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Posted by salkahfi 13 hours ago

Zed 1.0(zed.dev)
1638 points | 525 comments
giancarlostoro 12 hours ago|
Congrats to the Zed team for building the best modern editor I have ever used. I subscribe to the monthly plan just to give you guys the funding you need, even if my funding is a tiny drop in the bucket. I always wanted a feature rich alternative to Sublime Text that can run anywhere and do basically anything I need from it. I've use JetBrains IDEs for years (been subscribed annually since 2017), but since Zed I havent really opened any of those IDEs in a long time, other than maybe Rider but that's due to C# nuances I needed to work with.
joefitzgerald 11 hours ago||
Zed really is delightful to use. I haven't had any need to open VSCode in over a year. Extending it has been relatively simple, even as someone who doesn't know Rust well.

The Zed team seem to have really learned their lesson on performance from the Atom days, because it's very performant. @nathansobo, @maxbrunsfeld, @as-cii and the team, congrats!

foxylad 2 hours ago||
I only open VSCode when I need to resolve a conflicted merge. The Zed interface is basically diff2, and doesn't show character-level differences.

Apparently Zed was working on a better diff viewer, but that seems to have been shelved.

k_bx 9 hours ago|||
Never thought of Zed as Sublime replacement, but now that you've mentioned – why not? I use Sublime only as blazingly fast temp note taking that doesn't lose them on exit, but I see Zed fits the job perfectly. One less close product hopefully!
NamlchakKhandro 59 minutes ago|||
yep that lycra wearing bike rider from North Sydney doesn't need more of your money
giancarlostoro 5 hours ago|||
Sadly this is how I use Sublime as well, though not anymore, on work systems the new Notepad app has tabs finally, and can do exactly that...
chrysoprace 6 hours ago|||
I've always thought of Zed as a good Sublime Text alternative. I can tinker with and potentially break my Neovim config, but I'll have Zed as a backup for when I need to do a quick edit. Their Vim mode is the best I've used outside of JetBrains (or Vim itself).
sudb 11 hours ago|||
it's now my go-to for when I need to wrangle basically any text file manually - has handled everything I can throw at it (some of which has crashed other editors -looking at you Cursor/VSCode)
for1nner 9 hours ago|||
I was downloading it "just to see," but your comment is roughly a carbon copy of my own IDE/editor usage history, so 1) ooo spooky deja vu and 2) here's hoping I feel the same way you do.
bbor 8 hours ago||
Can you speak to your feelings on Zed's customizability/extensibility? Zed is shiny and impressive, but Sublime's rich ecosystem of python plugins is hard to beat...

EDIT: Tho if sublime wasn't already "doing everything [you] need", maybe you aren't familiar with the plugin ecosystem!

giancarlostoro 7 hours ago|||
I used Sublime Text since ST2, and bought into ST3. It just felt stale compared to Visual Studio or any JetBrains IDE. I loved the speed, but at least back when I was using it, LSP wasn't as big and so I didn't have that at my fingertips.

With Zed all the high quality features are OOTB. For example, with Python they run some high quality linters out of the box, I don't even have to think about setting anything up, I don't even thing I have installed a single plugin for Zed outside of themes. It's a very batteries included text editor.

NamlchakKhandro 57 minutes ago||||
sublime text is a joke with regards to LSP

It doesn't even respect local project dependencies

Plus the whole "holy than thou" attitude of python devs in general just sucks tbh

Python isn't as great as you think it is.

