Zed is now available on Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#311

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 1:30 PM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #309

bdhtu wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to Sublime Text: RAM: 213 MB Zed 41 MB ST Storage: 406 MB Zed 52 MB ST Startup time: Zed is slower than ST (but only by a few milliseconds). Also when you reopen ST it will remember how you've resized the window from last time whereas Zed won't.

ST is a text editor while Zed is an IDE. I wish there were something like VSCode that is very modular but written in native. But VSCode is good enough and it is my daily driver.

For those on Windows, which is the topic at hand, UltraEdit and Notepad++.

I disagree Zed is an IDE, it is quite far from InteliJ, Borland/Embarcadero, VS, XCode, Eclipse, Netbeans...

If it is about adding enough plugins until it eventually becomes one, then any programmer's editor is an IDE.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#312

Post by CaptainOfCoit » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

andrewl-hn wrote: post #306

bdhtu wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to Sublime Text: RAM: 213 MB Zed 41 MB ST Storage: 406 MB Zed 52 MB ST Startup time: Zed is slower than ST (but only by a few milliseconds). Also when you reopen ST it will remember how you've resized the window from last time whereas Zed won't.

Probably it helps that Sublime doesn't come with an AI agentic features, LSP, and a whole video-conferncing and screen-sharing client by default.

> and a whole video-conferncing and screen-sharing client by default

Haha wait what? Are you confusing Zed (the text editor) with something else? Surely it doesn't ship with video conferencing???

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#313

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

submeta wrote: post #222

So many new options. NeoVim and Helix in terminal, Zed as a beautiful GUI editor. - A few years ago I thought it’s Emacs/vim for us hackers, and for the rest it’s Sublime, and later VS Code, and then comes nothing. But wow, here we are: Ever more options. I‘m loving it.

For some of us it has been IDEs since the Borland days on MS-DOS, unless forced otherwise.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#314

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 1:42 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#315

Post by afandian » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 1:43 PM UTC

kettlecorn wrote: post #113

I've been using Zed primarily for months but I just switched back to VSCode for 2 reasons, one of which is kinda my fault and the other it's unclear where the fault is. 1. I deleted a few hours of work because I was late night coding and I decided to rename a file before check-in and delete the old version. Well I renamed it and Right-Click -> Deleted the new version by accident. It turns out Zed has both "Delete" an…

On the subject of surprising behaviour. I did something last week. I don't know what it was, but maybe some kind of fat-finger error.

It randomly deleted 3-line chunks all across my codebase. No rhyme or reason. I was just about to commit a big change, so it was annoying.

It might have been a global search and replace, but there was no clue in the history. And I can't think what kind of regex it could have been.

Or maybe a bug in IPC with the language server?

Anyone got any clues about what I did?

(I love Zed, on Mac and Linux. Even went as far as buying a new graphics card as my 5-year-old one didn't have Vulcan support, which is pretty much mandatory for Zed)

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#316

Post by array_key_first » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 1:53 PM UTC

breadwinner wrote: post #38

STKFLT wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High frame rates (low frame times, really) are essential to responsiveness which, for those who appreciate it, is going to make much more of a difference day to day than the odd hiccup opening a large file (not that zed does have that issue, I wouldn't know as I haven't tried opening something huge).

That's an interesting take. For whatever reason, frame rate is not one of my complaints about existing editors such as Emacs, VS Code, etc.

Latency often is for VS Code - that's frame rate. Your editor taking 1s to respond to inputs is not normal.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#317

Post by 1718627440 » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 1:57 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #292

1718627440 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Windows having Rename and Delete next to each other was always bad design.

Windows has undo for Delete, however. You have to press Shift to delete permanently, and then you also get a confirmation prompt.

Ok, I always do this unconsciously.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#318

Post by 1718627440 » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 1:59 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #287

1718627440 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS deficiency. And maybe programs shouldn't be allowed to update themselves.

Is it? On Linux, you can overwrite the file, but the underlying inode will still be open, and the 'invisble' old version will linger around - you don't have any easy way short of restarting everything to make sure the new versions are being used. And with Chromium this directly leads to crashes - when you update the browser as its open, the new tabs will open with the new version of the binary, with the old ones stil…

I don't use Chromium. I never had issues with Apache, MySQLd, Firefox, Thunderbird, ... . You can even swap out the Linux kernel under userspace it still keeps all running.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#319

Post by ahuth » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #312

andrewl-hn wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably it helps that Sublime doesn't come with an AI agentic features, LSP, and a whole video-conferncing and screen-sharing client by default.

> and a whole video-conferncing and screen-sharing client by default Haha wait what? Are you confusing Zed (the text editor) with something else? Surely it doesn't ship with video conferencing???

Probably referring to the collaboration tools. Zed has a bunch of stuff around remote pair programming with people.

Re: Zed is now available on Windows

#320

Post by resonious » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 2:02 PM UTC

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #312

andrewl-hn wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably it helps that Sublime doesn't come with an AI agentic features, LSP, and a whole video-conferncing and screen-sharing client by default.

> and a whole video-conferncing and screen-sharing client by default Haha wait what? Are you confusing Zed (the text editor) with something else? Surely it doesn't ship with video conferencing???

I haven't seen video but it does have voice. And similarly I don't think it's screen-share, it's just editor state syncing, so live collaboration. Still quite a lot.