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I got laid off last week because I was coding too slow. Had I been using Zed, I could have closed more tickets 10-15ms faster. Dammit

It has a lot of potential. But it’s no way near feature complete enough to be considered a vscode killer. Yet.

Lmao. That 97ms to 58ms marketing is just marketing 101.

No windows support yet. Like it or hate it, it still is the big fish in the pond. Zed should get to level 6 first to get their ult and then try killing vscode

The bad thing about Zed (for now) is that VSCode has a ton of extensions; yes Zed automatically integrates using LSP but that's pretty much it. But it's VERY promising.

I'm in a similar position: I'm not using Zed as my main editor for now, but I am keeping it installed and periodically checking things out as it gets updated. It has a lot of promise for me and I'm really looking forward to seeing where it goes in the future

Performance matters a lot more when low on resources. I've driven a baseline MacBook Air to its limits and beyond for years, most of the time VSC had little to no noticeable delays but whenever running out of memory or having the CPU catch up, it was BAD. Particularly the vim mode plugin (ergonomics, yo) would swallow inputs and become generally unreliable. That aside, VSC also uses much more memory than it needs to, as any Electron based app does. 300-600mb may be nothing for my current computer, but when you're running 8GB with your base system already using 2 of those, you've got some containers (another 1-2GB), browser tabs and other dev tools open, you'll appreciate every bit of extra memory you can save.

Taking the crown from VScode is very difficult, there is a lot of work behind it, it takes years to offer the developed benefits that it offers.

My opinion on zed is..... ( waits 2 years )

Zed's response times wil be fantastic for use in films where everyone 'programming a computer' seems like they're on speed.

Thanks for your great videos. I even sometimes watch them twice because there is soooo much useful information in your videos. Greetings from Belgium & Germany

What code editor did they use to create Zed?

VSCode works on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Web browsers. With so many extensions like WSL, SSH, Docker, etc. With SSH extension I can view pictures and videos over SSH on my server and browse files like I'm working with Files Explorer or Finder on the local machine. Zed is not a VSCode killer 😂 I don't think they going to kill anyone anytime soon.

I realize how valuable extensions are for VS Code. They're the only ones keeping me from moving to Zed.

Definitely will be checking out Zed. Thanks!

I dunno if I'm the only one that doesn't care about an extra 50ms or whatever input delay, but just having good features, like what you get with Jetbrains

There’s an extension for VSCode to enable zooming font size in the editor separately from the rest of the UI. I think it’s called “Responsive Font Weights”.

I think the problem here is that nobody is complaining that VSCode is slow - we use it for its convenience and its extensions. if you want a fast no-frills code editor like this, you're gonna use nano or neovim or Sublime, etc. Nobody asked for "VSCode but stripped down to the essentials and also slightly faster," so while Zed is getting a lot of coverage and that is good for competition, there is absolutely no reason to use it over VSCode.

It's nowhere near a vscode killer, being MacOS exclusive still.

I just installed it on my personal Mac and I have to admit I absolutely love the clean and smooth interface. Thank you Alex! I might try it on my company's Mac too, I'm curious to see how it will manage our huge codebase.

Yeah, killer only for mac user

VSCode does slow down with large projecțs (like multi-project mono repos). I switched over to JetBrains WebStorm and the usability with these large projects was terrific! Yes, you have to pay to use WebStorm, but it’s worth it for my projects (plus JetBrains’ AI Assistant is just as good if not better than copilot).

Alex went full fuzz testing bloodbath, the poor editor wan't ready for such intensity.

That's some blast processing right there by Zed.

How did you do the voice dubbing that perfectly sounds like Bruce Willis? Which tool?

When something becomes a "killer" of something, it's usually all hype.

The response time differences may have a lot to do with the simplified extensions that Zed supports compared to the more complex extension interface of VS Code.

In every way possible, the $20/month for GHCP is superior in efficiency and cost-effectiveness to using the chat API endpoint. Also, that pop out to new floating window is a new feature and took VSC a long time, but it’s still limited since you can’t pop out a Jupyter NB.