nsm 3 hours ago|||
Not the OP, but for me ST can't be beat in terms of how easy it is to write a plugin. It uses Python (Zed is Rust). Plugins generally auto-reloads. If extensibility is important to you, ST is still the way to go.
obeavs 12 hours ago||
What an abysmal series of top comments. These guys created a phenomenal product using novel technology, which will only continue to improve. Great work to the Zed team.
electroly 11 hours ago||
FWIW, the top comments at the time of my comment (one hour after yours, two hours after the article was posted) are all complimentary. You commented one hour after the article was posted; it's worth waiting a bit for the comment voting to shake out.
dooglius 10 hours ago||
Further discussion from dang on the "contrarian dynamic": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601
vovavili 9 hours ago||
This comment could easily be expanded into an essay on the sociology of social media, wisdom-to-word ratio is insane.
neya 1 hour ago|||
From what I can see, one of the top comments (at the time of this comment) is worried about legalese claiming to have "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable" access to your source code. I think it is very fair criticism to not want to give away your source code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953501

coldtea 5 hours ago|||
What exactly is phenomenal and novel about Zed? I've tried it a couple of times for a week or so, didn't see the point, and moved on every time.

And I'm not luddite swearing by vi or something, I use VSCode and Idea, and have used Sublime for many years, Xcode on/off for some Obj-C/Swift dev, Eclipse for 5-6 years in the 2000s, and vim for everything cli/lightweight since forever.

Is the GUI tech what's supposed to be novel? I couldn't care less about that backend in my everyday editor use as long as the editor is fast enough. Which on modern hardware, even Idea is.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good editor still.

theteapot 16 minutes ago|||
VSCode extensions and the ecosystem is a security time-bomb. Zed looks to be doing things better.
ricardobeat 4 hours ago||||
Currently on this machine: using 900MB of RAM, including all language servers, with nine open projects - that is pretty phenomenal. VSCode could barely keep one open with the same memory.

The perception of 'fast' is very subjective. To me having a smooth, jitter-free UI, low input latency, and instant startup, all matter a lot.

coldtea 4 hours ago|||
It's amazing that a gig of ram is considered lightweight for having 8 project dirs open in an editor, which normally means 8 tree views and a few open file tabs per project :)
ricardobeat 4 hours ago||
Even more amazing that 10GB for the same purpose is considered acceptable. ± 100MB for window, project files, LSP servers, ASTs etc is something very few editors can achieve - I'm pretty sure Zed beats both Emacs and Neovim in memory consumption.
Zetaphor 1 hour ago||||
I understand wanting your software to be well optimized, but at no point in my years of using VSCode have I ever actually had to care about how much RAM it's using. I have 32GB, I'm going to use it.
jimbokun 28 minutes ago|||
Maybe use it to run a small local LLM + Zed instead of just VS Code?

(I’m probably off on how much memory it takes to run a small LLM, but still.)

bigstrat2003 32 minutes ago|||
I, too, would like to use my RAM. And I would like to be able to use it on the things I deem important, not to subsidize the laziness of devs who reach for Electron.
OccamsMirror 3 hours ago|||
My experience with Zed differed. On Linux I found it to be very memory hungry.
feelamee 4 hours ago|||
I heard that Zed has very impressive collaboration features. I tried them a little and they really look well (like discord, but directly in editor). But this was very superficial look
xvedejas 11 hours ago|||
Maybe this wasn't true an hour ago, but all the top 3 comments right now look supportive (if I am to count yours), and the next few are just mildly critical.
john_strinlai 11 hours ago|||
yeah, all forms of criticism, all feature suggestions, any comparisons to other products/solutions, etc. should be outright banned by HN. if you aren't praising the thing, get out!

(do you comment this same type of thing on github, microsoft, apple, etc. posts? all of these comments seem absolutely tame compared to the vitriol in those threads. most top comments here are supportive. most of the negative ones are constructive.)

shimman 1 hour ago|||
Did Zed ever answer their code of conduct violation?

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604

sieabahlpark 10 hours ago|||
[dead]
MoonWalk 9 hours ago|||
Maybe they'd be better if the title were informative.
VerifiedReports 52 minutes ago||
Yep. The intentionally obscure titles on here are just inexcusable.
rtaylorgarlock 11 hours ago|||
^^the #1 reason I limit my daily time allowance for HN
madibo3156 10 hours ago|||
I haven't read them because they're now buried, but whatever those top comments said can't be bad enough to warrant your vitriol. Abysmal means bad, not pessimistic. It's inappropriate for the (currently) top comment to be casting such judgment in its preface.

