That figures, their lead platform was the Mac where HiDPI is totally ubiquitous, so their renderer probably has no provisions for subpixel font rendering.
While I do not doubt that there are people who experience this on some monitor/OS combinations, I have used zed on basic 1080p and 1440p 24" monitors with no issue. Sometimes I have general issues with some monitors in macos, which is usually due to some super-resolution/sharpness setting on the monitor itself that I need to adjust, but nothing specific to zed. All I say is that these issues are far from universal with non-hidpi monitors.
While this is probably annoying, I have to imagine that non-hidpi displays are becoming rarer and rarer. It's probably not a great idea to spend a lot of work on a feature that will only ever see declining use.
My guess: their shaders or text rendering don't account for sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which is critical to getting decent text rendering on low pixel density displays.
If they'd used Skia (which is what Electron and Chromium use), they would've got this for free. Instead they tried to reinvent the world and didn't realise how big the world was.
Top of my head switching between IntelliJ and Zed:
- Git UI is extremely barebones with no support for other VCS
- No merge tool or side-by-side diffs
- Configuration is all JSON
- Would be nice having a full file tree for the search editor instead of just the list; having the functionality split between a tab and the outline panel is quite clunky.
- Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows or other configurations (multiple docks per side, multiple copies of the same panel linked to a specific tab).
Zed is basically a slightly more featured text editor, so it does a good job when I just want to open something quickly and do small edits. So it's really replacing Sublime Text.
But I find myself hopping out to other tools when I'm using Zed which wasn't really common with IntelliJ. So I still want to use a proper IDE for proper development work.
Curious as someone dabbling with building an editor: what do you prefer? A different configuration language? A GUI? How do you save and sync settings? Just with JetBrains account sync?
> Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows
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.)
People are bringing up a lot of sophisticated stuff. Honestly for me it would just be a more flexible panel system that lets me see eg: File Explorer, Git UI, AI mode, etc, all at the same time.
I can’t really pin down the reason but somehow vscode just feels a bit more „balanced“ to me - the font sizes, little borders, icons and details, it’s more consistent.
Git: IntelliJ is miles ahead. And we’re talking about essential features like three-may merge panel, diffing 2 files, diffing same file between branches, diffing folders, etc
Tests:. Zed is bare bones compared to IntelliJ (rerun failed tests, export list of failures, go to failed lines easily etc
The AI stuff is cool but it won’t get me to switch from PyCharm.
Wow. This might be the 1st time i've seen someone comment negatively regarding UI performance. Zed is one of the fastest programs i use. I used to laugh when seeing them market fps and such, but yeesh it's fast
Smoothness and frames per second is the core of why they were building a very optimized editor. Not sure if it is just your machine that it is not leveraging the right bits.
For me the extension ecosystems is something I really like about VSCode, but that is an entirely different matter.
This could be an issue with GPU drivers. I experienced some incompatibility with GPU kernel drivers that allowed Zed to crash the whole window manager during text selection.
sapiogram|6 months ago
jsheard|6 months ago
freehorse|6 months ago
stouset|6 months ago
delta_p_delta_x|6 months ago
If they'd used Skia (which is what Electron and Chromium use), they would've got this for free. Instead they tried to reinvent the world and didn't realise how big the world was.
TiredOfLife|6 months ago
EnPissant|6 months ago
kenhwang|6 months ago
- Git UI is extremely barebones with no support for other VCS
- No merge tool or side-by-side diffs
- Configuration is all JSON
- Would be nice having a full file tree for the search editor instead of just the list; having the functionality split between a tab and the outline panel is quite clunky.
- Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows or other configurations (multiple docks per side, multiple copies of the same panel linked to a specific tab).
Zed is basically a slightly more featured text editor, so it does a good job when I just want to open something quickly and do small edits. So it's really replacing Sublime Text.
But I find myself hopping out to other tools when I'm using Zed which wasn't really common with IntelliJ. So I still want to use a proper IDE for proper development work.
seanssel|6 months ago
modernerd|6 months ago
Curious as someone dabbling with building an editor: what do you prefer? A different configuration language? A GUI? How do you save and sync settings? Just with JetBrains account sync?
> Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows
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.)
WA|6 months ago
extr|6 months ago
valentinnnnn|6 months ago
insane_dreamer|6 months ago
Tests:. Zed is bare bones compared to IntelliJ (rerun failed tests, export list of failures, go to failed lines easily etc
The AI stuff is cool but it won’t get me to switch from PyCharm.
SJMG|6 months ago
pseufaux|6 months ago
tmdh|6 months ago
rtaylorgarlock|6 months ago
mlnj|6 months ago
For me the extension ecosystems is something I really like about VSCode, but that is an entirely different matter.
blurbleblurble|6 months ago
Longhanks|6 months ago
...and now they lose to a web app?