I generally like what Zed is trying to become. However, all of these features and blog posts are frustraing when they struggle to keep basic editor features stable. Edit a file outside of the editor? It's not going to show up in the project pane or the git diff. Need to work inside a container because it's 2025 and we don't need to clutter our local machine with 100s of dependencies and env managers... well now all the AI stuff is broken. ACP sounds cool until you realize every single CLI in existence works better.
My wish is that Zed gets the core working correctly 100% of the time before moving on to expanding feature sets. For now I'm back in NeoVIM because it always works the first time....
> Need to work inside a container because it's 2025 and we don't need to clutter our local machine with 100s of dependencies and env managers...
“Can I tell you about our lord and saviour Nix?”
Kidding, but seriously though I’ve found having to work in a container to be a bit clumsy, even with good tooling around it. As you said it’s 2025, and there are other ways to have reproducible toolchains that don’t pollute the rest of your system environment Nix or otherwise.
With the AI stuff, it feels like they invested a bit prematurely. When the Agentic editing demo came out (6 months, 10 months ago? It’s a blur), it felt right. Accepting and reviewing edits, live tracking ..etc., felt like pair programming. The ACP addition felt like a natural evolution .
With the continuous improvement in CLI tools and people’s experience with them, it feels like doing a live review or edit-by-edit approvals all feel like a drag. I personally have come to avoid using the IDE/Editor. I just kick up Claude code - plan mode, auto-accept edits. Once the session is done, switch to the editor and make necessary adjustments. I suspect people with Max subscription and “dangerously-skip-permissions” …etc won’t even care if an editor has AI integration or not.
I am not getting tons of issues with Zed going out of sync all the time. I wonder if the issue is it silently having issues watching the filesystem due to open fd limits.
I've noticed that not only does it sync but it even will recognize if I rename the folder a workspace is in.
But then, I've run into a couple of strange issues that tell me there is more polish needed:
- Sometimes upon using LSP refactor, it seems like if a bunch of files get renamed, the open buffers will get screwed up somehow. Like, I'll hit save and it will write to the old filename! It's not actually a huge problem, as I can close the buffers, delete whatever excess files I accidentally create, and re-open them without error, but it is confusing as hell.
- I have indeed had issues with the file view not always updating when files are added externally, however it is not constantly. I usually just reload workspace when this happens. It is a minor frustration, but I had many minor recurring frustrations with both VS Code and Neovim before too, so I don't consider it a deal breaker.
yup, my pet peeve is there is no way to disable line wrap. the setting that exist doesn't work and there's no way to actually disable it instead of just increasing the max characters (with set hard limit in the source code).
have a big docs or log,data file where you don't care for the rest of the line ? well too bad better have a spare editor.
this feel to me like it should should be a number #1 priority. "an editor need to nail the editing part".
My experience has been so different. Zed seems to always do the right thing for me when I concurrently edit files with other tools. Not doubting your experience or anything, but you must have a very different environment than me. Zed has been absolutely rock solid for the past year on my computer.
My favorite bug was Claude Code kept editing some template file. Zed kept auto-formatting the file, which was BREAKING the template itself. It took me like 30 minutes of watching Claude implode, and literally using "ed" to edit the line, before I realized, then I started asking Claude how to turn off the Zed formatters to which it was like AH THAT MAKES MORE SENSE, which I thought was hilarious after it tried everything from editorconfig onwards.
The thing about "basic" here is that it's subjective. It could be that these issues only happen on your machine or that the staff (or even most people) don't need what you're asking for. Of course they should try to fix them anyway, but their backlog is enormous.
I would say you're being harsh but their file tree refresh is bad(so is vs code but they have a manual button), their ai panel can't beat Claude code and their panes / window layouts are not any better or flexible than other editors. I still use it but I'm close to going back to vanilla vs code. I'm just hanging on to determine if my frustrations are from me just being used to vs code or otherwise
I agree with you. Zed has a great vision and the team clearly cares, but the foundation still feels a bit shaky. Stability in core workflows matters more than any flashy feature, especially for people who just need their editor to disappear into the background. What gives me hope is that the community feedback is loud and consistent. If the team focuses on tightening the fundamentals, Zed could still become the lightweight but powerful editor everyone hoped for. I’m rooting for them, and like you, I’m ready to give it another full try once the basics feel rock solid.
For me, I was happy using Zed until suddenly an update caused it to crash every time I opened it. It was caused by some sort of issue with graphics drivers on linux I guess.
I just checked the issue [1] and it is fixed now, but it's crazy to me that I never really thought of my text editor needing to use my graphics card for rendering.
So many of the basic features (e.g., automatic Python venv, Pyright running, etc.) have random bugs that pop up from time to time, making the basic editor unreliable.
My fear is, if they keep going in this direction (adding bloat without fixing basic functionality), they'll be a perfect fit for Microsoft acquisition, at which point I'll have to switch careers, because there isn't any other editor out there that I like.
Yeah, I have been fighting Zed to get agents to use podman on my host, but Flatpak is sandboxed and makes it almost impossible. The ideal solution would be that Zed could use podman or docker to spin up a container where agents could run free!
I agree with you 100%. If basic functionalities are not airtight, there’s no way I am going to deal with growing pains just because they want to get paid on AI fluffs. Contrast this with something like Ghostty.
How does Neovim handle outside changes then? Or is there a plugin to make it work? AFAIK it doesn't reload any bufferes when files change. IntelliJ is the only other one I know that does it transparently.
What I like in zed (pretty new to me) is that I dont have to deal with vim/neovim plugings to make the basic stuff work. Zed workds out of the box(for rust).
It's not something I am excited about, but it is something I want my IDE to do well if I must engage with it. Other remote pair programming experiences are even worse and I appreciate Zed's capability in the area even if it's not what I prefer.
A lot of my IDE choices are about extensibility and flexibility more than perfection for my preferred coding approach. After all, until I only work for myself I need to be ready to accommodate the needs of others as part of my job.
This is a strong divider between types of minds. I respect your type, but know that others exist and they want these things. It's not crazy, it's just another way.
This feels like a huge distraction from building an IDE.
A monnumentous yak shave.
I've never used or cared for multiplayer in VSCode or JetBrains. It's silly.
I've never been the pair programmer type. The only time I've needed to share an IDE is during a SEV or ridiculously complicated systems bug, and that's 1% of the time.
I _really really_ want to try this feature, but only if I can selfhost the collaboration server. If there is any way to do this, it's not obvious. Given that as I understand it, lots of project details will pass through Zed's servers, I can't imagine any enterprises would knowingly allow this without some kind of SLA with Zed.
Maybe I'm old, jaded, stubborn and paranoid, but something about a coding editor that is controlled by a company is off-putting to me. It's even more off-putting when you add Zoom, Slack and everything else into said editor.
…you’re free to use other editors? People like Zed. They like IntelliJ. They like VSCode. If you have an aesthetic preference against all professionally maintained IDEs, I think you’re in the minority.
I like Zed. I pay for pro. I like the integrated agent stuff (though my usage model has changed a bit after 5 months of use).
I'm happy that others can type in each others' space, but this post reveals a tension here. They are building a tool for building the tool, and their own team. I think that's cool, but at a 2-3 person shop heavy polyglotted across 4 OSes and 5+ programming languages, this is not what I really need.
What I'm looking for is a snappy tool (check) that lets me explore, understand, modify code at a next level (marginal). And I want it to not only be snappy by virtue of execution efficiency, but cognitive load. I want the less-is-more experience. I don't need it to do Swift, Kotlin, or Python, because there are bespoke IDEs for each of those that focus on the environments where I deploy them best. What I mostly want from Zed is the ability to see the outline panel at the same time as the directory panel, and to separate the search outline from the file structure outline. I spent too much time toggling views in Zed.
Zed is lovely and I hope it becomes super successful but this kind of mass collaboration might be ok for meeting minutes... maybe. But thinking of it for coding it gives me shingles. Code by mass live committee. Yikes.
I think it's a fun and interesting idea for training junior engineers and possibly for other use cases. Suggesting alternatives to (perceived) bad practices the instant you see them could be helpful for many people, and also save a lot of future time for reviewers.
I could also see it as a potential productivity aid. Person 1 sees Person 2 is writing something and they don't want to be seen as idle, so they start working as well. This might sound oppressive but a lot of people who struggle with ADHD/procrastination/akrasia actually receive great benefit from that structure. Similar to that startup that forces you to code while screensharing with a stranger in order to push you to work, or people who code in cafes/libraries to be more productive.
