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Comment by peoplefromibiza | Hacker News Reader

zed is actually very fast though

This might be one of those things like monitor refresh rate where you can only really tell the difference if you've experienced the better version for a while, but I haven't ever felt slowed down by the speed of VS Code.

Every now and then I switch back to Apple's Terminal app, and I'm blown away at how much faster it is at just typing than iTerm it is, and how much nicer that is.

I switched to iTerm2 a few years ago due to blurry fonts on zoom with Terminal.app . Wonder if that's still a problem?

A few months ago I switched to WezTerm and, after some config wrestling, I've been very happy using it (https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm).

I do think it's something like that. Things can quickly get to the speed that feels "fast enough" that they don't feel subjectively slow, but can still be sped up by a couple orders of magnitude. If you Ctrl-F something and it takes a few hundred ms, you probably don't feel like it was slow, but in reality the "speed-of-light" for this operation was probably orders of magnitude faster than it happened on your device. Once you experience something close to the theoretical speed, it's really hard to go back to something you thought was perfectly fine before. And you start noticing that everything feels slower than it "should"..

I think of something like grep, where if I tried to grep a large hierarchy it'd be really slow and I'd sorta reason to myself "well yeah it's a lot of files in a large tree, of course it'll be slow!". Then I installed ripgrep and suddenly what I thought was a reasonable speed was shown to be unreasonably slow!

it is actually faster and snappier to use on a beefy M2 max, on the same hardware zed starts up in half the time. the difference is very noticeable. of course it is much less configurable and doesn't work with a lot of things VS Code can do easily.

edit: see this comment for a much better explanation than mine of what I originally meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39409763

Startup would have to be terrible for me to bother.

VS Code starts in under a couple of seconds, and I have it open all day long; once open, other windows open even faster than that.

If it took any longer than a couple of seconds, I'd start blaming the extensions other editors won't have.

In a perfect world startup times would be indistinguishable from instantaneous.

And for an image previewer I'd care.

If I'm opening a codebase with thousands of files, I don't mind to wait a couple of seconds, as long as it's responsive afterwards.

> Startup would have to be terrible for me to bother.

that's just the first noticeable difference.

but there have been instances lately where opening, editing and saving the file took me less time with zed than just open it in VS Code and waiting for it to be ready for inputs

> VS Code starts in under a couple of seconds

I am talking about relative speed differences. Imagine you open the same code base and the editor is ready in half a second. going back to the "slower" one would be unbearable.

now admittedly zed is no way near to the extensibility of VS Code so it is probably doing less and that's where probably much of the speed difference comes from, but it can't really be overlooked once you experienced it.

I have. I have some huge Markdown documents I've needed to load and VSCode cannot render them without becoming super slow. In contrast, vim gets it done.

Only works on Mac Big no no

I actually prefer Mac only apps. It usually means the experience is way more polished.

Unless you don’t own a Mac.

Even more so then. Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Mac-only apps come with additional security benefits on Windows and Linux too: there's no safer software than the software you cannot run.

Or even worse, you own a Mac (say, through work), but aren't entirely in the Apple ecosystem and don't want to relearn everything and fight muscle memory every time you switch devices.

Remap the keys.

Most people who say “all editors have vim keybindings just use that” miss the fact that bindings or not, a lot of vim’s functionality is just not available on other editors.

And that Vim is more than its keybindings, despite the often repeated jokes. Tabs, window splits, search and countless other details may work very differently, and usually not completely with the keyboard.

Exactly. If all you needed to move off vim were keybindings, then I submit that you weren’t really using vim at all.

I have (but or course Apple make it hard to do so you need third party software). But that doesn't help with special mac only software that has it's own style, like Arc or Zed.

compared to their non-mac versions?

I think they mean compared to cross-platform apps that feel equally weird on every system.

There’s some talk in the Mac world about “Mac-assed Mac apps”. I use BBEdit as my main editor because it feels right. The default shortcuts are like every other Mac app. You can use standard Mac tools like AppleScript to automate it. It uses the same fonts, widgets, and menu systems as everything else. It’s made for that environment and it shows in a million ways.

VSCode is a marvel of engineering and I love that it exists. It also feels uncanny-valley “off” on my Mac in ways that make my brain itch, so I don’t use it. Same with Obsidian: it’s a brilliant app, but it bugs me. It’s not bad in any way, it’s just not the right choice for me.

Thanks for saving my time. Topic hidden.

Cross-platform support is in development. You might miss the announcement that actually matters to you

Am I wrong in thinking that "topic hidden" means this specific post, and that future posts related to Zed (such as a cross platform announcement) would still show up for them...?

That's my understanding too. Not certain where the parent's comment came from.

For now.

So? It's a code editor.

Have you ever seen a serious programmer which is not on a Mac?

One of the people I admire for their programming skill works on a raspberry pi. I use my work MacBook through ssh because I prefer Sway to MacOS's window manager. We are many and varied.

Troll often?

Lol

My favorite corporate laptop and desktop ran Goobuntu. macOS is dissimilar to production hosts in datacenters.

You can already build and run it in Linux, even type things in and have dialogs! Linux and Windows are coming.

Oh that's awesome!!

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