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Anyone else using the Zed editor?
A month ago I decided to take a look at Zed. It hasn't hit 1.0 yet so I wasn't sure if I'd like it. But I haven't opened any other code editors since the first launch. It's open source and seems to be cross-licensed with multiple free software licenses.
Beyond the nice GUI performance from their use of native code it's clear that my use of VSCode forks for the last few years has kept me held back. There are lots of little things I love about Zed like how you can edit code within the search results page. Or how you can use your own self-hosted LLM without the outrageous shenanigans required to do so with Cursor.
After my thread a month or so ago I switched to Zed from VSCodium, which was starting to irritate me with how Microsoft was fudging with extension access.
I love it- it still has a rough edge or two, and there are a number of tiny things I'd love to be able to change (text truncation in the project structure view, for example), but it's so performant and almost everything else has a toggle or option! The extension ecosystem is reasonably comprehensive, despite the software not having reached 1.0, and I hope this only improves with time.
I went the other way, switched to VSCodium from Zed, for two reasons:
I use it. I like it for Go, but I still reach for IntelliJ (company provided) for Ruby and PHP. Zed just doesn't work as well for those. The speed is amazing, and really is my main reason for using it.
It is a little buggy, I wish the Vim bindings were a little cleaner, but overall, I'm a fan.
It works well for me with Typescript and Rust. It's clear the plugin ecosystem isn't super fleshed out but I haven't hit any walls yet.
I haven't actually tried it, but based on this post I'm interested in giving it a go. I'll probably still need to keep vscode around for specific uses, but I don't have any attachment to it in general.
Speaking of local LLM use, does anybody have a recommended coding model for trying it out? I gave it a shot a while back, but between fussing with vscode extensions and the poor accuracy:speed ratio I gave up on it.
That depends on what hardware you have available. I think unless you've got $10,000 in compute at hand performance will be far below the hosted models. But I have found Qwen Coder to be useful for web dev even on my little 24GB MacBook Air. But I only spin it up when I don't have internet access.
I currently have it installed but have yet to use it for anything substantial. The nice thing about it is that it’s very snappy, so it’s been my “fix the one file real quick” editor of choice.
I've been meaning to try it. I didn't know it was open-source, I thought it was paid which is why I haven't bitten yet.
I use it exclusively in my personal, potentially open-source Rust projects. With the opencode / bigpickle model -- which is still free of charge. It's pretty great, and obviously works as a pure non-AI editor well too. I pair it with Steve Yegge's beads project for better control and a sort of memory for the agents.
For professional work, I've found that Cursor still beats it, especially in its Auto mode. Which is sad, the Cursor editor is pretty abysmal compared to Zed.
I want to move to Zed as soon as the git integration becomes better, I know I could use some external tool like Gitui or Sublime-merge but being able to edit my files during diffs inside the editor with all the other functionality it's invaluable to me.
Until side-by-side is available, I will still use VS Code.