Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor • Hacker News Board

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#81

Post by cess11 » Wed, May 07, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC

duped wrote: post #54

volkk wrote: 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'm under Debian and i3wm/X11, sometimes it does some stuff that blocks input for a while so I can't drive the window manager until its done.

At least it did a month or so ago, and at that time I couldn't figure out a practical use for the LLM-integration either so I kind of just went back to dumb old vim and IDEA Ultimate.

When its fast its pretty snappy though. I recently put revisiting emacs on my todo-list, should add taking Zed out for another round as well.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#82

Post by erk__ » Wed, May 07, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC

mirawelner wrote: post #38

It’s funny that they lead with AI tools. I love zed because it’s fast, customizable, has a clean interface and it’s easy to pair program. The LLM bit is just an annoying thing I shut off because imo I’m too junior at the moment to use LLMs

Is it possible to shut the AI things off? As in properly hide all the buttons and stuff that relates to it?

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#83

Post by humlex » Wed, May 07, 2025, 1:55 PM UTC

volkk wrote: post #59

rtfeldman wrote: post #42

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!

Its the opposite to me. I really liked that the AI panel was a fully featured text editor buffer like any other. The new agent panel makes it too much like "the rest" haha. I guess I'll get used to it over time. The important thing is that we finally have agentic editing which is extremely powerful ofc.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#84

Post by SafeDusk » Wed, May 07, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

Tried Zed and Cursor, but they always felt too magical to me. I ended up building a minimal agent framework that only uses seven tools (even for code edits): read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, and think.

These simple, composable tools can be utilized well enough by increasingly powerful LLM(s), especially Gemini 2.5 pro to achieve most tasks in a consistent, understandable way.

More importantly - I can just switch off the 'ask' tool for the agent to go full turbo mode without frequent manual confirmation.

I just released it yesterday, have a look at https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami for the implementation if you think it is useful for you!

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#85

Post by WD-42 » Wed, May 07, 2025, 1:57 PM UTC

epiccoleman wrote: post #60

LeafItAlone wrote: post #46

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…

It's pretty tough to give up the good things that Jetbrains IDEs can bring, when they exist for a given lang. The obvious example is Java - IntelliJ is just leaps and bounds better than whatever stack of plugins you need in VSCode (or Cursor). This isn't a great solution, but in cases where I've wanted to try out Cursor on a Java code base, I just open the project in both IDEs. I'll do AI-based edits with Cursor, and…

Java is the original “it needs an ide” language. Always has been. If you’re not using jetbrains, eclipse, or whatever other monstrosity to write Java you’re going to have a bad time. I wouldn’t consider this a mark against Zed, I’d wager very few people write Java it.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#86

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 07, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

master-lincoln wrote: post #56

divan wrote: post #22

Meanwhile I'm checking Helix editor every 6 month to see if authors became any less hostile to the idea of thinking about considering of starting thinking about potentially adding copilot support. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037

Why should an open source editor support some single commercial product API in their core? Why copilot and not another product? It's completely reasonable to me that this should be a third party plugin or that they should wait for some standard that supports many products.

[deleted]

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#87

Post by createaccount99 » Wed, May 07, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

awill wrote: post #70

As a longtime Sublime user, Sublime really needs to step it up. Presumably their silence is because they're (hopefully) releasing something big soon.

That's a fresh joke, had a good laugh

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#88

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 07, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#89

Post by gnrlst » Wed, May 07, 2025, 1:59 PM UTC

conartist6 wrote: post #67

ammmir wrote: 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…

I've very interested in this, and completely agree we are still trying to evolve the horse carriage without realizing we can move away from it.

How can I follow up on what you're building? Would you be open to having a chat? I've found your github, but let me know how if there's a better way to contact you.

Re: Zed: High-performance AI Code Editor

#90

Post by rapnie » Wed, May 07, 2025, 1:59 PM UTC

volkk wrote: 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…

> because the other Rust GUI libraries/frameworks aren't great.

Waiting for Robius / Makepad to mature a bit more. Looks very promising.