Just wanted to mention that some basic Windows-OS keyboard shortcuts don't work, like ALT+F to open the File menu. Also things like ALT+SPACEBAR to bring up the system context menu for the focussed window (the menu with maximise, minimise, close options etc.) do not seem to work. I'm guessing with the DirectX rendering backend, the 'app' is rendered more akin to a video game than a native win32 process.
Also after install, the install directory takes up 400MB+. Even VSCode only takes up around 380MB. I believe it when they say it's not an Electron app, but I do wonder what's being packed in there. I was always under the impresion that Rust apps are pretty lightweight, but that install size is nearing Java levels of binary/dependency bloat.
I just compiled "zed" with "cargo build --release" and not only did it pull >2000 dependencies, its size (executable file) is literally 1.4G. Debug is 1.2G.
$ pwd
/tmp/zed/target/release
$ ls -lh ./zed
-rwx------ 2 john john 1.4G Aug 28 17:10 zed
$ du -h ./target/debug/deps/
20G ./target/debug/deps/
$ du -h ./target/release/deps/
8.0G ./target/release/deps/
$ du -h ./target/debug/zed
1.2G ./target/debug/zed
$ du -h ./target/release/zed
1.4G ./target/release/zed
This is on a whole new level of bloat; both with regarding to dependencies AND the resulting executable file(s) (EDIT: executable files are unstripped).
Any explanations as to why "cargo" does not seem to re-use libraries (dependencies) in a shared directory, or why it needs >2000 dependencies (that I see being downloaded and compiled), or why the executable file of the release mode is 1.4G unstripped while of the debug one it is less?
Probably due to treesitter modules for many languages compiled in. AFAK Treesitter's codegen is unfortunately a share nothing between different languages. So a dozen language parsers can easily cross upward of 200 MB.
Entirely untrue. Download git, run make and you'll get a 19MB `git` binary along with a whole lot of other 19MB binaries. Running `cargo build` produces a 3.8MB binary.
And that's still comparing apples to oranges, because git is compiled with full optimizations. Running `cargo build --release` produces a 462KB binary.
Even if I'm comparing to my system's git installation, that's still 3.9MB, and that's with all the debug info stripped.
Yes rust (like C++) tends to produce larger binaries than C, but lets be real here: The reason Zed has a bloated binary is the ~2000 rust packages that comprise it.
That's an entirely different issue. The kb's of overhead for backtrace printing and the format machinery is fixed and does not grow with the binary size. All combined it wouldn't account for anywhere close to 1mb let alone 100's of mb.
I say "strangely" because honestly it just seems large for any application. I thought they might not be doing LTO or something but they do thin LTO. It's just really that much code.
> The world moved into dynamic linking in the 1980's for a reason.
Reasons that no longer exist. Storage is cheap, update distribution is free, time spent debugging various shared lib versions across OSes is expensive.
My /usr is 15G already, and /var/lib/docker isn't that far off despite people's obsession with alpine images. If more people would dismiss storage as cheap it'll quickly become expensive, just not per GiB.
> update distribution is free
I wouldn't be surprised if at one point Github would start restricting asset downloads for very popular projects simply because of how much traffic they'd generate.
Also, there's still plenty of places on the planet with relatively slow internet connectivity.
I 100% agree.
As soon as you step outside of the comfort of your Linux distributions' package manager, dynamic linking turns into dependency hell.
And the magic solution to that problem our industry has come up with is packaging half an OS inside of a container...
RAM isn't cheap (it may be for your tasks and wallet depth, but generally it isn't, especially since DDR5). Shared objects also get "deduplicated" in RAM, not just on disk.
What objects is the Zed process using that would even be shared with any other process on my system? Language support is mostly via external language servers. It uses its own graphics framework, so the UI code wouldn't be shared. A huge amount of the executable size is tree-sitter related.
Storage doesn't really feel cheap. I'm considering buying a new laptop, and Apple charges $600 per TB. Sure, it's cheaper than it was in the '80s, but wasting a few gigabytes here and a few gigabytes there is quickly enough to at least force you to go from a 500GB drive to a 1TB drive, which costs $300.
If you're buying Apple then you should expect inflated prices.
I got a 4TB NVMe SSD for like 350€, a 2TB one goes from 122 - 220 € depending on read/write speeds.
I don't check the installation size of applications anymore.
I'm just saying that $600/TB is a real storage price that lots of people deal with. Storage isn't universally cheap.
This feels especially relevant since we're discussing Zed here, the Mac-focused developer tool, and developers working on Mac are the exact people who pay $600/TB.
It's the reality of storage pricing. The general statement "storage is cheap" is incorrect. For some practically relevant purposes, such as Apple laptops, it's $600/TB. For other purposes, it's significantly below $50/TB.
You could say "just don't buy Apple products". And sure, that might be a solution for some. But the question of what laptop to buy is an extremely complicated one, where storage pricing is just one of many, many, many different factors. I personally have landed on Apple laptops, for a whole host of reasons which have nothing to do with storage. That means that if I have to bump my storage from 1TB to 2TB, it directly costs me $600.
I don't need to "get far in the Apple universe", I need a laptop. My current MacBook Pro cost about the same as the Dell XPS I was using before it, I like nice laptops
Even if it’s delta, it cannot patch itself when running on Windows. So it runs the updater, creates a new exec and switches to it after relaunch. Same as Chrome or Firefox.
> maybe programs shouldn't be allowed to update themselves.
Honestly I'd be all for this if the OS had a good autoupdate mechanism for 3rd party applications. But that's not the world we live in. Certainly not on windows - which is too busy adding antivax conspiracy articles to the start menu.
Will it though?
I mean it's a lot for a "text editor", but much less than a classical IDE.
And 400M is pretty negligible if you're on Windows, where your OS takes up dozens of GB for no reason.
> I believe it when they say it's not an Electron app, but I do wonder what's being packed in there
Half of Electron namely Node.js. As majority of lsp are .js based. Also extensions are WASM. Also VS Code keeps extensions in separate config directory, while Zed in main directory.
> I was always under the impresion that Rust apps are pretty lightweight
Maybe compared to electron, but binary size is an issue with any nontrivial rust application. Due to how cargo works, it compiles and bundles in every dependency in world.
Zed looks and feels amazing to use. I test-drove it for a bit on my linux system, and the feel of it is difficult to convey to those who have not tried it yet. It's easy to overlook the significance of gpu accelerated editor - but I promise you, use it for a bit and you'll be sold.
The only feature that is preventing me from switching to Zed is the current lack of DevContainer support[1]. After investing a significant amount of time perfecting a devcontainer (custom fat image with all tools/libs + config), it would be a large step backwards to go back to installing everything locally.
There's a lot of eyes on this feature, so I'm hopeful it will be implemented in the future.
One of the reasons why I'm not fully switching yet is a Zed's inability to update the currently open file with changes made elsewhere [1].
All the other editors I use are aware of outside changes, but not Zed. And I'm just not willing to close and reopen the file to get fresh contents. Eventually, I'll forget to do it and lose some work.
I sometimes work on old PHP applications, some of which require versions as ancient as 5.4 and refuse to run on anything beyond that. They're not only difficult/impossible to install on modern systems, but also make it hard to onboard other people — you have to write a detailed setup document and then waste a couple of hours time for each new system. And then repeat that a few more years down the line.
Why not write that document as a bunch of build instructions instead of free-form text, while also isolating the result from the rest of the system.
Are you talking about the same thing? This sounds like your typical docker/compose dev setup for running the software under development. The "dev container" stuff is more about running your editor stack in a container, like static analysis tools, language servers etc.
I've been using Zed primarily for months but I just switched back to VSCode for 2 reasons, one of which is kinda my fault and the other it's unclear where the fault is.
1. I deleted a few hours of work because I was late night coding and I decided to rename a file before check-in and delete the old version. Well I renamed it and Right-Click -> Deleted the new version by accident.
It turns out Zed has both "Delete" and "Trash" right next to each other in its right-click menu. Delete skips the trash and Zed does not implement Ctrl+Z yet, so unless you have a backup that file is gone. Because I renamed it and had not yet checked in it wasn't in version control yet.
2. For some reason a particular crate in my Rust workspace wasn't having errors and warnings show up in the editor. I messed with configuration a bunch and couldn't figure it out, so I tried VSCode and it just worked without any additional configuration.
> Delete skips the trash and Zed does not implement Ctrl+Z yet,
I'm not going to claim Zed has a good UI in this space, but saying it doesn't implement Ctrl + Z for a feature which is literally "skip the undo-ability of this option" is a bit misleading.
While I understand your point, and think you are correct - if the 'Trash' button is not behind a confirmation box, and it's not undoable, then that is a pretty terrible design choice.
Zed is pretty awesome on macOS and Linux, but I tried the Windows version tonight and things that work great on the other OSes aren't working on Windows. I've noticed:
- Issues with various keybinds not working as expected, e.g. Ctrl+S to save works on my Linux machines but not Windows if Vim Mode is enabled
- Issues with LSPs/diagnostics not working on Windows the same way they work on macOS/Linux
- The terminal holds a lot of assumptions about how the system works that don't hold true on Windows, e.g. "the user has one shell they use for all things" or "setting environment variables in the OS is easy"
I love Zed on my work issued macbook and use it full time, but the Windows version still needs some work.