I don't think overly-opinionated meta-comments are inherently bad, but I don't come to this site for them. I don't even think your comment is bad; I'm mad that this is what the people of HN have decided is the most important remark on the matter. It tells me something unfortunate.

wslh 10 hours ago|||
I think the Zed team's enthusiasm adds a lot of momentum to the product, on top of their indisputable engineering capabilities.
EGreg 10 hours ago|||
I hope HN can appreciate what a game changer (and paradigm shift) Zed can be.

To the Zed developers: CONGRATULATIONS! I have been following your project with great interest since your speed demo years ago. And since it’s AI-first, I’m interested to see how we can integrate it with https://safebots.ai (Safebots, Safebox, and Safecloud).

I would love to see how we might be able to increase the safety of agents in Zed, use local models like Qwen/Deepseek and we also have Grokers which can turn any codebase into a graph with tree-sitter and help your agents far more than RAG and similarity search (https://grokers.ai/deck.pdf)

What’s the best way of getting in touch? (If you want, my profile has a way of emailing me).

SEJeff 9 hours ago||
https://graphify.net and trail of bits’s trail mark https://github.com/trailofbits/trailmark

Both use treesitter and create knowledge graphs for llm use. It results in way less tokens spent as well.

EGreg 4 hours ago||
Yes, several projects have been going in the right direction.

But also - see https://safebots.ai/grokers.html

bubbi 9 hours ago|||
[dead]
sieabahlpark 10 hours ago|||
[dead]
OccamsMirror 3 hours ago||
Maybe they shouldn't be releasing it with anti-consumer terms of service? People's objections are legitimate. Where else should they be discussed?
nzoschke 13 hours ago||
Congrats!

My daily driver is Zed developing on SSH remote servers on exe.dev.

It's crazy to think of all the dev tools I've churned through over the last 18 months but these two feel sticky.

Zed has everything I need in a unified pane. File editor, terminal, agents, SSH remotes. And it's fast and intuitive

exe.dev is the first "dev container" I've ever *loved*. The remote sandbox means `dangerously-skip-permissions` is safe. Being on the internet with good private / shared / public access saves so much time.

I also use https://conductor.build/ and GitHub but this is starting to feel clunky compared hacking directly against online live reloading apps.

tikotus 12 hours ago||
I'm glad to hear the SSH remote editing is working well.

A lot of the time I'm developing on a remote server using VSCode Remote-SSH. I mostly love it. But! It consumes a lot of memory. And not only that. At times it gets stuck in some infinite loop or such, and ends up consuming all memory on the machine, preventing all traffic. Takes a few minutes for the OS to finally kill it, so I can get back in. I'm pretty this is happening due to large collections of symlinks (the subprocess eating up the memory is rg). But also just JavaScript editing at times launches up a bunch of ts-servers consuming everything and more.

This is super scary, if I'm poking around on the prod server.

Looking for alternatives. Zed is on my list.

apitman 9 hours ago|||
The VSCode remote ssh implementation is a bit concerning:

https://fly.io/blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/

Any idea if zed does things differently?

Pyrodogg 12 hours ago||||
Do you happen to use the AutoImport extension? rg subprocess explosion seems related.

https://github.com/soates/Auto-Import/issues/127

eknkc 9 hours ago||||
I've been using the SSH remote editing on Zed too and it works great. No issues whatsoever.
whalesalad 7 hours ago|||
The only reason I remained on vscode for so long was the remote ssh editing as I also use a dev box (M2 air + dev box = multi-day battery life) but recently got sick and tired of the vscode instability and frequent need to blow away state / reinstall plugins after updates. When I saw Zed had an ssh dev equivalent I jumped ship and haven't looked back. Here is my theme if anyone is interested, https://github.com/whalesalad/dotfiles/blob/master/zed/whale...
user3939382 5 minutes ago|||
What you really want is to build a Docker container and wait for ECS deployments between iterations.
huijzer 9 hours ago|||
How does exe.dev differ from VPS + Caddy + some subdomain on a domain you already own?

