I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium, and then adding in their own branded features, including all the AI pushes. If you like VS Code except for the Microsoft bits, consider VS Codium alongside other modern choices.

https://vscodium.com

Isnt vscodium a specific product built strictly from open-source VS Code source code? It's not affiliated with Microsoft, they simply build from the same base then tweak it in different ways.

This is somewhat unlike my understanding of Chromium/Chrome which is similar to what you described.

https://vscodium.com/#why

> I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium, and then adding in their own branded features

This part isn't true, MS and VSCodium both build their releases upon https://github.com/microsoft/vscode, but MS does not build VSCodium at all.

I think VSCodium is a good option if you need extensions not available in Zed.

[0]: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/discussions/1641#discus...

I appreciate that we have good alternatives to pylance. While it is good, it being closed source is a travesty.

I'm really glad the article mentioned ty as I'm going to try that today.

On zed I tried it but the font rendering hurt my eyes and UI seems to be glitchy and also doesn't support the drag and drop to insert links in markdown feature * I use all the time.

* https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages/markdown#_inser...

edit: zed is working much better for me now and does not have the issue vscodioum was having (not recognizing changes/checking some code till I triggered rebuild)

I'm probably barely scratching the surface of what I can do with it, but as a code editor it works well and it's the first time I've ever actually found code completion that seems to work well with the way I think. There aren't any formatters for a couple of the languages I use on a daily basis but that's a Me Problem - the overlap between IDE users of any sort and assembly programmers is probably quite small.

Are there any MS-branded features I should care about positively or negatively?

This isn't an anti-AI stance; I use AI tools on a daily basis. I put "features" in quotes because some of these aren't really features, they're pushes to pay for subscriptions to specific Microsoft AI services. I want to choose when to incorporate AI tools, which tools to incorporate, and not have them popping up like a mobile news site without an ad blocker.

It is possible that from time to time a new AI related feature slips in that does not respect that setting, but we try our best to push fixes as soon as possible.

Thanks! Ben (VS Code Team)

(Of course, I know that's never going to happen.)

My default settings are stored in a 11922 line json file.

Am I expected to read that entire file to find the setting I'm after?

Am I expected to do so when I don't know what the setting is called?

The reason you can't simply change the setting is because the setting isn't simple.

It's essentially a hidden setting, cloaked behind an ambiguous name in a user-hostile manner.

That’s what AI is for. Have it turn itself off.

Having a "master switch" doesn't matter, since their standard operating procedure is to waffle-stomp more "features" into vscode every month that will fall under a different setting and then they'll continue to shuffle them around.

Their indifference towards their own user-hostility with regards to this is the main problem.

I use emacs, so maybe they're better trained on my editor. But I've had a lot of success resolving little annoyances I have just lived with for years talking to Claude in gptel.

I can't get it to do real work for shit, but it's A+ at helping me waste time with yak-shaving. lol

And I thought my 50 lines settings.json is getting unmanageable and needs some cutting. WoW.

I don't think they meant that their own settings are that long, just the default in the app and they're commenting that it's ridiculous to expect a person to find it there.

It's a tradeoff

...are there any?

Not the smartest argument to brand this as anti-AI.

For most other stuff I prefer Cline/RooCode/KiloCode, but sadly it doesn’t seem like any of those offer similar autocomplete (Continue.dev did with even Ollama support for local models but the whole plugin was a buggy mess and it didn’t work well). Oh and sometimes Claude Code or Codex is nice in a terminal directly.

Personally, I don’t mind something being there by default (same as how JetBrains has their pre installed plugin and also something like Junie available), as long as it’s easy to turn off or uninstall.

Similar to how I wouldn’t scoff at a Git integration plugin even if I prefer to use Sourcetree or GitKraken.

That's the issue here.

The "disable all AI features" option isn't really easy to find.

No, I think the point is to escape encroaching monetization that dilutes the value of local on-device text editing.

But more to the point, I don't understand why one would ever have to edit the file directly when there's already a settings panel that lets you search for a setting using natural language, and get back a list of matching settings. Why doesn't VS Code let you make all the changes from the settings panel, without having to mess with JSON directly?

For many companies and products it's apparently hard to do these days when LLM integration is the hot new thing pushed by management and investors. Developers, users, and citizens deserve the respect and right to opt-out from AI features as it permeates other areas of work, life, computing, commerce and governance.

Large company hegemony of our industry is bad. VSCode, Google Search + Chrome, mobile phone duopoly, Amazon/AWS/MGM/WholeFoods/TeleDoc conglomeration and cross promotion... It doesn't matter. We need more distribution of power.

