ok yeah true, people don't really open move code windows or write code like this, still it's nice if it's more responsive using the GPU. Not a feature enough to sway you away from the editor you're used to though. I think since GPUs are mainstream, this should really be the job of the desktop renderer, to probe for GPU capability and use it. Hear this Wayland?
No windows support yet. Like it or hate it, it still is the big fish in the pond. Zed should get to level 6 first to get their ult and then try killing vscode
And no build for Linux? You know... the thing most people are connecting to and working on? So, just Mac users.... who are... not always doing dev work... Um... okay, Zed! You just pretend to be the cool kid.
i trust microsoft more than some small team from zed, the benchmarks are fake, when you install extensions it even worse than vscode, vscode is nice, its smooth, and windows design is good, also widely used and recognized editor, what the he is even zed?😂 theay hopefully fixed scroll whcih was buggy, but they didn't fixed other issues , i checked the source code they use strange variable names and also dont follow guidelines from mister bob clean code architecture that's why their codesucks j! and willsuck ! they will never replace google code editor and vscode !❤
The thing that gets me is thats still a HUGE delay. Assuming your screen is 60Hz thats nearly FOUR WHOLE FRAMES between keypress and it being rendered on screen. I dread to think how slow it looks on a 144hz monitor
This is a far more interesting metric on a Raspberry Pi that is more resource limited. With VSCode living in that world, having Zed (Or COSMIC-Edit) running faster than the incumbent editor would make a palpable difference in programming experience on these small devices.
I'm in a similar position: I'm not using Zed as my main editor for now, but I am keeping it installed and periodically checking things out as it gets updated. It has a lot of promise for me and I'm really looking forward to seeing where it goes in the future
The bad thing about Zed (for now) is that VSCode has a ton of extensions; yes Zed automatically integrates using LSP but that's pretty much it. But it's VERY promising.
@@VivekYadav-ds8ozdoesn't what? VSCode bundles a whole browser, an OS compatibility layer (electron) and a language runtime just to run a text editor. that's as wasteful as it can be
@@FlanPoirot That's more of a thing which I hate on principle. However, realistically, it doesn't take that much storage for something that's such a key component of your development cycle.
I think the problem here is that nobody is complaining that VSCode is slow - we use it for its convenience and its extensions. if you want a fast no-frills code editor like this, you're gonna use nano or neovim or Sublime, etc. Nobody asked for "VSCode but stripped down to the essentials and also slightly faster," so while Zed is getting a lot of coverage and that is good for competition, there is absolutely no reason to use it over VSCode.
I am complaining about VS Code’s speed. It used to be fast when it came out but it has slowed down overtime. Sometimes it takes me seconds to open a file, which is annoying considering I use VS Code as a quick editor and not my main IDE. (I use Jetbrain’s tools for my main IDEs)
@@DynamicalisBlueyeah. Whats the point of ide if it freezes when opening/editing projects(based on my experience). As for me, neovim is the one, it also fixed my wrist.
@@DynamicalisBlue I think that installing a lot of thing on vs code also make it slower, I have only the language exstation and the code runner and it goes smoothly with no problem
@@perghosh8135I mean when I work on a large codebase, I move to neovim. Vscode cant handle large projects and I don’t think thats a negative, because vscode could not add all the features it has plus be super easy to use with no learning curve if they also wanted to make it handle large projects better. Personally, I work on large projects maybe twice a year or even less than that, so vscode fits my requirements. And I think most developers and engineers fall in the same category. Plus I don’t think your point makes sense because no one who works on a large codebase uses vscode. Vscode never said that its large codebase friendly. Everyone knows its electron and can’t handle large projects.
Performance matters a lot more when low on resources. I've driven a baseline MacBook Air to its limits and beyond for years, most of the time VSC had little to no noticeable delays but whenever running out of memory or having the CPU catch up, it was BAD. Particularly the vim mode plugin (ergonomics, yo) would swallow inputs and become generally unreliable. That aside, VSC also uses much more memory than it needs to, as any Electron based app does. 300-600mb may be nothing for my current computer, but when you're running 8GB with your base system already using 2 of those, you've got some containers (another 1-2GB), browser tabs and other dev tools open, you'll appreciate every bit of extra memory you can save.
When working on large monorepos my extensions alone would consistently use 4GB of ram. Thankfully that doesn't really affect my workstation, but it's still not okay.
Which is why I just use vs code sparingly when pairing with another person or computer, but personally I use vim and neovim. Also when I need to go to a cafe and want the peace of mind of being able to do quick coding sessions, I could also replace the laptop for a tablet and use vim / code-server via ssh.
Yup, having a browser as the display surface for all electron apps (chromium) and running everything in it essentially adds a non-significant amount of tax to any app. For vs code its's fine (it does a lot of things well), but you can also take a look at intellij based apps (while more advanced) having a java swing based app is also quite heavy. One thing I will never understand is the people who create / use something like hyper (the electron based terminal....) that is just insanity, even if your computer makes no sweat about it.
VSCode works on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Web browsers. With so many extensions like WSL, SSH, Docker, etc. With SSH extension I can view pictures and videos over SSH on my server and browse files like I'm working with Files Explorer or Finder on the local machine. Zed is not a VSCode killer 😂 I don't think they going to kill anyone anytime soon.
I'm using Zed for 2/3 months now and it became my main editor as VSCode is the backup because of the extensions. Zed still has a long way to go but it's quiet impressive what they have done so far and I'm loving it.
