Zed on Linux Is Here

The thing is, I would just disable it, but you can't, as far as I can tell. There's this somewhat angry issue about it here:

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589

They might have a point but beyond whether or not they have a point regarding the fact that it automatically fetches binaries from the Internet, not having an option to disable it is just cruel.

I still like Zed a lot and I also have a big appreciation for the design of GPUI, which I think is a very well-designed UI library that puts focus on the important things. So, I hope it goes well.

For example, if you make some changes in a file (new or not), don't save the changes, close and open the editor, the state of the opened files are kept like I never had closed the editor. The unsaved files are still unsaved. New edited files are still there, unsaved, ready to user manually save them.

Notepad++ works that way, and it is an amazing feature.

EDIT:

Holy sh*t, they actually have bindings for each OS and built a Rust abstraction on top of that. That's pretty wild

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/crates/gpui/...

I find that out-of-the-box Zed is much prettier and feels more native than VS Code. But for a tool that we spend hours using each day, how it looks and makes you feel really matters.

I am enjoying experimenting with Zed. I have kept my extensions and configuration to a minimum which is a refreshing change compared to the cluster that my VSCode installation has become.

1. VSCode is pretty damn fast to be honest. Very rarely is my slowdown in my work VSCode loading. Maybe I don't open very large files? Probably 5k lines of typescript at most.

2. Integration with the Typescript language server was just not as good as VSCode. I can't pin down exactly what was wrong but the autocompletions in particular felt much worse. I've never worked on a language server or editor so I don't know what's on zed/VSCode and what's on the TS language server.

Eventually all the little inconveniences wore on me and I switched back to VSCode.

I will probably try it again after a few more releases to see if it feels better.

> curl https://zed.dev/install.sh | sh

Please stop telling people to curl pipe scripts into their shell...

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, I got java/maven plugins but there is no XML highlighting. Java does have highlighting but that's it... OH, and and I installed it this time and I noticed "downloading json-language-server"... (it was there before probably but didn't notice)... like WTF - didn't even ask if I want to... utterly rubbish experience.

For a simple text editor I prefer BBedit on mac, which is native and blazing fast. And for something slightly more complex I usually end up with `code <file>` to quickly edit it...

What's the business model here?

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/zed/

Great feature but there's a lot more stuff I need for a truly outstanding editor, what are the novel pieces?

The bar is ridiculously for editors (vim & emacs configurability, vscode just works, jetbrains can do it all) - what will/does it bring to the table to compete?

Whoever thought that was a great idea obviously has never worked with version control, with other people on a project? Sorry, but this is such an obviously wrong default setting, I'm surprised nobody pointed this out before?

I had a small project coming up and decided to try out Zed. As it's a native app I thought it would perform better than VSCode. But to my surprise it was not the case. The performance was actually worse.

And as for the TS integration, the overall experience is worse than on VSCode. The autocompletion works in a weird way, no way to just look at available methods, I have to start typing. It's just frustrating. I even decided to give another go to Sublime Text and it felt much better than Zed.

So Zed didn't work for me, but I'm sure it will work for somebody else.

For those who have used it, what are some of the killer features?

thread 'main' panicked at crates/gpui/src/platform/linux/wayland/client.rs:143:51:

called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: UnsupportedVersion

note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace

But I don't get the utility of all the collaboration features. It's noise to me, and feels like they could have invested that energy in other areas.

I work in a small fully remote team, and our tool of choice for collaboration is git. Why would I want to edit the same file while someone else is editing it too? Who will commit it? If I want to discuss a part of the code with someone screen sharing works perfectly. There's no need to bring in simultaneous editing.

It's such a technically hard feature to develop but just doesn't seem to have any utility for me.

First, Zed found to allow silent (non-consented) background binary downloads [0]

Now, launching on Linux.

Both of which are big news in its own right.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40902826

That's new. Does everyone running Linux have a dedicated GPU these days? Only caught this because I'm in the middle of updating my nvidia driver.

To keep things simple yet powerful is the key to find their place in the market IMO. Don't know about the rendering speed (never had issues with other editor), but that's a bonus anyway.

Sidebar contrast is too low, yet, spot on for the wrong contrast ratio target (3.0, for fill, versus 4.5 for text/bg).

I'll file an issue on GitHub eventually, feel free to pass along email in my profile if y'all see this and have someone who is already nerding out on this stuff.

Context on why, and before I get more fuzzy/opinionated, why I'm comfortable speaking to this is some quasi-authoritative tone: I built a new color system that ended up being launched as Material You at Google, at its heart is getting contrast while having expressive colors instead of just flat black/white, so I really appreciate the effort here.

Fuzzy/opinionated territory:

Problem with the low contrast here isn't just that it doesn't literally hit a 4.5 ratio. IMHO this isn't strictly verboten, if I thought that it would mean the engineer part of my brain was too in control. There's an argument to be made its good the sidebar isn't distracted. Problem is disabled states traditionally lower the foreground brightness, so it crosses over into "disabled element" territory when you visually parse it.

To the Zed folks here, can you please add a little line to say that it is an editor, for people like me who are not in the loop. There's nothing clear on the landing page or on the docs page that indicates it is so. The video shows an editor, but plenty of software has built in editors.

I found the zed website unhelpful, but if wikipedia is to be believed, it's a successor to the Atom text editor

Cons:

- spawning nodejs whenever you edit JSON files seems overkill, i'd prefer they use something native and more lightweight, or a way to completely disable it

- text still looks a bit blurry on low DPI screens

- doesn't support LSP properly, completion items are missing some data

- Rust for plugins.. this is painful, compare it to Sublime Text's python API, it's night and day..

