Create issue in the Zed Github repository?
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/9057 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12629
When you search, Zed opens a new tab, which I hate. Sometimes I just want to have a quick glance at some code and close the search using escape.
Telescope style search in vim, helix or JetBrains tools is so much better.
for file search, edit in the persistent buffer can rename files
for grep, edits in the persistent buffer edit across files
and so on
Also now they've introduced this "agent first" layout which i cannot undo. They're strength is in perf, idk why try to reinvent the wheel w.r.t DX.
The multibuffer result is so nice for "hands-on" search and replace.
You also have to validate the search, it doesn't start off immediately on its own, which annoys me a lot more.
I’m hoping the roadmap contains support for even more things that extensions can do, such as rendering images or Markdown in-editor.
This kind of nonsense really takes away from stuff that actually matters.
BUT: It's very easy to just choose a different theme and there are plenty to choose from by now. It's even possible to make your own theme and they even have a first-party theme editor (https://zed.dev/theme-builder) which works great. They should maybe include some descriptions for each color instead of just the name but that's the only negative thing I can say right now.
I'd even say that it's easier to theme Zed than VSCode because there are fewer variables.
But anyway, yes these bland names do annoy me. R, C, Go, etc. Have an opinionated name but especially, that's not hard to google
I'm trying right now the ACP with my own agent and I'm of mixed opinions but that's maybe because I care how my agent works. I believe that for the agent view a plain buffer with small ui elements would be the best ui for an agent conversation but I may have been spoiled by their text threads. I may spin a personal fork but the thought of tens of mins of compile time isn't that attractive.
Edit: I realized I started moving to terminal based editors like helix due to agents: claude -> codex -> custom pi, with the open sourcing of warp I was considering making a native integration for warp + pi but now I'm thinking zed's text threads (~17k lines) + pi might be a better way, any thoughts or ideas?
(there is, of course, a rich tradition of text editors with the same issue, including Vim and Emacs. They 1) have an excuse; 2) provide both workarounds and their own input method systems. Having this in a new program is nuts.)
The debugger in Python FastAPI and mainly Django is not working as expected. Hopefully soon will be fixed.
That seems risky.
Despite promising it for years and every comparable product having it.
Whenever I think to myself “yikes that sounds too hard”, my next thought is “well, Zed team could probably do it”.
Congrats to the team
For each kind of warning, I wish there was a button that said "don't warn me again about issues like this one in this project." Then I could keep the interesting warnings (like undeclared variable) and ditch the ridiculous ones.
With Zed, I feel like I'm being dragged into a modern style guide that I never agreed to. It would be nicer if I could make it my own by turning off those parts that I disagree with and keeping the rest. I know this is technically possible, but they've certainly not made it easy.
I feel like some people will be put off by all the "AI" mentioned by Zed, but you're sleeping on a top tier editor where you can just ignore the AI stuff if you don't want it. It's very high quality, and probably the reason I wont be renewing next year for JetBrains, unless JetBrains does something impressive, I thought by now they'd have a more native feeling IDE that handles most / any language instead of so many separate ones.
VS Code has gotten so bloated over the years. The gold standard of ST has spoiled me with simpler editors. Zed is the first time I felt like someone finally built an editor that is modern and has a rich set of features.
I don't know what your financial situation is, but given that the upgrade is an $80 one off payment (a new license is $99), that it's a per-user license (not per-machine), and that there were 8 years between Sublime Text 3 (2013) and Sublime Text 4 (2021) (only major versions require a new license), I personally think it's very reasonably priced.
That said, there are a lot of reasons why someone might be struggling with money. If I was the creator, I wouldn't object to someone using an unlicensed copy forever in that case.
I was confused until here because I remember using Sublime until it went paid
I’m not sure why though. I do not have the issue you do, but Sublime feels better.
Isn't it just the default configuration of whatever LSP zed defaults to for PHP?
So you should be able to either configure the LSP to avoid that or disable the LSP server entirely.
however, i think LSP or integrated linters/typecheckers have been standard fare in editors for a while now (zed does seem to have a lot more set up by default, but i like the sane defaults most of the time). The "correct" solution would be to configure whatever lsp zed is running for the project the way you want, and reap the benefits even outside of zed. for php the tools are listed here: https://zed.dev/docs/languages/php the main one seems to be Phpactor and you should be able to configure it globally or per project https://phpactor.readthedocs.io/en/master/usage/configuratio...
but i understand the frustration, sometimes i try to navigate an ancient python codebase and it really is a sea of red
You may be able to do this by editing a language server-specific config file in whatever arcane syntax they decided to offer. But there isn't any editor support for configuring languages servers, so it's a bit of a lift for a newcomer who just wants to turn off some warnings
It really there is no realy good ide or tools for php
But it is not for me. Multiple issues on Linux and high memory usage makes it a worse alternative to vscode and jetbrains.