I dunno if I'm the only one that doesn't care about an extra 50ms or whatever input delay, but just having good features, like what you get with Jetbrains
I held off trying Rider for .NET dev and regret waiting so long. It’s superb on Mac IMO. Not as much of a fan of it on Windows but I have Visual Studio on there. JetBrains Rider has tons of .NET focused tools that VS4Mac didn’t have. I know this is an IDE but JetBrains also have a beta of an application that can switch between text editor (like VS Code) and Full IDE as required. Which I think is an interesting idea
@@KerojeyBut how often do you close and re-open the editor or reboot your computer when you work ? Surely only once. If you gain a few seconds but then have to deal with a worse developer experience, less tooling support, constant crashes in collaboration, etc. (we didn't even see any git support in this video) then what's the point of saving those initial few seconds?
There’s an extension for VSCode to enable zooming font size in the editor separately from the rest of the UI. I think it’s called “Responsive Font Weights”.
its mostly about their target audience is wrong, they are not supporting developers as a whole but a niche group, most developers like dark mode on everything, so if your product is for developers so should you target that audience, same goes for the windows 90% usage vs mac...@@AZisk
so to iterate a tldr, I doubt their product because they don't know what their target audience is, so features that most likely would be good will tend to not be priority.@@AZisk
Thanks for your great videos. I even sometimes watch them twice because there is soooo much useful information in your videos. Greetings from Belgium & Germany
Sublime is the GOAT. 🐐 It’s as fast as Zed (look at dev build performance), native and has a great plugin ecosystem. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. UI is hardware accelerated too.
My favorite too. It's perfect for scripting and projects that are too small to justify using a full-fledged IDE. With LSP plugins it's completely replaced VSCode for me.
In a span of last 8ish years I saw VSCode to turn from an editor into a full-fledged IDE with features missing in mammoths of industry like Visual Studio.
I've been using Zed and it really is snappy. I was able to customize the colors a bit and I'm really happy with the interface. I was never a big fan of the VSCode icons on the left.
VSCode does slow down with large projecțs (like multi-project mono repos). I switched over to JetBrains WebStorm and the usability with these large projects was terrific! Yes, you have to pay to use WebStorm, but it’s worth it for my projects (plus JetBrains’ AI Assistant is just as good if not better than copilot).
Yea I’ve worked on projects where if I have like more then 3 tabs open with tens of thousands of lines I can get an input lag of more then 500ms and witch really sucks
I also find many corp environments they got us installing Symantec or some other file scan tank responding to git and VSCode. My Intel max sits at 100C most of the day. Any attempts at asking for an exclusion list are lost.
I’m excited to see a new player in the space. I’ve been happily using Helix for a while now (I think Kakoune’s way of doing things makes a lot more sense than vim), but I originally switched from VSCode because I got tired of all the popups, notifications, and random obtrusive features getting added without warning, forcing me to read for hours through release notes and settings descriptions trying to figure out how to turn it off. I want my editor, and I don’t want it to change unless I ask it to. Hopefully Zed turns out this way
- no extensions - no copilot chat - no extensions - no theme store - no extensions - no windows app - no extensions But yeah, rust, it opens quickly, it scrolls quickly, and uses gpus. As if that is what I needed from my code editor that I run on an M2 chip.
Will definitely give Zed a good try. I like the idea of modern performance-focused editor. As I am not a full-time programmer, it is hard to keep my vim/neovim configuration stable. In contrast Zed seems to be almost feature-complete without any plugins.
I doubt that it will get comparable extensiblity as VS Code. But without it, I don't think it will be easy to switch. If they instead build everything they can into the base editor, it will become a full blown IDE like Visual Studio, which is not at all lightweight...
What makes VSCode so strong for me is the extensions. If they catch up, especially when it comes to remote development, I'm super fine with going over.
Holy shit you changed my life, i had no idea vscode let you drag windows like that, it's been a top request for ages. Anyways, i hope zed becomes a viable competitor to vscode!
One thing I realised is if you want to create a Monopoly, building extension ecosystem is big part of that. Scenarios like this shows it very well. Developers put years of effort into building these awesome extensions and now its harder to competition to break in. Thats why even Google's new cloud ide, project idx is based on code - oss and they can use well established vs code extensions.
Do you have all extensions disabled? I recently switched to NeoVim because VSCode becomes too slow and memory hogging for large project. Frequently got VM OutOfMemory issue. Moreover the extension can eat up loads of space as well
Hi Alex! Your videos are a must for any developer, I really enjoy your attention to detail and really professional tests, oriented to the developer ecosystem.
Biggest benefit: battery consumption is much lower on Zed. Gotta love that Rust performance! But I agree with Alex. Zed's not quite there yet, but they're making quick progress. Gonna keep checking back to how they crack VSC's "moat": the extensions.
The response time differences may have a lot to do with the simplified extensions that Zed supports compared to the more complex extension interface of VS Code.
It is very good to have alternative. However, I don't think being fast is a good angle for promoting an IDE. VScode success is its huge number of plugins.
I’m still going to use IntelliJ IDEA to do my actual work because it does so much for me, and can handle working on massive projects well. The only time I run VSCode is when I need a dumb text editor, as long as it has a cli tool to open a file it does what I need.
Honestly bro as much as I like vscode, for this kind of usecase I'd pick Fleet. It starts similar to Zed and you only get the IntelliJ platform features (indexing, LSP support, code refactoring, -basic- debugging and profiling, etc.) *after* you click on a button so for simple text editing with git support, terminal, folder workspace and whatnot Fleet is better than vscode in my opinion.