As long as it's not an organization requiring it for senior engineers, I could see promise to it as an eventual common new paradigm.
Pair programming can be really great. Or horrible. Depends entirely on the people.
This would be good for code-walks too though. Instead of having to share your screen and hope the video comes through well. Everyone can follow along in the comfort of their own editor.
Let's lean into the chaos and see what it might give us. Imagine a production application deployed directly from a non-version-controlled directory. Anyone on the team can edit the files, at any time. Insane? Probably. The disadvantages are easy to see.
But the positives are really compelling: 1. make small, granular testable changes; 2. use feature toggles; 3. refactor intensely and concurrently; 4. always work on the latest code; 5. use in-code documentation instead of GitHub/etc workflows; 6. explore continuous, incremental, hot-swappable code deployment.
Doesn't thought of ditching all the wasted motion and ceremony around logging async work and just coding sound glorious? I'm actually not a "move fast and break things person" usually. But the idea of moving so fast that broken things will only stay broken for a tiny fraction of the time is pretty compelling. There is also an intensity that comes from real-time interactions where a team needs to reach consensus quickly.
I would love to see collab servers take the same path as LSPs in being standarized and integrated across various editors and IDEs. I would love to work more closely with my VSCode peers, for example. Of course some features may be outside the standard and only supported with likewise editors, e.g. voice chat perhaps, but having shared cursors and a text chat would be a good start.
This is what I'd like to see as well. These collaboration tools are really good, but I barely use them because they always assume that you and your team are using the same editor. Most of the time that's just not the case, so I've used them a handful of times but beyond that there's little opportunity.
It's probably not an issue the Zed team will experience as they're all naturally using their own editor. Hopefully it's on their radar though.
These are definitely some interesting features, though not sure I'm in any position to take advantage of them at all.
The multi-user editing is kind of cool... there's an ANSI art tool (PabloDraw) that you can run a host session so multiple artists can create text art, and I thought back when I first saw it, that it might be cool to be able for multiple editors to work on a project. I've used some of the collab stuff with VS Code, but haven't done enough to even begin to compare.
Not to mention that in a lot of workplaces, self-hosting or otherwise layers of bureaucracy stand in the way.
> Despite attempts to make Atom—an Electron application—more responsive, it never reached the performance standards the team yearned for.
This feels like an attempt at deflecting blame. VSCode is another Electron application that ended up having better performance than Atom. There's another Electron adjacent application that has good performance, the one you're probably using right now to read this page.
Reading this static HTML page and executing several megabytes of JavaScript to read and edit short lines of text are fundamentally different tasks, even if the same program can perform both actions.
VSCode can pretend to be fast in my desktop, and I would not care because desktops today are computing monsters that rival supercomputers of the past, but Sublime Text is still much faster at any text editing task.
I’m not saying that VSCode is the snappiest editor out there but for all its flaws it’s still the most responsive editor for my use case on moderately sized CUDA/HIP projects.
What are you saying here? It is true that VS Code is less bad in terms of responsiveness in comparison to Atom. Zed, however, is written in Rust (i.e., not Electron), and I would guess it is at least an order of magnitude more responsive than VS Code across every possible scenario.
Web technologies are an unrivaled technological marvel for what they are, but it is disingenuous to imply they represent anything near the peak of what we are capable of in the context of performance.
Unlike a lot of other commenters, I found this to be an interesting approach. Text files are good. Having an integrated environment that combines files and channels and collaboration seems like a neat idea, and I could imagine building all sorts of neat stuff on it.
However, I just tried it myself and was really shocked to see other people in my sidebar after I clicked on the “collaboration” stuff. I expected to be dropped into my own collaboration environment built around my own channels, like a fresh private Slack instance, but instead I saw the built-in Zed channels and as I clicked around, it looked/sounded like I was joining voice channels. It was as if I’d accidentally joined someone else’s Discord. It was so mentally jarring that I got afraid I was on a live mic or would accidentally be live-sharing stuff with strangers.
If you've been a developer long enough, you might recall the teletype package for Atom—both built by Zed's founders.
I first experienced this in SubEthaEdit in 2013 or so, but it has been around since the early 2000s:
Appropriately working together on a truly collaborative tool, Martin Ott, Martin Pittenauer, Dominik Wagner, and Ulrich Bauer of Technische Universitat Munchen won the Best Mac OS X Student Project for Hydra 1.0.1, a Rendezvous-based text editor that enables multiple people to contribute to a shared document. (Adam and about ten other attendees at MacHack used Hydra to take notes during this year’s Hack Contest.)
It seems like the "unlock" here that makes it different this time is organization-wide sharing.
People have been doing collaborative text editing since the 60s actually! See, The Mother Of All Demos[0], referenced in our first blog post[1] :D
I'd say CRDTs are also a big change. CRDTs make live collaboration much more robust for all parties involved, and they only started to reach maturity in the mid-late 2010s
SubEthaEdit was a very inspiring software project for me. The fact that a small team could, in a few months, produce an amazing app that solved real problems and gained notoriety was amazing.
As time goes on it feels like much of the low hanging fruit opportunities in software is disappearing faster and faster. I'm also a fan of Zed and everything they're doing, but it's notable that shipping next-gen editor software takes a lot more developer effort now than it did in the 2000s.
I'd forgotten all about it but SubEthaEdit was such an amazing tech when we were using to collaborate internationally back in about '04. It went off my radar but I am glad to see its still available as a free app.
I don't understand why text editors became so complicated. When I ran zed, I think my gpu wasn't properly used and it ran at 5 fps. I couldn't even get the thing to boot..
Remember when people had 1024x768 and coded perfectly fine software without instant messaging pinging every few minutes? We peaked there
What I remember from those days was saving my work reflexively because the chances of the window manager or text editor crashing at any given moment were quite high. Also, emacs came in for lots of grief for being so slow. Remember “Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping?”
This is not necessarily to endorse Zed; I’m ecstatically happy with my current text editor. However, “we peaked 25-30 years ago” is just not true. Things have gotten better and they continue to do so.
I tried the collaborative features to pair program with a colleague a few months ago, but it was bad. It was very flaky in establishing a connection. In the cases we were able to establish a connection, the voice chat would not work. We tried to make it work for a couple of days, and then we gave up. Has there been lots of work in the past few months on the collaborative features?
I’ve been using “The Notioning” for the last few years to refer to the convergence of tools like slack adding notion like features, clickup adding notion and slack type features, and so on. There seems to be a stable set of features that retains teams in an org
I was very surprised to find a "forum" integrated in Zed when I first opened it. But to be honest, it is not something I ever felt the need for and overall I don't like having this in my text editor. So far it never got in my way and that's a good thing, I hope it stays that way :)
It would have been good to include a link to the collaboration docs https://zed.dev/docs/collaboration in the article. There were a lot of links in that article and a lot of assumptions that I knew how things worked. And I daily drive and like Zed, but I had so many questions.
I don't work at zed anymore but I do find it funny that anyone would think that the collaboration features of zed are "tacked on"...
We started building zed in zed using it's collaboration in early 2021. Collaboration has always been part of it's DNA. Nearly everything at zed is written in pairs over collab.
I joined a Zed hackathon at RustConf 2024 where I built the "Open in split" functionality from the file fuzzy picker. A member of the engineering team who was floating around helping folks had us exclusively work through the included collaboration features. It was a great tour of the editor, and did not feel tacked on.
I understand interacting with other engineers right in the editor but I dont get why so many collab tools need to be bolted on to what is basically a text editor. This will only fragment communications since its not just engineers that work in any company. Meaning you'll now have communication spread out in Slack and Zed making collaboration difficult, not easy.
I dont honestly dont get the allure of pair programming. My pair programs are the unit tests which I run as often as I can and limit discussions to Gitlab/Slack. I have worked ag FAANGs and large companies and never once pair programmed anything.
I honestly cannot think of a single software or process problem that requires real time collab in the editor. Having said that it is a cool feature and I quite like Zed as an editor.
I listened to the founders explain that the current process of syncing up to review or question code is very multi-step and sort of inefficient almost adversarial at a high level. A slack mention, Github discussion, screen share, etc it all ends up being kind of disorganized and painful versus just being able to edit the document collaboratively and directly, perhaps leaving some metadata tagged at certain locations (e.g, notes from a conversation about the code).
