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I switched from VSCode to Zed

tenthousandmeters.com

241–250 of 440 posts

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#241

This article struck a personal chord with me: I bought a new MacBook a week ago and installed minimal software on it, specifically I did not install VSCode and I don’t miss it. I use Emacs exclusively on my new laptop. I have about 40 years experience with Emacs and except for a treemacs automations, I am using my regular setup. VSCode is a great project but I just didn’t feel “happy” while I was using it. I feel hap…

We don't all have - 40 years experience with Emacs - the ability to predict that 20 years from when we started we would fall in love with Emacs - the fortitude of will to overcome the mountainous project that it is to turn Emacs, The text editor "toolkit", into the perfect text editor for you.

[deleted]

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#242

I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code. The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs. There’s an open discussion about it, though it hasn’t seen much activity recently: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770 Stronger support for GDB/LLDB and broader C/C++ tooling would also be a big win. It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become. Huge th…

> I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code. Can you elaborate on when you use which editor? I'd have imagined that there's value in learning and using one editor in-depth, instead of switching around based on use-case, so I'd love to learn more about your approach.

My workflow isn't very common. I typically have 3-5 projects open on the local machines and 2 cloud instances - x86 and Arm. Each project has files in many programming languages (primarily C/C++/CUDA, Python, and Rust), and the average file is easily over 1'000 LOC, sometimes over 10'000 LOC.

VS Code glitches all the time, even when I keep most extensions disabled. A few times a day, I need to restart the program, as it just starts blinking/flickering. Diff views are also painfully slow. Zed handles my typical source files with ease, but lacks functionality. Sublime comes into play when I open huge codebases and multi-gigabyte dataset files.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you do this in a professional setting? I'm curious because I did some embedded/uC work about 10 years ago and considering the state of C/C++ SDKs (and IDE support) at the time, I would have expected it to take decades for Rust to get a foothold.

Yep; do it at work (Security-related sensors for a DoD contractor) as well as my own small business. It doesn't have a foothold, and may not ever; we will see. I think a lot of the embedded rust content you see online is makers who are more interested in doing tricks with the ownership system and Async. So, I am an exception, but... I do recommend this workflow despite its lack of popularity! I just like rust for the…

As a hobbyist who's written and is working on a couple of async HALs my take is that Rust is well suited to embedded work but yeah there are hurdles. It's immature so while things like Embassy are a joy to work with, they're missing a lot of (sometimes seemingly basic) features.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#244
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it opt-in only at welcome page, and we have a deal. (Of course, I know that's never going to happen.)

I really don’t get this attitude. What deal do you mean? You using VS Code? Why not change the setting simply?

> Why not change the setting simply?

My default settings are stored in a 11922 line json file.

Am I expected to read that entire file to find the setting I'm after?

Am I expected to do so when I don't know what the setting is called?

The reason you can't simply change the setting is because the setting isn't simple.

It's essentially a hidden setting, cloaked behind an ambiguous name in a user-hostile manner.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#245

We maintain a single VS Code setting that allows you to opt out of the AI features provided in VS Code: "chat.disableAIFeatures" (see also: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_104#_hide-and-disab... ). If you can still find AI features appearing after you have configured this setting, then please report an issue at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode and we are happy to take a look. It is possible that from time…

I'm just so extremely uninterested in a text editor whose main selling point is that it's an "AI code editor".

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#246
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine is 2560x1440 which is a pretty nice "sweet spot" size. A comparable 5k to 6k display still commands a substantial price, and - given that I work at two locations - would need me to have two of them. The screen I use as my current (a 3x2 BenQ) also has some amount of subsampling going on, because running it at 2x ("Retina native HiDPI") all the UI controls are too damn big, and space is not enough. Running it at…

When people says things like "mine is 2560x1440" on HN, are they talking about the mac scaled resolution? I feel like some context is always missing from resolution discussions, and it's a topic non-technical people can weigh in on as well.

The 2560x1440 is QHD which is kind of a happy medium: high resolution enough to look really sharp, but not so high resolution that you have to scale it up like Macs do on retina displays. Having had retina Macs (and been very happy with them) since they came out, I've been using 16" and 17" QHD panels on my linux laptops for about five years... and they are actually just fine.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#247
post #203

Zed has been one of the most consequential changes to my dev tools in years. It's noticeably faster in day-to-day use than VS Code (launch time, input latency, etc.), is way less of a resource hog, and has the best Vim mode of any GUI editor I've ever used.

Let's see if that holds up when it has better feature parity. Things always run faster when you have less to do

Zed doesn’t need to run a web browser so I kinda doubt it will ever have “as much to do”

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#248
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which microcontrollers? Of interest, I program STM32, ESP32 (Risc-V) and Nordic chips, and do everything in RustRover. The compiling is decoupled from the editor. (You do cargo run to build and flash with debugging, or click the Run IDE button; works just like any program) The editor is for the code structure, and should reflect that, vs the chip. There is Cube IDE which is useful for configuring clocks, memory layou…

Mostly Arm systems using CMSIS from TI.

So I think you and the person you responded two are talking about two different things: developing software with and without a HAL.

The rise in ARM brought about quite a bit of standardization. You're no longer bound to vendor specific compilers and toolchains. Insofar as you're willing to essentially reimplement large swaths of the HAL you're able to BYO dev environment. Of course all of this is also subject to the quality of the CMSIS packs and documentation put out by vendors.

This is true with Rust as well, and in this capacity Rust is quite mature and well supported for Cortex-M stuff (and to a slightly lesser extent Xtensa and RISC-V). The tools to create thin wrappers around the registers (so called Peripheral Access Crates — PACs) are pretty well fleshed out at this point.

If you're looking for a equivalent to first party HAL to leverage (e.g. CubeMX, Atmel Studio), Rust is significantly less mature here if only because of its age. In Rust land there are multiple different HAL frameworks to work with and it's likely you'd need to use a combination of them. Embassy (a combination of an async framework and HAL components) is pretty slick if it does what you need.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#249

I tried switching from VScode to Zed but unfortunately it doesn't have Jupyter notebooks and image/video preview which are deal brakers for me. Other pain points: - Format on save by default: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/29395 - VSCode Debugger UX seams to be much better

The VSCode Debugger is the only thing that keeps it installed on my work machine. Lately I've been doing all my editing in Helix and switching over to Xcode for debugging though. It's even more consistent than VSCode, which occasionally leaks memory and blows itself up. I haven't had time to really learn lldb at the command line but it may have to be the next step. The only other thing I miss is VSCode's Find-All/Rep…

Doesn't Helix support debuggers via the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP)?

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#250

Hi, I'm the author of the post. I hope it resonates with many who got tired of VSCode and found Zed. I'd also like to add there are many small features I miss in Zed that I don't go over in the post, e.g. autodetect and respect file's indentation ( https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4681 ). But I see Zed is actively shipping the missing features, so I believe they'll improve significantly over the next year…

Have you tried using vim? Or rather nvim? If tinkering is your thing, feel free to completely do your own setup but out of the box lazyvim is pretty sane and you may not need much to get it to your liking.

But it’s very nice to easily able to extend or modify to fit your workflow. I’m just curious what people are getting out of zed that seems like vim has available.

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