From reading some of the comments, I'm not sure which is worse, Zed Shaw or Zed the code editor
Zed is our office
181–190 of 343 posts
Re: Zed is our office
#182I use Zed instead of my normal text editor because it opens instantaneously. But I don't write code in it, and still use my IntelliJ + IdeaVim with Claude Code and Codex in a separate terminal in Ghostty. But Zed is an insanely fast text editor to open text files in. Just double click and it's on the screen. Love that. Maybe over time I'll do more in it.
If that is all you need there has always been Vim and Nano.
I do use (and am in the Backers.md of) neovim. But the GUI versions open much more slowly than Zed. Zed is near instantaneous. I do often edit text in neovim by opening a terminal window and doing things, but the experience of browsing a large log file and filtering through it is much nicer in a GUI text editor, so if I ever double-click or open a JSON file I want that to happen instantly.
I can't stand Nano. I find it impossible to use because my brain is strongly vim-bound.
Re: Zed is our office
#183Maybe I'm old, jaded, stubborn and paranoid, but something about a coding editor that is controlled by a company is off-putting to me. It's even more off-putting when you add Zoom, Slack and everything else into said editor.
…you’re free to use other editors? People like Zed. They like IntelliJ. They like VSCode. If you have an aesthetic preference against all professionally maintained IDEs, I think you’re in the minority.
Re: Zed is our office
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like development of DeltaDB has been discontinued. https://github.com/delta-db/deltadb?tab=readme-ov-file#-upda...
That is a different project :D Here's our overall pitch: https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed#introducing-deltadb-o...
Oh is this based on my favoritest data structure ever: zed's Sum Tree?
Re: Zed is our office
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make some good points, and I need to revisit Zed+AI to see where things are at. This probably proves you are a better developer than me. But, also, after reading your comments, I'm just not sure I need an "editor" anymore. I love that I can npm install claude anywhere. Zed does not exist for ARM servers yet, but I can install claude there, and it can troubleshoot my database connections, and edit code, and grep f…
If I were still hardcore avoiding a GUI Id probably be in the same camp. But I moved to VSCode as my primary interface a long time ago, and Zed is just a better version of my workflow when comparing against that.
100%. I also moved to VSCode years ago. Then, I got disillusioned by the performance, and by M$ telemetry. Zed is so much better in so many ways if you have to go with a GUI for all those reasons.
Re: Zed is our office
#186Maybe I'm old, jaded, stubborn and paranoid, but something about a coding editor that is controlled by a company is off-putting to me. It's even more off-putting when you add Zoom, Slack and everything else into said editor.
…you’re free to use other editors? People like Zed. They like IntelliJ. They like VSCode. If you have an aesthetic preference against all professionally maintained IDEs, I think you’re in the minority.
...doesn't mean the majority is right :)
Re: Zed is our office
#187There is a lot of complaints about Zed in the comments here. I don't think that they are "hate", per se; they all definitely care about Zed and want it to succeed.
I daily drive Zed for work across several languages and I love it. I use a lot of its features, like the git interface, agentic editing, etc. I might even consider paying for Pro in the future if I want unlimited edit predictions.
However, all of these complaints are fully justified. I think Zed is a massive undertaking, only one that a VC-backed company has the capital to do. iirc, it requires 70k lines of Rust just for the cloud part [1]. I cannot fathom the amount of fundamental infrastructure they have to get the editor functional at all. That doesn't excuse all of the papercuts in Zed though.
If I were Zed I would do the following:
1. stop all work on future features, like DeltaDB etc. They all seem extremely cool but they won't meaningfully contribute to increasing Zed adoption or fixing its issues.
2. remove all agentic editing features. if Zed tries to simultaneously become the world's best agentic editor and a good general-purpose text editor, it will fail at both. Keep around ACP so users can still use other agents, but remove all of Zed's built in agent stuff.
3. fix literally every papercut. Triage every single issue and go through every PR, even if it will take half a year to do so. People won't switch to Zed until it's perfect, and the existence of this many issues means it's not perfect enough.
4. make extensions actually good. Every programming language, library, etc. has it's own ecosystem, and many such ecosystems mainly rely on VSCode extensions for advanced features. Zed needs to be extremely extensible like VSCode is; obviously its architecture makes this slightly harder, as it's nontrivial, for example, for extensions to render their own GUI, but there are a lot of low(er)-hanging fruit for extensions that need to get solved. People will only switch to Zed if they can get a similar breadth of ecosystems.
Of course, this won't happen, and given that none of these will really make them money, Zed has no incentive to focus on these, especially given the amount of time they would need to do this. But I think that if Zed can't nail the core experience, it won't get anywhere.
[1] https://maxdeviant.com/posts/2025/head-in-the-zed-cloud/
Re: Zed is our office
#188I understand interacting with other engineers right in the editor but I dont get why so many collab tools need to be bolted on to what is basically a text editor. This will only fragment communications since its not just engineers that work in any company. Meaning you'll now have communication spread out in Slack and Zed making collaboration difficult, not easy.
I dont honestly dont get the allure of pair programming. My pair programs are the unit tests which I run as often as I can and limit discussions to Gitlab/Slack. I have worked ag FAANGs and large companies and never once pair programmed anything.
I honestly cannot think of a single software or process problem that requires real time collab in the editor. Having said that it is a cool feature and I quite like Zed as an editor.
Re: Zed is our office
#189Zed looks really cool and I would love to give it a try, but I am just too beholden to devcontainers. I know there are workarounds to use them with Zed but with many extra steps compared to VS Code and it's forks. I can't go back to not having a totally integrated container per repo.
Re: Zed is our office
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
…you’re free to use other editors? People like Zed. They like IntelliJ. They like VSCode. If you have an aesthetic preference against all professionally maintained IDEs, I think you’re in the minority.
...doesn't mean the majority is right :)
...doesn't mean there is a right or wrong either :)