Comment by zephod
9 hours ago
I tried Zed for a few days and loved it, but had to switch back to Cursor because I've become dependent on Cursor Tab.
The problem is that Cursor Tab seems kinda psychic, and I didn't realise how conditioned I'd become to just expressing a few keystrokes in the right place and have Tab pick up my intentions. If you're refactoring, you can move between files and it'll remember what you just did in a tab you just closed, and work out how to make the same changes here.
It's also really good at picking up patterns and the right imports from the whole repo. It seems to be working with a much larger, more persistent context.
I tried Zed AI, Copilot, and Mercury. All three seemed forgetful after a year of Cursor Tab. I wish there was a fix because literally everything else about Zed was an improvement.
When was the last time you tried? We recently released a new model and are doing a lot more iterative improvement https://zed.dev/blog/zeta2
Thanks for the reply! I gave it a solid week at the start of this month, about 3 weeks ago.
The only other thing I didn't like (and this is subtle, but I had not realised that I took it for granted): In Cursor, you can close and reopen a tab, and the undo history is kept. Working on a large repo, this comes up surprisingly often.
Save -> Close -> Assume everything is fine -> Do something more -> Oh no! That was a mistake! -> Cmd+Shift+T -> Undo. Cursor will comply; Zed says there's nothing to undo. So you're back to reverting chunks of code in git.
I will try Zeta again shortly. The biggest thing I'm looking for is that I can move between files and the context of recent changes persists, and the assistant treats it has highly relevant. Comes up a lot when refactoring.