Alex - why are you not wearing Apple vision pro? Scared of seing Zed being 10ms faster on your own eyes? :D

8:10 how did you call up that FPS monitor on that MacBook Pro ??😮😉😉

I'm using Zed for 2/3 months now and it became my main editor as VSCode is the backup because of the extensions. Zed still has a long way to go but it's quiet impressive what they have done so far and I'm loving it.

I've switched from vscode to helix for my daily editing. It is amazingly fast and has most of the features I normally use already baked in. Loving it thus far. There's even an extension dance for vscode that stress up a similar keymap to helix so I can use the same key commands if I have to use vacode. It's not perfect but very helpful. All that being said I haven't needed to switch from helix in a while.

But what if we compare zed with sublime text? 😊

Is not how fast is vs code, but is how many resources consumes when is running. Sometimes it crushes the entire system… at least on my Mac.

Glad to see that Scharzenager got broken out for the true test 👍

zed is awesome. im not ready to change over. but for sure looks like an exciting project.

Zed is good, but UI/UX in VS Code is much more convenient. And VS Code is fast enough.

Do you have all extensions disabled? I recently switched to NeoVim because VSCode becomes too slow and memory hogging for large project. Frequently got VM OutOfMemory issue. Moreover the extension can eat up loads of space as well

I have switched to Zed only this whole week at work and I really love it. Think I will stay on it in the future.

Hi Alex! Your videos are a must for any developer, I really enjoy your attention to detail and really professional tests, oriented to the developer ecosystem.

No support for linux nor windows, no dark mode in their website .... long ways to be even close to vscode killer.

I’m sorry but if the speed of opening files is what’s killing your productivity then congrats. Maybe remove some plugin bloat?

Will definitely give Zed a good try. I like the idea of modern performance-focused editor. As I am not a full-time programmer, it is hard to keep my vim/neovim configuration stable. In contrast Zed seems to be almost feature-complete without any plugins.

tryed Zed for a while. looks ok for some simple tasks considering perfomance, thx for suggesting new software

my sudo nano opens faster than zed

They improved upon the Notepad code base and called it Zed. As you can see both include e and end with d.

are the cpus so slow... that we need gpu for text display?

"stability" lol saw this thing crashing a suspicious amount of times :P

I’m still going to use IntelliJ IDEA to do my actual work because it does so much for me, and can handle working on massive projects well. The only time I run VSCode is when I need a dumb text editor, as long as it has a cli tool to open a file it does what I need.

Try doing multiline and editing 4000 lines at once, I use sublime for this at times when writing queries for locations and stuff, sublime can be really really slow, how's Zed?

Biggest benefit: battery consumption is much lower on Zed. Gotta love that Rust performance! But I agree with Alex. Zed's not quite there yet, but they're making quick progress. Gonna keep checking back to how they crack VSC's "moat": the extensions.

As a vim user, vscode is noticably slow.

I’m excited to see a new player in the space. I’ve been happily using Helix for a while now (I think Kakoune’s way of doing things makes a lot more sense than vim), but I originally switched from VSCode because I got tired of all the popups, notifications, and random obtrusive features getting added without warning, forcing me to read for hours through release notes and settings descriptions trying to figure out how to turn it off. I want my editor, and I don’t want it to change unless I ask it to. Hopefully Zed turns out this way

I doubt that it will get comparable extensiblity as VS Code. But without it, I don't think it will be easy to switch. If they instead build everything they can into the base editor, it will become a full blown IDE like Visual Studio, which is not at all lightweight...

If you wanna quickly edit a file, focus editor is really nice too Currently it's basically just a text editor with some code highlighting features But the text editing part works really well and a lot of short cuts that help you just around and make changes

So does Zed load at start and stay fully resident in ram but with a hidden window?

One thing I realised is if you want to create a Monopoly, building extension ecosystem is big part of that. Scenarios like this shows it very well. Developers put years of effort into building these awesome extensions and now its harder to competition to break in. Thats why even Google's new cloud ide, project idx is based on code - oss and they can use well established vs code extensions.

