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Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

zed.dev

261–270 of 447 posts

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#261
post #54
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…

Is it only fast on MacOS? I tried it on Linux and it was unusably slow. Seconds per frame instead of frames per second.

That sounds a lot like a CPU fallback of the rendering that should otherwise happen on the GPU. Isn't there any logs that could suggest that this is the case?

Edit: I just saw your edit to your reply here[1] and that's indeed what's happening. Now the question is “why does that happen?”.

[1]

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#262
post #26
post #22

Meanwhile I'm checking Helix editor every 6 month to see if authors became any less hostile to the idea of thinking about considering of starting thinking about potentially adding copilot support. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037

This is exactly why I bounced off Helix a while ago. No copilot and endless bikeshedding for plugin development.

The bikeshedding has long past. They've been working on the implementation now for some time.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.

Same here. My slightly older M2 MacBook Air seems to be allergic to electricity. I wouldn't be afraid of leaving the house without a charger before a full day's work, as long as I'm not planning to run compute-heavy stuff the entire time.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#264
post #213

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.

I work with PHP and even the commercial LSPs are not even remotely up to par with PhpStorm’s capabilities.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#265
post #82

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?

I was interested in zed as I was looking for a performant VSCode replacement, but its inability to fully remove AI integration and disable the prominent sign-in button made me lose any interest. Judging by the project’s response or lack of it on these topics, I am worried about adopting zed in my workflows.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12325

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/6756

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#266
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it only fast on MacOS? I tried it on Linux and it was unusably slow. Seconds per frame instead of frames per second.

it's not even fast on macOS in my experience

That's interesting[1], what was slow when you tried it on MacOS?

[1]: people experiencing sluggishness on Linux are almost certainly hit by a bug that makes the rendering falls back to llvmpipe (that is CPU rendering) instead of Vulkan rendering, but MacOS shouldn't have this kind of problems.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#267
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That repo is to download a small template (why do we need a crate for that?), and it still pulls `gpui` directly from the Zed monorepo via a git dependency. That kind of setup is fine for internal use, but it’s not how you'd structure a library meant for stable, external reuse. Until they split it out, version it properly, and stop breaking stuff all the time, it's hard to treat GPUI as a serious general-purpose opti…

i agree that it's currently too unstable, but the point was to show they have intent in others using it. maybe it'll be later

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#268

Slightly OT: Why aren't AI coding assistants implemented as plugins (like through an LSP), rather than being a standalone AI-first editor (like Cursor)? I might be missing the obvious, and I get no standard exists, but why aren't AI coding assistants just plugins?

Do you mean for Zed in particular? Because there are lots of AI agent plugins for VSC and Jetbrains IDEs both. I’m currently using one now, namely Augment. And AFAIK, copilot is still a plugin.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They certainly can be quite different things and in all current systems I know of the two are unrelated, but in my system they are one and the same.

That's possible because the source of truth for the IDE's state is an immutable concrete syntax tree. It can be immutable without ruining our costs because it has btree amortization built into it. So basically you can always construct a new tree with some changes by reusing most of the nodes from an old tree. A version history would simply be a stack of these tree references.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish they would have stayed with the collaborative part a bit longer. Once the AI wave hit it feels abandoned with various bugs and hard to reproduce issues. I am a full time zed user converting from sublime only due to the collaborative features, but by now we don't even use the collaborative features anymore because it's unreliable (broken connections, sounds, overwriting changes, weird history/undo behavior), so…

Yeah, we plan to revisit the collaboration features; it was painful but we decided we needed to pause work on it while we built out some more highly-requested functionality. We still have big plans for improving team collaboration!

Not sure what your budget looks like, but maybe its time to look for a new developer if its feasible? So you don't neglect a feature that's already in production and broken.
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