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Comment by ashvardanian | Hacker News Reader

I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code.

The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs. There’s an open discussion about it, though it hasn’t seen much activity recently: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770

Stronger support for GDB/LLDB and broader C/C++ tooling would also be a big win.

It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become. Huge thanks to the people behind Zed and Sublime for actively pushing in the opposite direction!

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> The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs.

> It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become.

It's a bit ironic to see those two in the same message but I'd argue that right there is an example of why software becomes bloated. There is always someone who says "but it would be great to have X" that in spirit might be tangentially relevant, but it's a whole ordeal of its own.

Diffing text, for example, requires a very different set of tools and techniques than what just a plain text editor would already have. That's why there are standalone products like Meld and the very good Beyond Compare; and they tend to be much better than a jack of all trades editor (at least I was never able to like more the diff UI in e.g. VSCode than the UI of Meld or the customization features of BC).

Same for other tangential stuff like VCS integration; VSCode has something in there, but any special purpose app is miles ahead in ease of use and features.

In the end, the creators of an editor need to spend so much time adding what amounts to suplemental and peripheral features, instead of focusing on the best possible core product. Expectations are so high that the sky is the limit. Everyone wants their own pet sub-feature ("when will it integrate a Pomodoro timer?").

Fully agree.

People call "bloat" the features they don't need, and "deal breakers" the lack of features they want besides good text editing.

This is a sharp observation, and it goes even further: BeyondCompare easily allows one to hop into an editor at a specific location, while Total Commander, with its side-by-side view of the world, is n excellent trampoline into BeyondCompare. In this kind of ecosystem (where visual tools strive to achieve some Unix-like collaboration), the super power of editors (and IDEs) is their scripting language, and in this arena it is still hard to beat Emacs (with capabilities that were present maybe 40 years ago).

I agree with that comment chain about the intelliJ diff view so much

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...

I don't even need that to be built into the editor – I would pay for a fast, standalone git UI that is as good as the IntelliJ one. I use Sublime Merge right now and it's kind of ok but definitely not on the same level

I mostly use git from the terminal, but the goodness of the IntelliJ UI for cherry-picking changes is one of the things that has me maintaining my toolbox subscription. Also, IdeaVim is a really solid vim implementation, IMO.

If they factor out the VCS UI into a standalone non-IDE product that starts and runs a little faster than their IDEs and doesn't care about your project setup I'd pay a subscription even

I dunno if you are aware, but you can use the diff/merge standalone. My gift to you:

     [mergetool "intellij"]
     cmd = 'intellij-idea-ultimate-edition' merge "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE" "$BASE" "$MERGED"
     trustExitCode = true

> I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code.

Can you elaborate on when you use which editor? I'd have imagined that there's value in learning and using one editor in-depth, instead of switching around based on use-case, so I'd love to learn more about your approach.

My workflow isn't very common. I typically have 3-5 projects open on the local machines and 2 cloud instances - x86 and Arm. Each project has files in many programming languages (primarily C/C++/CUDA, Python, and Rust), and the average file is easily over 1'000 LOC, sometimes over 10'000 LOC.

VS Code glitches all the time, even when I keep most extensions disabled. A few times a day, I need to restart the program, as it just starts blinking/flickering. Diff views are also painfully slow. Zed handles my typical source files with ease, but lacks functionality. Sublime comes into play when I open huge codebases and multi-gigabyte dataset files.

Different user, but I prefer to use different editors for:

- project work, i.e. GUI, multiple files, with LSP integration (zed)

- one-off/drive-by edits, i.e. terminal, small, fast, don't care much about features (vim)

- non-code writing, i. e. GUI, different theme (light), good markdown support (coteditor)

I don't like big complex software, so I stay away from IDEs; ideally, I'd like to drop zed for something simpler, without AI integration, but I haven't found anything that auto-formats as well.

in my case, I use zed for almost everything, and vscodium for three things:

search across all files; easier to navigate the results with the list of matching lines in the sidebar, and traversing the results with cursor up/down, giving full context

git; side-by-side diff, better handling of staging, and doesn't automatically word-wrap commit messages (I prefer doing that myself)

editing files which have a different type of indentation than what is configured in zed, since zed does not yet have autodetect

It looks like the most recent thread has noted an early feature flag for testing that!

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...

Specifically https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770#disc...

Have you looked at the size of Zed binary lately? How is it pushing against bloat, especially compared to Sublime?

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