It's not like the editor prevents one from still using slack and other external tools, either. I guess I just see the value in in-editor integration to handle that stuff more smoothly, at least for those using the same editor.. I can see myself really appreciating the feature if there's a part of the codebase that consistently trips people up or is under active discussion.
My understanding was always that this is a way to monetize a text editor. How else do you monetize dev tools? Developers are used to very high quality free tools. You’re either one of the few old guards (like JetBrains, Microsoft or maybe Oracle) that can sell IDEs and other dev tools because 25 years ago open source dev tools were far from beginner friendly.
But how do you monetize a programming language, a text editor, a build system, a terminal emulator, etc in 2025? The examples are deno, bun, mojo, nextjs, zed, earthly, warp, etc. all know they can’t monetize the actual tool. You monetize services that you build around the tool. Like a cloud/workers/deployment (basically compute), or a sharing service or an AI service, etc. once you have critical mass on your platform, you can find other easy services to offer. Like if Zed has a critical mass of users, maybe the offer “in editor chat”. A small startup with just 3 devs working together can replace slack with zed. Maybe they offer an uptime check service. Why not? Maybe a file sharing service. Maybe a small wiki service, etc. all things that have million other solutions. But if you have critical mass, someone will pay for those things.
> I dont get why so many collab tools need to be bolted on to what is basically a text editor
It's because the collab tool wants to have access to the code as it changes live. It could and should be done in an editor-agnostic daemon like LSP, but then you wouldn't have editor lock in. And that's why both Zed's collab and VSCode's LiveShare are builtin.
Anyway Zed has a very interesting idea to provide links to codebase places that remain stable even after the codebase changes. This is pretty cool, because so many discussions about code quickly become outdated
> why so many collab tools need to be bolted on to what is basically a text editor. This will only fragment communications since its not just engineers that work in any company
Once they finish their collab platform they can make it standalone.
The current version in Zed seems to be isolated very good.
As long as I don't have to use, feel free to include it. It is really not essential feature for editor.
I run update and Collab requires you to sign in... which again, it is fine if you want it. I don't, so it can be dormant, icon is really tiny, doesn't take much space.
The feature of Zed that is most annoying yet essential is frequent updates. Pretty much daily when I switch to Zed window, I can expect update and restart, which messes up my window layout, so this is annoyance. Getting updates and knowing you guys are shipping good stuff is what is essential.
I think integrating terminal ai's is great move and useful. Sometimes I use it like that, often I use it in terminal (like the outside of the editor terminal) and switch to editor to review or update stuff. Same with git. I am old-fashioned.
Looks a lot like Google Wave. This is interesting for some things but I don't think coding is it, for the same reason that IntelliJ's CodeWithMe doesn't work for pair programming. And apparently one of the guys is a former Pivot, so it's a little surprising.
Pair programming is Two People One Cursor. A critical aspect of it is you're both looking at the same lines of code and working on the same problem and following each other's thought processes.
CodeWithMe (and it seems Zed) is Same Codebase, Same Day. There's no shared focus. You edit stuff, I edit stuff, maybe there's overlap. But this isn't much different from doing separate git commits.
So far the only remote pairing tool I've found that works competently is pop.com.
Pair programming so often degrades into one pilot and one person just sitting there trying to catch mistakes. When those mistakes are caught they are mentioned taking the first persons attention away and breaking flow.
In contrast how I like to work, with similar level people, is to work at the same feature in the same codebase at the same time. We either sit next to eachother, or have a remote call, where we continuously talk through what we want to achieve. Sometimes this results in one person writing ahead (code, docs, doesn’t matter) and the second sweeping behind it and cleaning it up. Two cursors, one source. IntelliJ even manages to keep authors correctly in git.
The other mechanism is where we work on different parts of the code base at the same time. Either main code and tests, or split across interfaces and implementations. Because this happens on the same machine the iterations are way faster as they are local and incremental.
This basically saves the whole dance of creating branches, pulling/pushing, the fixing typos etc.
With zed you can also share your screen in the editor which makes it a bit better, but still you can't take control of the other machine.
IMO if you only care about coding doing it in the editor is the best approach, you get zero latency and have all the context that you need (most of the times). But if you want to do more, like opening the browser for whatever reason, or teaching how to use a specific cli, etc, then taking control works better.
If you liked pop you might like gethopp.app, which is an OSS pair programming app (full disclosure I am the co-maintainer). Unfortunately because we have chosen tauri for the frontend we can only support macos and windows, but I am working on a solution for Linux too.
I never used Zed collab, but isn't there an option to follow someone's cursor rather than having your own separate cursor? Zed even has an option to follow the cursor of an AI agent ffs.
I know that VSCode's Live Share allows you to follow the cursor of someone else. However Live Share is very buggy and will disconnect at times, so it's more like a cool demo than a product.
I'd say it's medium gray on white, which is not too bad in my subjective opinion. I have seen far worse. Light gray on white was "trendy" for a while and dark gray or dark green on black has always been popular among the edgy crowd.
Looks very cool, and of course it's nice to basically have Slack inside of Zed.
But personally, what I want in a Code Editor / IDE, is to be the very best experience at writing code and working with code projects. That is what will save me time and make the coding experience better.
Collaborative features are nice but not essential since there are other tools out there. It's not likely to move a team away from Slack (though if it's self-hosted, it stands a chance).
I'm not yet at the point where I can rely solely on Zed for python coding. I mostly use Zed because I like new initiatives, especially open source ones, and it's fast and responsive. But PyCharm is still better for python development at this point, with its one black mark being endless indexing on large codebases / dependencies, and I find myself falling back to it regularly. I would argue that the priority should be to achieve parity as a _code editor / IDE_, and then we can talk about other shiny new features.
I use Zed instead of my normal text editor because it opens instantaneously. But I don't write code in it, and still use my IntelliJ + IdeaVim with Claude Code and Codex in a separate terminal in Ghostty.
But Zed is an insanely fast text editor to open text files in. Just double click and it's on the screen. Love that. Maybe over time I'll do more in it.
Zed looks really cool and I would love to give it a try, but I am just too beholden to devcontainers. I know there are workarounds to use them with Zed but with many extra steps compared to VS Code and it's forks. I can't go back to not having a totally integrated container per repo.
I kind of love this, although I feel like I'd need to try it out to understand exactly how it feels. I'd even like to see a video if Zed could make one. It would be good to understand e.g. if the issue of "who wrote that?" actually affects things in practice, or any other weirdness or limitations.
I also kind of get why it's built into an editor! I wonder how it compares to e.g. https://www.coscreen.co.
The default method of remote work, with e.g. Slack and video meetings, I think leaves a lot of potential on the table. I wonder if a flexible collaboration system like this could actually be a lovely default method for many companies.
What I see in posts like this is that it becomes clear to me that I am not their target demographic.
I work with IDEs and low-code/no-code tools, VSCode is kind of unavoidable in some scenarios as it has become the only programmers editor that some companies bother to provide tooling support for their SDKs, and that is it.
For bettr or worse, everyone and their dog that used Eclipse forks for their SDKs, now is doing VSCode forks.
For historical UNIX purposes vi and Emacs, and then any editor will do when changing some bunch of configuration files, in case nothing else is installed.
In no project I would be able to make Zed our office, that is what stuff like Monday, Jira, Confluene, Trello, Workfront, happens to be.
Here is where I've settled on for Zed. I initially thought it might be a Sublime replacement for one-off files, but it seems it's geared towards projects. It's not as powerful as Jetbrains (RustRover, PyCharm etc), but is much faster. So here's how I'm using Zed:
- On my Tablet, which is too slow for Jetbrains IDEs to run smoothly
- On certain projects I have which choke Jetbrains IDEs. (Due to macro use maybe?)
I think its' a much nicer experience than VsCode, which I admittedly haven't figured out to run in a project-oriented way.
I'm also trying their GPUI library, but am in the early stages, so can't really comment on how it compares to EGUI.
Zed is the only modern IDE-like editor which is fast enough to replace (n)vim for me. I plan to use it for more and more projects, but I've had minor issues with it's Vi-mode.
I'll always remain someone plugged into vim because I need it sometimes when shelled over a terminal. Editing files over SSH can work with editor support, but is often less reliable or fast than jumping through whatever hoops I need to to get an SSH connection once and then doing everything from there.