I've been using Zed for 1 week now. No regrets moving to zed. (the only missing feature is the capacity to work over ssh on a remote server)

Hi Alex. When you installed it, did you have any problems with VSCode already being present? Or Sublime Text?

Great you didn't post a link, it's so more fun searching for it 👍

The response time is more noticable on higher refreshrate monitors 60 fps is good enough, but damn 120-144 hz feels smooth

I actually prefer editors to not use GPU resources because I might be running a task that requires intensive GPU power like training a model.

I've tried Zed and if you run it on a 120Hz screen (e.g., directly on your MBP) it feels glorious. Once we have all the usual plugins that everybody uses, it's going to be a serious VSCode competitor. VSCode is great but it's hamstrung by electron, I like the bare-metal feeling that Zed gives. Also the AI autocompletion in Zed is god-tier, I use it to write documents and it's incredible! Definitely a must try if you can afford OpenAPI API keys.

4:55 the window tear off is pretty new to VS code! Although the issue was sitting in their tracker for almost forever it was always down to some Electron limitations. I guess that was fixed now and so it could be passed to VS code.

When opening files, mske sure to switch it up do you don't always open using VS Code first because the operating system may coache recent files.

I tried it with a 5MB file and realized that it is terible with big files

I'm curious how much of a hit the battery takes from using GPUI. Although interesting, the benefits just don't seem to be worth it for me if it affects battery. I'd like to be able to be remote when I want/need to.

Opening folders/files with zed looks like the folder/file is open in the background

LSP server? Plugins/extensions? No telemetry? Seamless integration with current vscode extensions?

So, how many times do you open your editor? Not running all the time because of sleep mode in the computer? Sure Zed is quicker but at no point have VSCode been a problem for being slow.

Tried it out myself too, it's honestly a great experience. It really needs ssh support like vscode has and maybe a better ecosystem, but as soon as the ssh support is there I'll be ready to jump ship from vscode on to it.

Extensions are what are holding VSCode, like a network effect. Lapce is also pretty fast compared to VSCode, but I don't see how it can take over with so many missing niceties.

There is also Lapce wich as popular as Zed, also written in rust and cross-platform

I have an intel macbook pro (2018) and I am definitely seeing VSCode slowing down a bit more on every new release. The difference with Zed, on my laptop, is immediately evident. But after trying Zed for a bit, I think for me it's still a bit early...still some rough edges and a couple of missing features I really need. Definitely considering for the future though.

Laughs in Neovim

With respect to the increased speed found with Zed loading files, starting approximately at 1:35, the testing did not take into account two important things. The first is the time to start or switch to the app. The second is that after the first test the file or directory is held in cache memory by the operating system. To properly test how fast each opens a directory or file a new directory or file must be selected for each test. For each pair of tests the two directories or files should be as close to the same size as possible. I was part of a team that was responsible for changing a process which ran once a night into one that could be started from a website. The process involved a large number of small programs that each performed a tiny bit of the process and used temporary files to communicate between the different stages. The process originated on a six bit mainframe and there had never been enough money or time to integrate them into them all. Programming wasn’t the issue. Verifying the outcomes stayed the same was the highest priority as the application was used during the process of business incorporation. Any differences and lawsuits could occur. The data was still stored using six bits and every small program read data, converted it from six bits, ran, converted the output to six bits, wrote the data to a file, and exited. A script was used to control the flow of the small programs and that had to be modified to prevent them from overwriting one another temporary data. Time and extreme caution limited our choices. Instead of making each of the small programs able to run instances at once it was easier and safer to lock each one to a single instance. When it came time to testing we ran a request through the nightly version and it took somewhere around 45 seconds. We then switched over to our project and ran it in a two or three seconds. We were all thrilled but it seemed way too much of an improvement for me as we could not implement the chances we identified as having the biggest performance improvements. I asked the person running the test to retry the old method again and it ran in three to four seconds. We eventually determined that the gigabytes of data the application uses was cached in during the first running. Because we were running on a server with lots of memory and set up to cache as much as possible we had to fill the cache with approximately 96GB of junk between tests if we wanted to compare times. This was 25 years ago on a Silicon Graphics server. Ever since then I’ve remembered to take caching in account.