It isn't as easy as on Linux, but you press Windows, type env, click edit Variables then select User vs. System, the you press add. That's not too complicated.
That sets them globally, right? I need different variables and values in different contexts. e.g. in VSC I can set variables per-directory in settings.json files.
Have they implemented subpixel font rendering by now? I remember that being a sticking point when it came to Linux because they had designed their custom UI renderer around the Macs ubiquitous HiDPI displays, leading to blurry fonts for the much, much larger proportion of Linux (and Windows) users who still use LoDPI displays.
I'm glad there's finally some progress in that direction. If they actually implement subpixel RGB anti-aliasing, it would definitely be worth considering as an alternative. It's been surprising to see so many people praise Zed when its text rendering (of all things) has been in such a state for so long.
My gaming PC is also connected to a 1080p display because tbh for gaming that's good enough, but I don't whine about application text quality on that setup since it looks pretty bad with or without ClearType compared to a highdpi display ;)
> The Windows build uses DirectX 11 for rendering, and DirectWrite for text rendering, to match the Windows look and feel.
As I understand, DirectWrite font rendering uses Windows subpixel font rendering. It seems OK on my monitor (better than the linux version) but haven't done any pixel peeping.
They seem to have anticipated this issue and designed it accordingly!
Spitballing here, but subpixel rendering also requires integration with the rendering pipeline, specifically that you have the infrastructure to pass fractional offsets to the rasterization engine based on the concrete screen position of a glyph, and that the glyph atlas is a full RGBA texture (not just an alpha texture), and that the rasterizer knows about the particular texture format (RGBA vs BGRA etc.)
I tried it out on macOS and have a 1440p external monitor that the fonts just look horrible on. Looks fine on the laptop's "retina" display but blurry enough every else that it actually gave me a headache after a few hours.
I installed Zed and tested out a bunch of fonts on my 1440p monitor. It looks decent, but not great. I think that's more a byproduct of Windows' awful font rendering in general though moreso than a Zed specific problem. VSCode is no better.
Seems like the only way to get high quality font rendering these days is a 4k+ display.
[Window Title]
Critical
[Main Instruction]
Unsupported GPU
[Content]
Zed uses DirectX for rendering and requires a compatible GPU.
Currently you are using a software emulated GPU (Microsoft Basic Render Driver) which
will result in awful performance.
For troubleshooting see: https://zed.dev/docs/windows
Set ZED_ALLOW_EMULATED_GPU=1 env var to permanently override.
[Skip] [Troubleshoot and Quit]
That's more of an issue with your system than an issue with Zed, you have to veer pretty far from the beaten path to not have proper DirectX nowadays. Are you running Windows in a VM?
I've literally programmed with VSCode for basically a decade this way without issues. Zed lags, it's disappointing and if I really like Zed I'll have to sort out another setup.
MSTSC is one of the rock-solid tools from Microsoft, and does better than almost everything else available on the market other than some PC over IP technologies specifically highly optimized for this use case. I've been programming with an ancient ThinkPad forever because I'm just remoting into a much more powerful machine.
Maybe try gaming-oriented remote desktop tools, like steam link or sunshine/moonlight. Those work great with directx, assuming you have a working gpu (at least integrated gpu) on your remote box. They also have way better latency, though use a lot more bandwidth.
By explaining the advantages over "older" methods. A lot of people use Moonlight/Sunshine for non gaming related stuff, specially considering than the alternatives are all proprietary.
They're productivity tools, not gaming software. You'll be faster and deal with less errors using the correct optimized remote desktop tool for your job, versus what you're using now, which can be slow and error prone.
Sunshine and Moonlight are no more than accelerated and finely tuned VNC servers that happen to be targeted at gaming. You can totally set them up as a regular remote desktop solution.
My post was answering the question of how they should ask for permission to use it. You pitch it as productivity software that helps you do your job better.
If no monitor is connected then RDP doesn't load gpu drivers. It can also make RDP performance much worse as HW accelerated video encoding is not working
Maybe it's misdetecting something? I used to use Remote Desktop for game development sometimes, as weather could make the journey to the office impossible, and the performance was always pretty ok, even with UE5 stuff making heavy use of Nanite running at 1440p.
And if it was actually software emulated, which I can't believe for a moment, though I admit I never checked (I just always assumed the window contents were transmitted via some kind of video encoder) - then I can't imagine that a text editor would be a problem.
The input latency might not be as good as you'd like.
> The input latency might not be as good as you'd like.
Yeah input latency is annoyingly rough, not super bad but _just_ laggy enough to make it annoying to use.
Debating how much I want to change things, I can directly punch into my Linux machine but all my dev IDEs are on a VM for a long list of reasons, and I doubt Zed is going to run on my old ThinkPad if it struggles on software rendering, but we'll see.
Size on disk is about 64x less relevant than size in RAM for me. To give Zed some credit in this area, it's statically linked and the Linux binary is half the size as the Windows one.
Every Unity game ships with three UI frameworks (IMGUI, UGUI, UI Elements) built-in, in addition to everything else the game engine supports, and the engine is only about 50 MB.
Yes. Zed is snappy in a way that makes my copy of Sublime Text 3 feel slow. Compared to VSC it feels like going from a video game at 40 FPS with 2-3 frames of input lag to 120 FPS.
Why don't you actually do some considering how mistaken this superficial dismissal is: storage is not cheap where it matters - for example, your laptop's main drive. It doesn't help you that an external hard drive can be purchased cheaply since you won't be able conveniently upgrade your main mobile system. Also, the size of various used content (games/photos /videos) has increased a lot, leaving constrains on storage in place despite the price drop.
I just refuse to use any software that baloons it's filesize. Not because I can't afford storage, but because there are always alternatives that have similar features and packed into fraction (usually less than 1%) of filesize. If one of them can do it and other can't, it's a bad product, that I have no intention to support.
We should strive to write better software that is faster, smaller and more resilient.
"Storage is cheap" is a bad mentality. This way of thinking is why software only gets worse with time: let's have a 400mb binary, let's use javascript for everything, who needs optimization - just buy top of the shelf super computer. And it's why terabytes of storage might not be enough soon.
I can empathize with how lazy some developers have gotten with program sizes. I stopped playing CoD because I refused to download their crap 150+ GB games with less content than alot of other titles that are much smaller.
That said, storage is cheap, it's not a mentality but a simple statement of fact. You think zed balloons their file sizes because the developers are lazy. It's not true. It's because the users have become lazy. No one wants to spend time downloading the correct libraries to use software anymore. We've seen a rise in binary sizes in most software because of a rise in static linking, which does increase binary size, but makes using and testing the actual software much less of a pain. Not to mention the benefits in reduced memory overhead.
VSCode and other editors aren't smaller because the developers are somehow better or more clever. They're using dynamic linking to call into libraries on the OS. This linking itself is a small overhead, but overhead none-the-less, and all so they can use electron + javascript, the real culprits which made people switch to neovim + zed in the first place. 400mb is such a cheap price to pay for a piece of software I use on a daily basis.
I'm not here to convince you to use Zed or any editor for that matter. Use what you want. But you're not going to somehow change this trend by dying on this hill, because unless you're working with actual hardware constraints, dynamic linking makes no sense nowadays. There's no such thing as silver bullet in software. Everything is a tradeoff, and the resounding answer has been people are more than happy to trade disk space for lower memory & cpu usage.
Unfortunately, I tried to use zed as my daily driver, but the typescript experience was subpar. While the editor itself was snappy, LSP actions like "jump to declaration" were incredibly slow on our codebase compared to VS Code / Cursor.
Well exactly, I'm pretty sure that's what the GP is getting at — it would be a surprise if Rust didn't have good JSON support. Which it does. So it's unlikely to be the bottleneck.
I had the same experience and the same outcome. Zed was super fast for editing but slow for rich features, which on the net slowed me down compared with VSCode
Are you saying that VSCode runs tsserver in its own NodeJS process? Or are you saying that VSCode uses the NodeJS it ships to run tsserver in a different process?
I absolutely love the idea of Zed, and I'm regularly giving it a go. Typing in Zed really feels better than VSCode. It's hard to describe, but impossible to discard once you've used it for a short while.
Unfortunately, there's a bunch of small things still holding me back. Proper file drag & drop for one, the ability to listen to audio files inside the editor, and even a bunch of extensions, in particular one that shows a spectrogram for an audio file.
Maybe my biggest gripe is that Python support is still better in VSCode. Clicking on definitions is faster and more reliable.
The reason it's faster is largely because it doesn't have all those little quality of life features and extension ecosystem. It's easyish to make software perform well if it doesn't do all that much. If you take base vscode, no extensions, and just do raw text editing, it's hard for me to tell the difference between vscode, zed, or any other editor.
When vscode was released, Sublime was faster - and it stayed faster. But that wasn't enough to stop the rise of vscode.