I do not financially support any restaurant that has a Wall-street ticker. I wish more people would do this. There should be no reason to fund some CEO on Wall-street when we can benefit more by funding local communities.

P.S. You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and to engage with Amazon.

But sometimes this “corporate bad” mentality is just vapid snobbery. I’m better than you because I don’t support big bad corporate.

Of course, companies aren’t created equal, regardless of size or status of being public or private. Some are run very well and ethically and some are not.

I am sure we can find many mom and pop businesses that do shady things that no public corporation would be caught dead doing.

Did you know, small landlords are exempt from equal housing laws? Mrs. Murphy exemption.

If I go to an Olive Garden I know I’m getting the exact same experience everywhere, I know exactly what amenities and facilities they’ll have, and I know what price I’m going to pay.

Even though Cheesecake Factory is a public company they’re doing more real kitchen prep work and in-restaurant cooking than my local bar and grille that’s reheating premade Sysco food.

At least Olive Garden, Cheesecake Factory does better.

If I understood the history correctly, being a "shareholder" was a path to a fractional business ownership for people who could not afford to outright own a business.

It comes from the same mental position as a co-operative.

In these scenarios, a CEO is really just an employee of sorts for the shareholders.

It's quite funny that we see the CEO of a publicly traded company has worse than a sole-proprietor, when profits will go directly to a sole proprietor- but not to a shareholder CEO.

I understand how it has played out, that the largest companies on earth are publicly traded now, and that CEO compensation in those companies is crazy. But it's quite ironic in my opinion how it played out.

Including buybacks, few large and mature companies fail to return profits to shareholders at all, and we'd ordinarily want growing or startup companies to retain earnings and invest.

Speaking in the same mindset as the parent, we're fine with the profits going directly to a sole proprietor.

In fact, what we want is a name attached to the profits, and a not a role.

We're not anti-profits.

We're anti bland corporate leadership, with no reputational risk and no personal ties to the company (and often no financial risks either, see golden parachutes) - one whose only mission is to maximize profits, product and customers and legacy be damned.

As mentioned though, the irony is in that, once upon a time, the lords and landed gentry were the "bland, soulless overlords" and so buying things would improve their profits... and nobody could become them.

Then the idea of fractional ownership came about and the common man could buy in to an enterprise.

Now of course, everyone is correct that this has been weaponised- but it's often interesting to go back to the original intent (or idea) of something to see how warped it has become.

Emacs it is, still.

So I hope for your sake that you and others like you are pure hobbyists. Because anyone paying you to do this job is going to be firing you pretty soon in favor of those who lean on frontier LLMs, otherwise.

Internally, depending on what product is being worked on teams will have different development flows and different usage points of AI. For things like VSCode, teams have freedom on how they use it completely.

I recently (less than 2 months ago) did an in-depth analysis in the area of license compliance that suggests that Microsoft and many other companies that are shipping Electron apps aren't in compliance with the LGPL. (By all signs, it looks like the Electron project might not even be aware that Electron is subject to the LGPL, though they are. Even Slack, which isn't violating the license appears to be in compliance only incidentally—because they're shipping other LGPL components that they know are LGPL.)

I was set to leave the company I was at a couple weeks later (end of November), and I did, so there haven't been any developments with my investigation/findings since I departed. I haven't prepared or published a formal write-up, and I've only brought it up in a semi-public setting once. It's a pretty big deal, though. Could you raise this with Microsoft legal (not Electron/GitHub) and suggest they look into this?

A random engineer on Hacker News is not the proper channel.

Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/compliance/sbc/report-...

Your desire to condescend, however, is noted.

You were given helpful advice and a link. I don’t see this being condescending.

Compliance with FOSS licenses isn't a joke.

Ben is a random engineer, he is definitely not the proper point of contact. FOSS compliance is serious, so if this is real, do escalate it.

The problem is folks this thread seemingly taking a interlocutory approach that can be summarized as, "That which is not explicitly denied can be freely assumed to be true."

(Then throw on top of that, "Depending on how committed you are to your grandstanding, that which is explicitly denied can be conveniently ignored.")

I had a brief look at the docker image, and it's pretty clearly a repackaged version of OpenConnect. Debian's copyright linked to from https://packages.debian.org/sid/openconnect says it's primarily LGPL but with a plethora of other licences like the GPL.

Since there is GPL they are required to make some source available, and if they modified it they are required by the LGPL to make their modifications available. They have extended it by adding Microsoft's authentication mechanisms, but perhaps that is just a DDL mixin, and I could well believe / forgive them not being aware of the other licences.

