Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

The AI is a symptom of the problem. If it weren't AI, it would be something else.

Here you go: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> I found Copilot tab completion completion to be VERY slow in Zed, for some reason.

> Zed still takes a relatively long time to start on my old desktop. I thought something was wrong but no, it is just THAT slow

> I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code.

> I mean, good AI tab completion feels like a super power. Zed’s is not that good. It’s slow and normally not at all what I want.

> Zed tab is a lot worse in comparison (partly because it’s slow)

> In my personal experience I couldn't use Zed for editing python. Firstly, when navigating in a large python repository, looking up references was extremely slow (sometimes on the order of minutes).

> All I'm saying is that contrary to what someone else said about the software being "fast" I tried it and at startup, it was unusably slow.

> Tried using zed on Linux (pop os, Nvidia) several months ago, was terribly slow, ~1s to open right click context window.

> Zed is as close as it gets, I also use it, but it is still slow and cumbersome sometimes.

I'll stop here. There are other 4 pages of comments to pick anecdotes from, in this simple search alone.

MacOS native apps have had great sub-pixel rendering all along, but I guess since we have to develop everything in Electron now it's time to reimplement all the exiting functionality.

Meanwhile on Linux and Windows, they still implement subpixel rendering so fonts look great on 1440p.

https://www.jefftk.com/icdiff

Have Claude Code resolve merge conflicts, problem solved.

I don't care about the configuration language so much personally (though JSON is of course pretty lame in a lot of ways for that task.)

Really just a GUI for editing, the storage format can still be JSON and synced/backed up however you handle text files.

It just really nice having settings grouped by categories, with dropdowns for possible values, indicators for changes from default values or values overridden by project settings, search/hide/filters, and tooltips for what it does.

Right now the experience with Zed is: open the settings file, open the default settings file for documentation, and basically use search and copy-paste magic value strings/int/float/nulls into the right nested object/key.

> Is Zed's "zoom in" feature (shift-escape) that quickly maximises the active pane (excluding the file browser/git pane) enough? Or are you looking for the separate window experience of IntelliJ? (e.g. JetBrains lets you pop-out the commit window, I believe, which can be nice since once you close it you're back in the editor with nothing to switch or rearrange.)

Really the separate window experience (including the file browser/git pane). Really nice having the git panel just open on a window so you can quickly glance at changed files and quickly jump back to them for more editing. Or having search results able to spawn tabs in another pane/window so you don't have to keep switching back to search or rearranging the tab after opening the file from it.

Or even just expanding the workspace across monitors. Right now you can't even move tabs into its own window or across windows.

That doesn't mean Zed will have all the other extensions that VS Code has... Recently added the new SQL Server extension(s) and it's been at least interesting, in a way slightly better than using SMMS. It's pretty much burrowing the UI from Azure Data Studio (or whatever it was called). Haven't tried similar for PG/SQLite etc yet.

I tried Zed several times and I just don't see the point.

The main issues with VScode over something like the Jetbrains IDEs is that language servers are just not as powerful or as integrated to the IDE as the Jetbrains solution can be and Zed does nothing to solve it.

I don't think it being a native app offers much added value.

But the comparison here is broader than electron apps...

It is an editor made for people who are used to double-clicking individual files rather than opening a folder in VS Code, so they close and open their editor dozens or even hundreds of times per day.

Let's say VS Code takes 5 seconds to boot.

Some programmers may argue: "yes, I spend 3 hours on a project or just leave it open overnight, so 5 seconds per week is nothing"

But here is not the case, it is for programmers who come from Notepad/Sublime/Notepad++/emacs/vi, and who opens a single file and closes the editor right after.

If you work 2 hours, maybe 4 files per minute, this means 120 * 4 openings = 480 openings.

It means you would have wasted 2400 seconds (40 minutes per day!) waiting for VS Code to open (about 33% of the 2-hour work session spent waiting)

Yes, like with Notepad or Zed, you lose some features like Colors or Syntax checking, but still, time is the most precious thing in life.

For users who come from very advanced but slow text editors like Microsoft Word (used in coding exams: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76102874/single-and-doub... or programming courses: https://youtu.be/0TVugOJtAiU?t=162 ), this is truly revolutionary and life-changing.