It's great that they finally target all three mayor platforms! Let's see how developers using Windows treat them.
I used to be a Neovim purist, spending days on my config and I have barely touched it since I moved to Zed. It's so much nicer to use then VScode (and it's forks) because it's so snappy.
I hope they ship leap.nvim (https://github.com/ggandor/leap.nvim) support soon, then I am completely happy!
I watched the video on the home page and thought it is weird that they spend an inordinate amount of time on frame rate. Who picks an editor based on frame rate?
If you want to talk about perf in the context of a text editor show me how big of a file you can load--especially if the file has no line breaks. Emacs has trouble here. If you load a minified js file it slows to a crawl especially if syntax highlighting is on. Also show me how fast the start up time is. This is another area where Emacs does not do well.
So Zed is available on Windows--but only if you have a x64 processor. Lots of people run Windows on Arm64 and I don't see any mention of Arm64. This is where the puck is heading.
It's not just frame rate, but also input delay. If you're using Visual Studio Code, you might be used to waiting 100 ms for a character you typed to appear. My personal workflow is based on Kitty and Neovim, which I've configured so that it can launch within 20 ms. Working without any input delay allows me to explore and edit projects at typing speed. As such, even tiny delays really bother me and make me lose my flow. I would believe Zed's focus on performance is motivated similarly.
Also, I do not believe Windows on Arm64 is a very large demographic? Especially for developers, unless they're specifically into that platform.
The only IDE I have used where frame rate is noticeable was Visual Studio (not Code).
Once you are beyond a bare minimum, every other speed metric is more important. Zed does really well on many of those, but some depend on the LSP, so they become the bottleneck quickly.
You literally can’t tell the difference in a 20ms delay. That is an order of magnitude lower than the neural feedback loop latency. You may think that you can, but studies don’t back this up.
"Order of magnitude", so you're saying the neural feedback loop latency is >100ms? That seems obviously wrong.
Also you can absolutely feel the visual difference between 60Hz (~16ms) and 120Hz (~8ms), and for audio it's even more nuanced.
Just because studies don't back this up yet doesn't make it false. I imagine this is really hard to measure accurately, and focusing only on neuron activity seems misguided too. Our bodies are more than just brains.
> At the most sensitive, our findings reveal that some perceive delays below 40 ms. However, the median threshold suggests that motorvisual delays are more likely than not to go undetected below 51-90 ms.
By this study's numbers, 20ms is somewhat below the lower limit of ~40ms, but not too far below. 100ms would be easily perceivable - though, based on the other replies, it seems that VS Code does not actually have that much latency.
Don't confuse this with human reaction time, which is indeed an order of magnitude higher, at over 200ms. For one thing, reaction time is based on unpredictable events, whereas the appearance of keystrokes is highly predictable. It's based on the user's own keypresses, which a touch typer will usually have subconsciously planned (via muscle memory) several characters in advance. So the user will also be subconsciously predicting when the text will appear, and can notice if the timing is off. Also, even when it comes to unpredictable events, humans can discern, after the fact, the time difference between two previous sensory inputs (e.g. between feeling a keyboard key press down and seeing the character on screen), for much shorter time differences than the reaction time.
Of course, just because these levels of latency are perceptible doesn't mean they're a material obstacle to getting work done. As a relatively latency-sensitive person, I'm not sure whether they're a material obstacle. I just think they're annoying. Higher levels of latency (in the hundreds of ms) can definitely get in the way though, especially when the latency is variable (like SSH over cellular connections).
Yeah. The Steam survey isn't a perfect sample since it's skewed towards gamers, but that currently shows just 0.08% of Windows users are on ARM, while 81.5% of Mac users are on ARM.
That may be true if you're looking at all windows computers in existence. If you look at new laptops being sold you see different numbers. As of 2025, Arm processors hold about 13% to 20% of the market share for new Windows laptops. This is important because these are the people who are more likely to download and install your software.
High frame rates (low frame times, really) are essential to responsiveness which, for those who appreciate it, is going to make much more of a difference day to day than the odd hiccup opening a large file (not that zed does have that issue, I wouldn't know as I haven't tried opening something huge).
You probably do. Many people just never notice that. It's not about typing or reading fast either, it's just about how it feels. Typing into something with shitty latency feels like dragging my fingernails across a chalkboard.
It's the same with high dpi monitors. Some people (me included) are driven absolutely insane by the font rendering on low density monitors, and other people don't even notice a difference.
Honestly, consider yourself blessed. One less thing in the world to annoy you.
Me! Frame rate and input latency are very important for a tool I use for hours every day. Obviously that's not the only feature I look for in an editor but if an editor _doesn't_ have it, I skip it. I also try to work on devices with 120Hz displays and above these days.
This always makes me laugh. The editor was barely announced two years ago. They've built it from the ground up with native support now for three different operating systems. They're experimenting with some cool new features, and even though I don't care about it I've heard their AI integration is pretty damn good.
But waaaaah they don't support a processor that accounts for probably less then 10% of Windows Machines
Ubiquity is pretty important when you're going to invest in learning a new editor. This is one of the advantages of vim for example. It is available everywhere... linux, windows, terminal, gui, etc.
I build Zed for Windows aarch64 from source -- works great, though the build process is quite slow on my 16GB Surface Pro. Definitely hoping for official binaries, though!
I think I got as far as installing the Visual Studio Installer so I could install Visual Studio and I just bailed on that whole thing, lol. I'll have to take some time out on a weekend to take another look :)
Zed is awesome. It does everything I need. I easily find everything I'm looking for. It's fast, and I can use forked CLI terminals from the IDE via ACP mode. This means Cerebras and Qwen code 480b for super fast and cheap incredibly smart CLI agents.
Just downloaded and installed on mac. It asking access to pretty much every folder and even music apps. What a privacy nightmare. NOPE, will stick to cursor.
I installed the beta a week or two ago. Many of the files I tried opening in it just did not work at all. It can only open utf-8 encoded files.
That is not a problem for code, but if you just want to open some random .txt file or .csv file, these are often enough not utf-8 encoded, especially if they contain non English text.
The github issue for this is showing progress, but I think it's a mistake to promote the editor to stable as is.
Technically, Zed's Super Compete will almost never catch up with Cursor, or even as good as the free Windsurf.
If you look a little closer, you will see that the cursor and cursor completion requests are not initiated by the editor itself, which only interacts with the lsp.
Yes. They all come with an LSP, taking free windsurf as an example, when windsurf starts, it will start a process in /Applications/Windsurf.app/Contents/Resources/app/extensions/windsurf/bin/languageservermacosarm, This process is responsible for syntactic analysis of the current code's workspace and then local indexing. The editor communicates with LSP through localhost encoding through protobuf, including the current cursor, currently open tabs, recently viewed files, etc.
The LSP calculates locally based on this information, and if the inference cannot be completed locally, it will automatically extract the necessary information to interact with the server-side LLM. This ensures the intelligence of Super Complete.
However, ZED's Super Complete does not have an LSP. Instead, it interacts directly with the server, which runs a zeta model. This pattern is not smart, takes up a lot of bandwidth and more useless context, and lacks more useful information due to the lack of LSP support.
I hope my technical interpretation above will give you an understanding of why zed's super complete is technically backward. And, since ZED's LSP is configured by a third party, ZED itself does not offer its own languageserver, unless ZED is developing it now, but this is obviously difficult.
In this case, I don't understand why zed would charge for a feature that is clearly lagging behind.
You have to ask me why I know so much about this, because I am a member of Cursor, but I want a Zed Editor, so I want to customize an endpoint I developed by ZEDPREDICTEDITS_URL, relay requests to Cursor, to achieve powerful completion with Cursor in Zed. Obviously, it failed in the end. The above mentioned is the reason for the failure.
Excuse me, can you read what I wrote? I didn't say zed editor is bad, I just said that zed's PREDICT EDIT isn't good enough, or at least it shouldn't charge for it.
I never thought you said Zed was bad. I was genuinely asking since Cursor and Windsurf exclusively advertise AI features, whereas Zed is also a good editor without AI. I never bothered to try them because I inherently distrust AI that I don't control, and find the cloud stuff to be too expensive on top. Just wanted to know if they're any good, or can even be used at all, without AI; since their websites say nothing on the subject.
Yes, windsurf and cursor will also work whitout AI, cause it just fork from vscode.
I like zed very much. If u dont like AI, then zed is best editor for you. (and for me if zed's AI is good enough)
I just say they shouldn't charge for it PREDICT EDIT.
The reason is that it's not even as good as the free ones.
I don't know why you've become such a fanatic, but if you want to support them you can donate.
I tried it for a bit. But unless you want to use their choice of lsp/linter/whatever from what you are used to, then you will waste even more time customising zed to your needs from your previous solution.
I am using nightly on Windows and startup time is very slow. It can take 10 seconds to boot up. To quickly edit random files, I would open notepad++ or simple notepad instead, which isn't what I expected from Zed.