What is not so easy to forgive is them not acknowledging the open source they used in any way. Instead they slapped as pretty standard Microsoft Licence claiming it's all theipr own work, similar to this one: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-softwar...

Except for few language related extensions, I don't have any other extensions on Zed. Which means I worry less about which of those extensions will be sold off to a malware developer.

I had more issues with official extensions on VSCode (looking at you flutter) than not having any extension on Zed and having to rely on the terminal (which feels much closer to the system than it did on VSCode).

Configuration -

In external agents - I have Calude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI and a custom agent for Qwen Coder via Llama.cpp [1]

In MCP - I have fetch, brave-search, puppeteer

In LLM Providers - I have configured Llama.cpp, LMStudio and OpenAI (Zed Agent can access models from any of these providers).

Workflow -

When I need LLM assist I mostly use just Claude Code for specific tasks, with thorough scaffolding. One major drawback in using external agents on Zed is that they don't support history[2], Which doesn't impact me much as I use Claude just for individual tasks. I'm not really sure on how well Zed works for someone who 'vibecodes' entire project.

[1] https://zed.dev/docs/ai/external-agents

[2] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/37074

The frustration for me is that it turned my editor into a 2000s-era popup extravaganza (not necessarily anti-AI). Every line of my editor was constantly throwing a new popup or text to the side of my cursor. I know that VS Code's design philosophy has moved toward trying to make the editor have as many pop-ups as possible, but there are still a lot of us that don't think that's a good way to focus on the work. It is beyond frustrating when every week or so your editor decides you're wrong about that.

You mean marketing forces you to "accidentally" slip it in? Just in case it sticks this time?

And don't imagine the LLMs are sentient, the directive to cram "AI" features down the users' throats is in the prompt.

Being honest about shipping bugs is good. Being honest that you’ve designed a system where the same category of bug will keep happening? That deserves criticism, not praise for honesty.

So that we can have the actual good stuff (copilot, chat) and leave out the mountain of features that were clearly created to force induced demand for the sake of metrics inflation?

* Can we enable the only features we want by toggling chat.disableAIfeatures and only selectively enabling copilot and chat?

Not to say anything against Zed though. But sublime with one session of claude can help you build your very own customized ide.

That said, ST (and its predecessor, forgot the name) set the standard for "lightweight" (lighter than IDEs) editors - Atom, VS Code, now Zed, can all trace their common patterns back to ST.

True, but Zed is the only spiritual successor IMO, Atom and VSCode do not care about speed or snappiness, which is the nicest thing about Sublime Text (for me.)

TextMate? It's been surprisingly influential for an editor I've never seen anyone use; maybe in the US, where people actually buy Mac, it was different.

I'm still on SublimeText because I can't deal with the sluggishness of VS Code, and I'll pay for the latest version, but I am starting to worry about the future of what is still a great editor. Rust coding in particular is a bit of a nightmare.

The sad thing is that both of these were the products of business models I enthusiastically support and want to see more of: the solo dev (TM) and the small business (ST), or maybe it's solo dev pretending to be small business, I can't really tell.

Certainly small business :)

Only a problem if the software has broken in that time period

Once you get into the GB range there are very very few editors that can edit those files unfortunately.

I have to turn off my config (-u NONE) for large files (e.g., multi-GB JSON files), or everything slows to a crawl. I never profiled it to know what's causing the slowdown. It might be treesitter.

Can I drop it in the 'wrong' directory and have ST pick it up from there? I like apps that are as flexible as possible when it comes to file organization.

I use Emacs exclusively on my new laptop. I have about 40 years experience with Emacs and except for a treemacs automations, I am using my regular setup.

VSCode is a great project but I just didn’t feel “happy” while I was using it. I feel happy using Emacs and I only use very minimal LLM integrations with Emacs, preferring to separately running gemini-cli occasionally, or using a variety of LLMs (especially strong local models) with one-shot prompting.

- 40 years experience with Emacs

- the ability to predict that 20 years from when we started we would fall in love with Emacs

- the fortitude of will to overcome the mountainous project that it is to turn Emacs, The text editor "toolkit", into the perfect text editor for you.

It also is just super slow on windows unfortunately.

But one day, one day I'll switch

But I so happy with my config now. Simplified and modern.

Just joking, I really mis the org-mode.

At this point, I would recommend to every coder worth his salt to just jump to vim/neovim or emacs, these editors will be around for the next 1000 years and you wont need to fight against some BS features and you wont need to switch ever egain. The 1-2 month learning curve is worth it!