I've tried Zed and if you run it on a 120Hz screen (e.g., directly on your MBP) it feels glorious. Once we have all the usual plugins that everybody uses, it's going to be a serious VSCode competitor. VSCode is great but it's hamstrung by electron, I like the bare-metal feeling that Zed gives. Also the AI autocompletion in Zed is god-tier, I use it to write documents and it's incredible! Definitely a must try if you can afford OpenAPI API keys.
For the test where you opened Zed in the CLI and VSCode in the CLI, Zed was running in the background (clearly notated by the dot at the bottom) and VScode took significantly longer because it needed to be reopened. Borked test and this whole video is most likely invalid. Before publishing, check for flaws in your please.
Actually gave it a go by working on a real project and I'm quite impressed, it's been 2 days since I used VS Code for my React projects, had to use VS Code when working on Angular since Zed is missing the Angular extension but for React I have fully switched to Zed + Vim Mode + lazygit
The thing I don't like about VSCode, is that is not really OSS, you can create your own plugins but guess who is going to benefit from it? not you, not me, the only one that benefits is Microsoft. So please stop making plugins for VSCode :)
With respect to the increased speed found with Zed loading files, starting approximately at 1:35, the testing did not take into account two important things. The first is the time to start or switch to the app. The second is that after the first test the file or directory is held in cache memory by the operating system. To properly test how fast each opens a directory or file a new directory or file must be selected for each test. For each pair of tests the two directories or files should be as close to the same size as possible. I was part of a team that was responsible for changing a process which ran once a night into one that could be started from a website. The process involved a large number of small programs that each performed a tiny bit of the process and used temporary files to communicate between the different stages. The process originated on a six bit mainframe and there had never been enough money or time to integrate them into them all. Programming wasn’t the issue. Verifying the outcomes stayed the same was the highest priority as the application was used during the process of business incorporation. Any differences and lawsuits could occur. The data was still stored using six bits and every small program read data, converted it from six bits, ran, converted the output to six bits, wrote the data to a file, and exited. A script was used to control the flow of the small programs and that had to be modified to prevent them from overwriting one another temporary data. Time and extreme caution limited our choices. Instead of making each of the small programs able to run instances at once it was easier and safer to lock each one to a single instance. When it came time to testing we ran a request through the nightly version and it took somewhere around 45 seconds. We then switched over to our project and ran it in a two or three seconds. We were all thrilled but it seemed way too much of an improvement for me as we could not implement the chances we identified as having the biggest performance improvements. I asked the person running the test to retry the old method again and it ran in three to four seconds. We eventually determined that the gigabytes of data the application uses was cached in during the first running. Because we were running on a server with lots of memory and set up to cache as much as possible we had to fill the cache with approximately 96GB of junk between tests if we wanted to compare times. This was 25 years ago on a Silicon Graphics server. Ever since then I’ve remembered to take caching in account.
Unfortunately, it still doesn’t have a “source control page”, like vscode and jetbrains ides. It also doesn’t support debugging. And it’s multi cursors are still bugging some times. As soon as they fix this, it’ll get ok to use
Tried it out myself too, it's honestly a great experience. It really needs ssh support like vscode has and maybe a better ecosystem, but as soon as the ssh support is there I'll be ready to jump ship from vscode on to it.
When you were launching zed and vscode. Vscode was closed out completely while zed was not. Zed was still on the dock with a dot under it while vscode was nowhere on the dock. That dot under the application on the macOS dock shows that that application is loaded in ram, even though no visual window is loaded. All you did was measure loading from ram and loading from disk.
I don't think anything will replace vs code for me. With all the extensions I have, the snippets, the shortcuts, I am so invested in it that I can't really think of using any other ide(not that vscode is one)
By the way, it is now "available" for Windows and Linux too; but you have to build it yourself. It's essentially just running 3 commands in the terminal. Note that it is really unstable, crashes often, Copilot won't work and lot's of stuff is just not working yet.
Zed won't kill anything until it's officially and definitively available on Linux and Windows. Also, it will need some sort of plugin mechanism, unless it offers built-in functionalities for the most popular languages and/or frameworks. What I'm trying to say is that performance is not everything. There's a long path ahead for Zed to truly fulfill its potential.
The "speed issue" is a non-issue. What matters is workflow. I have no idea what Zed's workflow is like since I've never used it. But I do use VS Code and the workflow is great.
4:55 the window tear off is pretty new to VS code! Although the issue was sitting in their tracker for almost forever it was always down to some Electron limitations. I guess that was fixed now and so it could be passed to VS code.
I hope they have good luck. Looks like they're working hard. I can't use Zed because I exclusively use either Linux or Windows and Neovim and VSCode are 1st and 2nd choices. (Sublime at a solid 3rd). I love to see innovation though.
Great video Alex, very informative! While Zed looks promising, MSFT has a huge head start, tons of resources to throw at this and BTW, they are in bed with OpenAI. So they will have a big advantage on utilizing AI to make VS Code even better.