Is this something like Sublime? Light/responsive editor for one-off files? But maybe with some better introspection? That would fill a niche for me; trying it. FYI download+install is the smoothest experience of any software I've loaded recently I didn't build myself. Going to daily-drive it for a bit and see what's up; promising!
as a 10+ year Sublime user, Zed is the best of the more "modern" GUI editors I've tried.
I haven't fully switched over to using it as my daily-driver because Zed's heavy reliance on GPU rendering means that it locks up every time I suspend & resume my Linux box [0,1] but I'm optimistic about the progress they're making on it.
Was a heavy sublime user for many years, slowly migrated to vim (first sublime with vim keybindings) but now daily drive lazyvim and the defaults with that are very sane.
Quick install on any platform and just works. And obviously plenty of configuration that’s available to you but if you haven’t I’d give that a go.
Tried zed, it's interesting but several things are missing including the ability to skip extensions auto-update... which imho is critical for security.
So many new options. NeoVim and Helix in terminal, Zed as a beautiful GUI editor. - A few years ago I thought it’s Emacs/vim for us hackers, and for the rest it’s Sublime, and later VS Code, and then comes nothing. But wow, here we are: Ever more options. I‘m loving it.
I switched from VSCode to Zed as my "I just need to edit this 1 little text file" app because VSCode was way too spammy. Every time I open it it wants to update something or complain about some extensions or complain that I had a file open and now it MUST close it because heaven forbid I open two things at once.
I hope Zed stays clean. We'll see. So far so good. Was quite happy they had a JetBrains base hotkey setup. Had to add a few of my own but I could pretty easily, nothing missing so far.
> winget search zed
Name Id Version Match Source
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zed Preview ZedIndustries.Zed 0.208.4-pre Moniker: zed winget
I don't use windows, but this is good development as all platforms should be present for editors to be worth using. I am happy Zed user since long time, I am happy it had kept with out demands, with adding AI, Git etc.
Also integration of cli tools into AI is excellent and really refreshing.
First, you should fix fundamental operations on Mac and other distributions - for example when you stash or perform operations on files from other tools, it will put the state out of sync.
You can build the most beautiful and fastest IDE, but with this bugs, it’s useless
In January 2024 zed was open sourced, with only mac support. One week later Dzmitry Malyshau showed up with a prototype renderer for Linux. In July 2024 official Linux builds were available mostly thanks to community contributors. The swift Linux support is a tale of community steppung up to open source development, not one of manufacturer provides something. So Windows is certainly not popular with the kind of crowd that gets excited about an editor
Just surprised, as I thought building GUI app on Windows must be easy right, as must be libs/frameworks already available to support that? It's just not.
I hope you realize that Linux in this table is split up into many individual options where the others are not, i.e. that Ubuntu, Debian, Arch etc also all count towards Linux?
Just wanted to mention that some basic Windows-OS keyboard shortcuts don't work, like ALT+F to open the File menu. Also things like ALT+SPACEBAR to bring up the system context menu for the focussed window (the menu with maximise, minimise, close options etc.) do not seem to work. I'm guessing with the DirectX rendering backend, the 'app' is rendered more akin to a video game than a native win32 process.
Also after install, the install directory takes up 400MB+. Even VSCode only takes up around 380MB. I believe it when they say it's not an Electron app, but I do wonder what's being packed in there. I was always under the impresion that Rust apps are pretty lightweight, but that install size is nearing Java levels of binary/dependency bloat.
> I was always under the impresion that Rust apps are pretty lightweight, but that install size is nearing Java levels of binary/dependency bloat.
For what it's worth, the zed executable on Linux weighs 3.2 MB.
EDIT: Sorry, the nix store is too good at hiding things from me. It's actually around 337 MB plus webrtc-sys.
I just compiled "zed" with "cargo build --release" and not only did it pull >2000 dependencies, its size (executable file) is literally 1.4G. Debug is 1.2G.
--- Summary: This is on a whole new level of bloat; both with regarding to dependencies AND the resulting executable file(s) (EDIT: executable files are unstripped).Any explanations as to why "cargo" does not seem to re-use libraries (dependencies) in a shared directory, or why it needs >2000 dependencies (that I see being downloaded and compiled), or why the executable file of the release mode is 1.4G unstripped while of the debug one it is less?
Unstripped, perhaps?
EDIT: Ah, it was too good to be true. The true binary is hidden in libexec/.zed-editor-wrapped :( Extra weight also comes from webrtc, which nixpkgs dynamically links. So yeah, it's quite a large binary indeed.To make matters worse, it takes several minutes for Zed's window to appear on a cold start, whereas VSCode launches almost instantly.
[1] I am trying to measure it as we speak but it is taking quite a long time.
> Not to mention it takes minutes for the window of Zed to open, whereas VSCode is almost instant.
That one is interesting. It's much quicker for me, even cold starts are below 1s, and subsequent startups are basically instant.
Cold starts are minutes, subsequent startups are much faster than VSCode[1].
I wonder why though.
[1] I have not measured subsequent launches of VSCode though, but Zed is relatively pretty quick after the initial launch.
Probably due to treesitter modules for many languages compiled in. AFAK Treesitter's codegen is unfortunately a share nothing between different languages. So a dozen language parsers can easily cross upward of 200 MB.
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Rust Hello World is larger than Git. Still smaller than Java and Electron, but not exactly small.
Entirely untrue. Download git, run make and you'll get a 19MB `git` binary along with a whole lot of other 19MB binaries. Running `cargo build` produces a 3.8MB binary.
And that's still comparing apples to oranges, because git is compiled with full optimizations. Running `cargo build --release` produces a 462KB binary.
Even if I'm comparing to my system's git installation, that's still 3.9MB, and that's with all the debug info stripped.
Yes rust (like C++) tends to produce larger binaries than C, but lets be real here: The reason Zed has a bloated binary is the ~2000 rust packages that comprise it.
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That's an entirely different issue. The kb's of overhead for backtrace printing and the format machinery is fixed and does not grow with the binary size. All combined it wouldn't account for anywhere close to 1mb let alone 100's of mb.
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A 400mb+ install of bloat will upset many people
This needs to be justified asap to help people understand and reconsider installing it.
Strangely it's the actual binary's .text section that's about 400MB. Time to dive in!
Welcome to static linking of large applications.
The world moved into dynamic linking in the 1980's for a reason.
It is cool to advocate for a return to static linking when it is basic CLI tools.
All those beautiful dlls will anyways sit comfortably in the same folder as your "dynamically" linked executable on Windows.
They might be, or not.
I say "strangely" because honestly it just seems large for any application. I thought they might not be doing LTO or something but they do thin LTO. It's just really that much code.
> The world moved into dynamic linking in the 1980's for a reason.
Reasons that no longer exist. Storage is cheap, update distribution is free, time spent debugging various shared lib versions across OSes is expensive.
> Storage is cheap
My /usr is 15G already, and /var/lib/docker isn't that far off despite people's obsession with alpine images. If more people would dismiss storage as cheap it'll quickly become expensive, just not per GiB.
> update distribution is free
I wouldn't be surprised if at one point Github would start restricting asset downloads for very popular projects simply because of how much traffic they'd generate.
Also, there's still plenty of places on the planet with relatively slow internet connectivity.
Yet everyone is complaining on this thread about Zed distribution size, go figure.
They should shut up and just buy bigger drives. Ah, they can't on their laptops, bummer.
Also try to develop mobile apps with that mentality,
https://www.abbacustechnologies.com/why-your-app-keeps-getti...
Precisely. It seems like the people who say storage is cheap assume everyone is using desktop PCs
I 100% agree. As soon as you step outside of the comfort of your Linux distributions' package manager, dynamic linking turns into dependency hell. And the magic solution to that problem our industry has come up with is packaging half an OS inside of a container...
RAM isn't cheap (it may be for your tasks and wallet depth, but generally it isn't, especially since DDR5). Shared objects also get "deduplicated" in RAM, not just on disk.
What objects is the Zed process using that would even be shared with any other process on my system? Language support is mostly via external language servers. It uses its own graphics framework, so the UI code wouldn't be shared. A huge amount of the executable size is tree-sitter related.
Storage doesn't really feel cheap. I'm considering buying a new laptop, and Apple charges $600 per TB. Sure, it's cheaper than it was in the '80s, but wasting a few gigabytes here and a few gigabytes there is quickly enough to at least force you to go from a 500GB drive to a 1TB drive, which costs $300.
If you're buying Apple then you should expect inflated prices. I got a 4TB NVMe SSD for like 350€, a 2TB one goes from 122 - 220 € depending on read/write speeds.
I don't check the installation size of applications anymore.
I'm just saying that $600/TB is a real storage price that lots of people deal with. Storage isn't universally cheap.
This feels especially relevant since we're discussing Zed here, the Mac-focused developer tool, and developers working on Mac are the exact people who pay $600/TB.
That's more of an Apple problem? Storage is under $50/TB.
It's the reality of storage pricing. The general statement "storage is cheap" is incorrect. For some practically relevant purposes, such as Apple laptops, it's $600/TB. For other purposes, it's significantly below $50/TB.
