Really love Zed after working in it full time for a month now and pay their 20$ sub tier to support them even when I rarely use the LLM integration beyond the auto-complete.
At first I was very dismissive of it due to being Apple-first but they've turned it around with really good Linux support and it seems like Windows soon as well!
Zed is so great, I do wish they would focus just a little bit more on bringing the UI just a bit more up to parity with VS Code, I would switch full time.
Recently I set up a virtual machine running GNU/Linux on Windows, so that I can continue to use Emacs and all my usual tools for developing software, while I am waiting for a friend to make a move in a turn based game. I decided to give Doom Emacs a try. Well, I like the keybindings so far. However, it got issues. When I use neotree, it gets confused with windows (the Emacs term "window", not desktop windows, or the OS). Also it has already crashed twice. Once I even lost some code, which I had to write again. Unacceptable. Why was there not even an Emacs backup file for the file I was editing? Anyway, today I thought: "Why not try one of these other editors in that VM and see, if I like any?"
Yesterday I looked again at LunarVim's website. While LunarVim seems to look pretty, it has a lot of dependencies, including pip, npm, and more. Seems like it is installing stuff from everywhere. Not so confidence inspiring, especially pip and npm installs.
And just now I see this Zed blog post linked on HN! But, unfortunately the website is not inspiring much confidence either. Can anyone explain to me, why I cannot see any _text_ on all of zed.dev, without running JS? I mean, I probably know the answer, or some possible answers, but man, that's already such a turnoff, I already doubt the editor is any good now. Would be good, if they could fix their website, and make simple text, simple text again, accessible and all that. Please get some craftsmanship into this website.
EDIT: 'pparently I said something some people don't want to hear, lol.
Naive question: is using Claude Code from the command line or in these tools like VSC or Zed different from using it in the native app on a desktop? Is that because it has access to your codebase?
I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limited understanding, none of the existing alternatives offer anything (and often misses at least something) truly innovative or anything else that VSCode extension wouldn't solve. On VSCode I have about 15 different profiles setup, each with different settings and dozens of extensions based on either a technology stack or a project - it would be really difficult to find a good reason to throw it all away. The idea of switching between IDEs does not appeal to me either. I do use Neovim a little bit too, but most of that usage time was spent on configuration.
Really excited for this. I'm not sure if it supports ESC-ESC (and whether the SDK supports it) but I'm excited to try. If not, I hope Anthropic will add it soon since that's a key feature for fixing mistakes.
It's interesting that VSCode has its own Claude code extension which works well and does most of this.
Zed has a lot of these micro-battles ahead where it has to spend money building solutions that VSCode's community shipped without their core team putting in any effort at all.
My main issue with claude code is running multiple ones in parallel. I don't want to manually do all the git worktree stuff, I just want claude to handle it for me.
So if Zed automatically handles that (where there's a worktree per thread) I can see the appeal. Apart from that, I'm already using Tower to view the changes so I'm not really sure what the value here is.
I tried installing it, and got an error "can't load supported slash commands" – not sure what that means.
I just installed it on my EndeavourOS box. I opened it, it asked my which theme I want. I couldn't click, and suddenly it went into unresponsive mode. A minute later I killed it and uninstalled it.
I keep trying this editor every few months ever since it was announced, but I always have similar experiences. I remember once I managed to start actually editing something before the GUI started to disappear.
I want to try Zed but the Helix mode seems quite young. Vim mode sounds good, but i just can't move away from Helix mode. (oh and of course, my own modifications to Helix's input config)
My difficulty in finding editors that fit my desired input scheme kinda reminds me of the old pre-LSP days. Where you'd chose an editor based on it's language features. I wonder if we need some sort of common editor interface to allow these sort of text editing primitives to work in new editors, as it seems to be considerable friction.
It’s exciting that Zed even has a Helix mode. That was a big moment for Helix.
Last time I tried it, though, I immediately ran into parts of the keymap that hadn’t been translated yet. I’m already at my limit of tools in beta mode/built from my own fork, so I switched back to Vim mode – where the team is on record explaining their thorough testing methodology.
As a Helix user of two years, I sometimes wonder if I actually like the Helix keymap (certainly some parts are nicer than Vim’s) or if I simply tolerate it because of how nice it is to get a polished TUI IDE out of the box. Either way, my muscle memory expects Helix mode now, rather than Vim.
Remote dev isn't very good in Zed, unfortunately. For some reason they chose not to apply the local editor's settings to a remote session by default. Every remote has its own config file. Questionable choice, imo
IIRC it doesn’t work in Cursor either, and their own AI sidebar was getting weird issues too. Mostly switched back to VSCode for SSH workflows because of that.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 82.6 ms ] threadAt first I was very dismissive of it due to being Apple-first but they've turned it around with really good Linux support and it seems like Windows soon as well!
I have a subscription to Claude. What gives?
Yesterday I looked again at LunarVim's website. While LunarVim seems to look pretty, it has a lot of dependencies, including pip, npm, and more. Seems like it is installing stuff from everywhere. Not so confidence inspiring, especially pip and npm installs.
And just now I see this Zed blog post linked on HN! But, unfortunately the website is not inspiring much confidence either. Can anyone explain to me, why I cannot see any _text_ on all of zed.dev, without running JS? I mean, I probably know the answer, or some possible answers, but man, that's already such a turnoff, I already doubt the editor is any good now. Would be good, if they could fix their website, and make simple text, simple text again, accessible and all that. Please get some craftsmanship into this website.
EDIT: 'pparently I said something some people don't want to hear, lol.
Internal error: { "details": "can't load supported slash commands" }
> Escape the Terminal
it does not sound like a good thing to me: a) the terminal is fine; b) AI should not escape anything.
Zed has a lot of these micro-battles ahead where it has to spend money building solutions that VSCode's community shipped without their core team putting in any effort at all.
So if Zed automatically handles that (where there's a worktree per thread) I can see the appeal. Apart from that, I'm already using Tower to view the changes so I'm not really sure what the value here is.
I tried installing it, and got an error "can't load supported slash commands" – not sure what that means.
I keep trying this editor every few months ever since it was announced, but I always have similar experiences. I remember once I managed to start actually editing something before the GUI started to disappear.
But hey, it has AI.
My difficulty in finding editors that fit my desired input scheme kinda reminds me of the old pre-LSP days. Where you'd chose an editor based on it's language features. I wonder if we need some sort of common editor interface to allow these sort of text editing primitives to work in new editors, as it seems to be considerable friction.
Been wanting to learn Helix more and using it for small edits but never saw a Helix mode in any editor yet
Last time I tried it, though, I immediately ran into parts of the keymap that hadn’t been translated yet. I’m already at my limit of tools in beta mode/built from my own fork, so I switched back to Vim mode – where the team is on record explaining their thorough testing methodology.
As a Helix user of two years, I sometimes wonder if I actually like the Helix keymap (certainly some parts are nicer than Vim’s) or if I simply tolerate it because of how nice it is to get a polished TUI IDE out of the box. Either way, my muscle memory expects Helix mode now, rather than Vim.
https://x.com/sridca/status/1963271904384401886