By which I mean both startup time (yes, I know real Emacs people never leave the editor. I'm Not That Guy) but its single-threadedness leading to painful blocking pauses when using eglot + rust-analyzer, etc.

VS Code is still the better tool (imho) but I can't stand it.

I'm building an alternative, and I haven't opened emacs for a month now

Here's a copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260105144155/https://tenthousa...

  curl https://tenthousandmeters.com
  curl: (35) TLS connect error: error:0A000126:SSL routines::unexpected eof while reading

Also, for some reason Google Safe Browser thinks some pages on this site are unsafe [1]. It may well be a false positive, but it further contributes to the blocking. So it wasn't the slashdot effect after all.

[1] https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?u...

The website repo is public, so it's also available on github: https://github.com/r4victor/tenthousandmeters/blob/master/we...

Other pain points:

- Format on save by default: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/29395

- VSCode Debugger UX seams to be much better

X years later and VS Code is the one with the biggest ecosystem and therefore also has the largest and most complex addons.

Zed is starting from scratch again, relying on developers to create extensions. However, I'll argue that because Zed is Rust based instead of web tech based like Code, it'll be harder to get as big an ecosystem as Code has. Same with IDEs, some of the biggest plugins have corporate backers who pay people to develop and maintain them.

I've grown attached to the git diff view, so I use it for reviewing PRs mostly (especially larger ones as github UI has been struggling with them as of late).

The rest of my code is written in Vim or by Claude.

It uses the Jupytext format [1], for Python at least. Which frankly, is much more friendly to VCS than notebooks.

I agree on the 'format on save' as undesirable default, but disabling that was as easy as flicking a switch.

[0]: https://zed.dev/docs/repl [1]: https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Audio playback support is missing in Zed as well. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14409

I really like Zed, and I want to use it but I keep going back to VSCode when I need to be productive on my code instead of messing with my editor. I use both at the same time because Zed feels so much nicer, but so far, VSCode's features are quite a bit head.

My-Zed branch with both the features: https://github.com/MostlyKIGuess/zed/tree/my-zed

I haven't used a low-DPI monitor for like... not sure, but more than a decade, I'm pretty sure, so for me the weird blocker I have with Zed is the "OMG YOU HAVE NO GPU!!!! THIS WILL NOT END WELL!" warning (I run a lot of Incus containers via RDP, and they mostly have no GPU available).

But what kind of monitors are you low-DPI people using? Some kind of classic Sony Trinitron CRTs, or what? I'm actually curious. Or is it not the display itself, but some kind of OS thing?

And it is not an OS thing. The OS renders subpixel antialiased fonts just fine. But Zed uses its own font rasterizer, and it completely falters when faced with a "standard passable resolution" screen - the letters become mushy, as if they have been blurred - and rather sloppily at that.

Linux and Windows are significantly better for both 1440p and 4k monitors. Both Linux and Windows have subpixel rendering and configurable font hinting for 1440p. And they both have fractional scaling UIs for 4k. macOS on the other hand only really looks acceptable on a 5k monitor.

There aren't all that many >20" displays on the market that meet Apple's definition of high dpi, and not a ton more that meet my much looser definition.

Zed started out as a Mac-only app, and that's reflected in the way their font rendering works.

Unless you use it at 4K, but macOS isn't really usable that way (everything way too small).

But yeah, it's 60Hz. Which has sucked ever since I accidentally got a 120Hz display, so now 60 Hz looks like 30Hz used to...

    Monitor                              Resolution       PPI
    ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
    31.5" 8K                             7680 × 4320      280
    27" 5K                               5120 × 2880      218
    31.5" 6K                             5760 × 3240      210
    23" 4K                               3840 × 2160      192
    27" 4K                               3840 × 2160      163
    34" 5K ultrawide                     5120 × 2160      163
    31.5" 4K                             3840 × 2160      140
    39.7" 5K ultrawide                   5120 × 2160      140
    44.5" 5K ultrawide (LG 45GX950A-B)   5120 × 2160      125

I had a chance to try that LG 45GX950A-B at Yodobashi Camera in Akihbara the other day, and... that measly 125ppi might overperform at the distance you have to put it at. But then again my 50-year-old eyeballs are starting to be like "anyway you need your glasses bro" so... YMMV

https://rog.asus.com/monitors/27-to-31-5-inches/rog-strix-5k...

> USB-C with 15W power delivery for maximum compatibility

I am hoping that is a typo.

https://tftcentral.co.uk/news/lg-27gm950b-5k-monitor-announc...

