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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I'm basically sold on Zed, it has everything I have wanted from an editor for years, and that's without the amazing other things that they added that I wasn't even envisioning. For years I've prototyped a few different editors because of frustration with the status quo. There's a lot of work that goes into a good editor, and Zed has definitely done the legwork.

I welcome them openly collaborating.

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You can take my IntelliJ IDE out of my cold, dead hands. I don’t understand why anyone would want to miss out on all the automatic inference and interlinked code base, the integrated tooling… Every time I try something like Zed or VS Code, I end up disappointed or install a no longer supported plugin only to learn it falls way short.

Yes, Zed's startup time is way better, and it definitely feels snappier. But when I work on code, I need to jump around the code. I want the debugger to show me the current line in the file, annotating the value of every variable right in the source. I want to jump to property usages. I want to automatically rename a function everywhere intelligently, not using search-replace. I want to get completion for my database tables, and browse them from the IDE. And lots more.

It's fine, it sounds like you're an enterprise programmer and that suits your role/use case.

I use zed with the inbuilt terminal, additional terminals + tools like pgcli and docker. I would feel trapped/impotent using an IDE, esp combined with the lack of snappiness a java app gives you.

Couldn’t be further from Enterprise luckily, but it leaves me wondering if I’m missing the forest for the trees?

Maybe it’s just a difference in working style. I would feel exhausted by having to learn and maintain a bunch of tools instead of just one, sprinkled with occasional anxiety if there is a better or upstart competing tool that I should be using.

I don't think youre missing out necessarily. I would riot if i couldn't use Pycharm anymore, for big python projects just nothing beats it right now.

I do use VSCode too, but mostly for quick scripting or non-programming projects. and even then i installed a bunch of extensions to make it more like Pycharm.

It’s most likely about different ecosystems. JetBrains provides excellent support for many programming ecosystems, but if yours isn’t supported, you don’t have much choice. I was an avid JetBrains user until I needed to work with Elixir. You simply can’t do Elixir in their IDEs. So I switched to VS Code. After more than a year of using VS Code, you develop muscle memory for it. At this point, I don’t really care about the differences anymore and I’m happy with VS Code.

In my case, my employers forbid tools like JetBrains so I am paying out of pocket for tooling I cannot even use most of my day. I rather just invest in making a different tool better, even if that means doing a few PRs here and there.

> I want the debugger to show me the current line in the file, annotating the value of every variable right in the source. I want to jump to property usages. I want to automatically rename a function everywhere intelligently, not using search-replace.

But you have this with any modern language that have LSP and debugger, no? Zed,VS Code, neovim - pretty much any modern editor have those features either out of the box or via a plugin.

100% this. Zed is snappier to open multiple projects etc but even basic things like auto-complete are horrendous compared to JetBrains. And my python code is often filled with squiggles due to ruff, and when I remove ruff from my settings, then I get some obscure error. Sure I could spend hours tweaking the settings.json to come with the right combo that will work (maybe) but the recommended settings should be documented clearly somewhere. I’ve filed issues several times on their GitHub but gave up eventually.

> I don’t understand why anyone would want to miss out on all the automatic inference and interlinked code base, the integrated tooling…

It's almost like you can get that experience with other editors too, not just IDEs :) I'm using vim/neovim and have the same stuff I see others do with IDEs, but I can definitely see why a bunch of people use IDEs anyways, I'm not blind got the fact that other more barebones editors need a bit more fiddling to get to your liking.

Zed is awesome, but the absence of side-by-side diffs just drives me crazy, so I'm back to Cursor / VSCode. Turns out I can't work without it.

This is the top rated discussion on Github though: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770

I’m sure anyone invested enough could contribute that xD

Like, I agree that that’s the thing I want most out of Zed right now, but not enough to do it myself.

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