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Comment by tmdh | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the UI is not as smooth as VSCode. There is a slight lag when scrolling.

Wow. This might be the 1st time i've seen someone comment negatively regarding UI performance. Zed is one of the fastest programs i use. I used to laugh when seeing them market fps and such, but yeesh it's fast

> Wow. This might be the 1st time i've seen someone comment negatively regarding UI performance

Here you go: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> I found Copilot tab completion completion to be VERY slow in Zed, for some reason.

> Zed still takes a relatively long time to start on my old desktop. I thought something was wrong but no, it is just THAT slow

> I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code.

> I mean, good AI tab completion feels like a super power. Zed’s is not that good. It’s slow and normally not at all what I want.

> Zed tab is a lot worse in comparison (partly because it’s slow)

> In my personal experience I couldn't use Zed for editing python. Firstly, when navigating in a large python repository, looking up references was extremely slow (sometimes on the order of minutes).

> All I'm saying is that contrary to what someone else said about the software being "fast" I tried it and at startup, it was unusably slow.

> Tried using zed on Linux (pop os, Nvidia) several months ago, was terribly slow, ~1s to open right click context window.

> Zed is as close as it gets, I also use it, but it is still slow and cumbersome sometimes.

I'll stop here. There are other 4 pages of comments to pick anecdotes from, in this simple search alone.

The other examples you listed are valid, but A.I tab auto complete is a model & inference issue unrelated to the editor.

It is a feature that they control. Whether it comes from the model, a bad prompt, a bad provider or a bug in their implementation is their responsibility (especially considering you have to pay per-request AI features).

That’s true if we’re evaluating Zed as a product, but the GP is discussing Zed U.I perf specifically.

Idk if 'linux + gpu = problem' is surprising or very relevant either.

> Here you go

That is a list of search results of people complaining that VS Code is slow compared to Zed.

There are tons of complains about zed performance there.

Do you think messages like this are talking about VSCode performance?

> In my personal experience I couldn't use Zed for editing python. Firstly, when navigating in a large python repository, looking up references was extremely slow (sometimes on the order of minutes).

Smoothness and frames per second is the core of why they were building a very optimized editor. Not sure if it is just your machine that it is not leveraging the right bits.

For me the extension ecosystems is something I really like about VSCode, but that is an entirely different matter.

This could be an issue with GPU drivers. I experienced some incompatibility with GPU kernel drivers that allowed Zed to crash the whole window manager during text selection.

Wait what? Isn't a super fast UI one of their main selling points, what led them to write their own rendering in Rust?

...and now they lose to a web app?

I have no idea what they're talking about. Maybe they're used to a smooth scroll animation in VS Code or something? Zed feels snappier/lighter in just about every way to me.

No kidding. It is /so/ fast. It has remote development like VS Code, and most of the features I use, so it's my main thing now. Claude Code was the only thing that made me wince, since I wondered if I was living in the dark ages. VS Code of course has many more extensions, but I don't use that many.

There's a reason everyone writes their GUI apps in Electron nowadays. Browser have spent 30 years figuring out fast rendering, it's hard to beat that, even with native code.

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