Both at work and at home, I can plug in my monitor to my laptop with a single cable to my monitor. That single cable charges my laptop, connects the display, and passes through a usb hub that's built into the monitor that connects my keyboard and webcam. It's _incredibly_ convenient. It's also just a lot less cabling. You can think of it like a dock, built into the monitor for free.

> It seems like kind of a niche

Different workflows/circles. It's not something you're likely to use with a desktop, mainly with a laptop. It also really only works well if you use thunderbolt. It's reasonably common but probably not a majority where I work, where 90% of dev machines are macs.

They’re still pretty common in enterprise. So cheap. At this point most desks probably cost more than the PCs on top of them.

TBF, enterprise probably still has to deal with ancient apps that can’t handle higher resolution well.

https://zed.dev/docs/linux

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Zed “supports” 1080p monitors just fine. Supports is in quotes because it doesn’t need to do anything nor care at all about the count of pixels on the screen.

Keep in mind that Zed developers [2] consider blurry fonts on low DPI displays a Priority 1 issue, and a reproducible bug that is commonly encountered.

I'm sure if there was no blurry font issue with Zed, they would just close this bug report.

[1]: https://ibb.co/zVS0Qz6z

[2]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

I'd also like to add there are many small features I miss in Zed that I don't go over in the post, e.g. autodetect and respect file's indentation (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4681). But I see Zed is actively shipping the missing features, so I believe they'll improve significantly over the next year.

But it’s very nice to easily able to extend or modify to fit your workflow. I’m just curious what people are getting out of zed that seems like vim has available.

a) file tree - I really like being able to 'root' the view at a directory, explore the hierarchy, and easily open any file within it

b) LSP - Zed's auto-formatting is it's best feature, for me

I generally like a whole bunch of things the gui gives me, but I would probably drop zed if I could get these two features working as well (or, at least, almost as well) in vi.

For VS Code users, there's actually a special feature where a subset of VS Code settings can be migrated to Zed settings. Cannot vouch for its stability, but the functionality is there.

Sorely missing a REPL for Lisp languages, but for statically-typed languages like Rust and TypeScript, Zed works pretty well. I appreciate that Zed works smoothly with Nix and Direnv, even through remote projects. I do wish the collaboration features would receive a bit more attention, though. It feels like that functionality has slowly been bitrotting, and it's always unfortunate when my friends on Linux cannot share their screen. Then there's other little regressions, like the audio bit depth being incorrect on MacBooks connected to external monitors -- they did fix this with the experimental Rodio backend, but I am not sure if that is stabilized yet.

However, AI-related features are fairly stable and it's amazing how far it has come in less than a year. That and things like the debugger UI.

have you tried lazygit? that's my go-to. Can even run in in a panel inside Zed.

The rise in ARM brought about quite a bit of standardization. You're no longer bound to vendor specific compilers and toolchains. Insofar as you're willing to essentially reimplement large swaths of the HAL you're able to BYO dev environment. Of course all of this is also subject to the quality of the CMSIS packs and documentation put out by vendors.

This is true with Rust as well, and in this capacity Rust is quite mature and well supported for Cortex-M stuff (and to a slightly lesser extent Xtensa and RISC-V). The tools to create thin wrappers around the registers (so called Peripheral Access Crates — PACs) are pretty well fleshed out at this point.

If you're looking for a equivalent to first party HAL to leverage (e.g. CubeMX, Atmel Studio), Rust is significantly less mature here if only because of its age. In Rust land there are multiple different HAL frameworks to work with and it's likely you'd need to use a combination of them. Embassy (a combination of an async framework and HAL components) is pretty slick if it does what you need.

I just like rust for the overall language and tooling. (For example, the workflow I described above); don't really care about the memory safety aspect to the degree it's often presented.

The biggest downside is I have to do a lot of leg work which wouldn't be required if done in C or C++. E.g. implementing hardware interfaces from datasheets and RMs. Sometimes there will be a Rust lib available, but in my experience they are rarely in a usable state.

That is one of the few things keeping me going on VSCode.

For example, I frequently write Ansible playbooks. And with VSCode you can just fire up the Ansible-provided Dev Container with all the dependencies. Which means you don't have to clutter up your local system with them.

It isn't 1:1 since there probably won't be ansible provided configs, but I find writing nix devshells per project to be low effort and high reward. It'll only be a couple lines if all you need is a specific version of ansible

Why don't they do the real portable thing and use OCI?