As a daily coder, I understand the desire for a more lightweight text editor. I use Sublime Text 3 as my everyday editor even though I also depend on VSCode (for PlatformIO). In fact I even use Sublime Text to work on my VSCode extension. While overall I like VSCode, I do 99.9% of my code editing in Sublime because it has a clean layout, it's responsive, and it does keyboard handling / editing shortcuts exactly right. (LSP for coding assistants could be better.) VSCode has a faster global search-and-replace, but Sublime's search UI is better. It's still very early days for Zed so it's still missing a lot of basic features (even basics like block selection with the option key). Although it can't zoom the UI like an Electron app, we can probably make a custom theme with larger UI fonts. Icons will still remain small unless they add extended theming features. To gain users Zed will need to do a lot of things better than VSCode, better than Sublime Text - and certainly better than the dearly departed Atom. It will need to have a better, faster global search-and-replace, a really good plugin architecture, and provide a truly superior coding experience unachievable by other editors. It will need to get projects like PlatformIO onboard. I hope to see Zed continue to develop beyond the experimental stage and for it to have an effect on the performance of other editors. I doubt Zed will catch on as a popular editor while Sublime Text exists. I would like to see some of the intelligence that's being put into "reinventing the editor" also go towards optimizing Electron and improving the UX of VSCode for those of us who will continue to depend on VSCode no matter how things go for Zed.
JOIN: youtube.com/@azisk/join
mac only
I got laid off last week because I was coding too slow. Had I been using Zed, I could have closed more tickets 10-15ms faster. Dammit
😆
top notch humour hahahhahaha
10ms per frame * millions of frames = hundreds of thousands of dollars lost in productivity 😅
@@amjedbelgacem8218Humor is appreciated here
@@AZisk Typical German.
"One thing about Zed, is it is focused on stability."
Next Scene:
Zed crashes.
It does not crash, it panics!
@@kovalidis Hopefully by next version "Zed is focused on staying calm and composed".
🤣🤣
Maybe this whole video is a troll.
90% of the time i just stare at my code. Soo..
Zed's response times wil be fantastic for use in films where everyone 'programming a computer' seems like they're on speed.
no it feels they are on cr@ck
ok yeah true, people don't really open move code windows or write code like this, still it's nice if it's more responsive using the GPU. Not a feature enough to sway you away from the editor you're used to though. I think since GPUs are mainstream, this should really be the job of the desktop renderer, to probe for GPU capability and use it. Hear this Wayland?
No windows support yet.
Like it or hate it, it still is the big fish in the pond.
Zed should get to level 6 first to get their ult and then try killing vscode
+rep for the analogy
And no build for Linux? You know... the thing most people are connecting to and working on?
So, just Mac users.... who are... not always doing dev work...
Um... okay, Zed! You just pretend to be the cool kid.
i trust microsoft more than some small team from zed, the benchmarks are fake, when you install extensions it even worse than vscode, vscode is nice, its smooth, and windows design is good, also widely used and recognized editor, what the he is even zed?😂 theay hopefully fixed scroll whcih was buggy, but they didn't fixed other issues , i checked the source code they use strange variable names and also dont follow guidelines from mister bob clean code architecture that's why their codesucks j! and willsuck ! they will never replace google code editor and vscode !❤
I mean they could poke them down slowly by spamming Q (getting more extensions)... Zed is an artillery mage after all.
Didn't expect a dota 2 reference here
My opinion on zed is..... ( waits 2 years )
I hope you'll write the answer someday
Still waiting
1 year and 7 months to go
@@jon1867 I agree with this guy's future opinion
I'll come back when two years will be over to remind you
Lmao. That 97ms to 58ms marketing is just marketing 101.
The thing that gets me is thats still a HUGE delay. Assuming your screen is 60Hz thats nearly FOUR WHOLE FRAMES between keypress and it being rendered on screen. I dread to think how slow it looks on a 144hz monitor
@@squishy-tomato They will have more time to enjoy slow MacOS UI animations 😅
This is a far more interesting metric on a Raspberry Pi that is more resource limited. With VSCode living in that world, having Zed (Or COSMIC-Edit) running faster than the incumbent editor would make a palpable difference in programming experience on these small devices.
Try zed vs vscode on a 4 year old Intel Mac and you will see this huge difference.
zed is written is rust 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
I'm in a similar position: I'm not using Zed as my main editor for now, but I am keeping it installed and periodically checking things out as it gets updated. It has a lot of promise for me and I'm really looking forward to seeing where it goes in the future
The bad thing about Zed (for now) is that VSCode has a ton of extensions; yes Zed automatically integrates using LSP but that's pretty much it. But it's VERY promising.
What makes it promising? It's for Mac, and as far as I can see, VSCode just runs like butter on Mac and prolly doesn't hog a big %age of RAM too.
@@VivekYadav-ds8oz Drains a lot of my battery tho, I still need to try Zed and see if there is some improvements
@@VivekYadav-ds8ozdoesn't what? VSCode bundles a whole browser, an OS compatibility layer (electron) and a language runtime just to run a text editor. that's as wasteful as it can be
All of my extensions in VS Code that I use at work are to provide functionality that LSP and treesitter provide. Im fine with it just having LSP now.
@@FlanPoirot That's more of a thing which I hate on principle. However, realistically, it doesn't take that much storage for something that's such a key component of your development cycle.
I think the problem here is that nobody is complaining that VSCode is slow - we use it for its convenience and its extensions. if you want a fast no-frills code editor like this, you're gonna use nano or neovim or Sublime, etc. Nobody asked for "VSCode but stripped down to the essentials and also slightly faster," so while Zed is getting a lot of coverage and that is good for competition, there is absolutely no reason to use it over VSCode.
I am complaining about VS Code’s speed.