You could say "just don't buy Apple products". And sure, that might be a solution for some. But the question of what laptop to buy is an extremely complicated one, where storage pricing is just one of many, many, many different factors. I personally have landed on Apple laptops, for a whole host of reasons which have nothing to do with storage. That means that if I have to bump my storage from 1TB to 2TB, it directly costs me $600.
Bro, with this mentality, you won't get far in Apple universe.
Embrace your wallet will be owned by Apple. Then you can continue.
Sorry, but people buying Apple products are different bread :D
I don't need to "get far in the Apple universe", I need a laptop. My current MacBook Pro cost about the same as the Dell XPS I was using before it, I like nice laptops
Big sigh. I wish we still had pride in our field, rather than this race to the bottom mentality.
I was a little sus, so I checked: https://imgur.com/a/AJFQjfL
897MB! But it appears to have installed itself twice for some reason. Maybe one is an 'update' which it didn't clean up...? I'm not sure.
Edit: I just opened it and it cleaned itself up. 408MB now. I guess it was in the process of upgrading.
So the upgrades are not delta diffs either?
Even if it’s delta, it cannot patch itself when running on Windows. So it runs the updater, creates a new exec and switches to it after relaunch. Same as Chrome or Firefox.
OS deficiency. And maybe programs shouldn't be allowed to update themselves.
> maybe programs shouldn't be allowed to update themselves.
Honestly I'd be all for this if the OS had a good autoupdate mechanism for 3rd party applications. But that's not the world we live in. Certainly not on windows - which is too busy adding antivax conspiracy articles to the start menu.
Will it though? I mean it's a lot for a "text editor", but much less than a classical IDE. And 400M is pretty negligible if you're on Windows, where your OS takes up dozens of GB for no reason.
PSPad is 40MB. And that is quite a legacy software that is still being updated to this day. Notepad++ is 17 mb.
400 mb for new project in this amazing bestest compiled language ever made is ridiculous.
> I believe it when they say it's not an Electron app, but I do wonder what's being packed in there
Half of Electron namely Node.js. As majority of lsp are .js based. Also extensions are WASM. Also VS Code keeps extensions in separate config directory, while Zed in main directory.
Just so others here know, it’s possible to have a graphics context and a Win32 menu bar in the same window.
> I was always under the impresion that Rust apps are pretty lightweight
Maybe compared to electron, but binary size is an issue with any nontrivial rust application. Due to how cargo works, it compiles and bundles in every dependency in world.
400MB is unnecessarily large though.
Zed looks and feels amazing to use. I test-drove it for a bit on my linux system, and the feel of it is difficult to convey to those who have not tried it yet. It's easy to overlook the significance of gpu accelerated editor - but I promise you, use it for a bit and you'll be sold.
The only feature that is preventing me from switching to Zed is the current lack of DevContainer support[1]. After investing a significant amount of time perfecting a devcontainer (custom fat image with all tools/libs + config), it would be a large step backwards to go back to installing everything locally.
There's a lot of eyes on this feature, so I'm hopeful it will be implemented in the future.
[1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/11473
One of the reasons why I'm not fully switching yet is a Zed's inability to update the currently open file with changes made elsewhere [1].
All the other editors I use are aware of outside changes, but not Zed. And I'm just not willing to close and reopen the file to get fresh contents. Eventually, I'll forget to do it and lose some work.
[1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/15791
Any chance you'd be willing to share more about your custom dev container?
What does having a DevContainer get you?
I’m all for documenting every bit of my setup, but beyond that…
I sometimes work on old PHP applications, some of which require versions as ancient as 5.4 and refuse to run on anything beyond that. They're not only difficult/impossible to install on modern systems, but also make it hard to onboard other people — you have to write a detailed setup document and then waste a couple of hours time for each new system. And then repeat that a few more years down the line.
Why not write that document as a bunch of build instructions instead of free-form text, while also isolating the result from the rest of the system.
Are you talking about the same thing? This sounds like your typical docker/compose dev setup for running the software under development. The "dev container" stuff is more about running your editor stack in a container, like static analysis tools, language servers etc.
I use a devcontainer to run Claude Code on a sandbox with all tools and services installed. That way I can run YOLO mode with some safety.
That's quite unnecessary. You could just mount "all tools and services" from your base system without the complicated Dockerfile: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/ai-agent-sandbox/
It works with devpods
I've been using Zed primarily for months but I just switched back to VSCode for 2 reasons, one of which is kinda my fault and the other it's unclear where the fault is.
1. I deleted a few hours of work because I was late night coding and I decided to rename a file before check-in and delete the old version. Well I renamed it and Right-Click -> Deleted the new version by accident.
It turns out Zed has both "Delete" and "Trash" right next to each other in its right-click menu. Delete skips the trash and Zed does not implement Ctrl+Z yet, so unless you have a backup that file is gone. Because I renamed it and had not yet checked in it wasn't in version control yet.
2. For some reason a particular crate in my Rust workspace wasn't having errors and warnings show up in the editor. I messed with configuration a bunch and couldn't figure it out, so I tried VSCode and it just worked without any additional configuration.
> Delete skips the trash and Zed does not implement Ctrl+Z yet,
I'm not going to claim Zed has a good UI in this space, but saying it doesn't implement Ctrl + Z for a feature which is literally "skip the undo-ability of this option" is a bit misleading.
While I understand your point, and think you are correct - if the 'Trash' button is not behind a confirmation box, and it's not undoable, then that is a pretty terrible design choice.
This is like when the macOS touchbar was a thing, if I recall correctly, in the commit management menu, cancel was right next to force push.
Yeah Windows having Rename and Delete next to each other was always bad design.
> Zed does not implement Ctrl+Z yet
Wait, what? That seems like an incredibly important missing piece of functionality.
Undo works for editing. Just not (apparently) file deletion.
To clarify, you can't Ctrl+Z immediate deletion of a file (skipping the Recycle Bin/Trash). You can undo other stuff, of course.
How can people justify using editors like this when they are missing basic features?
Like what's the benefit?
That's a bit dramatic, isn't it? Zed is still fairly new and although it's not perfect, they're doing quite a good job so far.
I would be using Zed full time if Sublime Text wasn't already perfect for me.
Zed is pretty awesome on macOS and Linux, but I tried the Windows version tonight and things that work great on the other OSes aren't working on Windows. I've noticed:
- Issues with various keybinds not working as expected, e.g. Ctrl+S to save works on my Linux machines but not Windows if Vim Mode is enabled
- Issues with LSPs/diagnostics not working on Windows the same way they work on macOS/Linux
- The terminal holds a lot of assumptions about how the system works that don't hold true on Windows, e.g. "the user has one shell they use for all things" or "setting environment variables in the OS is easy"
I love Zed on my work issued macbook and use it full time, but the Windows version still needs some work.
> setting environment variables in the OS is easy
Windows has a GUI, how can it not be easy. /s
It isn't as easy as on Linux, but you press Windows, type env, click edit Variables then select User vs. System, the you press add. That's not too complicated.
That sets them globally, right? I need different variables and values in different contexts. e.g. in VSC I can set variables per-directory in settings.json files.
Have they implemented subpixel font rendering by now? I remember that being a sticking point when it came to Linux because they had designed their custom UI renderer around the Macs ubiquitous HiDPI displays, leading to blurry fonts for the much, much larger proportion of Linux (and Windows) users who still use LoDPI displays.
Idk about subpixel font rendering, but font rendering on Linux looks massively better after a patch last week: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992#issuecomme...
I'm glad there's finally some progress in that direction. If they actually implement subpixel RGB anti-aliasing, it would definitely be worth considering as an alternative. It's been surprising to see so many people praise Zed when its text rendering (of all things) has been in such a state for so long.
Tbh though, is subpixel text rendering really all that important anymore when high resolution monitors are common now and low-dpi is the exception?
You should get outside your major metropolis and highly paid Western job once in a while. High-DPI monitors are the exception for most of the world.
Most people I know are on 1920x1080 LCDs. Over half of PC gamers seem to be on that resolution, for example: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
My gaming PC is also connected to a 1080p display because tbh for gaming that's good enough, but I don't whine about application text quality on that setup since it looks pretty bad with or without ClearType compared to a highdpi display ;)
Yea, I tried to give it a go on Fedora, but the terrible text rendering made it a insta-delete, for me.
ok for what reason we need sub-pixel rgb anti aliasing here???? does we run game engine for code??
Subpixel antialiasing of fonts is a pretty standard feature for a few decades. Without it, text can look fuzzy on certain displays.
> does we run game engine for code??
Zed literally does this; they render their UI using a graphics library just like a video game.
It's fun to see "GPU accelerated" and "like game engine" when literally every application is rendered the same way with the same APIs.
That "after" image is still rendered with greyscale AA rather than subpixel, but whatever they changed did make it more legible at least.
> The Windows build uses DirectX 11 for rendering, and DirectWrite for text rendering, to match the Windows look and feel.
As I understand, DirectWrite font rendering uses Windows subpixel font rendering. It seems OK on my monitor (better than the linux version) but haven't done any pixel peeping.
They seem to have anticipated this issue and designed it accordingly!