A back and forth "conversation" with Gemini with extreme amounts of copying/pasting/executing in Geany (a relatively simple editor) is now faster than whatever I was trying to do before, hopping between emacs and vim and IDES, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355165

I spent a fair bit of time this weekend tracking down bugs in a project caused by format on save in Zed occasionally deleting the first line of Python classes.

I turned off format on save and life is good now but data loss bugs like that are pretty annoying in a text editor.

It is not, IMO, a replacement for Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm, Rustrover, for example). I do substitute it on my tablet sometimes, where those IDEs can be too sluggish. Unless I'm missing something with plugins I should be installing, it is not on the same level for introspection, refactoring, import adding and moving, real-time error checking, and generally understanding the code base holistically.

So, I've settled into this: Jetbrains if on a sufficiently powerful PC. (It can still bring a 9950x to its knees though...) Zed for lower-power ones.

Sublime for editing one-off files, as both JB and Zed are project-oriented.

The author also mentions missing the sidebar with files but it's one of the icons at the bottom left.

But to the authors note, one might find a single behavior in zed really annoying. Mine is how zed appends a new line at the end of files on save. Used to be able to disable this in settings but an update broke that long ago. Maybe some can tell me its fixed but seems like I’ll need to journey down git hub issue fix but did not find one while back.

Combined it becomes a very powerful setup!

But I love the thought put into Zed and it looks great (this is important to me).

I don't use their AI features but it does come in handy when I need an quick alternate answer or perspective. I use Claude Code in a separate terminal.

1 - https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7721

There are some core features that work so much better out of the box than with the best plugins in others.

Local History (or even for a selection) with search, stacked clipboard, recent locations, how good search is in general (text, symbols, actions etc), how in-modal buffers work, debugging experience, version control merging experience, etc etc

Old now fixed complaints:

- making plugins used to be awful

- used to have no lsp support

(Was pleasantly surprised when I built ron-lsp [1] plugin)

Long standing complaints:

- it's heavy and slow

- has weird failure modes

All that being said, still my main IDE, with neovim (well configured) used frequently.

---

[1]: https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/ron-lsp/tree/main/jetbrains-...

It amazes me they all put debugging as a second class citizen. Are these people the ones who debug with printfs?

Zed has a lot of issues in flight; maybe these are useful to you? Here are the issues that have been filed under the label "area:parity/emacs". Some also have the label "state:needs repro" (needs reproduction). I wonder if any of them scratch your itch? Weighing in might help get your pain points resolved a bit faster?

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20...

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/21146 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/8043

Or do you mean line-editors? They have gotten impressively good. See rustyline (based on linenoise) and reedline (not a typo; developed by the Nushell team) for example. Way better than one might expect!

[1]: https://github.com/kkawakam/rustyline

[2]: https://github.com/antirez/linenoise

[3]: https://github.com/nushell/reedline

I have spent some time configuring it and probably will spend more when I start including more languages but imo it's worth it. You can configure everything but you can also find very nice defaults by running Kickstarter (or some heavier neovim "distro").

Microsoft has done great work with LSPs - I can now get great navigation/autocompletion/formatting/inline errors/warning combined with neovim navigation, light weight and fantastic tools/extensions.

One thing I haven't integrated yet is a debugger (gdb from the terminal is good enough for me), maybe that's something people are missing in neovim?

My biggest worry with Zed since I started using it (again, early adopter) was that it would eventually need to be monetized, and likely enshittified. I'm not at all a fan of subscription software, but probably would've happily handed over $20-$50 for a one time purchase (or, maybe $20 for a 1 time purchase of a major version, with another $20 at least 3+ years out or something).

In the last year, Zed has become a sort of AI reseller. You can buy their 'pro' plan, get so many openai/anthropic/gemini tokens, and set a max budget.

For me, this is probably as good of a business model gets in terms of staving off enshittiffication. Zed can happily take a cut, I can preview a bunch of different services, and if you don't care about ai at all, well the core editor is still free. My only worry about this model is that I think I'd have a hard time getting my employer to pay for a Zed pro plan over copilot, so I think they may have trouble monetizing enterprise users with this plan.

In any case, seeing an obvious/relatively innocuous method of sustainable dev has been a tremendous relief to me (and I'm sure the Zed devs as well).

Its biggest remaining flaws IMO remain its small extension ecosystem which hopefully is simply a matter of momentum. I'm sure they could do something like provide richer examples of how to port an extension from vscode, so it's not an intractable problem.

I also continue to have concerns re: the security of their chat/cooperative editing system as it's currently difficult (impossible?) to self host, but perhaps that will also be improved.