Really user here:
Switched from vscode to zed for ~2 weeks entirely in a windows PC, getting back to vscode today, just not feeling good enough:
1. zed updates frequently, but I'm not feeling any update at all. I mean, no new features, not fixing stuff that I'm experiencing that's not good enough;
2. while it put heavy in AI stuff, the ACP thing and the integration of codex and claude code just not working as expected as is. Especially I'm getting really poor outcomes from the same tool in zed compared to the cli itself, which is really frustrating;
3. the terminal in windows zed is barely usable, it's slow and slugish, sometimes the texts or some symbols are not rendering properly, it's just not stable at all. I really like to use the terminal inside the ide especially when I need to start up dev server, but with zed I'm used to open an extra terminal app when I need to start up dev server;
4. I'm a frontend dev, which means the tech stack should have great support in morden editors, but the case is not quite right in zed. I got jetbrain style inline type hints for typescript files with deferred types, but it is so annoying cause it makes a line too long I may even need to scroll horizontaolly more than may screen width to see the content at the end of the line, but the line has only 40 chars. At the same time, I'm not sure how to shutdown this feature after openning the settings. And when I want to set wrap width to 80 chars, I don't know how to do this either. The settings maybe there and are easy to tweak but it is not doing great to make the user understand it and use it;
5. it constantly showing some language servers are down and I don't know why, I do not like to tweak with settings so it could not be my bad, I don't event know how to touch the language servers;
I have more to input here but I forgot some of them, overall, I just want to get back to vscode which is much easier and battle tested. I think zed have a totally different perspectives on feature sets and stuff, that's good, so people could have another choice. Hope zed could do great and I will definitely come back one day.
PS: I don't think collab worth too much effort in an IDE, you have much better tooling out there and have better intergrations.
i'm now guessing the software engineering universe is becoming like the lawyer ones
1. big corporate shops / vc funded ones - many tens of programmers working on features (this is where zed collab features might be needed)
2. bespoke high productive small teams - less than 5 product programmers in a company e.g basecamp - these would be your bespoke law firms
3. the indies (injury lawyers) -> 1 - 3 programmers chunning out products at scale or eating of one product + maybe with help of A.I
for 2 & 3 - a lot of stuff being shilled is not needed. a legal pad + some notes that can be posted via a google doc is all that's needed. Jira isn't needed too
There is a lot of complaints about Zed in the comments here. I don't think that they are "hate", per se; they all definitely care about Zed and want it to succeed.
I daily drive Zed for work across several languages and I love it. I use a lot of its features, like the git interface, agentic editing, etc. I might even consider paying for Pro in the future if I want unlimited edit predictions.
However, all of these complaints are fully justified. I think Zed is a massive undertaking, only one that a VC-backed company has the capital to do. iirc, it requires 70k lines of Rust just for the cloud part [1]. I cannot fathom the amount of fundamental infrastructure they have to get the editor functional at all. That doesn't excuse all of the papercuts in Zed though.
If I were Zed I would do the following:
1. stop all work on future features, like DeltaDB etc. They all seem extremely cool but they won't meaningfully contribute to increasing Zed adoption or fixing its issues.
2. remove all agentic editing features. if Zed tries to simultaneously become the world's best agentic editor and a good general-purpose text editor, it will fail at both. Keep around ACP so users can still use other agents, but remove all of Zed's built in agent stuff.
3. fix literally every papercut. Triage every single issue and go through every PR, even if it will take half a year to do so. People won't switch to Zed until it's perfect, and the existence of this many issues means it's not perfect enough.
4. make extensions actually good. Every programming language, library, etc. has it's own ecosystem, and many such ecosystems mainly rely on VSCode extensions for advanced features. Zed needs to be extremely extensible like VSCode is; obviously its architecture makes this slightly harder, as it's nontrivial, for example, for extensions to render their own GUI, but there are a lot of low(er)-hanging fruit for extensions that need to get solved. People will only switch to Zed if they can get a similar breadth of ecosystems.
Of course, this won't happen, and given that none of these will really make them money, Zed has no incentive to focus on these, especially given the amount of time they would need to do this. But I think that if Zed can't nail the core experience, it won't get anywhere.
Technically really impressive. In practice, completely unpractical in any medium to large organization. And although I adore Zed's speed and reliability, I still don't understand why we need these features at all.
Because "maximum editor" was achieved with Visual Studio Code (which is why all these new editors look and feel like VSC), the same way "maximum toothbrush" was achieved with the electric toothbrush. But the toothbrush industry had to keep going, so now we have a $400 bluetooth connected toothbrush-as-a-service that monitors your brushing habits to optimize teeth cleanliness, with brush heads that cost more than 5 regular toothbrushes.
Zed and the current crop of AI editors (including VSC itself) are that toothbrush.
Their collab feature looks promising. But I can't move to Zed yet, because it's laggy on both my Linux laptop and workstation. They need to fix these issues first.
To me it feels like 2 different set of products, what they are showcasing here seems very similar to slack/teams.
Of course, it would be awesome to have a faster and open source slack, and if I can take notes on the same style as my editor great. So I guess, it would be nice to be able to embed zed in another product.
I think this would be appealing for a company that it's core product is code, like zed, but I do wonder if other companies even need this functionality.
Very cool idea, and helps promote owning your own data, and it being highly interoperable (plain text!)
I do wonder if we need a term for shoe-horned dogfooding though. Like sure, you can do this. You could do this in Figma! Or in Notion! Or in LEETCODE if you wanted to.
At least with Zed though, its plain text. If you find another way to collab realtime on plain text, you're not bound to 1 vendor.
people live-dumping their comments into a text doc while i'm presenting with no ability to know _who_ left a comment (unless they manually prefix their name) really showcases that its the wrong tool.. https://i.imgur.com/vEttouw.png
Because I'm apparently a billion years old, I still use Sublime Text and just text editor. If I do switch, it will be to this. However, is it as responsive? Do file changes just appear if I change them elsewhere in like terminal?
As mentioned in the post, Zed's collaboration functionality is its core USP. The entire editor was literally built around it. IIUC their moonshot is to replace the GitHub PR model with something more collaborative and granular.
I’m always _this_ close to adopting Zed, but I just can’t get used to the project search. I’m too used to telescope now. Maybe I need to bite the bullet because I think Zed’s search is objectively better. Old dog, I suppose…
While certainly an amicable goal, I doubt that many companies/groups would be willing to put their comms inside zed, where it feels locked outside any other ecosystem.
I love Zed as an idea. They built some impressive tech. They're clearly a smart and capable bunch. I tried zed out for a bit, then I switched back to vscode.
I have been trying to figure out how this works in concert with Git (or SCM in general). Is one of the developers in the session merely responsible for it?
I mean, you have the same "problem" when peer coding in person. Whoever is officially working on the fix will commit it. I've helped devs get around a hump for ages, you don't get "credit" for all the work you do. It's why I hate most ticketing systems (when management starts to ask why your tasks fell behind), they don't let you correctly track multiple people when they work together.
Zed sounds desperate, nobody in the world would use Zed as office. Zed is a niche. Nobody wants it's multiplayer features since coding id usually asynchronous until crunch happens and nobody wants crunch All the time.
All office have their own communication tools , you can't expect all developers just to use zed l, it is missing features and the whole ecosystem which would take one more decade and non development people won't even touch it. Then the office cannot happen inside Zed for the rest of the world, except Zed team.
The collaboration tools built into Zed have basically existed since the product launched. It is one of the primary drivers behind the product - they wanted to build the best editor for remote code collaboration.
This is interesting to read and very important to me since I am building a coding agent with team collaboration in mind. I used to use Zed daily till the point that I moved away from writing code directly and instead generate all my projects only from prompts.
I think collaboration for people who eventually use the software will be more critical in the era of agentic coding. Project Management will change. We are not waiting for 2 weeks to build prototypes, it gets done in a hour. What does that mean for end users - do they prompt their changes and get access to new software? Who would double-check, would AI reviews be good enough, would AI agents collaborate along with humans in the loop?
There are so many questions not answered. If anyone is keen on having these talks, I would happy to share what I think. Here is what I am building: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo
I want to see a future where end users can prompt their needs, have collaborators in the company to help clear things up and in an hour the feature/issue is tackled and deployed.
It's nice to see Zed's collaboration features discussed in their blog. The collaboration features are really what makes Zed such an interesting project and product. I was worried they'd gone full AI hype train. There's so much opportunity to improve digital collaboration tools.
I love Zed. I, mostly, love the direction they are taking the editor in.
But. There are now two times I see Zed going in the wrong direction. The AI integration was one. This feels like the wrong direction again.