For auth one can use Caddy and basic auth. Yes it takes a bit of work but it isn’t that bad. Plus zero subscription costs if your VPS is a Raspberry

fowlie 6 hours ago||
> Yes it takes a bit of work but it isn’t that bad.

Agreed, it takes a few hours to set up everything. But just did it with Claude the other day, and I was up and running in no time! :-)

c-hendricks 10 hours ago|||
I'll have to check it out again. Last time I tried, the got integration didn't work when connecting to a remote SSH server, and ports couldn't be mapped at runtime.

Had to shut everything down, list the port, and then reconnect. A big pain when other tools just automatically figure out what needs to be forwarded, or just let you specify arbitrary ports at runtime.

nate 10 hours ago|||
"online live reloading apps" => trying to get my head around this workflow. so the disk is shared across these? so do you still have the problem of say running a "main" version of an app, and it's weird experimental version of that same app? because they still have to live in different folders/worktrees? that's where I get stuck a little trying to enable things like this for others. right now, I've got people a system we can spin up N "vms". but it's not persistent storage if the vm goes away. it's whatever version exists in their GitHub branch. hopefully if they hack the vm app they commit and push back to the repo.
nzoschke 10 hours ago||
Yes I’m trusting exe.dev disks and persistence.

For many apps the weird experimental version is all there is. Call it vibe coding or experiments or non-critical tools. These may not even have a GitHub repo. I trust local git and the exe.dev disks.

Then for serious apps the above is the same shape for development branches. Spin up a VM in a few seconds with the code checked out and running online and editable over an SSH mount is the magic.

Then that turns into a PR on GitHub and a normal review then CI/CD to staging and prod takes over.

chrisweekly 11 hours ago|||
Thank you for this comment! exe.dev is what I've been seeking without quite knowing it. excited to dig into it.
mark_l_watson 12 hours ago||
Using Zed with ssh is an interesting idea. I spend a lot of time mosh/ssh to VPSs, then running 'emacs -nw' locally on the server. This is a great setup since I love Emacs, but I will give Zed/ssh a try. Thanks.
davidw 10 hours ago||
Emacs has had this feature forever, and it works pretty well.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Re...

flossly 5 hours ago||
KDE also IIRC. Just works in all load and save dialogs :)
Meekro 13 hours ago||
I really want to like Zed because they've clearly put so much work into it, but so far I've been sticking with Sublime. I have several large PHP projects that were started in the 2010-2020 era, and Zed will highlight and complain about all sorts of minor things that were standard PHP fare at the time: functions without return types, for example. My code (which works fine) looks like an ocean of red when I view it with Zed, and turning all those warnings off is not trivial.

For each kind of warning, I wish there was a button that said "don't warn me again about issues like this one in this project." Then I could keep the interesting warnings (like undeclared variable) and ditch the ridiculous ones.

masklinn 12 hours ago||
> My code (which works fine) looks like an ocean of red when I view it with Zed, and turning all those warnings off is not trivial.

Isn't it just the default configuration of whatever LSP zed defaults to for PHP?

So you should be able to either configure the LSP to avoid that or disable the LSP server entirely.