VSCode has really become such a nightmare to use recently I am strongly looking for a way out. Recently I had some odd corruption take place where I had to blow away essenitally my entire VSCode install on my Mac. Going from zero to hero and bootstrapping back to good state should have been trivial with a single conf file that could be used to rehydrate state (like a lockfile for bundler or node) but - particularly with the remote ssh stuff - it becomes a mess. This extension is installed locally but not remotely, this is remote but not local, ... like dude figure it out and just make it all consistent.

I should expect this from Microsoft, though. I did this to myself.

Revisiting Zed... I am glad to see they have SSH support! Going to give it the old college try today. It's absolutely insane to me that they do not have a first-class Debian/Ubuntu apt repo, though. This has been an issue for quite some time.

I wish Microsoft would make software that just respects that I do not want to use copilot rather than enshittifying VSCode.

how in the world is this possible in THE web dev editor?

this is pathetic, and really shows how much of a shitter css tooling currently resides in

There's something extremely satisfying about having a dependable free software editor, available on all systems, and not having to change every time a new fad comes in, or a VC decides it's time to make money.

For some reason I'm happy in vim. I feel I understand most of what's happening. Not sure what It is.

I still use vscode for debugging (breakpoints etc.) as it's just the easiest. Maybe there is a workflow with lldb that I could use to debug within vim...

The existing AI plugins for neovim aren't great.

I was pleasantly surprised to basically configure-and-use the AI part: GitHub Copilot login and use, MCP servers, custom MCP servers. VSCode made this part really annoying: Copilot would blow up every now and then, MCP server auto-starting is not there yet and you need an extension (which works for 8 things out of 10), I haven't even tried adding a custom server because I was already annoyed. In Zed I just copy-pasted the suggested custom server start-up command into the small JSON array it presents to add a custom server, and it just started the MCP server in a custom thread, no fuss. Autostart works reliably every time the editor is re-opened.

It's also a reason I still use Firefox based browsers instead of chromium based browsers.

If that ever gets fixed then I'd look at replacing Sublime (which is still my go-to for quick editing) and then see if it can handle more advanced coding (which one the rotating list of various vscode forks handle today)

I work on large (everything is relative, though) monorepos, that would probably qualify for this limit, and I remember already did the kind of "workaround" discussed in this issue years ago on this device. I think it's hard to blame the software when the default file limit is so low depending on the languages you work with.

Anyway, if you would encounter this problem, you would have already encountered it with other tools, or else this is fine.

I was genuinely surprised that I can use Zed to remote into my server and it works great with Ruby tooling like Solargraph LSP and Rubocop. Everything in the UI is refreshingly minimalist and quite snappy. Good stuff.

It doesn't easily allow for parallel work like Claude Code in a Terminal but for a single session it is just as good plus it makes it really easy to switch between models. I also find it super useful when I'm working on our large monorepo, the minimal and fast ui makes it super easy to pull in the right context of folders, files, snippets etc to help the Agent.

but I mean actual features you see people here asking for because they are missing, those will require CPU cycles and memory

The browser engine is itself an abstraction point that many people find agreeable on both sides, for those of us that don't have a problem with chromium/codium/electron as a technology, seeing it more so as useful and enabling

In my mind, sharing a common engine across chromium/codium/electron is like how so many things use the linux kernel. To me, the more eyes, devs, and consumers of the code makes it better in the long run

Meanwhile, chromium works reasonable well on billions of devices of all shapes and kinds

The problem I had with zed when I tried it is that I'm on linux with kde and zed had a hamburger menu on linux, whereas on Mac it has a proper application menu. It also didn't have keyboard shortcuts for menus that I expected, e.g. Alt-f to open file menu. This is a Windows specific convention that many applications bring to linux too. I still prefer Sublime Text for its user interface.

The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs. There’s an open discussion about it, though it hasn’t seen much activity recently: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770

Stronger support for GDB/LLDB and broader C/C++ tooling would also be a big win.

It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become. Huge thanks to the people behind Zed and Sublime for actively pushing in the opposite direction!

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...

I don't even need that to be built into the editor – I would pay for a fast, standalone git UI that is as good as the IntelliJ one. I use Sublime Merge right now and it's kind of ok but definitely not on the same level

     [mergetool "intellij"]
     cmd = 'intellij-idea-ultimate-edition' merge "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE" "$BASE" "$MERGED"
     trustExitCode = true

Can you elaborate on when you use which editor? I'd have imagined that there's value in learning and using one editor in-depth, instead of switching around based on use-case, so I'd love to learn more about your approach.

