Is the new #zed editor mostly hype rn?
I can believe it’s good and cool ( built in graphics and collab seem to me like good ideas).
But as someone who happily stayed with sublime (with LSPs a likely game changer) …
takes like “it’s fast!”, “LSP!”, “it now has snippets!” … along with people telling me it has a plug-in system, but doesn’t (cf python/lua runtimes of sublime/nvim) give me massive hype vibes and honestly just feels very “2020s-tech”.
Zed invented tree-sitter which is a great feature. But since tree-sitter is open source it’s also available in neovim and helix.
My device doesn’t have a graphics card and only has two threads, so I guess it’s just for higher end devices?
Unfortunately it requires vulkan (it says 1.3, but because vulkan is based on extensions so it probably doesn’t require the full 1.3). So if you have the Intel GMA 950 that’s in the motherboard for your Pentium 4 HT is not supported. But I’m confident that an AMD HD 6000 from 2010 with the Mesa driver “terakan” is enough to run it. And theoretically one could implement vulkan even for an HD 2000 from 2007, but it’s an unreasonable effort.
If they made an opengl backend, you would be golden, as the Mesa driver i915 implements opengl 2.1 for the GMA 950, and it’s definitely enough to run an editor
P.s.: and I sure did not spend the last 30 minutes looking up vulkan hardware
I’m not sure when something counts as hype vibes and what the problem with that would be.
It’s a pretty good editor, way faster than VSCode on my machine, but I’m also missing a bunch of features. Those seem unimportant enough compared to the speed for now, so I’ve switched, but switching editors is easy, so I might switch back later. And if other editors get on my radar, I might try them for a bit too. Hype or not, no real harm done.
I tried it briefly. I like the idea of an alternative to VS code, that’s not some inefficient javascript electron app. But the focus of zed seems to be on collaboration in cloud and also pushing LLM tools. That’s not what I’m looking for. I disliked that it was impossible to hide the “log in to github” button (I don’t want to log into an editor). Irked me the wrong way.
It drives me nuts that there’s no way to close a folder once you opened it. There’s no way to just edit a file without making it a “project”. In my mind that’s a weird design decision (which is probably rooted in weird fundamental ideas) and gives me no warm & fuzzy feeling about what direction it will take in the future.
That’s not too weird, until IntelliJ added its lite editor, it was the same way for many years.
IntelliJ is an all-out full IDE in the tradition of the old Visual Studio or Borland IDE:s, so it makes sense there. Zed is ostensibly a text editor in the same niche as VS Code, vim and Sublime, where I expect to be able to just open a single file and edit it without any bigger investment.
I typically have both an IDE and a text editor installed, for different use cases. But Zed can never replace IntelliJ and because of this design choice it can’t replace VS Code/vim/Notepad++ either.
@maegul @programming I think there is no general answer, as every developer has different priorities.
Zed looks and feels much better than VSCode to me. Also a lot is working out of the box, where you need to install Plugins in VSCode.
But in both Zed and VSCode I miss the good git support of IntelliJ and the overall intelligence of the Jetbrains IDEs. It feels like IntelliJ knows what I’m doing there at 90%, Zed knows like 60% and VSCode like 50%.