It used to be fast when it came out but it has slowed down overtime.
Sometimes it takes me seconds to open a file, which is annoying considering I use VS Code as a quick editor and not my main IDE.
(I use Jetbrain’s tools for my main IDEs)
@@DynamicalisBlueyeah. Whats the point of ide if it freezes when opening/editing projects(based on my experience). As for me, neovim is the one, it also fixed my wrist.
I complain about that. I use vs code as a lightweight editor with some useful programming related features. For real development work I use intellij
@@DynamicalisBlue If you're using Jetbrains IDE primarily and only need a lightweight text editor why not use their new Fleet editor ?
@@DynamicalisBlue I think that installing a lot of thing on vs code also make it slower, I have only the language exstation and the code runner and it goes smoothly with no problem
Taking the crown from VScode is very difficult, there is a lot of work behind it, it takes years to offer the developed benefits that it offers.
The developers of Zed contributed a lot of that work, particularly with respect to Electron.
Have you used VS or working with larger projects then Sublime Text is a lot faster
VSCode is slow if projects are big
@@perghosh8135I mean when I work on a large codebase, I move to neovim. Vscode cant handle large projects and I don’t think thats a negative, because vscode could not add all the features it has plus be super easy to use with no learning curve if they also wanted to make it handle large projects better.
Personally, I work on large projects maybe twice a year or even less than that, so vscode fits my requirements. And I think most developers and engineers fall in the same category.
Plus I don’t think your point makes sense because no one who works on a large codebase uses vscode. Vscode never said that its large codebase friendly. Everyone knows its electron and can’t handle large projects.
if they fix about 5 things, I would never go back to vscode
I realize how valuable extensions are for VS Code. They're the only ones keeping me from moving to Zed.
VS Code is the Skyrim of text editors. It has its flaws, but it will outlive all of us with its extension/mod support
@@Daniel_WR_Hart Kind of Like C/C++ .
Performance matters a lot more when low on resources. I've driven a baseline MacBook Air to its limits and beyond for years, most of the time VSC had little to no noticeable delays but whenever running out of memory or having the CPU catch up, it was BAD. Particularly the vim mode plugin (ergonomics, yo) would swallow inputs and become generally unreliable. That aside, VSC also uses much more memory than it needs to, as any Electron based app does. 300-600mb may be nothing for my current computer, but when you're running 8GB with your base system already using 2 of those, you've got some containers (another 1-2GB), browser tabs and other dev tools open, you'll appreciate every bit of extra memory you can save.
When working on large monorepos my extensions alone would consistently use 4GB of ram. Thankfully that doesn't really affect my workstation, but it's still not okay.
I have 8 gb linux laptop
I feel firefox eats too much ram even web uses too much ram in general
8gb feels 2Gb these days
Which is why I just use vs code sparingly when pairing with another person or computer, but personally I use vim and neovim.
Also when I need to go to a cafe and want the peace of mind of being able to do quick coding sessions, I could also replace the laptop for a tablet and use vim / code-server via ssh.
Yup, having a browser as the display surface for all electron apps (chromium) and running everything in it essentially adds a non-significant amount of tax to any app. For vs code its's fine (it does a lot of things well), but you can also take a look at intellij based apps (while more advanced) having a java swing based app is also quite heavy.
One thing I will never understand is the people who create / use something like hyper (the electron based terminal....) that is just insanity, even if your computer makes no sweat about it.
Exactly. Everyone who says that bloated Electron apps are as fast as something native like Zed are just spoiled with high-end pc's
VSCode works on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Web browsers.
With so many extensions like WSL, SSH, Docker, etc.
With SSH extension I can view pictures and videos over SSH on my server and browse files like I'm working with Files Explorer or Finder on the local machine.
Zed is not a VSCode killer 😂 I don't think they going to kill anyone anytime soon.
I'm using Zed for 2/3 months now and it became my main editor as VSCode is the backup because of the extensions. Zed still has a long way to go but it's quiet impressive what they have done so far and I'm loving it.
It's nowhere near a vscode killer, being MacOS exclusive still.
Is programming on a Mac even really programming?
@@GoblinArmyInYourWalls why wouldnt it be?
@@szymonn4800 it's sarcasm you dunce
@@GoblinArmyInYourWallswhat kinda dumb question is that
@@leonstone3443 it's a joke, dunce
I dunno if I'm the only one that doesn't care about an extra 50ms or whatever input delay, but just having good features, like what you get with Jetbrains
I held off trying Rider for .NET dev and regret waiting so long. It’s superb on Mac IMO. Not as much of a fan of it on Windows but I have Visual Studio on there.
JetBrains Rider has tons of .NET focused tools that VS4Mac didn’t have.
I know this is an IDE but JetBrains also have a beta of an application that can switch between text editor (like VS Code) and Full IDE as required. Which I think is an interesting idea
yeah, if we are talking slow vs slow editors, then at least JetBrains stuff provide great experience.
VS code opens for me like in 10 seconds with all extensions, and OS loads in like 12 seconds
@@KerojeyBut how often do you close and re-open the editor or reboot your computer when you work ? Surely only once.
If you gain a few seconds but then have to deal with a worse developer experience, less tooling support, constant crashes in collaboration, etc. (we didn't even see any git support in this video) then what's the point of saving those initial few seconds?
When something becomes a "killer" of something, it's usually all hype.
What code editor did they use to create Zed?
Of course it was notepad.exe.
