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Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

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Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#211

Post by krastanov »

trevorhinesley wrote: post #21
krastanov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am amazed people consider 1440p low resolution. My knee-jerk reaction was to assume you were sarcastic. I use a monitor of roughly that many lines of pixels and have never had observed blurry text in the tools I use (and I use fairly small fonts).

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.

I have native 1440p 120Hz on my main screen which is more than 30inches across (ultrawide). I can see pixels if I look close enough, but I do not see any pixels at usual reading distance.

I have used retina displays of various sizes -- but after a while I just set them down to half their resolution usually (i.e. I do not use the 200% scaling from the OS, rather set them to be 1440p (or lower on 13inch laptops)). I have not seen an advantage to retina displays.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#212

Post by krastanov »

maleldil wrote: post #30
krastanov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am amazed people consider 1440p low resolution. My knee-jerk reaction was to assume you were sarcastic. I use a monitor of roughly that many lines of pixels and have never had observed blurry text in the tools I use (and I use fairly small fonts).

How big is your screen? At 27", I can clearly see pixels on 1440p. A 4k display with 150% scaling (effectively 1440p) looks much better. Maybe you haven't used a higher resolution? If so, you might not know what you're missing.

(cross-posting on both subthreads): I have native 1440p 120Hz on my main screen which is more than 30inches across (ultrawide). I can see pixels if I look close enough, but I do not see any pixels at usual reading distance.

I have used retina displays of various sizes -- but after a while I just set them down to half their resolution usually (i.e. I do not use the 200% scaling from the OS, rather set them to be 1440p (or lower on 13inch laptops)). I have not seen an advantage to retina displays.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#213

Post by dcow »

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…

I use both Zed and JB. The thing with the jetbrains stuff is (1) it costs money and (2) you only need the fancy refactoring features occasionally. With modern LSP you can “find usages” and “goto definition” and you get live symbol completion and documentation in Zed just as naturally as JB. Zed covers 98% of your editing needs. A proper Debugger would be awesome, I use JB for debugging every time.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#214

Post by droopyEyelids »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #193
ndiddy wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of commenting that it's slow if you don't care about using the program and switched to something else? Also, how is whether the project is volunteer-run relevant? Would you file a support ticket for commercial software you use saying "it's slow" and then when they follow up asking for details about your setup, you say "sorry, you don't get free QA work from me"? Do you really think that would lead to…

There is great enthusiasm for the editor in this thread. A personal anecdote indicating subpar performance on a common developer environment (Linux) is a useful signal that took a few seconds of effort. Putting together a high quality, actionable bug report is a much higher bar that can often feel like screaming at the clouds.

It seem like bickering at this point, but I do not see how that is a useful signal.

I’m genuinely curious what you are getting out of it

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#215

Post by thestephen »

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…

Counterpoint: Zed wins me over because the LLM calls don't feel like magic - I maintain control over API calls unlike Cursor, which seems to have a mind of its own and depletes my API quota unexpectedly. Plus, Zed matches Sublime's performance unlike Cursor's laggy Electron VS Code foundation.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#216

Post by anderber »

erk__ wrote: post #82
mirawelner wrote: post #38

It’s funny that they lead with AI tools. I love zed because it’s fast, customizable, has a clean interface and it’s easy to pair program. The LLM bit is just an annoying thing I shut off because imo I’m too junior at the moment to use LLMs

Is it possible to shut the AI things off? As in properly hide all the buttons and stuff that relates to it?

Yes, you can. Just edit your settings: { "features": { "edit_prediction_provider": "none" } }

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#217

Post by LinusU »

camjw wrote: post #11
outcoldman wrote: post #7

I am amazed how well it works. Yesterday I have spent a full day with a new macOS project with idea in my head. Spend half a day writing basic features, and after that opened the project in Zed to add features. Not very well documented things like AppKit + SwiftUI integration - no issues, and I mean I was getting about 500 new lines from my questions and was getting compilable code (and working). A few times after re…

a bit offtopic but whats your workflow for building macos products using a different editor to xcode? i am new to this and xcode seems awful (?)

(not the one you asked, but can chime in with some info)

This was a long time ago, but the way I did it was to use XcodeGen (1) and a simple Makefile. I have an example repo here (2) but it was before Swift Package Manager (using Carthage instead). If I remember correctly XcodeGen has support for Swift Package Manager now.

On top of that I was coding in VS Code at the time, and just ran `make run` in the terminal pane when I wanted to run the app.

Now, with SwiftUI, I'm not sure how it would be to not use Xcode. But personally, I've never really vibed with Xcode, and very much prefer using Zed...

1: https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen 2: https://github.com/LinusU/Soon

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#218

Post by freehorse »

rtfeldman wrote: post #140
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.)

No problem, and thanks for the response here! I sent two feedback threads (added a second test where a file succeeded to edit and the rest failed). It was actually quite entertaining seeing the model try troubleshoot stuff anyway.

I used github copilot's sonnet 3.7. I now tried copilot's sonnet 3.5 and it seems to work, so it was prob a 3.7 issue? It did not let me try zed's sonnets, so I don't know if there is a problem with zed's 3.7 (I thought I could still do 50 prompts with a free account, but maybe that's not for the agent?).

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#219

Post by stronglikedan »

duped wrote: post #198
ndiddy wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of commenting that it's slow if you don't care about using the program and switched to something else? Also, how is whether the project is volunteer-run relevant? Would you file a support ticket for commercial software you use saying "it's slow" and then when they follow up asking for details about your setup, you say "sorry, you don't get free QA work from me"? Do you really think that would lead to…

The point was contradicting another comment with my own experience, not to putz around with bug reports or trouble shooting. I don't care about Zed fixing anything - they're Zed's issues, not mine. All I'm saying is that contrary to what someone else said about the software being "fast" I tried it and at startup, it was unusably slow. I'm what you would call a failed conversion. > Also, how is whether the project is…

> they're Zed's issues, not mine.

seems like you needing a GPU would be your issue

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#220

Post by xmorse »

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 would love having gpui bingings for JS using NAPI, now using it from Rust is too slow, Rust feedback loop is too long
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