Meekro 12 hours ago|||
Coming from Sublime, I'd never even heard of a Language Server when I first tried Zed. As I recall, disabling particular kinds of warnings required copy-pasting some pretty exotic incantations into my project config. All of it was poorly documented, and it felt like I was doing something nobody expected me to do. Instead, I should have been able to mouse over a particular warning and say "don't warn me again about things like this", at which point Zed should edit the project config for me.
throawayonthe 12 hours ago|||
that does sound like a pretty nice ui idea to add to code actions (command + .), it already lets you one-click add an ignore comment iirc so probably not too hard to wire a global per-project option

however, i think LSP or integrated linters/typecheckers have been standard fare in editors for a while now (zed does seem to have a lot more set up by default, but i like the sane defaults most of the time). The "correct" solution would be to configure whatever lsp zed is running for the project the way you want, and reap the benefits even outside of zed. for php the tools are listed here: https://zed.dev/docs/languages/php the main one seems to be Phpactor and you should be able to configure it globally or per project https://phpactor.readthedocs.io/en/master/usage/configuratio...

but i understand the frustration, sometimes i try to navigate an ancient python codebase and it really is a sea of red

rob74 12 hours ago||||
Well, PHPStorm (and the other JetBrains IDEs) does it this way. You can disable a certain "inspection" globally, per project, per file, per method or just for one occurence - the last three work by inserting annotations into the code. Then again, PHPStorm costs money (not just if you want AI assistance), and is based on (drum roll) Java technology (although JetBrains don't advertise this fact a lot nowadays).
Groxx 10 hours ago||||
Yeah, I really can't stand every vscode has done to the ecosystem for settings. JSON as a storage format for config is entirely fine, but it's a truly awful UX for changing things. But they're successful and it's easy to build, so everyone mindlessly copies them.
spockz 7 hours ago|||
Mind you that vscode does have an ui to change the settings. Also it has code completion when editing the json because of the linked json schema.
Groxx 6 hours ago||
It has a UI to change some of the settings. And not even all of the settings with autocomplete help - I have no idea why those aren't equivalent to each other at least as a fallback, but they very clearly are not. And plugins frequently have major settings documentation gaps, including absolutely massively used ones like Go.

Compare that to something like a JetBrains product.

DangitBobby 7 hours ago|||
Zed is highly configurable via JSON (so already puts them in a tier above many editors) and also for some things like shortcuts provides an actual interface for editing that JSON. I imagine as time goes on they'll expose more interfaces for editing configurations. For now I'll take JSON over nothing/gui-only.
mtoner23 12 hours ago||||
LSP is how all editors work today and its simplified everything so so much. you should figure them out
_verandaguy 11 hours ago|||
While this comment is overly general (some major editors ship without LSP support built in; many more do not have a sane configuration out-of-the-box), it is useful to learn about them and how your editor of choice integrates with them.

The landscape isn't generally intuitive, unfortunately, and while it's getting better, understanding the differences and interop places between LSP, Treesitter, DAP, your editor, and the underlying language-specific tooling can be a big, confusing time hog.

That said, and to be clear: LSP's been a huge boon for me. I used a minimal, kinda-broken configuration for a while with Python, then rebuilt the whole thing when I switched to Rust for work, and holy hell, this thing's awesome.

nickelpro 11 hours ago||
This is way too equivocating.

You are a craftsman, learn your tools. Could you imagine the equivalent from other professionals? A machinist saying, "Understanding the differences and interop places between the DRO, hand controls, and CNC controls for the lathe can be a big confusing time hog."

It takes a couple of hours, and it's a tool you use every single day. Learning how it works is the price of entry, not a mountain to overcome.

_verandaguy 10 hours ago|||
It is a fact that some useful things in the software world are a pain in the ass to learn, and that they could be better on that front.

LSP is one of those things, or at least it has been, for a while.

LSP is also something that's not necessary to writing quality code; it's absolutely a major quality-of-life boost, but before rewriting my configs after switching to Rust, my LSP usage was limited to being a slightly faster autocomplete engine more than anything. I didn't have keybinds set up for going to definitions, implementations, or references of symbols. I still put out what I think was decent code. I'm also better off now that I've adopted a more useful config.

