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I switched from VSCode to Zed

tenthousandmeters.com

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Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#71

Does Zed have something similar to VSCode Dev Containers ? That is one of the few things keeping me going on VSCode. For example, I frequently write Ansible playbooks. And with VSCode you can just fire up the Ansible-provided Dev Container with all the dependencies. Which means you don't have to clutter up your local system with them.

They seem to be working on it, but so far it's only available in preview builds? https://zed.dev/docs/dev-containers

Thanks for the link, looks promising, even if "no separate extensions" under Known Limitations for the initial release is perhaps a little unfortunate.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#73
i never understood why people like vscode. visual studio used to be great back in the day because it was really thoughtfully designed and everything was nicely integrated. vscode always felt like a hodgepodge of random features and extensions that don't really fit together all that well at all.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#74
post #19
post #8

I would have switched in a pinch if Zed had their low-DPI font rendering in order. At the moment it just looks bad.

This is interesting to me, because I see this kind of comment on almost every Zed post. I haven't used a low-DPI monitor for like... not sure, but more than a decade, I'm pretty sure, so for me the weird blocker I have with Zed is the "OMG YOU HAVE NO GPU!!!! THIS WILL NOT END WELL!" warning (I run a lot of Incus containers via RDP, and they mostly have no GPU available). But what kind of monitors are you low-DPI peo…

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Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#75
post #37

I've been frustrated by the constant nudges to use specific AI tools from within VS Code, but I made a different change. Rather than moving to a different editor altogether, I started using VS Codium. If you're unfamiliar, it's the open core of VS Code, without the Microsoft-branded features that make up VS Code. I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium, and then adding in their own branded f…

> I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium

Isnt vscodium a specific product built strictly from open-source VS Code source code? It's not affiliated with Microsoft, they simply build from the same base then tweak it in different ways.

This is somewhat unlike my understanding of Chromium/Chrome which is similar to what you described.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#76
I'm a very early Zed adopter, and have gotten much more confident in it in the last 6 months mainly because of their AI plans. Note that my strongly positive opinion on this actually has very little to due with the _utility_ of their ai functionality, but rather in that it appears to be a sustainable funding model.

My biggest worry with Zed since I started using it (again, early adopter) was that it would eventually need to be monetized, and likely enshittified. I'm not at all a fan of subscription software, but probably would've happily handed over $20-$50 for a one time purchase (or, maybe $20 for a 1 time purchase of a major version, with another $20 at least 3+ years out or something).

In the last year, Zed has become a sort of AI reseller. You can buy their 'pro' plan, get so many openai/anthropic/gemini tokens, and set a max budget.

For me, this is probably as good of a business model gets in terms of staving off enshittiffication. Zed can happily take a cut, I can preview a bunch of different services, and if you don't care about ai at all, well the core editor is still free. My only worry about this model is that I think I'd have a hard time getting my employer to pay for a Zed pro plan over copilot, so I think they may have trouble monetizing enterprise users with this plan.

In any case, seeing an obvious/relatively innocuous method of sustainable dev has been a tremendous relief to me (and I'm sure the Zed devs as well).

Its biggest remaining flaws IMO remain its small extension ecosystem which hopefully is simply a matter of momentum. I'm sure they could do something like provide richer examples of how to port an extension from vscode, so it's not an intractable problem.

I also continue to have concerns re: the security of their chat/cooperative editing system as it's currently difficult (impossible?) to self host, but perhaps that will also be improved.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#78

I tried switching from VScode to Zed but unfortunately it doesn't have Jupyter notebooks and image/video preview which are deal brakers for me. Other pain points: - Format on save by default: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/29395 - VSCode Debugger UX seams to be much better

Yes! I also got bitten by format_on_save when working with legacy projects with inconsistent formatting. Given another discussion I saw, the maintainers didn't think about this use case much, i.e. "why don't you want to have a proper formatting?". It can be turned off now, so not sure if they'll change the default.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#79
post #73

i never understood why people like vscode. visual studio used to be great back in the day because it was really thoughtfully designed and everything was nicely integrated. vscode always felt like a hodgepodge of random features and extensions that don't really fit together all that well at all.

If you're a typescript developer the VS Code experience is great. It also has a lot of useful plugins. For other languages JetBrains products are mostly still better.

Re: I switched from VSCode to Zed

#80

I have switched to terminal

Do you mean a terminal-based editor, like emacs, vim, neovim, or helix? (I quite like the latter, after having used all the former to some degree.)

Or do you mean line-editors? They have gotten impressively good. See rustyline (based on linenoise) and reedline (not a typo; developed by the Nushell team) for example. Way better than one might expect!

[1]: https://github.com/kkawakam/rustyline

[2]: https://github.com/antirez/linenoise

[3]: https://github.com/nushell/reedline

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