I never really liked the AI integration. It felt off to me. I do love coding with Claude and I think I know why. It presents the "information I need to know" in a way my puny brain can handle it. Colored diffs. Summaries of what happened. It isn't perfect, but it has been incredibly productive for me. I never got that from Zed's AI integration; perhaps this has been improved, but I was up and running with Claude in a way that I never was with Zed.
This write-up sounds like "slack in my editor." If it is that, I hate it. Slack has destroyed company culture and communication. People, who are inherently lazy (I'm an old Perl programmer, so I can say that), have stopped thinking carefully and writing carefully, and in that void just throw the first thing in their head into a slack channel and think that is "collaboration" and "communication." It's toxic.
For example, this comment rubs me the wrong way: "Staff members hop in, volunteer to show off a cool feature or bug fix they worked on, and get real-time feedback from the rest of the team." I don't think our human brains work well with "real time feedback" UNLESS we have the information presented in a way that gives us massive clues on what's right and what's wrong. Reading a wall of text is not the way. A colorized git diff, or a video, or an entirely new way of presenting information might make real time feedback possible, but I am highly skeptical a text editor is the way or place to do that. And, I'm an emacs user and love text UIs, don't get me wrong.
Do I want to have "generalized one off rooms for things that don't fit anywhere?" I definitely don't want that. I want you AS THE AUTHOR to be really intentional about what's important and fit that into the proper channels. I need to know that information, but I don't want to know about, nor have the unspoken expectation that I SHOULD have known, about the other stuff. And, I want "managers" (if that still exists) to be carefully thinking about those channels and how the company is organized and push that structure down to people in the organization.
As Zed is the office, having one off rooms instead of in person coffee time feels very dangerous. That's the world a lot of people live in, but I don't like that office.
If this comment is the guiding light, then I'm worried: "We're building toward a future where collaboration is continuous conversation, not discrete commits—where every discussion, edit, and insight remains linked to the code as it evolves, accessible to both teammates and AI agents." I'm human, I have kids, I have other interests. A continuous conversation is impossible for me. I want discrete ideas, and right now, discrete commits and PRs are better, IMHO, than what I hear here. It's hard, but setting the expectation that to be successful I need to be paying attention to a river of information flowing by seems like a bad idea to me. I don't buy that Zed solves the problem of hiding the pieces of information that I don't need to see.
Oh hey! I have an idea. Why not use AI to summarize those conversations into discrete pieces! </joke>
I do love Zed. It is the best GUI editor out there. I know they will get it right. I just am skeptical about this direction and feel it misses the forest for the trees.
Man, Im like the total opposite in terms of preferring the Zed UI vs claude code. I really try to avoid raw claude when possible. I very rarely pull it up to do concurrent sessions when I have Zed open already working on something else. Or if I need to do something quick while in the CLI in a random directory. Otherwise, I think just the "files modified" feature is worth using Zed as the primary interface.
I agree about the bad side of slack culture, except when compared to how things were before slack: Horrible email threads, in-person meetings, phone calls, and people walking over to your desk to ask you stupid things they could have looked up themselves.
Slack revolutionized this for me because I can turn it off anytime I want. When I want focus, I close it and it cannot reach me for some time. Then I pull it up and read all the threads while taking a poop.
Having it in zed is the same: You can just log out of collab anytime you want! You would only use it if you _want_ to use it. When you do want to use it, it's incredible. Someone can just join your channel and work on a tricky problem with you and you don't even need to screen share. It's like the best of discord and slack available at the touch of a button. It's much lighter weight than slack. Slack huddles are super annoying to me. I want it to behave more like discord, and that's what zed does!
Ever since Apple Silicon macs came out, it's been a real struggle. Almost 6 years later and there is still nothing on the market that:
* Has the same level of performance
* With the same or better battery life
* With the same quality of screen
* With the same quality of speakers and touchpad
* Runs as quiet or as cool
as the Apple Silicon macbooks. If you add in "needs to be able to run Linux" your choices go down from maybe 1 or 2 to 0.
They all have some sort of compromise. Either the speakers, screen, keyboard, touchpad, build quality, battery life, or thermals.
I have a Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon X Elite, and it's pretty close. Checks the boxes for Screen, build quality, and touchpad. Loses out on speakers and battery life, and the fans need to run a lot more than my M4 Pro MBP does. It also loses on performance, and it doesn't run Linux. Windows on Arm also still has a lot of little quirks and bugs that start to become daily annoyances.
It's incredibly frustrating. I want, essentially, my 14" M4 MacBook Pro, but in a Linux laptop, and there's no OEM out there that's fulfilling that need without compromises.
Apple keeps pulling ahead in silicon and every other laptop OEM is just being left in the dust, shrugging their shoulders, and putting out the same old 1200p 16:9 plastic garbage they have always been putting out.
I could imagine that in ten years git will feel strangely slow and ceremonial. Why not just continuously work and continuously deploy live-edited software
I feel the opposite way, that git branching and merging will become a bigger part of the job as more code is written by agents in parallel and then accepted by other agents or humans.
it doesn't work quite well for complex projects that require integration with other teams/software.
You would need to either have separate versions running at the same time or never do breaking changes or devise some other approach that makes it possible.
Imagine if someone clicks the deploy button when you're in the middle of typing something and then the service goes down due to a syntax error. To prevent this, we will need some sort of way to set a global lock to indicate that "I'm not done typing yet" and you can only deploy once everyone has released this lock.
It's truly showing that the zed team is chauvinistic by dismissing different encodings not being supported and focusing on other things. "It wurks in merica", it gut i guess
BinaryPie|3 months ago
My wish is that Zed gets the core working correctly 100% of the time before moving on to expanding feature sets. For now I'm back in NeoVIM because it always works the first time....
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/38109
Hopefully soon I can give it another shot at full time usage.
rounce|3 months ago
“Can I tell you about our lord and saviour Nix?”
Kidding, but seriously though I’ve found having to work in a container to be a bit clumsy, even with good tooling around it. As you said it’s 2025, and there are other ways to have reproducible toolchains that don’t pollute the rest of your system environment Nix or otherwise.
tecoholic|3 months ago
With the continuous improvement in CLI tools and people’s experience with them, it feels like doing a live review or edit-by-edit approvals all feel like a drag. I personally have come to avoid using the IDE/Editor. I just kick up Claude code - plan mode, auto-accept edits. Once the session is done, switch to the editor and make necessary adjustments. I suspect people with Max subscription and “dangerously-skip-permissions” …etc won’t even care if an editor has AI integration or not.
jchw|3 months ago
I've noticed that not only does it sync but it even will recognize if I rename the folder a workspace is in.
But then, I've run into a couple of strange issues that tell me there is more polish needed:
- Sometimes upon using LSP refactor, it seems like if a bunch of files get renamed, the open buffers will get screwed up somehow. Like, I'll hit save and it will write to the old filename! It's not actually a huge problem, as I can close the buffers, delete whatever excess files I accidentally create, and re-open them without error, but it is confusing as hell.
- I have indeed had issues with the file view not always updating when files are added externally, however it is not constantly. I usually just reload workspace when this happens. It is a minor frustration, but I had many minor recurring frustrations with both VS Code and Neovim before too, so I don't consider it a deal breaker.
gryn|3 months ago
have a big docs or log,data file where you don't care for the rest of the line ? well too bad better have a spare editor.
this feel to me like it should should be a number #1 priority. "an editor need to nail the editing part".
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26344
on the positive side I do like that you can in-place edit the result of global search.
girvo|3 months ago
easygenes|3 months ago
yobert|3 months ago
giancarlostoro|3 months ago
85392_school|3 months ago
chironjit|3 months ago
phyzix5761|3 months ago
iknowstuff|3 months ago
Also buggy git support, I selected a few things but it committed everything and made me think I lost it all.
But I love Zed when it works. Literally 5h more M4 battery life vs Cursor.
johntash|3 months ago
I just checked the issue [1] and it is fixed now, but it's crazy to me that I never really thought of my text editor needing to use my graphics card for rendering.
[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/37448
gonational|3 months ago
So many of the basic features (e.g., automatic Python venv, Pyright running, etc.) have random bugs that pop up from time to time, making the basic editor unreliable.
