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Comment by that_lurker | Hacker News Reader

I just moved to Zed (zed.dev). Has everything I need

Ah yeh Zed. The editor that downloads random binaries for LSPs unprompted without asking me. That's not gonna end badly.

The only way I found out is because I run NixOS and it downloaded a dynamically linked binary that failed to start up and it spat out an error

I installed Zed on a work machine at a well-known software company and a week later they forced me to reimage my machine because they got some alert that the app was attempting to access browser credentials :(

No shade on Zed, sometimes in-house security tools just don't like new software.

> they got some alert that the app was attempting to access browser credentials :(

That sounds pretty specific.

According to the email I initially received for this alert, zed.exe was attempting to access its own folder within the AppData directory. Nothing more normal than that, no?

No idea how that related to what I was told by the sec people shortly afterwards.

Possibly an abundance of caution based on the behavior in the other comments?

I really need to find the time to properly test Zed. I'm mainly using PHP Storm and I love what it can do, especially when it comes to code discovery and auto-completion. I'm not a huge fan of having a bloated toolbox, I never use PHP Storm's included terminal or database browser.

Zed was super impressive when I first started it, but I don't know yet how it compares with PHP Storm.

PHP Storm is a proper IDE, Zed is a souped-up editor.

It wont be the same experience at all, the debugging and deployment stuff will be strictly inferior and the jump to code might be less impressive.

Zed has LSP support though, so if you have a good LSP then you’ll get some nice IDE features, but they’re not really comparable.

unfortunately it's not anprroved tool in many companies. VSCode's new Agents window is quite similar to zed's Parallel Agents UI though.

does it have some kind of sandboxing for its extensions?

The extension capability is much less powerful than VSCode (no embedded web view) so it's a lot harder to pull off crazy stuff. All of the language support is done via language servers.

But in the process of installing those language servers (automatically, without notifying you) it will install node, and download npm packages, which can do crazy stuff, as we've seen recently with the shai halud redux

They are compiled to WASM, so they have limited IO capabilities, but still they have IO.

Zed installs all kind of random crap without asking you and once done it's total memory usage is on par with vscode is not higher.

Plus, it runs like shit on Linux.

Except extensions.

In this day and age, and extensión is the thing is ask my local AI to do for me. They are very simple, self contained code that can be crappy as I'll run it locally.

Browser extensions have been a great playground for me.

You're preaching to the choir, I've personally done 30+ custom chrome extensions and that was pre-AI.

Nowadays it's mostly tamper-monkey scripts when I just want to rearrange a website's DOM. I do those with Claude and it one-shots them more often than not.

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