I am confused about this. Doesn't Zed use CoreText on MacOS just as they use DirectWrite on windows. Shouldn't MacOS CoreText handle all this ?
Spitballing here, but subpixel rendering also requires integration with the rendering pipeline, specifically that you have the infrastructure to pass fractional offsets to the rasterization engine based on the concrete screen position of a glyph, and that the glyph atlas is a full RGBA texture (not just an alpha texture), and that the rasterizer knows about the particular texture format (RGBA vs BGRA etc.)
You don't _need_ fractional offsets no?
There's many ways to represent it, but the "sub" in "subpixel" does tell us that someone along the way needs to deal with fractional pixels. :-)
If they’re like egui, they may render to a font atlas which complicates subpixel-AA.
I tried it out on macOS and have a 1440p external monitor that the fonts just look horrible on. Looks fine on the laptop's "retina" display but blurry enough every else that it actually gave me a headache after a few hours.
I installed Zed and tested out a bunch of fonts on my 1440p monitor. It looks decent, but not great. I think that's more a byproduct of Windows' awful font rendering in general though moreso than a Zed specific problem. VSCode is no better.
Seems like the only way to get high quality font rendering these days is a 4k+ display.
No lol
That's more of an issue with your system than an issue with Zed, you have to veer pretty far from the beaten path to not have proper DirectX nowadays. Are you running Windows in a VM?
No, but I am remoted in to my dev box (over RDP/mstsc).
If you're using it via RDP then you won't notice any rendering performance issues since RDP itself has terrible rendering performance.
I've literally programmed with VSCode for basically a decade this way without issues. Zed lags, it's disappointing and if I really like Zed I'll have to sort out another setup.
MSTSC is one of the rock-solid tools from Microsoft, and does better than almost everything else available on the market other than some PC over IP technologies specifically highly optimized for this use case. I've been programming with an ancient ThinkPad forever because I'm just remoting into a much more powerful machine.
Maybe try gaming-oriented remote desktop tools, like steam link or sunshine/moonlight. Those work great with directx, assuming you have a working gpu (at least integrated gpu) on your remote box. They also have way better latency, though use a lot more bandwidth.
How am I supposed to ask for permission from IT to install Steam or gaming related tools like Moonshine just to use a code editor?
By explaining the advantages over "older" methods. A lot of people use Moonlight/Sunshine for non gaming related stuff, specially considering than the alternatives are all proprietary.
Every part of this sentence made me so sad.
Your company trusts you to write code but not run code?
It is for protection against rootkits, not to be nanny to the employees.
They're productivity tools, not gaming software. You'll be faster and deal with less errors using the correct optimized remote desktop tool for your job, versus what you're using now, which can be slow and error prone.
> Moonlight
> Open source game streaming client
> Moonlight allows you to play your PC games on almost any device
OK, fine, maybe Sunshine will be different.
> Sunshine is a self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight.
Maybe not.
Sunshine and Moonlight are no more than accelerated and finely tuned VNC servers that happen to be targeted at gaming. You can totally set them up as a regular remote desktop solution.
My post was answering the question of how they should ask for permission to use it. You pitch it as productivity software that helps you do your job better.
It's a free Parsec alternative.
If no monitor is connected then RDP doesn't load gpu drivers. It can also make RDP performance much worse as HW accelerated video encoding is not working
What does a text editor have to do to achieve >>awful performance<< when software rendering?
I also get that message when opening Zed in a VM. The performance is not actually awful, I can use it just fine.
Maybe it's misdetecting something? I used to use Remote Desktop for game development sometimes, as weather could make the journey to the office impossible, and the performance was always pretty ok, even with UE5 stuff making heavy use of Nanite running at 1440p.
And if it was actually software emulated, which I can't believe for a moment, though I admit I never checked (I just always assumed the window contents were transmitted via some kind of video encoder) - then I can't imagine that a text editor would be a problem.
The input latency might not be as good as you'd like.
> The input latency might not be as good as you'd like.
Yeah input latency is annoyingly rough, not super bad but _just_ laggy enough to make it annoying to use.
Debating how much I want to change things, I can directly punch into my Linux machine but all my dev IDEs are on a VM for a long list of reasons, and I doubt Zed is going to run on my old ThinkPad if it struggles on software rendering, but we'll see.
I want to try Zed, but it’s not going to happen until they remove the nonconsensual download of unattested third party code.
What do you mean by that? The extensions? Do you want them to maintain that themselves?
Either you have a community that happily maintains extensions or you have an "official" extension manager that rolls out an update every next year
They clearly just want the option to say yes/no to the downloads, hence the use of the word "nonconsensual".
Seems like a reasonable ask.
If you open a .cpp file it will silently download clangd in the background. Same is true for other language servers AFAIK.
It's extremely refreshing to see the editor's memory and processor usage be smaller than the webapp tab I'm working on.
I'm really liking it thus far!
Just be sure about that because zed fires up node as well for lsp.
Its binary is half a gig in size, so just like a browser, nothing fresh about that.
It has a huge amount of treesitter modules, etc., statically compiled into the executable. They're not all loaded the instant you fire it up.
Size on disk is about 64x less relevant than size in RAM for me. To give Zed some credit in this area, it's statically linked and the Linux binary is half the size as the Windows one.
What could they be statically linking to have a 400MB executable?
A tonne of treesitter grammars
They wrote their own graphics renderering library for starters, that's bundled into the editor when compiled.
https://www.gpui.rs/
Every Unity game ships with three UI frameworks (IMGUI, UGUI, UI Elements) built-in, in addition to everything else the game engine supports, and the engine is only about 50 MB.
Is that really necessary for an ide? Seems like a ton of added complexity for little to no trade off or even a downside considering...
Yes. Zed is snappy in a way that makes my copy of Sublime Text 3 feel slow. Compared to VSC it feels like going from a video game at 40 FPS with 2-3 frames of input lag to 120 FPS.
You can read about it here:
https://zed.dev/blog/videogame
The OS loads the entire binary into RAM.
It loads on demand, and pages you don't use don't need to be on RAM
considering how cheap storage is nowadays nitpicking about binary size is a very weird take. Are you editing code on an esp32?
Why don't you actually do some considering how mistaken this superficial dismissal is: storage is not cheap where it matters - for example, your laptop's main drive. It doesn't help you that an external hard drive can be purchased cheaply since you won't be able conveniently upgrade your main mobile system. Also, the size of various used content (games/photos /videos) has increased a lot, leaving constrains on storage in place despite the price drop.
I just refuse to use any software that baloons it's filesize. Not because I can't afford storage, but because there are always alternatives that have similar features and packed into fraction (usually less than 1%) of filesize. If one of them can do it and other can't, it's a bad product, that I have no intention to support.
We should strive to write better software that is faster, smaller and more resilient.
"Storage is cheap" is a bad mentality. This way of thinking is why software only gets worse with time: let's have a 400mb binary, let's use javascript for everything, who needs optimization - just buy top of the shelf super computer. And it's why terabytes of storage might not be enough soon.
I can empathize with how lazy some developers have gotten with program sizes. I stopped playing CoD because I refused to download their crap 150+ GB games with less content than alot of other titles that are much smaller.
That said, storage is cheap, it's not a mentality but a simple statement of fact. You think zed balloons their file sizes because the developers are lazy. It's not true. It's because the users have become lazy. No one wants to spend time downloading the correct libraries to use software anymore. We've seen a rise in binary sizes in most software because of a rise in static linking, which does increase binary size, but makes using and testing the actual software much less of a pain. Not to mention the benefits in reduced memory overhead.
VSCode and other editors aren't smaller because the developers are somehow better or more clever. They're using dynamic linking to call into libraries on the OS. This linking itself is a small overhead, but overhead none-the-less, and all so they can use electron + javascript, the real culprits which made people switch to neovim + zed in the first place. 400mb is such a cheap price to pay for a piece of software I use on a daily basis.
I'm not here to convince you to use Zed or any editor for that matter. Use what you want. But you're not going to somehow change this trend by dying on this hill, because unless you're working with actual hardware constraints, dynamic linking makes no sense nowadays. There's no such thing as silver bullet in software. Everything is a tradeoff, and the resounding answer has been people are more than happy to trade disk space for lower memory & cpu usage.
Does static linking really reduce memory and cpu usage significantly compared to dynamic linking?
I keep hearing this since I've got my first Pentium 1 PC, that storage is cheap.
RAM is not cheap. Executables live in RAM when running.
Executables lives in pages of RAM and not all pages are in physical memory at once.
No, they're mmapped to RAM. Only the pages that get used are loaded to RAM.
Only the parts that are being used (the working set).
Unfortunately, I tried to use zed as my daily driver, but the typescript experience was subpar. While the editor itself was snappy, LSP actions like "jump to declaration" were incredibly slow on our codebase compared to VS Code / Cursor.
Check if it supports using typescript-go as your LSP. IDEA recently added this, and I've been using it for a couple of months already; it's fantastic.
https://github.com/zed-extensions/tsgo does exactly this
That doesn't make sense, they both use tsserver under the hood.
I've heard that VSCode gets some special treatment and integrations with the typescript server that go deeper than normal LSP
To expand on this, the vscode editor can do a lot more than what is specified in LSP.