My fear is, if they keep going in this direction (adding bloat without fixing basic functionality), they'll be a perfect fit for Microsoft acquisition, at which point I'll have to switch careers, because there isn't any other editor out there that I like.
rsolva|3 months ago
maxbrunsfeld|3 months ago
lvl155|3 months ago
mystifyingpoi|3 months ago
dbacar|3 months ago
righthand|3 months ago
recroad|3 months ago
verdverm|3 months ago
Don't bring the attention economy to my cave of solitude, it's where I go to escape all that noise
aeturnum|3 months ago
A lot of my IDE choices are about extensibility and flexibility more than perfection for my preferred coding approach. After all, until I only work for myself I need to be ready to accommodate the needs of others as part of my job.
pprotas|3 months ago
patcon|3 months ago
echelon|3 months ago
A monnumentous yak shave.
I've never used or cared for multiplayer in VSCode or JetBrains. It's silly.
I've never been the pair programmer type. The only time I've needed to share an IDE is during a SEV or ridiculously complicated systems bug, and that's 1% of the time.
Octoth0rpe|3 months ago
nixpulvis|3 months ago
bitbasher|3 months ago
fergie|3 months ago
This doesn't fill me with confidence.
aduffy|3 months ago
adastra22|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
travisgriggs|3 months ago
I'm happy that others can type in each others' space, but this post reveals a tension here. They are building a tool for building the tool, and their own team. I think that's cool, but at a 2-3 person shop heavy polyglotted across 4 OSes and 5+ programming languages, this is not what I really need.
What I'm looking for is a snappy tool (check) that lets me explore, understand, modify code at a next level (marginal). And I want it to not only be snappy by virtue of execution efficiency, but cognitive load. I want the less-is-more experience. I don't need it to do Swift, Kotlin, or Python, because there are bespoke IDEs for each of those that focus on the environments where I deploy them best. What I mostly want from Zed is the ability to see the outline panel at the same time as the directory panel, and to separate the search outline from the file structure outline. I spent too much time toggling views in Zed.
olejorgenb|3 months ago
You can do this now by moving one of them to the right dock (right-click the toggle-button)
wateralien|3 months ago
meowface|3 months ago
I could also see it as a potential productivity aid. Person 1 sees Person 2 is writing something and they don't want to be seen as idle, so they start working as well. This might sound oppressive but a lot of people who struggle with ADHD/procrastination/akrasia actually receive great benefit from that structure. Similar to that startup that forces you to code while screensharing with a stranger in order to push you to work, or people who code in cafes/libraries to be more productive.
As long as it's not an organization requiring it for senior engineers, I could see promise to it as an eventual common new paradigm.
nixpulvis|3 months ago
This would be good for code-walks too though. Instead of having to share your screen and hope the video comes through well. Everyone can follow along in the comfort of their own editor.
xpe|3 months ago
Let's lean into the chaos and see what it might give us. Imagine a production application deployed directly from a non-version-controlled directory. Anyone on the team can edit the files, at any time. Insane? Probably. The disadvantages are easy to see.
But the positives are really compelling: 1. make small, granular testable changes; 2. use feature toggles; 3. refactor intensely and concurrently; 4. always work on the latest code; 5. use in-code documentation instead of GitHub/etc workflows; 6. explore continuous, incremental, hot-swappable code deployment.
Doesn't thought of ditching all the wasted motion and ceremony around logging async work and just coding sound glorious? I'm actually not a "move fast and break things person" usually. But the idea of moving so fast that broken things will only stay broken for a tiny fraction of the time is pretty compelling. There is also an intensity that comes from real-time interactions where a team needs to reach consensus quickly.
Feature Toggles: https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html
BEAM (Erlang, Elixir) provides hot-swappable code and lots more
drcongo|3 months ago
tkfoss|3 months ago
nixpulvis|3 months ago
bluehatbrit|3 months ago
It's probably not an issue the Zed team will experience as they're all naturally using their own editor. Hopefully it's on their radar though.
paradox460|3 months ago
tracker1|3 months ago
The multi-user editing is kind of cool... there's an ANSI art tool (PabloDraw) that you can run a host session so multiple artists can create text art, and I thought back when I first saw it, that it might be cool to be able for multiple editors to work on a project. I've used some of the collab stuff with VS Code, but haven't done enough to even begin to compare.
Not to mention that in a lot of workplaces, self-hosting or otherwise layers of bureaucracy stand in the way.
sunnyps|3 months ago
This feels like an attempt at deflecting blame. VSCode is another Electron application that ended up having better performance than Atom. There's another Electron adjacent application that has good performance, the one you're probably using right now to read this page.
Depending on page content of course
Shorel|3 months ago
VSCode can pretend to be fast in my desktop, and I would not care because desktops today are computing monsters that rival supercomputers of the past, but Sublime Text is still much faster at any text editing task.
valtism|3 months ago
TiredOfLife|3 months ago
Atom was kinda like emacs. Extensions could do almost anything. VS Code has a limited api that extensions can use
x0nr8|3 months ago
kriops|3 months ago
Web technologies are an unrivaled technological marvel for what they are, but it is disingenuous to imply they represent anything near the peak of what we are capable of in the context of performance.
TheTaytay|3 months ago
However, I just tried it myself and was really shocked to see other people in my sidebar after I clicked on the “collaboration” stuff. I expected to be dropped into my own collaboration environment built around my own channels, like a fresh private Slack instance, but instead I saw the built-in Zed channels and as I clicked around, it looked/sounded like I was joining voice channels. It was as if I’d accidentally joined someone else’s Discord. It was so mentally jarring that I got afraid I was on a live mic or would accidentally be live-sharing stuff with strangers.
conradev|3 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubEthaEdit
https://tidbits.com/2003/06/30/apple-announces-design-awards...
mikaylamaki|3 months ago
I'd say CRDTs are also a big change. CRDTs make live collaboration much more robust for all parties involved, and they only started to reach maturity in the mid-late 2010s
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
[1] https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
Aurornis|3 months ago
As time goes on it feels like much of the low hanging fruit opportunities in software is disappearing faster and faster. I'm also a fan of Zed and everything they're doing, but it's notable that shipping next-gen editor software takes a lot more developer effort now than it did in the 2000s.
sandbags|3 months ago
mawadev|3 months ago
sevensor|3 months ago
This is not necessarily to endorse Zed; I’m ecstatically happy with my current text editor. However, “we peaked 25-30 years ago” is just not true. Things have gotten better and they continue to do so.
animeshjain|3 months ago
mariusor|3 months ago
antoniojtorres|3 months ago
verdverm|3 months ago
phito|3 months ago
theoldgreybeard|3 months ago
Redster|3 months ago
iamnbutler|3 months ago
We started building zed in zed using it's collaboration in early 2021. Collaboration has always been part of it's DNA. Nearly everything at zed is written in pairs over collab.
arusahni|3 months ago
I joined a Zed hackathon at RustConf 2024 where I built the "Open in split" functionality from the file fuzzy picker. A member of the engineering team who was floating around helping folks had us exclusively work through the included collaboration features. It was a great tour of the editor, and did not feel tacked on.
another_twist|3 months ago
another_twist|3 months ago
I dont honestly dont get the allure of pair programming. My pair programs are the unit tests which I run as often as I can and limit discussions to Gitlab/Slack. I have worked ag FAANGs and large companies and never once pair programmed anything.
I honestly cannot think of a single software or process problem that requires real time collab in the editor. Having said that it is a cool feature and I quite like Zed as an editor.
noobly|3 months ago
It's not like the editor prevents one from still using slack and other external tools, either. I guess I just see the value in in-editor integration to handle that stuff more smoothly, at least for those using the same editor.. I can see myself really appreciating the feature if there's a part of the codebase that consistently trips people up or is under active discussion.
eddythompson80|3 months ago
But how do you monetize a programming language, a text editor, a build system, a terminal emulator, etc in 2025? The examples are deno, bun, mojo, nextjs, zed, earthly, warp, etc. all know they can’t monetize the actual tool. You monetize services that you build around the tool. Like a cloud/workers/deployment (basically compute), or a sharing service or an AI service, etc. once you have critical mass on your platform, you can find other easy services to offer. Like if Zed has a critical mass of users, maybe the offer “in editor chat”. A small startup with just 3 devs working together can replace slack with zed. Maybe they offer an uptime check service. Why not? Maybe a file sharing service. Maybe a small wiki service, etc. all things that have million other solutions. But if you have critical mass, someone will pay for those things.
nextaccountic|3 months ago
It's because the collab tool wants to have access to the code as it changes live. It could and should be done in an editor-agnostic daemon like LSP, but then you wouldn't have editor lock in. And that's why both Zed's collab and VSCode's LiveShare are builtin.
