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I switched from VSCode to Zed

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Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#301

Post by z3dd »

intern4tional wrote: post #227
colbythrowaway wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Ben. I recently (less than 2 months ago) did an in-depth analysis in the area of license compliance that suggests that Microsoft and many other companies that are shipping Electron apps aren't in compliance with the LGPL. (By all signs, it looks like the Electron project might not even be aware that Electron is subject to the LGPL, though they are. Even Slack, which isn't violating the license appears to be in c…

Assuming this is real and you have the authority to share your work from previous location; you should reach out and contact Microsoft Legal directly. A random engineer on Hacker News is not the proper channel. Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/compliance/sbc/report-...

This is just attention seeking, hard to imagine that after having worked there their best contact is a random person on HN.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#302

Post by kmoser »

illiac786 wrote: post #193
g947o wrote: 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?

That, in a nutshell, is one of my biggest complaints about VS Code: there are many overlapping settings for various things, and I could never get clarity on what takes priority. Setting up things like formatters (and their settings) for various file types was a nightmare; between VS Code complaining I didn't have one set up (I did), the settings seemingly being ignored, and various other issues, I break into a cold sweat whenever I have to edit my settings file.

But more to the point, I don't understand why one would ever have to edit the file directly when there's already a settings panel that lets you search for a setting using natural language, and get back a list of matching settings. Why doesn't VS Code let you make all the changes from the settings panel, without having to mess with JSON directly?

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#303

Post by spartanatreyu »

sgc wrote: post #268
spartanatreyu wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's a tool for programmers. Use google + ctrl+f. Not a hill to die on.

How is googling it meant to work when they keep changing what the AI settings are called each month?

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#304

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

barrenko wrote: post #296
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually moved to Zed for AI, Claude integration is seamless and the IDE is so fast and crisp. I can use what ever agent I want, when I need them instead of being asked to use Copilot. Except for few language related extensions, I don't have any other extensions on Zed. Which means I worry less about which of those extensions will be sold off to a malware developer. I had more issues with official extensions on VSC…

Could you provide some detail on how you use it (the AI features)?

I just have a minimalist setup.

Configuration -

In external agents - I have Calude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI and a custom agent for Qwen Coder via Llama.cpp [1]

In MCP - I have fetch, brave-search, puppeteer

In LLM Providers - I have configured Llama.cpp, LMStudio and OpenAI (Zed Agent can access models from any of these providers).

Workflow -

When I need LLM assist I mostly use just Claude Code for specific tasks, with thorough scaffolding. One major drawback in using external agents on Zed is that they don't support history[2], Which doesn't impact me much as I use Claude just for individual tasks. I'm not really sure on how well Zed works for someone who 'vibecodes' entire project.

[1] https://zed.dev/docs/ai/external-agents

[2] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/37074

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#305

Post by roywiggins »

foxylad wrote: post #267

This article (and holiday spare time) made me update and check zed again. I really liked it when I tried it a few months ago, but it failed miserably when doing work on remote code. It would hang, and I couldn't find any diagnostics to debug it's fairly complex remote agent to find out what went wrong. But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote…

Funny, I switched to Zed after VS Code remotes kept hanging!

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#306

Post by dangus »

yndoendo wrote: post #253
echelon wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to attach to this comment to say that we should support smaller companies. It doesn't matter how responsive a big company is if it controls too much surface area of the important technological salients. Large company hegemony of our industry is bad. VSCode, Google Search + Chrome, mobile phone duopoly, Amazon/AWS/MGM/WholeFoods/TeleDoc conglomeration and cross promotion... It doesn't matter. We need more dis…

Fun fact. I do not financially support any restaurant that has a Wall-street ticker. I wish more people would do this. There should be no reason to fund some CEO on Wall-street when we can benefit more by funding local communities. P.S. You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and to engage with Amazon.

You can pry Cheesecake Factory brown bread and Olive Garden breadsticks out of my cold dead hands.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#307

Post by awfulneutral »

theappsecguy wrote: post #206
awfulneutral wrote: post #156

I am ahead of this curve, my trajectory was VSCode -> Zed -> Helix. Helix doubles my battery life from 4 to 8 hours compared to Zed. Zed is also on a bad trajectory IMO with the huge amount of updates being pushed constantly.

What is bad exactly about the trajectory? They are constantly adding features and none of feels like bloat, it just happens to be a much younger editor so iteration is rapid. I welcome it compared to the monstrosity that Jetbrains has become.

Yeah, it just reminds me of the early days of VS Code, where features were constantly added and it was fun at first, but they didn't stop and eventually it did feel more sluggish and bloated. Sometimes I'd have to spend time fixing or re-configuring something just because I opened the editor and the daily auto-update did something annoying. It might not happen with Zed, but it seems like a very similar approach to development.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#308

Post by riffraff »

z3dd wrote: post #301
intern4tional wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this is real and you have the authority to share your work from previous location; you should reach out and contact Microsoft Legal directly. A random engineer on Hacker News is not the proper channel. Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/compliance/sbc/report-...

This is just attention seeking, hard to imagine that after having worked there their best contact is a random person on HN.

GGP didn't say they worked at Microsoft, the comment is a bit hard to parse, but they wrote "I left the company I worked at".

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#309

Post by temporallobe »

I tried switching to Zed, and was even able to get it use identical themes and key mappings as my preferred ones in VSC, but ultimately I switched back due to lack of plugins that I’ve really come to depend on, not to mention some key feature differences. I didn’t notice that much of a performance boost over VSC (given that I was on an M4 with 32GB of memory), so in the end, the switch wasn’t worth it. I really want to like Zed, so I will be sure to occasionally check out any new releases. By the way, I did indeed notice that Zed was a heck of a lot faster than VSC on an old Intel-based MBP!

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#310

Post by bjackman »

Zed is faster and less annoying than VSCode, I hope to switch to it permanently sooner or later.

Annoyingly the only hard blocker I have right now is lack of a call-graph navigation widget. In VSCode you can bring up an expandable tree of callers for a function. Somehow I am completely dependent on this tiny little feature for reading complex code!

The annoying thing is: "can't you just use an extension for this?" No, Zed extensions are much more constrained, Zed is not a web browser. And I like it this way! But... My widget...

I also have some performance issues with searching large remote repos, but I'm pretty confident that will get fixed.

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