You can have custom functions in your language server that is not in spec and have your editor specific plugin call them.
I imagine there is a lot of this for typescript.
But I'm not sure if this can explain the speed difference..
You could have an lsp server of infinite speed, but that wouldn't help one bit if the bottleneck is how the client deals with the messaging.
The specific techniques used to send, receive, and parse JSON could matter.
Could, ya, but I'd be pretty impressed and sad if Rust didn't have really good JSON parsers/serializers by now.
What do you mean? It has exceptionally good crates for that, and has for more than a decade. Is there something you feel is missing?
Well exactly, I'm pretty sure that's what the GP is getting at — it would be a surprise if Rust didn't have good JSON support. Which it does. So it's unlikely to be the bottleneck.
It’s had them for a very long time, pre-1.0.
I had the same experience and the same outcome. Zed was super fast for editing but slow for rich features, which on the net slowed me down compared with VSCode
Electron compiles NodeJS with v8's pointer compression which leads to an up to 50% decrease in memory usage, and might speed it up too.
Are you saying that VSCode runs tsserver in its own NodeJS process? Or are you saying that VSCode uses the NodeJS it ships to run tsserver in a different process?
I absolutely love the idea of Zed, and I'm regularly giving it a go. Typing in Zed really feels better than VSCode. It's hard to describe, but impossible to discard once you've used it for a short while.
Unfortunately, there's a bunch of small things still holding me back. Proper file drag & drop for one, the ability to listen to audio files inside the editor, and even a bunch of extensions, in particular one that shows a spectrogram for an audio file.
Maybe my biggest gripe is that Python support is still better in VSCode. Clicking on definitions is faster and more reliable.
I have to ask because I just can't wrap my head around it, what does 'ability to listen to audio files inside the editor' mean for a text editor?
The reason it's faster is largely because it doesn't have all those little quality of life features and extension ecosystem. It's easyish to make software perform well if it doesn't do all that much. If you take base vscode, no extensions, and just do raw text editing, it's hard for me to tell the difference between vscode, zed, or any other editor.
When vscode was released, Sublime was faster - and it stayed faster. But that wasn't enough to stop the rise of vscode.
It's great that they finally target all three mayor platforms! Let's see how developers using Windows treat them. I used to be a Neovim purist, spending days on my config and I have barely touched it since I moved to Zed. It's so much nicer to use then VScode (and it's forks) because it's so snappy. I hope they ship leap.nvim (https://github.com/ggandor/leap.nvim) support soon, then I am completely happy!
Nice but too little/too late, already switched to Linux - where Zed already works great!
I watched the video on the home page and thought it is weird that they spend an inordinate amount of time on frame rate. Who picks an editor based on frame rate?
If you want to talk about perf in the context of a text editor show me how big of a file you can load--especially if the file has no line breaks. Emacs has trouble here. If you load a minified js file it slows to a crawl especially if syntax highlighting is on. Also show me how fast the start up time is. This is another area where Emacs does not do well.
So Zed is available on Windows--but only if you have a x64 processor. Lots of people run Windows on Arm64 and I don't see any mention of Arm64. This is where the puck is heading.
Also noticed Emacs key binding is in beta still.
It's not just frame rate, but also input delay. If you're using Visual Studio Code, you might be used to waiting 100 ms for a character you typed to appear. My personal workflow is based on Kitty and Neovim, which I've configured so that it can launch within 20 ms. Working without any input delay allows me to explore and edit projects at typing speed. As such, even tiny delays really bother me and make me lose my flow. I would believe Zed's focus on performance is motivated similarly.
Also, I do not believe Windows on Arm64 is a very large demographic? Especially for developers, unless they're specifically into that platform.
The only IDE I have used where frame rate is noticeable was Visual Studio (not Code).
Once you are beyond a bare minimum, every other speed metric is more important. Zed does really well on many of those, but some depend on the LSP, so they become the bottleneck quickly.
You literally can’t tell the difference in a 20ms delay. That is an order of magnitude lower than the neural feedback loop latency. You may think that you can, but studies don’t back this up.
"Order of magnitude", so you're saying the neural feedback loop latency is >100ms? That seems obviously wrong.
Also you can absolutely feel the visual difference between 60Hz (~16ms) and 120Hz (~8ms), and for audio it's even more nuanced.
Just because studies don't back this up yet doesn't make it false. I imagine this is really hard to measure accurately, and focusing only on neuron activity seems misguided too. Our bodies are more than just brains.
Let's see.
https://web-backend.simula.no/sites/default/files/publicatio...
> At the most sensitive, our findings reveal that some perceive delays below 40 ms. However, the median threshold suggests that motorvisual delays are more likely than not to go undetected below 51-90 ms.
By this study's numbers, 20ms is somewhat below the lower limit of ~40ms, but not too far below. 100ms would be easily perceivable - though, based on the other replies, it seems that VS Code does not actually have that much latency.
Don't confuse this with human reaction time, which is indeed an order of magnitude higher, at over 200ms. For one thing, reaction time is based on unpredictable events, whereas the appearance of keystrokes is highly predictable. It's based on the user's own keypresses, which a touch typer will usually have subconsciously planned (via muscle memory) several characters in advance. So the user will also be subconsciously predicting when the text will appear, and can notice if the timing is off. Also, even when it comes to unpredictable events, humans can discern, after the fact, the time difference between two previous sensory inputs (e.g. between feeling a keyboard key press down and seeing the character on screen), for much shorter time differences than the reaction time.
Of course, just because these levels of latency are perceptible doesn't mean they're a material obstacle to getting work done. As a relatively latency-sensitive person, I'm not sure whether they're a material obstacle. I just think they're annoying. Higher levels of latency (in the hundreds of ms) can definitely get in the way though, especially when the latency is variable (like SSH over cellular connections).
Do you not perceive more than 50 Hz?
I don't have to think a full thought for every keystroke.
It is 18% according to this story: https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/projections-show-that-a...
Most of that is macOS and ChromeOS, not Windows.
Yeah. The Steam survey isn't a perfect sample since it's skewed towards gamers, but that currently shows just 0.08% of Windows users are on ARM, while 81.5% of Mac users are on ARM.
That may be true if you're looking at all windows computers in existence. If you look at new laptops being sold you see different numbers. As of 2025, Arm processors hold about 13% to 20% of the market share for new Windows laptops. This is important because these are the people who are more likely to download and install your software.
> you might be used to waiting 100 ms for a character you typed to appear.
The latest benchmark I could find is 2022 and it's nowhere as bad as you claim
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/161622#issuecomme...
I ran it on VS Code and kitty recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45253927
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45254054
High frame rates (low frame times, really) are essential to responsiveness which, for those who appreciate it, is going to make much more of a difference day to day than the odd hiccup opening a large file (not that zed does have that issue, I wouldn't know as I haven't tried opening something huge).
This is one of those things that make me question whether I experience the world fundamentally differently than many of you.
I have never, ever felt “latency” in editor UI. Any editor UI. It’s editing text for Pete’s sake. I can only type so fast, or read so fast.
You probably do. Many people just never notice that. It's not about typing or reading fast either, it's just about how it feels. Typing into something with shitty latency feels like dragging my fingernails across a chalkboard.
It's the same with high dpi monitors. Some people (me included) are driven absolutely insane by the font rendering on low density monitors, and other people don't even notice a difference.
Honestly, consider yourself blessed. One less thing in the world to annoy you.
It's expected for editors to have non-perceivable latency. It's just text, how hard can it be.
That's an interesting take. For whatever reason, frame rate is not one of my complaints about existing editors such as Emacs, VS Code, etc.
> Who picks an editor based on frame rate?
Me! Frame rate and input latency are very important for a tool I use for hours every day. Obviously that's not the only feature I look for in an editor but if an editor _doesn't_ have it, I skip it. I also try to work on devices with 120Hz displays and above these days.
I think the claim is more that an editor is supposed to have an arbitrary good frame rate.
Yeah, Kate will choke on a large single line file. Its one of the very few issues I bump into from time to time.
This always makes me laugh. The editor was barely announced two years ago. They've built it from the ground up with native support now for three different operating systems. They're experimenting with some cool new features, and even though I don't care about it I've heard their AI integration is pretty damn good.
But waaaaah they don't support a processor that accounts for probably less then 10% of Windows Machines
Ubiquity is pretty important when you're going to invest in learning a new editor. This is one of the advantages of vim for example. It is available everywhere... linux, windows, terminal, gui, etc.
You mean... like a GUI editor that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux?
I have waited for this for months... but it's still only an x86_64 binary!
I love my ARM Surface Pro, and Zed would make a wonderful editor on this hardware. If anyone from Zed is reading this, please think about it!
I build Zed for Windows aarch64 from source -- works great, though the build process is quite slow on my 16GB Surface Pro. Definitely hoping for official binaries, though!
I think I got as far as installing the Visual Studio Installer so I could install Visual Studio and I just bailed on that whole thing, lol. I'll have to take some time out on a weekend to take another look :)
For whatever reason, zed compilation on windows with msvc is extremely slow compared to the Linux counterpart.