IMO it's an important part of this industry (among others) to let developers have whatever workflow they want, within reason. If someone decides they want to invest the time into setting up LSP with their editor, that's their prerogative. If not, that's fine too. I don't know who among my present or past coworkers use LSP outside of occasionally chatting about editor configs with one or two of them, because they've usually figured out a workflow that lets them produce respectable code, and I've never had to question their tooling before questioning their methodology.

nickelpro 8 hours ago||
The context is a user adopting an editor that has LSP integration and is relying on the language server. That's why I said "it's a tool you use every single day".

If your tool is TextMate, you should learn how TextMate grammars work. If your tool is vi, you should learn how modal editing works. If your tool is Ed, you don't need to learn anything because "Ed is the standard text editor".[1]

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

daemin 1 hour ago||||
Except these days companies are telling you to not be a craftsman but a supervisor.

I want to be a craftsman and know my tools and want to actually enjoy using them, but it's becoming less accepted to do so.

serf 9 hours ago||||
lol ok but where does it stop?

I got into programming long before LSPs and MCPs.

The only craftsmen are the ones at the edge of the lingo tree?

To use your own analogy, as a machinist myself : I can master the concept of the lathe and bow drill without learning simulation-driven CAM, and I would be no less a machinist than the guy pressing buttons on a brand new Haas.

If you work via notepad.exe and assembly with a compiler and linker ready in the next window, fine! the work is what matters.

nickelpro 8 hours ago|||
It stops at the tools you use, "it's a tool you use every single day". If it's not a tool you use every day, you don't need to learn it.

If you don't use language servers, you don't engage with development environments which rely on them, you need not learn them.

If you're making chips on a Monarch 60 you don't need to learn shit about CNC. If you're pushing buttons on a Haas you do.

If you're coming from a Monarch and want to try pushing buttons on the Haas on the kids are using, you need to learn how CNC works. That's your job. If you want to switch from notepad to Zed, you need to learn how language servers work.

andai 6 hours ago|||
https://notepadexe.com/

Every day we stray further from God.

Groxx 10 hours ago|||
[dead]
alwillis 11 hours ago||||
AI agents also use LSP to be more efficient with source code [1].

[1]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/plugins-reference#lsp-server...

parampampam 12 hours ago|||
Definitely not all.
iknowstuff 12 hours ago||||
You should learn about LSPs
tecoholic 7 hours ago||||
If you have never used an LSP and don’t need it, you can just turn the LSP off. I do it from the UI (thunderbolt icon on bottom bar I think) for some projects which don’t have LSP typing support. There should also be a setting to turn off permanently.
meatloaf_man 12 hours ago||||
https://xkcd.com/1172/
keithnz 8 hours ago||||
you could just get your AI to configure it for you
extr 12 hours ago|||
[flagged]
Lalabadie 12 hours ago|||
IIRC, Zed uses PHPactor by default. It's a mess for Kirby projects as well.

Edit for clarity: I want to fully switch to Zed, I really like it and their vision for the editor. PHP issues are a hurdle, not a turnoff to me.

giancarlostoro 13 hours ago|||
I love Sublime, but I don't want to pay to upgrade from 3 to whatever version it is now, Zed is everything I wanted Sublime to be. Honestly, I wanted VS Code but fully native, and I feel like that's what I'm getting from Zed.

I feel like some people will be put off by all the "AI" mentioned by Zed, but you're sleeping on a top tier editor where you can just ignore the AI stuff if you don't want it. It's very high quality, and probably the reason I wont be renewing next year for JetBrains, unless JetBrains does something impressive, I thought by now they'd have a more native feeling IDE that handles most / any language instead of so many separate ones.

