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.
Helix for a better default config. But you’ve probably already set up vim the way you like it.
I tried Helix but my muscle memory around Vim movements was a non - starter for me. Also , Helix wasn’t working out of the box with Vue.JS (it needs to be tweaked a bit.
So I gave a try to LazyVIM and everything works almost as is. I’ll never look back.
@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
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.
