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Comment by leafmeal | Hacker News Reader

The thing that's so sticky for me with JetBrains IDEs is their run configurations. Being able to configure all of the environment variables etc. for the actual code that I need to run, especially when connecting to a debugger or tests integrated with the IDE.

I haven't seen anyone else complain about this so I figure I must be missing something. Does Zed let you set up run configurations like this? If not, how do users actually run their code? Just in the terminal? It seems backwards to me to use a fancy IDE, but then run all your code in the terminal. I love IDE features like clicking on the test I'm editing to run it, and setting breakpoints in the IDE.

Does anyone else have this problem?

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> It seems backwards to me to use a fancy IDE, but then run all your code in the terminal.

Having literally spent days at a time just to get a working run configuration at various employers and clients over the past decade, I find it backwards to use anything besides the terminal and version-controlled scripts & task runners / CLIs to fire up anything. (: People rarely document their JetBrains setup fully and even if they do, JetBrains IDEs are not exactly known for their reproducible behavior or for not occasionally messing up your configuration (in case you do decide to check in your IDE config & share with your team).

Besides, you will need those terminal scripts for your CI pipeline, anyway.

That being said,

> I love IDE features like clicking on the test I'm editing to run it, and setting breakpoints in the IDE.

I agree, that is very useful. However, to me it's the cherry on top of proper self-contained run scripts for the terminal.

Points taken about benefits of run scripts for portability, reproducibility, CI, etc. I'm mostly just trying to find a way to debug arbitrary programs and run tests in the IDE.

It looks like this should be possible with tasks https://zed.dev/docs/tasks#variables but I haven't put enough time into figuring it out yet.

Maybe my use case is too specific, but I'll spell it out just in case: I try and open a Django project in Zed. I go to a test file. There's a > arrow next to the test to run or debug, but it will only run it with PyTest (I use unittest, but PyTest is backwards compatible, so w/e). When I try to run it, it fails because some environment variables I need are not set. I don't see how to configure them so I'm dead in the water.

I'd also love to run the Django server with a debugger attached. It's not clear to me how to do that. I haven't found the rights docs. Dead in the water again.

Maybe I need to spend more time exploring and reading the docs :)

Same here. Zeds task configurations are not nearly as versatile, easy to set up and run as pycharms especially when it comes to virtual envs. The debugger is superior in Pycharm too. But in terms of overall use Zed is good.

My other complaint is that pyright (used by Zed) isn’t nearly as good as pycharms type inspection.

I love these too. I have a run config checked into my repo that runs three run configs, for `fastapi dev`, npm start, and launching a JavaScript debugger, with one click. I also like clicking on a test or script and just hitting "ctrl+shift+d" to launch that particular code with the debugger.

VS Code can launch a fleet of dev containers but it's just not as good of an experience to restart and debug.

For personal projects I just use npm scripts or make

Minus some magic, those scripts are not going to interface with the IDE debugger.

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