Anyway Zed has a very interesting idea to provide links to codebase places that remain stable even after the codebase changes. This is pretty cool, because so many discussions about code quickly become outdated
TiredOfLife|3 months ago
Once they finish their collab platform they can make it standalone. The current version in Zed seems to be isolated very good.
piker|3 months ago
desireco42|3 months ago
I run update and Collab requires you to sign in... which again, it is fine if you want it. I don't, so it can be dormant, icon is really tiny, doesn't take much space.
The feature of Zed that is most annoying yet essential is frequent updates. Pretty much daily when I switch to Zed window, I can expect update and restart, which messes up my window layout, so this is annoyance. Getting updates and knowing you guys are shipping good stuff is what is essential.
I think integrating terminal ai's is great move and useful. Sometimes I use it like that, often I use it in terminal (like the outside of the editor terminal) and switch to editor to review or update stuff. Same with git. I am old-fashioned.
stickfigure|3 months ago
Pair programming is Two People One Cursor. A critical aspect of it is you're both looking at the same lines of code and working on the same problem and following each other's thought processes.
CodeWithMe (and it seems Zed) is Same Codebase, Same Day. There's no shared focus. You edit stuff, I edit stuff, maybe there's overlap. But this isn't much different from doing separate git commits.
So far the only remote pairing tool I've found that works competently is pop.com.
spockz|3 months ago
In contrast how I like to work, with similar level people, is to work at the same feature in the same codebase at the same time. We either sit next to eachother, or have a remote call, where we continuously talk through what we want to achieve. Sometimes this results in one person writing ahead (code, docs, doesn’t matter) and the second sweeping behind it and cleaning it up. Two cursors, one source. IntelliJ even manages to keep authors correctly in git.
The other mechanism is where we work on different parts of the code base at the same time. Either main code and tests, or split across interfaces and implementations. Because this happens on the same machine the iterations are way faster as they are local and incremental.
This basically saves the whole dance of creating branches, pulling/pushing, the fixing typos etc.
iparaskev|3 months ago
IMO if you only care about coding doing it in the editor is the best approach, you get zero latency and have all the context that you need (most of the times). But if you want to do more, like opening the browser for whatever reason, or teaching how to use a specific cli, etc, then taking control works better.
If you liked pop you might like gethopp.app, which is an OSS pair programming app (full disclosure I am the co-maintainer). Unfortunately because we have chosen tauri for the frontend we can only support macos and windows, but I am working on a solution for Linux too.
nextaccountic|3 months ago
I never used Zed collab, but isn't there an option to follow someone's cursor rather than having your own separate cursor? Zed even has an option to follow the cursor of an AI agent ffs.
I know that VSCode's Live Share allows you to follow the cursor of someone else. However Live Share is very buggy and will disconnect at times, so it's more like a cool demo than a product.
aanet|3 months ago
Is it just my vision, or are websites getting super low contrast these days, esp the text-heavy ones?
gpm|3 months ago
Could be your monitor as well.
bityard|3 months ago
duderific|3 months ago
otikik|3 months ago
Jailbird|3 months ago
alberth|3 months ago
The screenshot below surprised me:
https://zed.dev/img/post/zed-is-our-office/this-week.webp
All the colorful avatars and the busy side/top panels feel out of character with the usual Zed aesthetics.
bguthrie|3 months ago
insane_dreamer|3 months ago
But personally, what I want in a Code Editor / IDE, is to be the very best experience at writing code and working with code projects. That is what will save me time and make the coding experience better.
Collaborative features are nice but not essential since there are other tools out there. It's not likely to move a team away from Slack (though if it's self-hosted, it stands a chance).
I'm not yet at the point where I can rely solely on Zed for python coding. I mostly use Zed because I like new initiatives, especially open source ones, and it's fast and responsive. But PyCharm is still better for python development at this point, with its one black mark being endless indexing on large codebases / dependencies, and I find myself falling back to it regularly. I would argue that the priority should be to achieve parity as a _code editor / IDE_, and then we can talk about other shiny new features.
arjie|3 months ago
But Zed is an insanely fast text editor to open text files in. Just double click and it's on the screen. Love that. Maybe over time I'll do more in it.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt|3 months ago
malkia|3 months ago
cpeth|3 months ago
colmanhumphrey|3 months ago
I also kind of get why it's built into an editor! I wonder how it compares to e.g. https://www.coscreen.co.
The default method of remote work, with e.g. Slack and video meetings, I think leaves a lot of potential on the table. I wonder if a flexible collaboration system like this could actually be a lovely default method for many companies.
pjmlp|3 months ago
I work with IDEs and low-code/no-code tools, VSCode is kind of unavoidable in some scenarios as it has become the only programmers editor that some companies bother to provide tooling support for their SDKs, and that is it.
For bettr or worse, everyone and their dog that used Eclipse forks for their SDKs, now is doing VSCode forks.
For historical UNIX purposes vi and Emacs, and then any editor will do when changing some bunch of configuration files, in case nothing else is installed.
In no project I would be able to make Zed our office, that is what stuff like Monday, Jira, Confluene, Trello, Workfront, happens to be.
the__alchemist|3 months ago
I'm also trying their GPUI library, but am in the early stages, so can't really comment on how it compares to EGUI.
nixpulvis|3 months ago
I'll always remain someone plugged into vim because I need it sometimes when shelled over a terminal. Editing files over SSH can work with editor support, but is often less reliable or fast than jumping through whatever hoops I need to to get an SSH connection once and then doing everything from there.
kwanbix|3 months ago
shunia_huang|3 months ago
I have more to input here but I forgot some of them, overall, I just want to get back to vscode which is much easier and battle tested. I think zed have a totally different perspectives on feature sets and stuff, that's good, so people could have another choice. Hope zed could do great and I will definitely come back one day.
PS: I don't think collab worth too much effort in an IDE, you have much better tooling out there and have better intergrations.
dzonga|3 months ago
1. big corporate shops / vc funded ones - many tens of programmers working on features (this is where zed collab features might be needed) 2. bespoke high productive small teams - less than 5 product programmers in a company e.g basecamp - these would be your bespoke law firms 3. the indies (injury lawyers) -> 1 - 3 programmers chunning out products at scale or eating of one product + maybe with help of A.I
for 2 & 3 - a lot of stuff being shilled is not needed. a legal pad + some notes that can be posted via a google doc is all that's needed. Jira isn't needed too
porphyra|3 months ago
aadishv|3 months ago
I daily drive Zed for work across several languages and I love it. I use a lot of its features, like the git interface, agentic editing, etc. I might even consider paying for Pro in the future if I want unlimited edit predictions.
However, all of these complaints are fully justified. I think Zed is a massive undertaking, only one that a VC-backed company has the capital to do. iirc, it requires 70k lines of Rust just for the cloud part [1]. I cannot fathom the amount of fundamental infrastructure they have to get the editor functional at all. That doesn't excuse all of the papercuts in Zed though.
If I were Zed I would do the following:
1. stop all work on future features, like DeltaDB etc. They all seem extremely cool but they won't meaningfully contribute to increasing Zed adoption or fixing its issues.
2. remove all agentic editing features. if Zed tries to simultaneously become the world's best agentic editor and a good general-purpose text editor, it will fail at both. Keep around ACP so users can still use other agents, but remove all of Zed's built in agent stuff.
3. fix literally every papercut. Triage every single issue and go through every PR, even if it will take half a year to do so. People won't switch to Zed until it's perfect, and the existence of this many issues means it's not perfect enough.
4. make extensions actually good. Every programming language, library, etc. has it's own ecosystem, and many such ecosystems mainly rely on VSCode extensions for advanced features. Zed needs to be extremely extensible like VSCode is; obviously its architecture makes this slightly harder, as it's nontrivial, for example, for extensions to render their own GUI, but there are a lot of low(er)-hanging fruit for extensions that need to get solved. People will only switch to Zed if they can get a similar breadth of ecosystems.
Of course, this won't happen, and given that none of these will really make them money, Zed has no incentive to focus on these, especially given the amount of time they would need to do this. But I think that if Zed can't nail the core experience, it won't get anywhere.
[1] https://maxdeviant.com/posts/2025/head-in-the-zed-cloud/
robinhood|3 months ago
jazzyjackson|3 months ago
> Collaboration as it stands today is considered alpha, and for the time being, is free for all to use! Peruse the source code.
qudat|3 months ago
ModernMech|3 months ago
Zed and the current crop of AI editors (including VSC itself) are that toothbrush.
tmdh|3 months ago
woile|3 months ago
Of course, it would be awesome to have a faster and open source slack, and if I can take notes on the same style as my editor great. So I guess, it would be nice to be able to embed zed in another product.