Only mac support so far, i built their linux version from source just to see how far along the support was and it froze up halfway through looking through my first project. Maybe down the road it will be great, but right now its just a mac exclusive half bake.

i feel sorry for anyone using vscode already anyways. The actual performance is not the reason why your a slow programmer if ur still using ur mouse. when you make use of a lot of shortcuts you will get dizzy from the slowness of vscode in no time

Does Zed let you print? I was surprised by VS Codes lack of a print menu item.

So one thing I appreciate about this video is now I can do more in vs cause I didn’t know you could do some of those things

Sublime is the GOAT. 🐐 It’s as fast as Zed (look at dev build performance), native and has a great plugin ecosystem. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. UI is hardware accelerated too.

Do I need an Nvidea rtx4090 to maximize the performance? Does it support Dlss and dlaa to make my code look sharper? What frame rate does it run with?

this summer, my company laptop was slow, was thermal throtling, and I would loved to have zed available. Now I've got a M2, and yeah, now I don't see the difference, but I'm sure past summer It will help a lot, I started using helix because of the performance problems.

Does Zed have Emmet? I downloaded Zed but it doesn't seem to have it, unless its something that has to be enabled?

I use an editor called Micro, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles but is really fast and I like it.

I have tried the Zed. And it looks awesome . But, it the same time it has some bugs and doesn’t support syntax highlights for Dockerfile for example.

I've been a huge fan and user of vscode, but what excites me about zed is the speed. You do notice slow the response of vscode is when you're doing a lot of vim commands and vim motions really quickly.

thanks for sharing this new tool. I truly hope that Zed can keep its advantage on the speed after adding a lot of features like VSCode.

I'm on linux, I am not a professional programmer, more like a medium student, I completely agree on speed and stuff, I'd love to try zed, but I can't (MacOS only atm). Also I wonder if Zed will be non-minimalistic, if it can compete with all the capabilities, that vscode extensions can offer.

Not sure about the zooming of whole window vs the editing component, but it would be nice on both if you could do this independent- like add a 'shift' key to the mix- so you zoom it all, or just your code. I'm just glad that VSC recently added the ability to have zoom per window, rather than zooming all open windows at the same time. I'm glad we have a competitor in Zed, but as a lot of people are saying, we need more extensions before it is a VSC killer.

By the way, it is now "available" for Windows and Linux too; but you have to build it yourself. It's essentially just running 3 commands in the terminal. Note that it is really unstable, crashes often, Copilot won't work and lot's of stuff is just not working yet.

apparently i'm leaning to zed now despite the lack of extensions. at first i thought it sucks then eventually i'm in love with it lmao

You used lapce ?

The best code editor by far is stock vi, only competition is stock ED but only the TempleOS edition.

I was tried to open a 400mb xml file in inbuilt text editor of MacOS it failed, tried the same with vscode and it failed as well(basically crashed) but Zed was the only editor that could open it with no issues. Just WOW!!!

I'm still gonna be sticking with neovim personally but damn this is really awesome to watch from the sidelines. This project has so much potential and to be honest I'm definitely rooting for it, even if I probably won't be using it. Excited to see where it goes!!

Mac only, not a VS Code killer CONFIRMED!

well said, never had a problem with vscode itself and even if it sometimes slows a small bit it is still super smooth overall with tons of extensions I think the only way to really consider Zed (for me) is when it supports vscode extensions and maybe the edge would be a "better" extension host somehow that controls monster extensions like ESlint and it's wild memory usage somehow Zed felt like Atom, which I hated tbh :D

Great video and btw I just started learning cpp however when trying to install library I haven't find a correct tutorial, I tried using vcpkg but it didn't work, do you have any tutorial or ressources to advice. Thanks