Comment by koito17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by koito17 | Hacker News Reader

Started using Zed about a year ago and, besides Magit, it has managed to completely replace Emacs for me. I was missing a good debugger for a long time, but that also went GA a month ago or so.

One thing that goes underappreciated is the input latency and how light on resources the editor is overall. Whenever I switch tabs to a web browser (or any web app), I can feel the lag in typing now, despite the fact I use an M3 Max MacBook Pro. Zed's built-in terminal used to feel high-latency too, but they recently shipped a bunch of performance improvements, and it's just amazing how clunky inputs feel in web apps feel after using Zed for a long time.

Two things I find interesting about this development.

1. This is a long-standing feature request ever since Zed added any AI capability. Adding AI-related functionality at all was a very controversial move at the time. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41302782

2. Text threads in Zed came out only 11 months ago. At the time, it felt revolutionary being able to effortlessly paste terminal output and entire folders into context. Additionally, being able to stop the LLM, correct part of its output, and have it continue code generation. Around 4 months ago, agentic coding released, and now this once-revolutionary workflow feels quite primitive. In the meantime, Zed also added screensharing, Linux support for collaboration, a Git UI, a debugger, and performance improvements to the editor.

I use Zed too, and as a longtime magit devotee, I've really been enjoying using gitu [0] in Zed. gitu doesn't have everything magit does, but there's not much I find myself missing.

I have it nicely integrated with Zed by defining the following task, which you can then add a keybinding for if you want:

    {
        "label": "gitu",
        "command": "gitu",
        "reveal_target": "center",
        "hide": "always",
        "env": {
          "VISUAL": "zed",
          "GIT_EDITOR": "vim"
        }
    }

[0] https://github.com/altsem/gitu

Not currently using Zed but low input latency is one of the things that’s kept me on Sublime Text over the years. Might give Zed a shot and see how it stacks up.

The other two editors I use a lot are Xcode and Android Studio, and while the first is usually fine, Android Studio (IntelliJ) feels servicable but a touch sluggish in comparison. Given the popularity of JetBrains IDEs I’m a bit surprised that there’s not more demand from customers to make it more responsive.

JetBrains IDEs with their zero-latency typing mode are actually some of the most responsive editors for typing performance: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

They can definitely feel a bit sluggish navigating around once you have a giant codebase and you’re using a lot of features, but code editing has been very responsive for me.

Low latency isn't working well on Linux for zer

Agree . Zed has the worst input latency of any app I've used on Linux.

I took Zed for a test drive about a year ago, and absolutely loved how butter smooth it felt to use. It's impossible to describe to others... you must experience it to understand what you're missing.

However, at least at the time, Zed's extension/plugin ecosystem prevented me from making the jump off vscode. Just like it took me a long while to ween myself off JetBrains and their workflow/plugins, it'll take a long while to do the same here - that's if an equivalent plugin exists (yet).

It seems to me, it would be a killer feature for new IDE's to just embrace vscode's extensions and make them "just work". It would remove a lot of the barriers people have with switching IDE's.

Maybe that's an impossible ask... I have no idea, but it would be pretty sweet.

how does it compare to neovim in terms of input lag?

I have not tried neovim, admittedly. Compared to Eclipse, IntelliJ, and now VScode, it's a completely different animal in terms of fluidity and smoothness.

Usually when I've attempted to explain it to others, people counter with things like "but my IDE already feels smooth", etc. I thought so too, until I tried Zed.

My only "complaint" was/is(?) the plugin ecosystem. It's a fairly new editor, so things might change in time.

Which platform? Input and UIlag is worse than vscode In Linux. Vscode is quite smooth for me

I'm on Fedora (kinoite). It was vastly better than vscode - especially when opening and scrolling large files, etc.

What about other Emacs functions such as org-mode? Or did you never use them to begin with?

These were the comments I came looking for. What existing users of Zed migrated from. I'm pretty curious to try it, but lacking some time to tool yak-shave at the moment.

Why was adding AI integration controversial? You go to their website and it seems the AI integration is the whole point.

You go to https://code.visualstudio.com and it will appear that AI integration is the whole point too. How a thing is currently marketed != How people have been using it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com