Is the new #zed editor mostly hype rn?
I can believe it’s good and cool ( built in graphics and collab seem to me like good ideas).
But as someone who happily stayed with sublime (with LSPs a likely game changer) …
takes like “it’s fast!”, “LSP!”, “it now has snippets!” … along with people telling me it has a plug-in system, but doesn’t (cf python/lua runtimes of sublime/nvim) give me massive hype vibes and honestly just feels very “2020s-tech”.
I tried it briefly. I like the idea of an alternative to VS code, that’s not some inefficient javascript electron app. But the focus of zed seems to be on collaboration in cloud and also pushing LLM tools. That’s not what I’m looking for. I disliked that it was impossible to hide the “log in to github” button (I don’t want to log into an editor). Irked me the wrong way.
It drives me nuts that there’s no way to close a folder once you opened it. There’s no way to just edit a file without making it a “project”. In my mind that’s a weird design decision (which is probably rooted in weird fundamental ideas) and gives me no warm & fuzzy feeling about what direction it will take in the future.
That’s not too weird, until IntelliJ added its lite editor, it was the same way for many years.
IntelliJ is an all-out full IDE in the tradition of the old Visual Studio or Borland IDE:s, so it makes sense there. Zed is ostensibly a text editor in the same niche as VS Code, vim and Sublime, where I expect to be able to just open a single file and edit it without any bigger investment.
I typically have both an IDE and a text editor installed, for different use cases. But Zed can never replace IntelliJ and because of this design choice it can’t replace VS Code/vim/Notepad++ either.
i have no reason to switch from vim to anything else.
Neovim maybe? 😉
@maegul @programming I think there is no general answer, as every developer has different priorities.
Zed looks and feels much better than VSCode to me. Also a lot is working out of the box, where you need to install Plugins in VSCode.
But in both Zed and VSCode I miss the good git support of IntelliJ and the overall intelligence of the Jetbrains IDEs. It feels like IntelliJ knows what I’m doing there at 90%, Zed knows like 60% and VSCode like 50%.
Well, yes, it currently lacks several basic things. But remote development is a killer feature to me and they seem to be prioritizing it.
However it should be noted that the remote development connection is via their servers, which makes it somewhat less useful
For now. But what I can say from my experience with VS Code is that their tunnel connection is far more stable than a direct SSH one; a tunnel also lets you punch through the workplace VPN, so that’s what I keep using.
But remote development is a killer feature to me and they seem to be prioritizing it.
Which is definitely interesting and cool. (Also, before this AI “moment”, their main selling point, along with taking graphics more seriously, and rust I suppose).
Yes.it is hype. Because it is a product still in development. Windows is not yet officially supported, and they announced Linux like one month ago.
It still lacks some basic features. However, what they already have looks good, it is much more performant that vscode.
vscode without any extension is very performant.
It’s easy to get better performance when you don’t have features.
I get that peeps are coming from VSCode and I support competition with MS’s EEE of software dev.
But, like, bloat and corporate capture were always the trade offs with VSCode … you all knew that right?
Zed invented tree-sitter which is a great feature. But since tree-sitter is open source it’s also available in neovim and helix.
I’m a fellow Sublime user and recently got excited about trying Zed. it’s a good editor and fairly similar to Sublime, but lacked some language support and the plugins are still very few compared to other mature editors. also, it’s not quite as configurable as Sublime, for example choosing the LSP or linters. but it’s still in early development with frequent updates so I keep it installed and watch the releases
> he plugins are still very few compared to other mature editors. also, it’s not quite as configurable as Sublime
AFAIU, it doesn’t have a plugin runtime, which is fairly glaring to me (but maybe not for devs these days).
This is what triggered my “is it hype” thought, as I’ve seen people say it does but it’s in rust or something.
And I feel like many fail to realise how hard it is to build a new editor with everything we take for granted these days.
Fediverse & typst similarly.
I kinda alternate between vscode and vim. Just depending on how I feel. Never really thought of branching out as other things feel too much. Like I tried pycharm and was not sure where the community stuff ended and where the professional started (free in uni). Netbeans was alright for a class. Sublime was cool, but I didn’t do anything special.
I’m not sure when something counts as hype vibes and what the problem with that would be.
It’s a pretty good editor, way faster than VSCode on my machine, but I’m also missing a bunch of features. Those seem unimportant enough compared to the speed for now, so I’ve switched, but switching editors is easy, so I might switch back later. And if other editors get on my radar, I might try them for a bit too. Hype or not, no real harm done.