Maybe it's better on OSX, but I dont use that anymore and why use an editor that treats your platform as a second class citizen?
- Doesn't highlight typos in variable, functions, class/struct names etc. Doesn't highlight rust borrow-check, invalid method etc errors.
- Doesn't seem to understand either language beyond superficial syntax
- "Go to definition" (Ctrl + B) Doesn't do anything
- Doesn't show which versions are valid in Cargo.toml and pyproject.toml
- No ability to move functions/classes/structs etc to different modules
- Doesn't seem to understand rust feature gates
- Doesn't seem to understand what fields a struct has, or params a function has, let a lone what types are valid in them.
- Rename seems naive
edit: Thank you very much for those who have pointed out I needed to disable restricted mode. This has added some introspection and in-line error handling. Some of my concerns are partially-mitigated. It seems when introspection and in-line editing/complete/data appears is inconsistent (But working in many cases), and I do not yet know what rules define this. Refactoring tools like moving are still absent. I will continue to use Zed on my tablet with the LSPs enabled, and observe.
That is the part that makes the space heater
The latest x86_64 Linux build is 136MB. (https://zed.dev/docs/linux#downloading-manually)
As for your list of grievances, they all seem to boil down to the respective LSPs not doing their job? Does Ctrl-Alt-l (lowercase L, not Shift+i) include the language's server in the context menu, and are there any errors reported for it if it does?
I do think they should have a more obvious warning that the current directory is untrusted, right now the little green warning in the corner is way to unobtrusive and will result in many people having the same issue as you.
My daily driver is Zed developing on SSH remote servers on exe.dev.
It's crazy to think of all the dev tools I've churned through over the last 18 months but these two feel sticky.
Zed has everything I need in a unified pane. File editor, terminal, agents, SSH remotes. And it's fast and intuitive
exe.dev is the first "dev container" I've ever *loved*. The remote sandbox means `dangerously-skip-permissions` is safe. Being on the internet with good private / shared / public access saves so much time.
I also use https://conductor.build/ and GitHub but this is starting to feel clunky compared hacking directly against online live reloading apps.
A lot of the time I'm developing on a remote server using VSCode Remote-SSH. I mostly love it. But! It consumes a lot of memory. And not only that. At times it gets stuck in some infinite loop or such, and ends up consuming all memory on the machine, preventing all traffic. Takes a few minutes for the OS to finally kill it, so I can get back in. I'm pretty this is happening due to large collections of symlinks (the subprocess eating up the memory is rg). But also just JavaScript editing at times launches up a bunch of ts-servers consuming everything and more.
This is super scary, if I'm poking around on the prod server.
Looking for alternatives. Zed is on my list.
Though it's a pretty big bummer to see that extension improvements were removed from the roadmap.
My editor is dumb. No AI anywhere.
The only unusual thing is that I use ruby as primary glue language to everything, so in a way that editor (no longer maintained, similar to Linus' editor) is just a wrapper over ruby as such, and functionality in these scripts.
I have also found that it is not the editor that slows me down, but the need to have to think. This is also one reason why I try to make the specification as useful as possible. For instance, in one project that I use to compile everything from source, I use a ton of simple, mostly smallish .yml files that describe everything - allowed keys, allowed values, settings that are mostly just a pointer to where to fetch the source, how, how to compile it then and so forth. The ruby code then is mostly just a glue over that data. And that approach, while very simple, works quite well. Users can also modify settings, by modifying the .yml file or via commandline flags. And if need be, I could also use and populate a SQL database with that data (but for the most part, yaml actually suffices; I don't understand why people are so upset about yaml, and then only point at use cases where folks use mega-nested yaml files. These guys don't understand why simplicity is a benefit; admittedly yaml is not a perfect format either, I notice this when I have a long .yml file and then some forgotten ":" or "," due to manual copy/paste error, then it takes me a few seconds to notice what's wrong).
I don't like how it loses the session when I reopen it randomly (and not randomly every upgrade).
I gave it weeks though, and the surrounding UI just never clicked for me. The various AI panels are confusing, the global search is awkward, and something about the type rendering just didn’t ever look right (maybe I’m hallucinating this?). I use VS Code only grudgingly, but I do think its ergonomics are actually pretty reasonable. I came from Sublime before that. I’ll keep trying Zed, and I hope you succeed.
I wish GPUI could become the go-to Rust UI library and not just an editor backend.
For that, a couple of changes would be highly desirable: being able to switch the GPU backend from Metal to wgpu (so it could be mixed with vello, for instance), and the ability to integrate into an existing event loop like egui allows you to. If this were easy to do, I would switch from egui in a heartbeat.
Just opened my current TS/TSX project and everything is working as expected.