They probably used vi
Zed was built with Zed when Zed was stable enough
@@whobitmyneckAnd before that?
@@whobitmyneck hahaha it was a joke
There’s an extension for VSCode to enable zooming font size in the editor separately from the rest of the UI. I think it’s called “Responsive Font Weights”.
Thats so useful, thank you.
VS code in Windows does it without an extension
No support for linux nor windows, no dark mode in their website .... long ways to be even close to vscode killer.
your first point is valid. Your second point I have questions.
its mostly about their target audience is wrong, they are not supporting developers as a whole but a niche group, most developers like dark mode on everything, so if your product is for developers so should you target that audience, same goes for the windows 90% usage vs mac...@@AZisk
so to iterate a tldr, I doubt their product because they don't know what their target audience is, so features that most likely would be good will tend to not be priority.@@AZisk
Both Windows and Linux support is in the works tho
in the works, is not priority, basically saying " we prefer to work in a 5% usage base instead of the biggest one "@@FirephoenixX02
Thanks for your great videos. I even sometimes watch them twice because there is soooo much useful information in your videos. Greetings from Belgium & Germany
Sublime is the GOAT. 🐐
It’s as fast as Zed (look at dev build performance), native and has a great plugin ecosystem.
It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. UI is hardware accelerated too.
My favorite too. It's perfect for scripting and projects that are too small to justify using a full-fledged IDE. With LSP plugins it's completely replaced VSCode for me.
I've been using zed for a month now as main and I think you should make another video, ALOT is improved
In a span of last 8ish years I saw VSCode to turn from an editor into a full-fledged IDE with features missing in mammoths of industry like Visual Studio.
I've been using Zed and it really is snappy. I was able to customize the colors a bit and I'm really happy with the interface. I was never a big fan of the VSCode icons on the left.
VSCode does slow down with large projecțs (like multi-project mono repos). I switched over to JetBrains WebStorm and the usability with these large projects was terrific! Yes, you have to pay to use WebStorm, but it’s worth it for my projects (plus JetBrains’ AI Assistant is just as good if not better than copilot).
Yea I’ve worked on projects where if I have like more then 3 tabs open with tens of thousands of lines I can get an input lag of more then 500ms and witch really sucks
If you buy a year of jetbrains you can keep those premium versions of the editors perpetually.
I am VERY exited for the future of this editor. I think it has a very promising future!
Alex - why are you not wearing Apple vision pro? Scared of seing Zed being 10ms faster on your own eyes? :D
😆
this is the most entertaining review i've ever seen - with enormous substance. speaks to me from the heart 👍👍👍
Is not how fast is vs code, but is how many resources consumes when is running. Sometimes it crushes the entire system… at least on my Mac.
It's not just on the Mac. Electron based browsers are also resource hungry.
I also find many corp environments they got us installing Symantec or some other file scan tank responding to git and VSCode. My Intel max sits at 100C most of the day. Any attempts at asking for an exclusion list are lost.
Try to run webstorm 😅
Zed is way faster than VSCode w/ minimal extensions here for my mid-sized projects.
I’m excited to see a new player in the space. I’ve been happily using Helix for a while now (I think Kakoune’s way of doing things makes a lot more sense than vim), but I originally switched from VSCode because I got tired of all the popups, notifications, and random obtrusive features getting added without warning, forcing me to read for hours through release notes and settings descriptions trying to figure out how to turn it off. I want my editor, and I don’t want it to change unless I ask it to. Hopefully Zed turns out this way
How did you do the voice dubbing that perfectly sounds like Bruce Willis? Which tool?
Could be Eleven AI
just a good microphone to capture the bass
- no extensions
- no copilot chat
- no extensions
- no theme store
- no extensions
- no windows app
- no extensions
But yeah, rust, it opens quickly, it scrolls quickly, and uses gpus. As if that is what I needed from my code editor that I run on an M2 chip.
and no extensions.
And no extentions
Yeah, killer only for mac user
I mean you could try to build it for other OS's, but for now you might run into trouble
Linux when???
It is literally available in the arch linux repos today. No need to compile anuthing, just use arch BTW.
@@hnasheralneam they are still working on linux and windows builds, you can check on their website
@@hnasheralneam now
Will definitely give Zed a good try. I like the idea of modern performance-focused editor. As I am not a full-time programmer, it is hard to keep my vim/neovim configuration stable. In contrast Zed seems to be almost feature-complete without any plugins.
try helix then
@@MindBlowerWTF Does it have support for CoPilot?
I doubt that it will get comparable extensiblity as VS Code. But without it, I don't think it will be easy to switch.
If they instead build everything they can into the base editor, it will become a full blown IDE like Visual Studio, which is not at all lightweight...
What makes VSCode so strong for me is the extensions. If they catch up, especially when it comes to remote development, I'm super fine with going over.
But what if we compare zed with sublime text? 😊
Holy shit you changed my life, i had no idea vscode let you drag windows like that, it's been a top request for ages.
Anyways, i hope zed becomes a viable competitor to vscode!
my sudo nano opens faster than zed
One thing I realised is if you want to create a Monopoly, building extension ecosystem is big part of that. Scenarios like this shows it very well. Developers put years of effort into building these awesome extensions and now its harder to competition to break in. Thats why even Google's new cloud ide, project idx is based on code - oss and they can use well established vs code extensions.
Zed is good, but UI/UX in VS Code is much more convenient. And VS Code is fast enough.