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/145864 was opened because of the the discrepancy
Does the editor have an "absolutely no AI crap" version? Also, it says that it uses WSL, but i do not use it. I use Git bash instead. Is it supported?
(I'm asking instead of finding out myself because of the little interest I have in this editor)
You can disable all of the AI features with a single config setting.
You can just ask AI
Zed is awesome. It does everything I need. I easily find everything I'm looking for. It's fast, and I can use forked CLI terminals from the IDE via ACP mode. This means Cerebras and Qwen code 480b for super fast and cheap incredibly smart CLI agents.
Just downloaded and installed on mac. It asking access to pretty much every folder and even music apps. What a privacy nightmare. NOPE, will stick to cursor.
I installed the beta a week or two ago. Many of the files I tried opening in it just did not work at all. It can only open utf-8 encoded files.
That is not a problem for code, but if you just want to open some random .txt file or .csv file, these are often enough not utf-8 encoded, especially if they contain non English text.
The github issue for this is showing progress, but I think it's a mistake to promote the editor to stable as is.
I'm editing a UTF16-LE file right now. Works just fine. It does show the BOM at the beginning, though.
Technically, Zed's Super Compete will almost never catch up with Cursor, or even as good as the free Windsurf. If you look a little closer, you will see that the cursor and cursor completion requests are not initiated by the editor itself, which only interacts with the lsp. Yes. They all come with an LSP, taking free windsurf as an example, when windsurf starts, it will start a process in /Applications/Windsurf.app/Contents/Resources/app/extensions/windsurf/bin/languageservermacosarm, This process is responsible for syntactic analysis of the current code's workspace and then local indexing. The editor communicates with LSP through localhost encoding through protobuf, including the current cursor, currently open tabs, recently viewed files, etc. The LSP calculates locally based on this information, and if the inference cannot be completed locally, it will automatically extract the necessary information to interact with the server-side LLM. This ensures the intelligence of Super Complete. However, ZED's Super Complete does not have an LSP. Instead, it interacts directly with the server, which runs a zeta model. This pattern is not smart, takes up a lot of bandwidth and more useless context, and lacks more useful information due to the lack of LSP support. I hope my technical interpretation above will give you an understanding of why zed's super complete is technically backward. And, since ZED's LSP is configured by a third party, ZED itself does not offer its own languageserver, unless ZED is developing it now, but this is obviously difficult. In this case, I don't understand why zed would charge for a feature that is clearly lagging behind. You have to ask me why I know so much about this, because I am a member of Cursor, but I want a Zed Editor, so I want to customize an endpoint I developed by ZEDPREDICTEDITS_URL, relay requests to Cursor, to achieve powerful completion with Cursor in Zed. Obviously, it failed in the end. The above mentioned is the reason for the failure.
Do either Windsurf or Cursor work well with local or no AI? One of the things I like about Zed is that it can, and is completely free.
Excuse me, can you read what I wrote? I didn't say zed editor is bad, I just said that zed's PREDICT EDIT isn't good enough, or at least it shouldn't charge for it.
I never thought you said Zed was bad. I was genuinely asking since Cursor and Windsurf exclusively advertise AI features, whereas Zed is also a good editor without AI. I never bothered to try them because I inherently distrust AI that I don't control, and find the cloud stuff to be too expensive on top. Just wanted to know if they're any good, or can even be used at all, without AI; since their websites say nothing on the subject.
Yes, windsurf and cursor will also work whitout AI, cause it just fork from vscode. I like zed very much. If u dont like AI, then zed is best editor for you. (and for me if zed's AI is good enough)
they shouldn't charge for it because their competetors have money to burn?? that is not how business works
I just say they shouldn't charge for it PREDICT EDIT. The reason is that it's not even as good as the free ones. I don't know why you've become such a fanatic, but if you want to support them you can donate.
I tried it for a bit. But unless you want to use their choice of lsp/linter/whatever from what you are used to, then you will waste even more time customising zed to your needs from your previous solution.
I am using nightly on Windows and startup time is very slow. It can take 10 seconds to boot up. To quickly edit random files, I would open notepad++ or simple notepad instead, which isn't what I expected from Zed.
I use this as Sublime replacement on my macOS. So far happy with it. Only use it as a general purpose text editor.
Okay, I may ocassionally do some code editing on it. But most of the time it's gotta be VSCode or vim/nvim.
Is this something like Sublime? Light/responsive editor for one-off files? But maybe with some better introspection? That would fill a niche for me; trying it. FYI download+install is the smoothest experience of any software I've loaded recently I didn't build myself. Going to daily-drive it for a bit and see what's up; promising!
as a 10+ year Sublime user, Zed is the best of the more "modern" GUI editors I've tried.
I haven't fully switched over to using it as my daily-driver because Zed's heavy reliance on GPU rendering means that it locks up every time I suspend & resume my Linux box [0,1] but I'm optimistic about the progress they're making on it.
0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7940
1: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/23288
Was a heavy sublime user for many years, slowly migrated to vim (first sublime with vim keybindings) but now daily drive lazyvim and the defaults with that are very sane.
Quick install on any platform and just works. And obviously plenty of configuration that’s available to you but if you haven’t I’d give that a go.
Still on Sublime, and helix in terminal.
Tried zed, it's interesting but several things are missing including the ability to skip extensions auto-update... which imho is critical for security.
I still Sublime for quick text file changes and then Zed for programming/AI assisted tasks.
> Zed isn't an Electron app; we integrate directly with the underlying platform for maximal control.
Sounds great. Looking forward to doing a simple test run with Astro SSG
Nice to see. Will probably start using it over quick edits on Windows.
I'd like to properly give it a go one day due to the effort put into its vim keybindings, but until then I'll stick to neovim.
My work PC is a $600 laptop with an on-board GPU, will I notice a difference between this and Vscode?
$600 laptop can mean a Macbook with Apple Sillicon CPU in this day and age.
So many new options. NeoVim and Helix in terminal, Zed as a beautiful GUI editor. - A few years ago I thought it’s Emacs/vim for us hackers, and for the rest it’s Sublime, and later VS Code, and then comes nothing. But wow, here we are: Ever more options. I‘m loving it.
The windowing is pretty broken if you use system scaling https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/40272
I'm so impressed by how quickly this team can ship new features. It seems like every few weeks there's a new major update!
I switched from VSCode to Zed as my "I just need to edit this 1 little text file" app because VSCode was way too spammy. Every time I open it it wants to update something or complain about some extensions or complain that I had a file open and now it MUST close it because heaven forbid I open two things at once.
I hope Zed stays clean. We'll see. So far so good. Was quite happy they had a JetBrains base hotkey setup. Had to add a few of my own but I could pretty easily, nothing missing so far.
Neovim > everything else.
Bye
tried to switch a few times
i can’t describe it in any other way other than it feels cold to use
i wonder if anyone else felt the same in earlier versions and feels that it’s fixed
What is Zed? A vscode like editor?
Pretty much, yeah.
It's native code, and it shows. It also has some AI integrations that are different, but I don't know how well they work.
It looks nice, but I haven't managed to use it for long.
ok dear thank you
Is it on winget?
Soon https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/pull/303728
These ones actually: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/issues/304075
I don't use windows, but this is good development as all platforms should be present for editors to be worth using. I am happy Zed user since long time, I am happy it had kept with out demands, with adding AI, Git etc. Also integration of cli tools into AI is excellent and really refreshing.
Viable C# support has stalled https://github.com/zed-extensions/csharp/pull/11
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First, you should fix fundamental operations on Mac and other distributions - for example when you stash or perform operations on files from other tools, it will put the state out of sync.
You can build the most beautiful and fastest IDE, but with this bugs, it’s useless
I didn't know bundling app for the most popular OS is that hard.
In January 2024 zed was open sourced, with only mac support. One week later Dzmitry Malyshau showed up with a prototype renderer for Linux. In July 2024 official Linux builds were available mostly thanks to community contributors. The swift Linux support is a tale of community steppung up to open source development, not one of manufacturer provides something. So Windows is certainly not popular with the kind of crowd that gets excited about an editor
For Zed user, yes. They don't care (I too, didn't use Windows for years, but Windows is popular is a fact, not opinion).
What I meant was there are so many problems with Windows that the team cannot do it quickly (they post about it before: https://zed.dev/blog/windows-progress-report).
Just surprised, as I thought building GUI app on Windows must be easy right, as must be libs/frameworks already available to support that? It's just not.
Not the most popular for programmers
Only if they happen to be UNIX programmers.
Turns out there are plenty of other jobs as programmers.
It is, based on Stack Overflow survey: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular... Couldn't find a way to access Statista report.
It obviously varies a lot by the preferred languages, but Windows is still at the top, on average.
I hope you realize that Linux in this table is split up into many individual options where the others are not, i.e. that Ubuntu, Debian, Arch etc also all count towards Linux?
It's a different tier of software engineers to be able to write a text editor, let alone the fastest one...
I worked at multiple FAANGs and can't see me or any of my colleagues capable of doing this.