Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

There are dozens of possible build tools for C and C++, all with complex syntax and most with mandatory user provided input to configure the build. For anything beyond simple syntax highlighting, you need to be able to context parse all the multi-file cross references and inputs that can only come from building the entire project with preprocessing and then parsing the LLM (the intermediate syntax, not the AI thing). For most projects that are nontrivial, a compilation cycle can be 10 minutes to 4+ hours, and requires the specific settings you want to build with. Breaking them down to per-file also doesn't work because you'd have to do a complete dry run execution of the build system just to get the specific toolchain build settings for each file. And remember there are dozens of possible build tools that your tool has to emulate a dry run of now.

Most tools I've seen can only make a half attempt at C/C++ as a result, and usually the solutions scale incredibly poorly. The basic CTags for example, that just indexes symbols in your project source code, easily generates a >4 GB database file on something like a Yocto build. Which is why they invented Exuberant CTags that uses a binary database to try and speed it up. But even still, you're getting almost no useful context from results, and it has a very long lag in response when you do ask something.

The AI LLM support for C and C++ seems able to make guesses with the partial info that's available to them, whether its only the one file of context or the whole project (very uncommon), but it has the lowest successful output rate of any context helper I've ever used.

You have to command-pallet to "assistant: show configuration" to setup almost any API or integration except the Zed "Zeta AI", and that configuration directly conflicts with the authentication needed for the Zed login. So you currently can't use a third-party authenticated AI engine and the Zed Collaboration features at the same time.

Once you've setup the third party AI configuration, you then have to open the settings.json and copy the "features" section from the default settings into it manually. Ignore the blog posts and docs from Zed, they're all wrong now that they've completely changed/broken everything with the "Zeta AI" release. In the copied "features" section of your settings.json, you have to set the value for the predictions to the name of your third party AI engine. Good luck guessing what the right string value is, the values for each engine aren't documented anywhere I can find.

But it's painful some of the basic features that are missing. Like manually switching indentation settings on a file. Not supported by Zed at all, you have to write an entire editorconfig file for your project instead, or change your global settings.

I do really love how simple some of the GUI config options are though. Just a single value to hide the useless Collaboration panel and button. And having a default settings and default keymap file you can open to look at and copy from when modifying your own is so helpful, and makes it much easier to customize a key binding here or there from the defaults instead of the GUI-fied VSCode mess that you can't eve see what's been manually modified easily.