Glad to see that Scharzenager got broken out for the true test 👍
Do you have all extensions disabled? I recently switched to NeoVim because VSCode becomes too slow and memory hogging for large project. Frequently got VM OutOfMemory issue. Moreover the extension can eat up loads of space as well
Hi Alex! Your videos are a must for any developer, I really enjoy your attention to detail and really professional tests, oriented to the developer ecosystem.
Glad you like them!
I’m sorry but if the speed of opening files is what’s killing your productivity then congrats. Maybe remove some plugin bloat?
Even without any extensions VSCode is starting slower than zed simply because VSCode is built on Electron
Biggest benefit: battery consumption is much lower on Zed. Gotta love that Rust performance!
But I agree with Alex. Zed's not quite there yet, but they're making quick progress. Gonna keep checking back to how they crack VSC's "moat": the extensions.
"stability" lol
saw this thing crashing a suspicious amount of times :P
using it for a week, crashed maybe 1 time (M1 Macbook Pro)
To me it seemed to mostly crash with the coop coding which makes sense as it's in such early development
Zed is not 1.0 (stable) yet, it's in BETA.
And 8 months after, what are your thoughts?
Laughs in Neovim
The response time differences may have a lot to do with the simplified extensions that Zed supports compared to the more complex extension interface of VS Code.
the sigh at 2:01 lol
I have switched to Zed only this whole week at work and I really love it. Think I will stay on it in the future.
It is very good to have alternative. However, I don't think being fast is a good angle for promoting an IDE. VScode success is its huge number of plugins.
have you every used Visual Studio though?
@@AZiskYes, but long time ago. I mainly use vscode and a little bit of eclipse now.
@anthelegendI thought zed don't have much plugin yet? How you get 40??
@baconmanthelegendOh, AZisk was asking about Studio, not code, so I thought you are referring back to his video and zed. My bad 🤦♂️
good luck getting zed to work in legacy projects. Hope they fix it soon, looks awesome and pretty fast
I’m still going to use IntelliJ IDEA to do my actual work because it does so much for me, and can handle working on massive projects well. The only time I run VSCode is when I need a dumb text editor, as long as it has a cli tool to open a file it does what I need.
Honestly bro as much as I like vscode, for this kind of usecase I'd pick Fleet. It starts similar to Zed and you only get the IntelliJ platform features (indexing, LSP support, code refactoring, -basic- debugging and profiling, etc.) *after* you click on a button so for simple text editing with git support, terminal, folder workspace and whatnot Fleet is better than vscode in my opinion.
its actually not just the input, its everything with it
I am a linux user, it cant kill me
😂
I was assuming they were talking about render times, not necessarily perceived delay.
As a vim user, vscode is noticably slow.
No shit sherlock. Ofc it's slower than vim.
I've tried Zed and if you run it on a 120Hz screen (e.g., directly on your MBP) it feels glorious. Once we have all the usual plugins that everybody uses, it's going to be a serious VSCode competitor. VSCode is great but it's hamstrung by electron, I like the bare-metal feeling that Zed gives.
Also the AI autocompletion in Zed is god-tier, I use it to write documents and it's incredible! Definitely a must try if you can afford OpenAPI API keys.
Zed is like Arc. Reinventing the wheel for the sake of it.
I've been using Zed for 1 week now. No regrets moving to zed. (the only missing feature is the capacity to work over ssh on a remote server)
not surprise since VS Code using electron..
so you're technically writing code in a browser xD
As much as I gripe about electron, I am always shocked at how versatile it is.
Can we appreciate this beautiful Pulp-intro? ❤️
thanks 😊
For the test where you opened Zed in the CLI and VSCode in the CLI, Zed was running in the background (clearly notated by the dot at the bottom) and VScode took significantly longer because it needed to be reopened. Borked test and this whole video is most likely invalid. Before publishing, check for flaws in your please.
LSP server? Plugins/extensions? No telemetry? Seamless integration with current vscode extensions?
I dont think that it will ever have integration with vs code extensions. Its not based on electron
Good but nothing can kill vscode
Give it a couple of years
I hope it really grows to be a competitive alternative to vscode, we need options !
Actually gave it a go by working on a real project and I'm quite impressed, it's been 2 days since I used VS Code for my React projects, had to use VS Code when working on Angular since Zed is missing the Angular extension but for React I have fully switched to Zed + Vim Mode + lazygit
The thing I don't like about VSCode, is that is not really OSS, you can create your own plugins but guess who is going to benefit from it? not you, not me, the only one that benefits is Microsoft. So please stop making plugins for VSCode :)
VSCodium and Code OSS exist. Plus with Open VSX Registry as an alternative to Microsoft Extension Gallery.
Maybe you also say "please stop uploading apps to Google Play, App Store"?
They improved upon the Notepad code base and called it Zed. As you can see both include e and end with d.
So i killed vscode?
lol how did you create that video in the begining? that was sick
Amazing, you can save 20ms while opening files. What do you do with that much free time?
With respect to the increased speed found with Zed loading files, starting approximately at 1:35, the testing did not take into account two important things. The first is the time to start or switch to the app. The second is that after the first test the file or directory is held in cache memory by the operating system. To properly test how fast each opens a directory or file a new directory or file must be selected for each test. For each pair of tests the two directories or files should be as close to the same size as possible.