Pros:

- Fast and responsive

- UI is simple yet effective

- drag&drop layouting, something i wish Sublime Text had..

- built-in terminal

- built-in Debugger (not yet ready)

Few more months of developments, and i'll certainly switch from Sublime Text, i'll be a little sad because i wrote plenty of plugins for it

I however worry about their business model, i have 0 interests in their AI/collaboration stuff, i'll probably maintain a fork to get rid of all that crap, they should setup something as a back up plan, a small paid license, just for support, i'll be happy to buy one

I have a fast editor in Sublime already, but I’d consider jumping ship from VS Code to Zed if I can set some breakpoints and look at local variables and whatnot (very basic IDE stuff).

Heck I'd like to "solve" all issues with public restrooms in the US, for example, or the lack of planning for trees or shade or water conservation, first, before I'd spend time on Yet Another Hip New Text Editor. The latter is perhaps several hundred slot ranks down (at most generous to it) in my priority list.

Will definitely try one this out!

Although the amount of plugins and community knowledge of vscode is immense.

And their opensource development mode is the best one I've seen so far! So many nice choices.

And make that the thing you charge for. ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯

Now, me personally (and this is just one man's tiny and insignificant opinion in a sea of billions of people!),

I personally, am slightly more inclined to give a slight bit of additional weight to the opinions of people closer to the vim/vi side of editor use, than I am to give to people on the Electron-based side...

My humble apologies if this offends anyone.

You don't see that kind of behaviour from Microsoft and Apple.

The default font was a bit small on a 4K resolution by default, but it was easy discover how to enlarge it.

Opening a Rust project worked flawlessly without any configuration at all.

zed --foreground

MESA-INTEL: warning: Performance support disabled, consider sysctl dev.i915.perf_stream_paranoid=0

Is there even more debug available?

I am also tempted to try out their gpui library, might just cure my Rust aversion.

"vim_mode": true,

  brew install --cask zed

I still use the JetBrains products as daily drivers but always keen to use new tools like this.

Edit: Nevermind, found it - https://zed.dev/faq#how-will-you-make-money. Interesting charter.

    We envision Zed as a free-to-use editor, supplemented by subscription-based, optional network features, such as:

        Channels and calls
        Chat
        Channel notes

    We plan to allow offer our collaboration features to open source teams, free of charge.

No Emacs keybindings :'(

Is TypeScript support fully baked in? I don’t want to pay for things I don’t use.

[1]: https://zed.dev/docs/linux

https://xkcd.com/378/

Yeah ...

I'll stick with VScode, might be slow but works

This is not an acceptable way to install anything on Linux. If you want to target Linux users you can't distribute with a shell script for installation.

I get that the idea is to reduce friction to installation and trying it out, but most Linux users - the ones you want filing bug reports anyway - are ones who will do due diligence and inspect the shell script to see what kind of opinions it makes about how to install the software.

For example, I see that the shell script downloads a tarball and unpacks it to `~/.local`, then tries to mess with my PATH variable.

Well, my local directory is `~/local`. So that's not where I want it. Actually, I would want it in `~/local/zed`, isolated from the rest of the installations in there. Then the PATH variable stuff just creates junk files since I don't use zsh. So I end up having to figure out the URL to the tarball and install it myself.

My point is that if you just listed the download link to the tarball, it would actually be closer to your own goal of reducing installation friction. The shell script is so much more friction because I have to read bash code instead of just clicking a download link.

Fortunately docs go into better detail, https://zed.dev/docs/linux

I'm on Debian anyway so who am I kidding expecting this to be in apt :D

20% (35 chars) of screen space permanently wasted on a always on file browser (meanwhile the animation showcases fuzzy finding)

4% (7 chars) of screen space permanently wasted by line numbers (why are the numbers cut off on the right?)

2.7% (5 chars) of screen space taken up by a gutter

So 27% of screen space effectively dead 99% of the time.

Why do people do this to themselves?

I can't quite figure out how to get the gutter to truly only appear when needed (I can't remember why) but in my vim configuration 2 chars of space are taken up by the gutter and the rest is for the actual code. The current line number is in the bottom right, and if I need to go to a specific line number I have `G` for that. If I need a file explorer, there's the default Netrw one, there's NERD Tree, there's a terminal (I actually rarely need this anyway, but I can understand not everyone can cope, but I can't comprehend why you would need it on 100% of the time).

Why does the "modern text editor" waste so much screen space?

I have a 1200p laptop monitor which gives me 174 chars of horizontal space at a comfortable font size. If I split that in half I get two terminal windows worth of 87 characters each. If I keep my code under 85 characters per line, not only is it easier to read, I can keep a man page or another piece of code on the other half of my screen.

  1. curl | sh, seriously
  2. The default theme is so low-contrast that I seriously struggled to read text. I could not find something that was, like, actual white on actual black.
  3. I can figure out how to enable Copilot, but not to open a file. (I had to resort to “zed file.cpp” from a terminal.)
  4. vim keybindings are not bad, but also not perfect.
  5. It feels… laggy? Isn't this supposed to be fast? Whenever I move the cursor over a symbol, it first moves and then like 100 ms later, it tries to highlight that symbol everywhere. And that takes time. In a 200-line file.
  6. Ugh programming ligatures. Where are preferences to turn it off? Where are the preferences for anything?

I'm at the point where I just can't motivate myself to try yet another. In my experience, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. My rule of thumb now: use whatever the majority of people on my team use. For non-team related work I find the community around Visual Studio Code to be good enough that it does what I need most of the time. I use bog-standard vim when I ssh into boxes.