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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

So, what‘s Zed?

Zed is a really really nice editor. I consider the AI features secondary but they have been useful here and there. (I usually have them off.) You can use it like cursor if you want to.

Where I think it gets really interesting is they are adding features in it to compete with slack. Imagine a tight integration between slack huddles and VS code's collaborative editing. Since it's from scratch it's much nicer than both. I'm really excited about it.

Zed's dead, baby. Zed’s dead.

Padadadap - Sound of fingers on a leather hood...

An AI editor, a competitor to Cursor but written from scratch and not a VS Code fork. They recently announced a funding round from Sequoia. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961172

I don't understand why people say X is a competitor to Cursor, which is built on Visual Studio Code, when GitHub Copilot came out first, and is... built on Visual Studio Code.

It also didn't start out as a competitor to either.

It wasn't an AI editor for a long time

Yup. Their big design goal seemed to just be "speed" for a majority of development. That's it.

Even without any AI stuff, it's a fantastic editor for its speed.

Someone posted this in the other zed thread but it looks on par with VS Code in speed according to these results:

https://mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/112146684329230663

Depends how you measure it. At least my battery lasts hour longer when using Zed and when comparing to VSCode. Also, the link is almost 1,5 years old.

Code editor. Imagine VSCode, but with a native GUI for each platform it supports and fewer plugins. And a single `disable_ai` setting that you can use to toggle those kinds of features off or on.

Watch the video on https://zed.dev/, apparently it's really good at quickly cycling through open documents at 120Hz while still seeing every individual tab. Probably something people asked for at some point.

Spiritual successor to Sublime Text. They’ve been doing a lot of AI stuff but originally just focused on speed.

https://zed.dev/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor)

More like a spiritual successor to Atom, at least per the people that started it who came from that project.

Atom was based on web tech, like VSCode, while Zed is a native app with a custom GUI framework, just like Sublime Text. And just like ST, the standard option now for a fast barebones text editor. That's what I mean by 'spiritual successor'.

Isn't extensible plugin API part of ST spirit? (so zed can't be a successor until its spirit incorporates a similar one)

Its funny how the same guy who wrote (borderline) the slowest editor, went ahead and built the fastest. Practice makes perfect I guess :)

A code editor with a lot of rough edges. If they don't start polishing the turd I doubt the'll make it.

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