VS Code glitches all the time, even when I keep most extensions disabled. A few times a day, I need to restart the program, as it just starts blinking/flickering. Diff views are also painfully slow. Zed handles my typical source files with ease, but lacks functionality. Sublime comes into play when I open huge codebases and multi-gigabyte dataset files.

- project work, i.e. GUI, multiple files, with LSP integration (zed)

- one-off/drive-by edits, i.e. terminal, small, fast, don't care much about features (vim)

- non-code writing, i. e. GUI, different theme (light), good markdown support (coteditor)

I don't like big complex software, so I stay away from IDEs; ideally, I'd like to drop zed for something simpler, without AI integration, but I haven't found anything that auto-formats as well.

search across all files; easier to navigate the results with the list of matching lines in the sidebar, and traversing the results with cursor up/down, giving full context

git; side-by-side diff, better handling of staging, and doesn't automatically word-wrap commit messages (I prefer doing that myself)

editing files which have a different type of indentation than what is configured in zed, since zed does not yet have autodetect

> It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become.

It's a bit ironic to see those two in the same message but I'd argue that right there is an example of why software becomes bloated. There is always someone who says "but it would be great to have X" that in spirit might be tangentially relevant, but it's a whole ordeal of its own.

Diffing text, for example, requires a very different set of tools and techniques than what just a plain text editor would already have. That's why there are standalone products like Meld and the very good Beyond Compare; and they tend to be much better than a jack of all trades editor (at least I was never able to like more the diff UI in e.g. VSCode than the UI of Meld or the customization features of BC).

Same for other tangential stuff like VCS integration; VSCode has something in there, but any special purpose app is miles ahead in ease of use and features.

In the end, the creators of an editor need to spend so much time adding what amounts to suplemental and peripheral features, instead of focusing on the best possible core product. Expectations are so high that the sky is the limit. Everyone wants their own pet sub-feature ("when will it integrate a Pomodoro timer?").

People call "bloat" the features they don't need, and "deal breakers" the lack of features they want besides good text editing.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...

I switched to VSCode now and whilst that piece of it seems to be much more reliable, I think overall I prefer the "feel" of Zed.

I've bookmarked the article to see if that helps me figure out how to make the settings stick.

Might be helpful:

  "prettier": {
    "allowed": true
  },

Frustrated, I switched to Zed and have not had that issue since.

Everything is monocolored, everything feels like it's an add-on, and settings are in weird different places rendered as json or a web page feel.

Last time I used a "real" IDE was 2008, so I may be the problem here.

I realize the irony here that Zed is fast because it's not web based, but I stand by my claim that being able to optionally display web UIs would be a really cool feature to have. It would open the door to a lot of extensions.

If you've got the ruff plugin installed it should use it by default. Should be able to use it in zed as well.

But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote git seems to work nicely. A very nice Christmas present - thanks, Zed!

Good job Zed!

I have been using Emacs since 1989. I have seen so many editors come and go, and Emacs was never the best, but it was always good. And it has stuck to its (very broad) knitting.

There are AI tools I can incorporate into Emacs, and one day I might. But I have so much choice, it gets distressing

Articles like this remind me why I keep loyal....

VSCode is still more polished and I’m going to keep it installed, but I’ve been using Zed for a month now and loving it.

Annoyingly the only hard blocker I have right now is lack of a call-graph navigation widget. In VSCode you can bring up an expandable tree of callers for a function. Somehow I am completely dependent on this tiny little feature for reading complex code!

The annoying thing is: "can't you just use an extension for this?" No, Zed extensions are much more constrained, Zed is not a web browser. And I like it this way! But... My widget...

I also have some performance issues with searching large remote repos, but I'm pretty confident that will get fixed.

Or do you want a more graphical tree view?

Does Zed address this in any meaningful way?

I'm building Fresh [0] [1] as an alternative to VSCode that runs in your terminal, with the main goal being ease-of-use out of the box (not a vi-clone modal editor), for example supports mouse, menu, command palette, etc out of the box. LSP as well. I'm focused on making it easy to use with minimum or zero configuration.

[0] https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh [1] https://sinelaw.github.io/fresh/

Unfortunately I'm still trying to figure out my AI workflow. Right now it's a mix of Cursor, Claude Code, and JetBrains Rider. I mainly use Cursor for the heavy AI lifting and then switch to Rider and Claude Code for tweaking and debugging. If Cursor didn't completely suck at .NET debug, I might just be able to use it alone.

So right now I'm sticking to Emacs.

that's not unusual for python. in fact, that is why I avoid python.