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Comment by xiej

3 hours ago

Funny how Zed's tagline is

  Love your editor again
  Zed is a minimal code editor crafted for speed and collaboration with humans and AI.

At home, I don't use any AI when coding, to keep my brain sharp. But it's clear that Zed's focus is on AI integration because that's where the money's going (seriously, where is the setting to have a different ui icon size vs ui font size). Is there any editor still being being developed and focusing on the experience of coding by hand?

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xiej

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modernerd  3 hours ago

> seriously, where is the setting to have a different ui size vs ui font size

Search for font size in preferences.

You'll see a 'font size' under 'buffer' (editor), under 'UI Font', and under 'Agent Panel' to let you control font sizes in all of those places independently.

> Is there any editor still being being developed and focusing on the experience of coding by hand?

Zed lets you hand-edit too! It's fast and decent. vim, neovim, Emacs, Helix, and JetBrains products continue to do that well too. There are still more traditional IDEs/editors than pure AI ones.

You can also toggle AI features off in Zed from preferences if you want to.

  • xiej  3 hours ago

    ah I forgot a word, I meant the ui icon size. If I bump up the ui font size so that I can distinguish the icons apart on my large monitor, the ui text becomes comically large.

    I do use Zed without AI features, it's just a bit of a disappointment (though understandable) since it was originally marketed as just a nice speedy editor.

    • modernerd  2 hours ago

      Have you tried a different icon theme? Some are just easier to see than others. The default icon theme is pretty light.

      https://zed.dev/docs/icon-themes

      I don't think changing icon size independent of UI font size would be a dealbreaker for many. (I'm quite happy having icons that scale in line with font size, but then I use the Material Icon Theme, which is easy to scan at most sizes.)

teekert  2 hours ago

I like LLMs, I like Zed, but I turn off the AI features. I rather have Claude or Open Code in a container with only access to a mounted folder, or use a local model.

And Zed lets me do that while remaining fast and minimal.

As for (even more) minimal editors, perhaps just Gnome Edit? Or Kate?

Matl  3 hours ago

The thing is, they have to monetize somehow. There's a setting to turn all AI features off with one toggle and you're back to an 'editor still being being developed and focusing on the experience of coding by hand'

taude  3 hours ago

Emacs. ;)

  • mplanchard  3 hours ago

    100%. I recently got rid of my lsp-booster and similar kludges because the builtin language server client (eglot) is now fast enough without it, even on large projects.

    And if you want AI integration at your choice and control, agent-shell (and chatgpt-shell, which is LLM-agnostic despite the name) are great packages. They’re totally hackable with elisp like you’d expect, which I personally haven’t done a ton with, because I use AI pretty sparingly, but I imagine the crowd here could come up with plenty of ideas for how to program your editor and your agent interface together.

throwaway041207  2 hours ago

> But it's clear that Zed's focus is on AI integration because that's where the money's going

Do you really think Zed's focus on AI is just about money? You do realize software engineering is in the midst of a tectonic shift?

  • bheadmaster  2 hours ago

    > You do realize software engineering is in the midst of a tectonic shift?

    As an everyday user of AI, both at work and privately, I am not that convinced. The biggest effect I've seen so far is demand for faster work because "everything is faster with agents", but software quality is slowly dropping in software I see around me.

    Current AI is very useful as a trivia engine and as a language manipulation tool - i.e. it can quickly extract information from a huge amount of text. But it still sucks when writing new things.

    Admittedly, here has been much progress, but it seems to be slowing down. Money is drying out, models are getting nerfed, and only better scaffolding and workflows are making it better. Unless they build 100x more data centers, I don't see models getting significantly better.

  • acedTrex  2 hours ago

    > Do you really think Zed's focus on AI is just about money?

    Yes? Legitimately curious what other explanation is there here, thats the reason all of these LLM integrations across all software is being pushed.