But as their focus has shifted to building Collaboration & AI features, and still haven’t yet nailed just being a good/great base editor, its become less useful to me.
I still have a lot of hope for Zed.
But for the time being, I’ve switched back to my old editor & IDE … and I’ll try Zed again at a much later date.
Except, as I understand it, the collaboration features were one of the primary things they wanted to do with Zed. So this isn't a case of bloat. The first blog post on the site is "How CRDTs make multiplayer text editing part of Zed's DNA".
I always wondered are people really doing this collaboration stuff. I tried it at the start of the lock downs era. But i quickly found it annoying, but maybe its because the implementation was just bad back then.
I'm still happy with vim/nvim as daily work tools (also currently exploring kakoune and helix... because why not).
Think of vim/nvim setup as a one time process: a bit complicated, but once done then you are ready to go. Of course, I use text editors for... code editing. No need to turn it into an IDE or mail client or whatever.
I don’t follow. The collaboration features have been part of Zed from day one. The recent addition of chat feels more like something the team wanted to use itself, so they never have to leave the editor any more, not a core focus of development.
Really my own issue with Zed is the crummy TS language server integration. Everything else is fantastic.
I would like some form of built in diffing, but for simple conflicts this is fine.
Seconded. I'm loving the Zed experience, but having Javascript features provided by the TS language server gives a really bad experience; if I fat-finger a bracket then I get a bunch of TS errors about missing TS stuff littering the code, even though I'm not writing TS.
It's not a deal-breaker, but it is really annoying - I have to find the problem myself with no assistance from the language server. In fact, with hindrance from the language server because it's littering the code with completely spurious warnings of irrelevant "errors" that aren't.
I haven't tried coding in TS on Zed, so I can't comment on how the actual TS experience is.
Doesn't highlight Perl so I'll pass until it does. Looks snappy otherwise. Back to VSCodium, I guess.
Collaboration, AI, chat, couldn't care less. Hopefully they can be disabled. I used Atom for a few years before they discontinued it. Yes, it was quite sluggish but otherwise it was usable, it had multiline editing and other sublime-isms, so I didn't have learn how to use an entirely new editor. If Zed can replace Sublime, Atom or VSCode for me that's great, otherwise I'll pass. I'm only using the basic code editor features, no git, no collaboration, no integrated terminal, no nonsense. Multiple cursors, PCRE matching and dark theme (preferably molokay) are a must.
There are many great editors out there, some free some not. If a newcomer wants to break into the market, they need to add something new to the table. Understandably, in this day and age, it might be AI. Plus, they need to find a way to make money, offering collaboration and AI related feature might enable that.
I tried Zed for one day, without collaboration or AI enabled. It has some un-rounded edges, for example, the scroll bar in some window frame don't even work, but I can still get some job done with it. I use VS Code daily, Zed reminded me how a faster and snappy interface should make me feel. I hope Zed succeed.
Zed also hastily went to v1. Simple things are missing such as labels to identify where a conpletion It's coming from when there are multiple completions with the same name. Also typescript types which are updated by an external process do not reflect unlike vscode.
They are now trying to do collaboration with ai to return money to investors but again nobody wants this.
That's why most editing tools should be open source and done by people passionate about it. The only company that managed to do paid editoes well is Jetbrains because their IDEs are actually much much better than the competition and much better than Zed.
Since many here are complaining about this, I’ll jump in here to say the contrary.
I love the AI integration in Zed, it’s really smooth, pleasant to use, and well-integrated. I have a good experience pairing it with Sonnet 3.5.
The REPL feature is great as well and I totally see myself using that.
I agree on the collaboration bit though. I understand it’s one of the original premises and goals of Zed, however in order for it to really work well, I think you’d need to get everybody in your company to use Zed… which is honestly a “pretty tough” sell. I could imagine it making more sense if they had IntelliJ and VSCode plugins integrated with it, so the adoption could be more incremental.
That said, I agree that I definitely miss e.g. debugging support.
I think the trick of text editors/note apps has become such that every few years you have to look for something else. Especially the note apps - either it dies, or bloats up, or these days more often goes subscription route ALONG WITH other negatives.
But as their focus has shifted to building Collaboration & AI features, and still haven’t yet nailed just being a good/great base editor, its become less useful to me.
I still have a lot of hope for Zed.
But for the time being, I’ve switched back to my old editor & IDE … and I’ll try Zed again at a much later date.