Comment by coldtea
16 hours ago
What exactly is phenomenal and novel about Zed? I've tried it a couple of times for a week or so, didn't see the point, and moved on every time.
And I'm not luddite swearing by vi or something, I use VSCode and Idea, and have used Sublime for many years, Xcode on/off for some Obj-C/Swift dev, Eclipse for 5-6 years in the 2000s, and vim for everything cli/lightweight since forever.
Is the GUI tech what's supposed to be novel? I couldn't care less about that backend in my everyday editor use as long as the editor is fast enough. Which on modern hardware, even Idea is.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good editor still.
Currently on this machine: using 900MB of RAM, including all language servers, with nine open projects - that is pretty phenomenal. VSCode could barely keep one open with the same memory.
The perception of 'fast' is very subjective. To me having a smooth, jitter-free UI, low input latency, and instant startup, all matter a lot.
It's amazing that a gig of ram is considered lightweight for having 8 project dirs open in an editor, which normally means 8 tree views and a few open file tabs per project :)
Even more amazing that 10GB for the same purpose is considered acceptable. ± 100MB for window, project files, LSP servers, ASTs etc is something very few editors can achieve - I'm pretty sure Zed beats both Emacs and Neovim in memory consumption.
"Including all language servers" is a big part of that. I hope.
I’ll stick to my butterflies.
I understand wanting your software to be well optimized, but at no point in my years of using VSCode have I ever actually had to care about how much RAM it's using. I have 32GB, I'm going to use it.
I made the mistake of buying an 8 GB macbook air m3 a while ago, thinking it would be enough. I wasn't accounting for docker or vscode. It REALLY lags. The vim mode plugin will regularly lag on nearly every keystroke, until I kill everything and restart.
On the topic of vim, the built-in vim mode in zed is really good. The helix mode is great too!!
I, too, would like to use my RAM. And I would like to be able to use it on the things I deem important, not to subsidize the laziness of devs who reach for Electron.
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Maybe use it to run a small local LLM + Zed instead of just VS Code?
(I’m probably off on how much memory it takes to run a small LLM, but still.)
VS Code is also offering significant more ability than Zed at the moment. If you want to sell RAM-usage as a phenomenal benefit, then you should compare it with similar editors, like Sublime or (Neo)Vim.
A side effect of Electron crap, before Zed many editors and IDEs on Atari, Amiga, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, Mac OS, NeXTSTEP, were written in fully native code.
My experience with Zed differed. On Linux I found it to be very memory hungry.
I heard that Zed has very impressive collaboration features. I tried them a little and they really look well (like discord, but directly in editor). But this was very superficial look
VSCode extensions and the ecosystem is a security time-bomb. Zed looks to be doing things better.
Zed literally downloads random executables and runs them by default without asking
What?! Really?! Link? I'm not a Zed user. That comment was based off a few minutes of research, and I guess a small dose hopium of a VSCode user and understanding what a shit show the extensions setup is and wanting someone to do better.
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Yes, this is annoying. When doing editor testing, I always also have to open the activity monitor and force quit all extra processes started by Zed.