Why develop this when the core editor is almost unusable? On Linux wayland, copypaste is broken, the file manager is laggy and snippets do not trigger before the heavy hint logic is done. This is just on top of my head, the list is long
I can't use an editor where the file contents I'm being shown don't match the reality of the file. I guess this issue doesn't affect most people somehow, but in the age of CLI agents I'm not sure how more people aren't running into it.
I was really enjoying Zed for a short while before I ran into this fundamental issue.
I just checked my workstation and found Watchman alone holds ~556K watches across 34 roots. It keeps those watches even after the tool that spawned it disconnects. Notably, I've never invoked Watchman manually -- other tools do. And the 8k floor isn't much of a floor. My nixpkgs checkout alone is 37,686 directories, 4.6x that.
Truthfully, I had no idea Watchman stays resident and accumulates watched roots. But, that's kind of the point. It's a very easy thing to miss.
Eg Pi has its own tools for editing files and ignores the ones Zed sends over ACP. If I used Zeds AI pane to have Pi change a file, I can see the edits in the ACP window but the editor view doesn’t update.
I end up having to use something from the command palette to force refresh it, something like “Editor: Reload File”.
It happens to me across Windows, OSX, native ArchLinux and ArchLinux via WSL.
For me, its a massive improvement over IntelliJ for my daily workflow.
Why?
I used Zed for about 6 months but I lost motivation.
I have the full jetbrains subscription and use it for some debugging etc. I got vim for quick edits and cli tooling for ai. I got no use case for Zed.
The only thing that doesn't work well is inertial scrolling[0]. But scrolling is a fucking shit show on Linux no matter what... so I don't necessarily fault Zed for this. The same issue occurs in other apps.
That's a bit of a low bar. Perhaps that's the disconnect?
I have never used snippets so unsure about that too, going from command bar seemed to work.
I think it might be bad, but could also be it's not correctly configured maybe try asking codex/claude or something to check if it can fix/fine tune the config, if that doesn't work file issues?
I do suspect it might be working for me cause I got lucky I do see an open issue[1], but given Zed is used a bunch the lack of comments does suggest maybe it's not that wide spread either way not a good look.
[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/47004
Maybe I got lucky?? Does it not auto update on linux maybe I am on an old build... Very suspicious.
For example, a lot of disable buttons do not actually disable stuff. They just hide it from the UI.
At least Excel has the courtesy to telling you "Hey the copy-paste buffer said it didn't catch that, can you try again?"
Linux Wayland (Ubuntu 26.04)
Terrible Linux support.
Zed is my daily driver and I'm pretty happy with it. I often switch over to other editors to do things Zed can't, but it's rarer than you'd think and really isn't that much of a hassle.
One thing they need to add is a way to double click on file names in agent output to navigate to it. It works in the bottom terminal but not the agent terminal panes or built in agents
Completely ditched VS Code and never looked back.
Maybe some Ubuntu-specific issue?
Shit, as someone who uses Zed everyday, I didn't realize what I am using is unusable.