Comment by jackling
6 hours ago
I really do like Zed, it's snappier than VS code and with pretty good vim emulation. Even through SSH, the native UI allows for no network latency, compared to something like vim+terminal. Like many other posters, I do feel like the core editor is getting worse.
Some issues I've encountered recently at work:
- Routinely encounter bugs with the python language server, it's particularly slow when compared to using VSCode. All that snappiest disappears when finding symbols after the '.' is considerably slower than my typing speed.
- I found similar issues with C++ code bases.
- It's also so hard to debug when something goes wrong. I was trying to find out why pyright keep spinning on startup, but the "LSP logs" never show anything.
- Connecting via SSH always opens the repo in restricted mode, even though I check the "Trust all projects in" checkbox. Never happened before.
- Debugger UI is a mess. Make a run, stop the run, edit the task.json, try running again, and 2 tasks show up. One for the old and one for the new.
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I stuck with it because I really do like the UI, the performance, and initially it seemed to be an improvement from VS Code for my workflows, but lately I've been moving back to code as it seems more stable. I don't really use agent features, so I don't think I'm the target customer for this or other priority Zed features.
I do see the usefulness of something like this, I'm interested to see if the new agentic style of programming will result in the "code" part of editors becoming second class (for the better) and will allow for more rapid development. Although I'm not looking forward to read my coworker's "threads" of how a feature was made, I have a feeling that it will be more difficult to read than the raw code, as from my experience, LLMs don't really employ terse and effective communication (might not be entirely fair, I found ChatGPT /study mode pretty good.)
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Anyone know of a good replacement editor that might meet my usecase? I'm really a batteries included type of developer.
Yeah apparently Zed was engineered for speed but I find it very slow in general, especially on startup.
VS Code can slow down as you add functionality, but Zed often just doesn’t have that functionality at all. So the proper comparison is “VS Code minus all extension-provided features” which is actually pretty fast.
Too bad VCs won't give you money for just building a fast editor.
Agree. Too bad it is impossible to have a sustainable, responsible business. Everything has to be to the moon, not to a sustainable future.