Live data from Hacker News

Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

zed.dev

61–70 of 447 posts

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#61
post #12

I was using Zed up until a few months ago. I got fed up with the entire AI panel being an editable area, so sometimes I ended up clobbering it. I switched to Cursor, but now I don't "trust" the the editor and its undo stack, I've lost code as a result of it, particularly when you're in mid-review of an agentic edit, but decide to edit the edit. The undo/redo gets difficult to track, I wish there was some heirarchical…

All vims and emacses can have undo-tree (as a plugin iirc). Many devs use it.

Vote/read-up here for the feature on Zed: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/17455

And here on VSCode: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/20889

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#63
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.

I’ve been using Zed a few months on my fedora laptop (thinkpad x230) and haven’t had any performance issues. Definitely faster than any other graphical editor I’ve used. Perhaps a driver issue would be slowing it down?

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#64
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i think the AI panel is really bad compared to Cursor's Have you had a chance to try the new panel? (The OP is announcing its launch today!)

i have and it's more of the same (unless i'm missing something). the fact that the entire thing is editable is weird to me. i really think they should just clone cursor's in this one case because they really nailed the UX with the checkpoint restoration edit: yes i missed something. i see the new feature. hell yeah!

Ah, that's still the old one - the whole thing is no longer editable in the new one we launched today. (You can still access the old one, but the new one is the default as of today.)

Check out the video in the blog post to see the new one in action!

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#65
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.

not sure why folks are downvoting you, but i'm not sure to be honest. i'm on an m3 pro

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#66
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i think the AI panel is really bad compared to Cursor's Have you had a chance to try the new panel? (The OP is announcing its launch today!)

i have and it's more of the same (unless i'm missing something). the fact that the entire thing is editable is weird to me. i really think they should just clone cursor's in this one case because they really nailed the UX with the checkpoint restoration edit: yes i missed something. i see the new feature. hell yeah!

In the new agent panel not everything is editable. Maybe give it another try.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#67
post #12

I was using Zed up until a few months ago. I got fed up with the entire AI panel being an editable area, so sometimes I ended up clobbering it. I switched to Cursor, but now I don't "trust" the the editor and its undo stack, I've lost code as a result of it, particularly when you're in mid-review of an agentic edit, but decide to edit the edit. The undo/redo gets difficult to track, I wish there was some heirarchical…

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 gets there and it's maddening to me that they don't embrace it fully. I think once I show them what the stakes of the game are they have the engineering talent to catch up.

The main reason it hasn't been done is that we're still all basically writing code on paper. All of the most modern tools that people are using, they're still basically just digitizations of punchcard programming. If you dig down through all the layers of abstractions at the very bottom is line and column, that telltale hint of paper's two-dimensionality. And because line and column get baked into every integration surface, the limitations of IDEs are the limitations of paper. When you frame the task of programming as "write a huge amount of text out on paper" it's no wonder that people turn to LLMs to do it.

For the integration layer using the tree as the primary means you get to stop worrying about a valid tree layer blinking into and out of existence constantly, which is conceptually what happens when someone types code syntax in left to right. They put an opening brace in, then later a closing brace. In between a valid tree representation has ceased to exist.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#68

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 was a RubyMine and later IDEA user for many many years. I agree with everything you've said but I got so tired of the IDE using excessive RAM and constantly making my fan spin (2019 Intel MBP). Switching to Zed made my experience on this laptop enjoyable again, the downside being that I miss out on some of the features from the JetBrains editors. I've learned to work around the loss of some functionality over the p…

> (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 was a constant source of frustration to know I was only ever getting 50% performance out of my expensive dev laptop.

[1]: https://github.com/macmade/Hot

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#69

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've ended up using aider with pycharm, it's not as feature rich as cursor but works great for me

https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html

Post reply on HN