I think this would be appealing for a company that it's core product is code, like zed, but I do wonder if other companies even need this functionality.
domenkozar|3 months ago
alberth|3 months ago
While I do not work at Zed, I'm curious to hear more about this use case for my own company needs.
frankfrank13|3 months ago
I do wonder if we need a term for shoe-horned dogfooding though. Like sure, you can do this. You could do this in Figma! Or in Notion! Or in LEETCODE if you wanted to.
At least with Zed though, its plain text. If you find another way to collab realtime on plain text, you're not bound to 1 vendor.
rileymichael|3 months ago
jokethrowaway|3 months ago
Moreover, this would be competing with Google Meet, Teams, Slack, Gather - way too much tech for collaboration
And I wish we were more async-first and less forced to deal with humans, especially over the network.
railing|3 months ago
was floored by the "explode all layers in the user interface and simulate a 3D camera rotating around them" graphic when i first saw it !
3D is always difficult to get right, but felt it had some really cute possibilities,
any way to open this up so devs can try things out?? < 3
seanssel|3 months ago
What is this in reference to?
hk1337|3 months ago
idk1|3 months ago
submeta|3 months ago
I get it, you are VC funded, investors want to turn this into a multi billion dollar unicorn.
Do not focus on investors, but developers.
jamesgeck0|3 months ago
ianks|3 months ago
aiiizzz|3 months ago
bloppe|3 months ago
I'm just too hooked on that OpenVSX ecosystem.
zamalek|3 months ago
giancarlostoro|3 months ago
v3ss0n|3 months ago
Aperocky|3 months ago
max-privatevoid|3 months ago
dcchambers|3 months ago
TiredOfLife|3 months ago
Also Zed was announced as a closed source comercial tool.
Iwan-Zotow|3 months ago
_se|3 months ago
ThinkBeat|3 months ago
When it comes to writing tool the trend has been strong that people want distraction free writing with no interruptions.
Seems like code editors are going the other way on speed.
brainless|3 months ago
I think collaboration for people who eventually use the software will be more critical in the era of agentic coding. Project Management will change. We are not waiting for 2 weeks to build prototypes, it gets done in a hour. What does that mean for end users - do they prompt their changes and get access to new software? Who would double-check, would AI reviews be good enough, would AI agents collaborate along with humans in the loop?
There are so many questions not answered. If anyone is keen on having these talks, I would happy to share what I think. Here is what I am building: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo
I want to see a future where end users can prompt their needs, have collaborators in the company to help clear things up and in an hour the feature/issue is tackled and deployed.
blks|3 months ago
richardhenry|3 months ago
bigyabai|3 months ago
jazzyjackson|3 months ago
frankfrank13|3 months ago
acdyer824|3 months ago
hank808|3 months ago
siva7|3 months ago
globnomulous|3 months ago
internet2000|3 months ago
tharne|3 months ago
amonith|3 months ago
> "Wish there was a windows laptop I could buy that is good"
What does it even mean? There are macs, there are chromebooks and there are just laptops. Wth is a Windows laptop? There's a good Linux laptop?
Just a nit :P
kombine|3 months ago
_gmkt|3 months ago
xrd|3 months ago
But. There are now two times I see Zed going in the wrong direction. The AI integration was one. This feels like the wrong direction again.
I never really liked the AI integration. It felt off to me. I do love coding with Claude and I think I know why. It presents the "information I need to know" in a way my puny brain can handle it. Colored diffs. Summaries of what happened. It isn't perfect, but it has been incredibly productive for me. I never got that from Zed's AI integration; perhaps this has been improved, but I was up and running with Claude in a way that I never was with Zed.
This write-up sounds like "slack in my editor." If it is that, I hate it. Slack has destroyed company culture and communication. People, who are inherently lazy (I'm an old Perl programmer, so I can say that), have stopped thinking carefully and writing carefully, and in that void just throw the first thing in their head into a slack channel and think that is "collaboration" and "communication." It's toxic.
For example, this comment rubs me the wrong way: "Staff members hop in, volunteer to show off a cool feature or bug fix they worked on, and get real-time feedback from the rest of the team." I don't think our human brains work well with "real time feedback" UNLESS we have the information presented in a way that gives us massive clues on what's right and what's wrong. Reading a wall of text is not the way. A colorized git diff, or a video, or an entirely new way of presenting information might make real time feedback possible, but I am highly skeptical a text editor is the way or place to do that. And, I'm an emacs user and love text UIs, don't get me wrong.
Do I want to have "generalized one off rooms for things that don't fit anywhere?" I definitely don't want that. I want you AS THE AUTHOR to be really intentional about what's important and fit that into the proper channels. I need to know that information, but I don't want to know about, nor have the unspoken expectation that I SHOULD have known, about the other stuff. And, I want "managers" (if that still exists) to be carefully thinking about those channels and how the company is organized and push that structure down to people in the organization.
As Zed is the office, having one off rooms instead of in person coffee time feels very dangerous. That's the world a lot of people live in, but I don't like that office.
If this comment is the guiding light, then I'm worried: "We're building toward a future where collaboration is continuous conversation, not discrete commits—where every discussion, edit, and insight remains linked to the code as it evolves, accessible to both teammates and AI agents." I'm human, I have kids, I have other interests. A continuous conversation is impossible for me. I want discrete ideas, and right now, discrete commits and PRs are better, IMHO, than what I hear here. It's hard, but setting the expectation that to be successful I need to be paying attention to a river of information flowing by seems like a bad idea to me. I don't buy that Zed solves the problem of hiding the pieces of information that I don't need to see.
Oh hey! I have an idea. Why not use AI to summarize those conversations into discrete pieces! </joke>
I do love Zed. It is the best GUI editor out there. I know they will get it right. I just am skeptical about this direction and feel it misses the forest for the trees.
JamesSwift|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
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yobert|3 months ago
Slack revolutionized this for me because I can turn it off anytime I want. When I want focus, I close it and it cannot reach me for some time. Then I pull it up and read all the threads while taking a poop.
Having it in zed is the same: You can just log out of collab anytime you want! You would only use it if you _want_ to use it. When you do want to use it, it's incredible. Someone can just join your channel and work on a tricky problem with you and you don't even need to screen share. It's like the best of discord and slack available at the touch of a button. It's much lighter weight than slack. Slack huddles are super annoying to me. I want it to behave more like discord, and that's what zed does!
zenlot|3 months ago
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huflungdung|3 months ago
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sayrer|3 months ago
It's true, most of them are bad. Galaxy Book5 Pro or Microsoft Surface are OK.
thewebguyd|3 months ago
* Has the same level of performance
* With the same or better battery life
* With the same quality of screen
* With the same quality of speakers and touchpad
* Runs as quiet or as cool
as the Apple Silicon macbooks. If you add in "needs to be able to run Linux" your choices go down from maybe 1 or 2 to 0.
They all have some sort of compromise. Either the speakers, screen, keyboard, touchpad, build quality, battery life, or thermals.
I have a Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon X Elite, and it's pretty close. Checks the boxes for Screen, build quality, and touchpad. Loses out on speakers and battery life, and the fans need to run a lot more than my M4 Pro MBP does. It also loses on performance, and it doesn't run Linux. Windows on Arm also still has a lot of little quirks and bugs that start to become daily annoyances.
It's incredibly frustrating. I want, essentially, my 14" M4 MacBook Pro, but in a Linux laptop, and there's no OEM out there that's fulfilling that need without compromises.
Apple keeps pulling ahead in silicon and every other laptop OEM is just being left in the dust, shrugging their shoulders, and putting out the same old 1200p 16:9 plastic garbage they have always been putting out.
jes5199|3 months ago
mattnewton|3 months ago
snerbles|3 months ago
apsurd|3 months ago
Here's a thread where the person replying to me makes this case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45455963
Shorel|3 months ago
What you describe sounds like a security nightmare to me.
Maybe you are using a remote dev server, and every change you do needs to be committed before you see the result?
Please setup a local environment instead. Not even F5 should be required, you save a file, you see the result in the browser.
When your work is finished, and only then, you should commit your changes.
Romario77|3 months ago
You would need to either have separate versions running at the same time or never do breaking changes or devise some other approach that makes it possible.
It's not always feasible to do it this way
coffeebeqn|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
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porphyra|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
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cantalopes|3 months ago
leshenka|3 months ago
tacone|3 months ago