My approach these days is to do one change at a time, until I can fully merge it with confidence.
Specifically for me that means that after I create a worktree I get some local config files copied over and Postgres duplicating my local dev and test databases so I can test in isolation, and then when I close out a worktree it deletes those databases.
The best at that that I've found is Conductor, but I can't use it at work because we only have Copilot and they're locked to a Claude/Codex backend. Arbor is close, but it's not under as active development and has a lot of rough edges. Opencode GUI has create hooks but not teardown.
If Zed can hook that up _and_ also keep its great editor roots, that'll definitely be a game changer.
This is helpful to know - we're working on adding more agents, Copilot and OpenCode harnesses are among the most popular requests.
We also recently built an escape hatch. If you turn on Settings → Experimental → Big Terminal Mode you can create new terminals in the center panel (with ⌘⇧T) and use any agent you'd like (Copilot, OpenCode, etc). It isn't the best experience because you don't get notifications etc (yet), but at least it lets you use the harness you'd like until we build out the first-class UI for it.
Send me feedback anytime, I'm charlie@conductor.build.
However with worktrees I am not really able to easily copy secrets, etc to run my app, ports conflict, I end up with a bunch of separate dbs and services, etc.
Does conductor help with this? Have you all found any useful ways of making this easier or more automated?
I don't use it much anymore, but last I did I would run into port conflicts with docker projects.
But I’ve tried to reinstall it since and it just gets stuck in a weird infinite loop.
I liked conductor though. Hope you are able to fix those bugs and I can try again in a few weeks.
The idea that a devcontainer gets built on-demand instead of checked out like 'docker pull ..." has always felt weird to me. It's so close to being awesome, but ends up being barely useful.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Is there a way to checkout an immutable devcontainer?
FYI, you can use Copilot directly in Zed!
And then I guess setting up tasks for the cleanup part, but it'd be great to see that get automated too so I don't need to remember it.
by far the most popular worktree manager
It should go: project tree | text editor | agent view | threads
Not to mention on most laptops you'll only have room for about two panes at a time. So they should be focusing on pane management and making it easy to swap between views. Not highlighting 4 pane workflows. Unless you have an ultra-wide monitor, I'd rather have a separate Agents window.
I use Zed a lot and this is a minor (can be configured) but telling design decision that really bothers me. How long until they decide editing itself isn't worth it anymore? Stop supporting VI mode?
Also, watching the change notes, most effort seems to be focused on agents this days, which is a bit worrying. I love Zed because it's great editor that also knows a bit about agents; I don't want it to continue pivoting towards pushing agent management deeper and deeper into the experience.
Unfortunately.
Personally, I still pay Zed because I think they’re doing great foundational work. However I’ve now almost entirely migrated to helix for editing needs.
The key advantages Zed has are being agent-agnostic (so not a first party UI like Claude/Codex/Cursor Desktop), supporting multiple repositories on the same agent via creating a worktree for each automatically, and having a high quality custom agent UI rather than wrapping over CLIs (I've used their IDE's agent UI in the past and it's great). AFAIK, this is the first mainstream tool that supports all of these features.
I also thought it was odd that I can't configure the font size in the git commit message editor.
On recent additions, the dev container integration was great.
Rooting for you Zed!
Sessions are linear though, so you cant do this _while_ an existing session is cooking.
That said, I am excited about this update too, I've been playing with ACP support and Zed's UX was bare bones. I want to run my agent with multiple workers now, and see what happens.
I really like Zed, I use it every day. But, if I'd seen this layout when I first installed, I never would have taken it seriously
I imagine this will push some new users away
Of course, that's only the default layout. I'm not familiar enough with Zed, but there's probably a way to change it? In JetBrains IDEs, you can configure panels to sit at the top left/bottom left/left bottom/right bottom/bottom right/top right side and show/hide them with one click (if only one panel on the respective side is shown, it will take up the full space). So you could have files at the top left and the agent panel at the bottom left. And the code editor is of course still the "centerpiece" in the middle.
I suspect it will gain them more users than it will lose
Most other tools doing this are heavy, buggy, and built on electron
⌘B : toggle the left dock
⌘R : toggle the right dock