Preview Builds of the Zed Editor Now Available for Linux | Hacker News Reader

Preview Builds of the Zed Editor Now Available for Linux

zed.dev

100 pointsdesperatecuban41 comments

One thing that I didn't enjoy when taking Zed for a spin was the default of prettifying my code on-save. I feel like that's something that shouldn't be enabled by default. People are most likely going to try and jump in editing an existing project, and don't want the entire file getting reformatted.

This is normal in Go though.

Zed certainly seems interesting!

I wonder though if it's enticing enough to leave Emacs' versatile configurability and introspection abilities behind. I don't think Zed has any way to extend its behavior beyond configuration options, and if it doesn't have a scripting language to go with it now, then it seems quite unlikely it will have a good one in the future either.

Based on another comment here I did some more searching and I found this: https://github.com/zed-industries/extensions . It seems though the extension abilities are limited to dealing with different kind of files, not for really extending Zed's abilities: https://github.com/zed-industries/extensions/blob/main/AUTHO... https://docs.rs/zed_extension_api/latest/zed_extension_api/ .

> I wonder though if it's enticing enough to leave Emacs' versatile configurability and introspection abilities behind.

I guess there are different hats emacs users wear, or things that are in Emacs' favour.

e.g. in terms of "Emacs is just a good tool", it's very good at being a keyboard-driven tool.

If these fancy features like multiplayer catch on, I'd expect someone would figure out a way to do something like that in Emacs.

It's probably due to Emacs being so customisable that allowed it to get Magit, which is an outstandingly good user interface for Git.

I wondered about the same thing. Even though some parts of Emacs feel old it's still the best editor IMHO

I'm rooting for Zed. Used it for a few months at the start of this year, but came back to VSCode. I think Zed can potentially be a replacement for Sublime Text or equivalent, but it's far from one for VSCode. There's too much missing currently and too many bugs (at least from when I last used back in March).

Is anyone using zed with success? I tried to use but it seemed slow to search compared to sublime.

Lots of features were nicer, but search is my most used feature.

From all the other possibilities, this seem the one that I am more inclined to successfully transition to.

I really liked sublime when I switched, but now it feels stuck in the past.

I am waiting for the right time to try again. If you are using and liking it, I would like to know what are the features you most like.

Use it for 50% of my dev work now. It has improved significantly in the last six months. The vim support is quite decent already.

Search hasn't been an issue for me yet. It feels instant and I like that I can use my keyboard for browsing search results in one view, just like in Sublime. Might depend on the project size, although I use it on bigger projects, too.

The one thing I'm missing is Git support. After getting used to Gitlens, it's really hard to move back to the command line.

I have used it only once, when I needed to inspect and lightly edit a giant json (50 GBs or so) and other editors got stuck on it.

It lacks so many features that others have that it makes no sense for me to use it as a daily editor.

I have been using for work & hobbies since the Setember 2023. It is not perfect, good enough to me though.

Is there somewhere a good feature comparison table between Zed, Helix, VIM, NeoVIM, EMACS, etc.? Or the same but for goals/scope?

I no longer code, except for the occasional fun and the usual front-end for marketing and documentation pages. This is why I wanted an editor that I could load up my entire drive or each of the entities, and that wouldn’t hang up on me. I’m beginning to learn VIM and will likely retire with it but for now I was looking for something I'm familiar with.

Zed came really close to being an open-source editor I can use for now, and the Sublime Text key binding was an icing on the cake. Unfortunately, with its regular nudges to do this, do that, install this, install that -- I gave up on it and went back to Sublime Text. ST is just there, super-fast, loads anything I throw in, and just silent - no nothing.

I wish zed and warp join forces to develop a rust gui toolkit that is truly cross platform

Has anyone been able to run it? I'm getting reports of things not being implemented for Linux:

    [2024-05-06T14:00:34+02:00 ERROR util] crates/zed/src/main.rs:192: could not find git binary path
    
    Caused by:
        Platform<LinuxPlatform>::path_for_auxiliary_executable is not implemented yet
    [2024-05-06T14:00:34+02:00 ERROR util] crates/settings/src/settings_file.rs:76: EOF while parsing a value at line 1 column 0
    [2024-05-06T14:00:34+02:00 ERROR util] crates/zed/src/zed.rs:661: EOF while parsing a value at line 1 column 0

I get those too, but the Zed window is still open and I'm able to edit a file just fine. I'm on Fedora 38 FWIW.

