs/source to understand how to use something or achieve something. Super frustrating…

part of me wants to dedicate time to making something with it and then creating examples/PRs -- but it's too unstable given how fast they're moving for now IMO. if anyone from Zed team can chime in and confirm, that'd be awesome.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#175

I really want to move off VS Code and start using Zed, but unfortunately the text is always extremely blurry. It's just unusable. I check back on the GitHub issue every few months and it just has more votes and more supportive comments, but no acknowledgement. Hopefully someone can rescue us from the sluggish VS Code. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992 I have a 1440p monitor and seeing this issue.

Thank you, I bring this up in every Zed thread on the internet, hopefully the devs will eventually fix it. Until they do, Zed is simply unusable on regular-DPI displays, at least in light mode. See these screenshots:

Example Zed screenshot, using "Ayu Light": https://i.ibb.co/Nr8SjvR/Screenshot-from-2024-07-28-13-11-10...

Same code in VS Code: https://i.ibb.co/YZfPXvZ/Screenshot-from-2024-07-28-13-13-41...

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#176
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 can't wait until GPUI becomes a bit more mature/stable so I can build on top of it I wouldn’t hold my breath. GPUI is built specifically for Zed. It is in its monorepo without separate releases and lots of breaking changes all the time. It is pretty tailored to making a text editor rather than being a reusable GUI framework.

i don't think that's quite true based on this repo: https://github.com/zed-industries/create-gpui-app

i think there's some desire from within zed to making this a real thing for others to reuse.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a RubyMine and later IDEA user for many many years. I agree with everything you've said but I got so tired of the IDE using excessive RAM and constantly making my fan spin (2019 Intel MBP). Switching to Zed made my experience on this laptop enjoyable again, the downside being that I miss out on some of the features from the JetBrains editors. I've learned to work around the loss of some functionality over the p…

> (2019 Intel MBP) I used to have one of these and recently got an M1 Max machine - the performance boost is seriously incredible. The throttling on those late-game intel macs is hardcore - at one point I downloaded Hot[1], which is a menu bar app that shows you when you're being throttled. It was literally all the time that the system was slowing itself down due to heat. I eventually just uninstalled it because it w…

I got an M4 as a new work machine and it is absolutely bonkers how much faster and quieter it is. And the battery lasts forever, even when running my dev setup. I can actually go and work at a coffee shop for a couple hours without taking the charger now.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#178
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using enlarged text or native 1440p? If the latter, have you used 4k or retina displays in the past? It’s hard to go back after that.

Look, you can insist that a 1440p monitor can only show blurry text all you like, but the problem that people are talking about is that the text is even blurrier than that .

I didn't insist that. Understood, but specifically, I was talking to the comment I replied to, which was about 1440p monitors in particular.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#179

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…

Agreeing with the other replies: Helix. https://helix-editor.com/

Here's a nice recent post about it: https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2025-03-16-helix-review.html

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