I was part of a team that was responsible for changing a process which ran once a night into one that could be started from a website. The process involved a large number of small programs that each performed a tiny bit of the process and used temporary files to communicate between the different stages. The process originated on a six bit mainframe and there had never been enough money or time to integrate them into them all. Programming wasn’t the issue. Verifying the outcomes stayed the same was the highest priority as the application was used during the process of business incorporation. Any differences and lawsuits could occur. The data was still stored using six bits and every small program read data, converted it from six bits, ran, converted the output to six bits, wrote the data to a file, and exited. A script was used to control the flow of the small programs and that had to be modified to prevent them from overwriting one another temporary data. Time and extreme caution limited our choices. Instead of making each of the small programs able to run instances at once it was easier and safer to lock each one to a single instance. When it came time to testing we ran a request through the nightly version and it took somewhere around 45 seconds. We then switched over to our project and ran it in a two or three seconds. We were all thrilled but it seemed way too much of an improvement for me as we could not implement the chances we identified as having the biggest performance improvements. I asked the person running the test to retry the old method again and it ran in three to four seconds. We eventually determined that the gigabytes of data the application uses was cached in during the first running. Because we were running on a server with lots of memory and set up to cache as much as possible we had to fill the cache with approximately 96GB of junk between tests if we wanted to compare times. This was 25 years ago on a Silicon Graphics server. Ever since then I’ve remembered to take caching in account.
Used VSCode for YEARS and never had to reload window for "stability issues". Only did it when reinstalling addons.
Zed is available on Linux now. I have it installed on Debian 12
Unfortunately, it still doesn’t have a “source control page”, like vscode and jetbrains ides. It also doesn’t support debugging. And it’s multi cursors are still bugging some times. As soon as they fix this, it’ll get ok to use
tryed Zed for a while. looks ok for some simple tasks considering perfomance, thx for suggesting new software
Alex went full fuzz testing bloodbath, the poor editor wan't ready for such intensity.
Tried it out myself too, it's honestly a great experience. It really needs ssh support like vscode has and maybe a better ecosystem, but as soon as the ssh support is there I'll be ready to jump ship from vscode on to it.
When you were launching zed and vscode. Vscode was closed out completely while zed was not.
Zed was still on the dock with a dot under it while vscode was nowhere on the dock. That dot under the application on the macOS dock shows that that application is loaded in ram, even though no visual window is loaded.
All you did was measure loading from ram and loading from disk.
I code in vim, BTW. thanks for your suggest.
Now now, no need to downgrade. Upgrade to neovim instead.
I currently use MacBook Air M1, and yes Zed is noticeably faster than VS code (seriously).
I had assumed that there was no competition for the VS Code, but Zed proved me wrong
Killed me with that intro:)
Is it Mike and Eleven on previous?
I don't think anything will replace vs code for me. With all the extensions I have, the snippets, the shortcuts, I am so invested in it that I can't really think of using any other ide(not that vscode is one)
By the way, it is now "available" for Windows and Linux too; but you have to build it yourself. It's essentially just running 3 commands in the terminal. Note that it is really unstable, crashes often, Copilot won't work and lot's of stuff is just not working yet.
Zed won't kill anything until it's officially and definitively available on Linux and Windows.
Also, it will need some sort of plugin mechanism, unless it offers built-in functionalities for the most popular languages and/or frameworks.
What I'm trying to say is that performance is not everything. There's a long path ahead for Zed to truly fulfill its potential.
The "speed issue" is a non-issue. What matters is workflow. I have no idea what Zed's workflow is like since I've never used it. But I do use VS Code and the workflow is great.
4:55 the window tear off is pretty new to VS code! Although the issue was sitting in their tracker for almost forever it was always down to some Electron limitations. I guess that was fixed now and so it could be passed to VS code.
You used lapce ?
I hope they have good luck. Looks like they're working hard. I can't use Zed because I exclusively use either Linux or Windows and Neovim and VSCode are 1st and 2nd choices. (Sublime at a solid 3rd). I love to see innovation though.
Great video Alex, very informative! While Zed looks promising, MSFT has a huge head start, tons of resources to throw at this and BTW, they are in bed with OpenAI. So they will have a big advantage on utilizing AI to make VS Code even better.
Unbiased reviews are a rare commodity these days
As a daily coder, I understand the desire for a more lightweight text editor. I use Sublime Text 3 as my everyday editor even though I also depend on VSCode (for PlatformIO). In fact I even use Sublime Text to work on my VSCode extension. While overall I like VSCode, I do 99.9% of my code editing in Sublime because it has a clean layout, it's responsive, and it does keyboard handling / editing shortcuts exactly right. (LSP for coding assistants could be better.) VSCode has a faster global search-and-replace, but Sublime's search UI is better.
It's still very early days for Zed so it's still missing a lot of basic features (even basics like block selection with the option key). Although it can't zoom the UI like an Electron app, we can probably make a custom theme with larger UI fonts. Icons will still remain small unless they add extended theming features. To gain users Zed will need to do a lot of things better than VSCode, better than Sublime Text - and certainly better than the dearly departed Atom. It will need to have a better, faster global search-and-replace, a really good plugin architecture, and provide a truly superior coding experience unachievable by other editors. It will need to get projects like PlatformIO onboard.
I hope to see Zed continue to develop beyond the experimental stage and for it to have an effect on the performance of other editors. I doubt Zed will catch on as a popular editor while Sublime Text exists. I would like to see some of the intelligence that's being put into "reinventing the editor" also go towards optimizing Electron and improving the UX of VSCode for those of us who will continue to depend on VSCode no matter how things go for Zed.