Hmm, the process segfaults right after, so I assumed this was the cause. Looking at the output again, I think there's another unrelated issue that happens at the same time, where Vulkan is unable to start due to ERROR_INCOMPATIBLE_DRIVER.

EDIT: Yes, I was missing a driver. I had a driver installed (amdvlk), but that apparently didn't work, and vulkan-radeon does.

I was able to reproduce the segfault in a project with millions of files. It spat out a JSON blob saying something about

    Could not start watcher on parent directory: Error { kind: MaxFilesWatch, paths: <my path>

It works well for smaller projects though.

I've seem zed a few times now, but I've always dismissed it as it was mac only. I'm now looking at features and it seems like a good base for "the last code editor I'll use" :D

I’m using Zed on macOS and like it so far. Only thing I wish they add is remote development like VSCode has. Zed seems to be focusing on collaborative development and the integrated AI assistant, but feels like remote programming is something closer to a lot more people’s use cases. I’d be willing to pay for a seamless remote experience with Zed.

sshfs/rclone as solution?

those give you access to modify remote files - vscode gives you remote search, debugging, building, testing, port forwarding, reproducable self-contained disposable environments, ...

You can do most of that with sshfs, It isn't much different than a mounted drive.

Having used both sshfs and vscode-remote for many years, I can assure you that vscode has a lot more features, with better integration; and even the features that sshfs does have, vscode-remote does the same thing better :)

(You can kiiiind of get the same features with sshfs + mosh + ssh + docker + a bunch of custom scripts + a suite of not-integrated command line tools... but that’s very much a “Why would anybody want to use dropbox when we already have rsync?” situation)

Starts super quickly and offered downloading omnisharp along with needed language server when I opened a c# source file. The only thing holding me back from exploring it more is that it has no window decorations so I can't easily manipulate the window (under Gnome with Wayland)

Alt (or is it super)+left mouse can move it, and right mouse can resize.

It's written in some GUI framework where I'm unable to resize, maximize or minimize the window.

> - [ ] Add Client Side Decorations for resizing / moving

…is currently on top of their Linux roadmap.

I do hope they mean it will br the native window decorations

you can still resize with the std window manager/desktop hotkeys.

the link for anyone looking to download it

https://zed-nightly-host.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/nightly...

or github release, but only on *-pre tag like this

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/releases/tag/v0.134.1-...

One of the big selling points of VS code is nowadays the plugin eco-system. How is that with Zed?

Smaller, as Visual Studio Code has a decade of headstart and Microsoft behind them. May change long term.

Last I checked, text was very blurry, so it's unusable for me

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

I started using it on Mac just last week and really like it.

Everytime I see this I think of zed that camw with Zortech c v1 (M/S DOS) that had an editor called zed. To me it was a very good DOS c package.

It's not starting for me on Linux, where do you want me to report?

I like Zed a lot but decided not to keep it because it has a direct connection with an AI assistant via a separate AI chat window/console. I prefer my software not to have any AI in it -- at least make it something that can be removed from the interface like in VS Code (Copilot there is optional).

You can remove all the AI stuff from the settings

  "collaboration_panel": {
    "button": false
  },
  "assistant": {
    "version": "1",
    "button": false
  },
  "chat_panel": {
    "button": false
  },
  "notification_panel": {
    "button": false
  },

How do I know hiding the button/panel actually turns it off?

Sorry mate, I want my editor dumb until I tell it otherwise. One of the main criticisms against vscode was the by-default analytics.

Cool. The only thing I was aware of is this one:

    "features": {
        "copilot": false
    }

Oh, thanks, I'll look into that. I didn't know that was possible (I searched around a little but couldn't find it.) Does this disable connecting to an AI server though or just hide the buttons?

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