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Comment by xiej | Hacker News Reader

Funny how Zed's tagline is

  Love your editor again
  Zed is a minimal code editor crafted for speed and collaboration with humans and AI.

At home, I don't use any AI when coding, to keep my brain sharp. But it's clear that Zed's focus is on AI integration because that's where the money's going (seriously, where is the setting to have a different ui icon size vs ui font size). Is there any editor still being being developed and focusing on the experience of coding by hand?

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> seriously, where is the setting to have a different ui size vs ui font size

Search for font size in preferences.

You'll see a 'font size' under 'buffer' (editor), under 'UI Font', and under 'Agent Panel' to let you control font sizes in all of those places independently.

> Is there any editor still being being developed and focusing on the experience of coding by hand?

Zed lets you hand-edit too! It's fast and decent. vim, neovim, Emacs, Helix, and JetBrains products continue to do that well too. There are still more traditional IDEs/editors than pure AI ones.

You can also toggle AI features off in Zed from preferences if you want to.

ah I forgot a word, I meant the ui icon size. If I bump up the ui font size so that I can distinguish the icons apart on my large monitor, the ui text becomes comically large.

I do use Zed without AI features, it's just a bit of a disappointment (though understandable) since it was originally marketed as just a nice speedy editor.

Have you tried a different icon theme? Some are just easier to see than others. The default icon theme is pretty light.

https://zed.dev/docs/icon-themes

I don't think changing icon size independent of UI font size would be a dealbreaker for many. (I'm quite happy having icons that scale in line with font size, but then I use the Material Icon Theme, which is easy to scan at most sizes.)

It's still a nice speedy editor. It didn't lose any features to make room for AI

Is Zed lacking any feature you need?

A proper git implementation.

I end up doing things in the terminal tab because its faster than the ui or is more clear.

The basics are good but thats about it.

What git features are you missing? We've been adding a ton recently

I use zed every day, but the git view is still buggy and unreliable for me. It often chooses the wrong folder---a subfolder rather than the root of my git project---and shows that there are no changes. And sometimes, even when the right folder is selected, it will still incorrectly say there are no changes.

Another bug is that clicking on new files in the git UI doesn't bring up their diff---you need to click them twice to open the file. I'd like to have those files included in the diff view just like other files are.

I'd love for there to be an easier way to get to the "view file history" view---I didn't realize that it existed until I tried searching for it. I'd love a "line history" view like GitLens has, as well.

Just injecting this here: What I've been missing is an equivalent for GitHub's "blame prior revision" feature to quickly follow through the history of individual source lines.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/42583

Thanks for building an awesome product :)

If you're taking suggestions I'd like to be able to see when I'm over the 72 character limit, last time I checked there was no way to know inside Zed when writing the commit message though I might be wrong. Other than that I think Zed's great and multi-buffer editing is really swell.

Zed is fantastic for coding by hand. The multibuffer editor and 120fps resizing is orgasmic

ecode [0] is ridiculously fast -- makes Zed feel like molasses -- and quite customizable. It's still early in development and mostly just made by one guy (who is also developing the GUI framework used), so progress is slow and there are some rough edges, but it has all the important stuff and quite a few niceties too. Really cool project, reminds me of Sublime.

[0] https://github.com/SpartanJ/ecode/

thanks for sharing. I'm looking for the next Sublime and this might be it.

Doesn't really count, but: https://gram.liten.app/

> ”What cannot be mended must be transcended.”

such a dark and gloomy quote as the mission statement.

I like LLMs, I like Zed, but I turn off the AI features. I rather have Claude or Open Code in a container with only access to a mounted folder, or use a local model.

And Zed lets me do that while remaining fast and minimal.

As for (even more) minimal editors, perhaps just Gnome Edit? Or Kate?

The thing is, they have to monetize somehow. There's a setting to turn all AI features off with one toggle and you're back to an 'editor still being being developed and focusing on the experience of coding by hand'

I'm building Paneditor with that focus. My goal is to close the gap so that (competent) humans can work with code at levels of editing throughput usually reserved for users of LLMs.

Helix?

Emacs. ;)

100%. I recently got rid of my lsp-booster and similar kludges because the builtin language server client (eglot) is now fast enough without it, even on large projects.

And if you want AI integration at your choice and control, agent-shell (and chatgpt-shell, which is LLM-agnostic despite the name) are great packages. They’re totally hackable with elisp like you’d expect, which I personally haven’t done a ton with, because I use AI pretty sparingly, but I imagine the crowd here could come up with plenty of ideas for how to program your editor and your agent interface together.

Vim? Emacs? Sublime Text?

> But it's clear that Zed's focus is on AI integration because that's where the money's going

Do you really think Zed's focus on AI is just about money? You do realize software engineering is in the midst of a tectonic shift?

> You do realize software engineering is in the midst of a tectonic shift?

As an everyday user of AI, both at work and privately, I am not that convinced. The biggest effect I've seen so far is demand for faster work because "everything is faster with agents", but software quality is slowly dropping in software I see around me.

Current AI is very useful as a trivia engine and as a language manipulation tool - i.e. it can quickly extract information from a huge amount of text. But it still sucks when writing new things.

Admittedly, here has been much progress, but it seems to be slowing down. Money is drying out, models are getting nerfed, and only better scaffolding and workflows are making it better. Unless they build 100x more data centers, I don't see models getting significantly better.

> Do you really think Zed's focus on AI is just about money?

Yes? Legitimately curious what other explanation is there here, thats the reason all of these LLM integrations across all software is being pushed.

What will convince people is what they see with their own eyes. Not yet another proclamation that the revolution is happening right now.

Like this.[1]

> AI-assisted coding has become the norm and with tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, we are increasingly letting models touch our code.

... how is it good literaly style to both (1) assume that something is the norm, and (2) use a long intro-sentence to state that something is the norm? Pick a lane—either it is the norm and you don’t need to state it or it isn’t and you need to set the stage. Stating the apparently obvious makes your (their) writing read like a eighth grade paper.

In short I’m agnostic as far as proclamations go. ;)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47866913

neovim or eMacs are the best text editors as up today.

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