Performance is fantastic. I used Sublime for a decade and always missed its native performance after switching to VSCode due to needing first class Svelte, Vue, or Astro support.
The only thing that bothered me is that it enabled the Tailwind LSP even though I'm not using TW and I couldn't stop it. Had to disable that LSP completely in the settings:
"language_servers": [
"...",
"!tailwindcss-language-server"
]For better or worse, my current workflow is to do most things through WSL on Windows 11. VSCode supports running the editor natively on Windows, but then having an agent or something inside WSL that lets me remote control what's going on there. Does Zed do anything similar?
Currently I'm just access the workspace in Zed via Windows Explorer, but I wonder if that's going to kneecap some of the integrations.
EDIT: nm, Zed supports exactly the same kind of remote editor session, via hamburger -> File -> Open Remote
Does anyone have any suggestions here? I would love to use Zed more.
Side note: I know OpenAI doesn't have infinite money but why do I feel like they're going to buy Zed?
Sorry, can't help it, every time I see Zed i think of the ZFS Event Daemon
This is why I say Docker is the only real "success" story here. And note, I mean a success story for the users; Docker tries real hard to enshittify and fails, and that's good.
And Mitchell definitely seems to want to make Alacritty an easy target for conversion, he was just talking about being open to help support Warp with it: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2049159764261925005
That being said, I love the software and will continue to check back on it with the hopes that it sticks one day. Congrats on the 1.0!!
Zed is the first one that got me to actually migrate. It does a great job of staying out of your way. Search and replace works seamlessly across multiple files with regex, and the extremely fast editing experience feels immediately familiar if you’re coming from Sublime. Being open source also gives confidence in its long-term viability.
Kudos to the team building Zed.
Anyhow, such comments are rarely consistent with how human nature works. People find rationalizations, and that's fine. It would just be nice if people were a little more self-aware. Changing editors is harder for some people more than others.
My suggestion: if you want to make Zed better for your use case, please smart by explaining who you are as a developer, what you've used, what your expectations are. And be intellectually honest about the last time you've made a big change to your development workflow. End soapbox.
I have no affiliation with Zed, though I have applied to work there, so I'm hardly neutral. I've been an enthusiastic user for probably two years. I don't expect perfect alignment with what I want, and sometimes the team doesn't respond how I would like with particular issues. But man, in a pretty suboptimal world right now, Zed is an amazing thing to have: open source, regular updates, extensions, nice settings. In the past I've used BBEdit, Eclipse, TextEdit, Sublime, Emacs, VS Code, Jetbrains, Helix. Zed is my favorite by far, probably because of the latency. It is an intangible feeling that just clicked immediately for me.
Personally, as a mostly independent developer/researcher, I go through bursts of re-evaluating my tools. To give some context about my newer tools over the last few years: some of the tools I've adopted include: Ghostty, Nushell, Podman, Nix, Cocogitto, Mochi, Monodraw, Swish (window manager for macOS), Base (macOS SQLite editor by Menial), LM Studio, (probably obviously) Claude Code. So for a "seasoned" developer, I'm probably more open to new tools than most?
There are still a few things PyCharm does better (debugging, for one), but overall Zed is very good and I haven't used PyCharm in months.
I still use CC in the terminal instead of inside Zed, and lazygit for reviewing git changes and other git actions (though Zed now does a decent job of the basics).
e.g. its "run" gutter icons rely on context free grammar queries, but of course Scala allows to define main methods via inheritance from a class. Zed's extensions are not powerful enough to allow to query entry points. This also goes for the various testing DSLs that need a custom treatment for each one, rather than supporting something similar to VS Code's Test Explorer and Testing API interface.
Also extensions can't add new UI, so you are stuck fitting to the recipe Zed team provides for you to plug into, and often enough this is not satisfactory.
jore•1h ago
802e65bc-e259•1h ago
edweis•1h ago
recov•1h ago
unshavedyak•1h ago
What does it not support? I want to try and figure out if its shortcomings in the ACP/Claude SDK or if it's just features that Zed has yet to support?
wldcordeiro•15m ago
iknowstuff•6m ago
ramon156•1h ago
bicepjai•1h ago
sodacanner•1h ago
I tried it for a bit and it was definitely usable and I got a few features built out, but I eventually moved back to using CC in the terminal. I'm sure they're working on it, though.
NortySpock•1h ago
Once I got that running on my machine it was also easy (literally a drop-down+ API key) to switch and explore using models on OpenRouter.
jeppester•36m ago
It lacks a lot of features, but IMO feels less "busy" than the terminal version, which I like.
Very recently Zed also gained support for parallel sessions, which is nice. In general it's very obvious that a lot of effort goes into improving it, and it gets better with every release.
maherbeg•21m ago