VS Code has gotten so bloated over the years. The gold standard of ST has spoiled me with simpler editors. Zed is the first time I felt like someone finally built an editor that is modern and has a rich set of features.

nicoburns 12 hours ago|||
> I love Sublime, but I don't want to pay to upgrade from 3 to whatever version it is now

I don't know what your financial situation is, but given that the upgrade is an $80 one off payment (a new license is $99), that it's a per-user license (not per-machine), and that there were 8 years between Sublime Text 3 (2013) and Sublime Text 4 (2021) (only major versions require a new license), I personally think it's very reasonably priced.

Meekro 12 hours ago|||
Agreed-- Sublime is asking $99 right now, which is quite reasonable for something that you're going to use for hours a day in your professional work. Somebody gave many years of their life to make that tool the best it could be, and as a well-paid professional, I feel it's more than fair. In other high-end professions (like the legal field), I've heard of law firms paying a lot more than $99 for certain software licenses.

That said, there are a lot of reasons why someone might be struggling with money. If I was the creator, I wouldn't object to someone using an unlicensed copy forever in that case.

GuB-42 10 hours ago||||
It is "one time" in the sense that it will never stop working, unlike a subscription model.

You are however limited to 3 years of updates, so if you want to keep up to date, it is $80 for 3 years. Which if fine for me, it is the one piece of software I used the most except for the browser and OS, I even use it to make money, $80 / 3 years is not much.

It is also the kind of software I like to support. It is... respectful in that it isn't a resource hog, runs fast, launches fast, and it doesn't try to be anything but a text editor. No ads, no subscription, no cloud, no AI, no slop, no dark patterns, no enshittification. Just an executable that does what it say it will do, and does it well. I wish it was open source, but it works well enough out of the box to not need it.

nicoburns 10 hours ago||
Ah, you are correct. I thought a renewal was only required for a new major version after 3 years. But it's actually any update after 3 years. Which is still pretty reasonable (but not quite such a good deal)!
albedoa 8 hours ago||
I also thought that it was perpetual. Maybe they changed it. Either way, the three-year subscription is news to me.
nicoburns 7 hours ago||
It's perpetual for the version you buy. 3 years of updates.

And tbh, Sublime Text is pretty stable and the kind of program you could probably get away without updating for some time if you wanted to. Things like LSP support are in 3rd party packages (that are open source, not subject to the license), so you'd get updates for those anyway.

gozzoo 12 hours ago||||
I'm using the latest free/unregistered version (4200) and I haven't experienced any limitiation so far
ziml77 12 hours ago||
There isn't any other than the occasional message when you save that tells you to buy the product. It's about as close to freeware as a paid product can get.

I do suggest people pay though, it's cheap for a one-time purchase. The only reason I've ever seen the message at all is because I spent months being too lazy to dig up the license key to send to my work email. (That should also say something about how little I was being bothered by the message too)

8note 11 hours ago||
on paid 3, i get a popup every time i try to do anything telling me i must upgrade and pay again, so i've steadily just stopped using sublime. Didn't install it on the new computer
pverheggen 10 hours ago||
I don't like that it upgrades to ST4 without telling you, but there's a simple workaround if you want to continue using your ST3 license. Download the latest stable build of ST3 from their website:

https://www.sublimetext.com/3

And then add

  “update_check”: false
to your user settings.
giancarlostoro 11 hours ago|||
I can't justify upgrading Sublime if I don't even find myself using ST3 I just don't see what 4 offers that would entice me, and compared to Zed, I get way more out of it.
nh2 11 hours ago||||
I tried Zed last month but found that it uses high CPU usage even when idle (up to 50% of 1 core of my i7-7500U).

This is even higher CPU usage than my vscode causes.

Sublime does not do that; in fact it has 0% CPU usage when idle:

    sudo strace -fyp "$(pidof sublime_text)"
shows that Sublime issues no syscalls when idle, as it should be.

(Note, you need to either unfocus it so that the caret stops flashing, or switch from fading caret to fixed / non-fading caret, otherwise it necessarily has to do syscalls to draw itself.)

Zed spams syscalls even when its screen is entirely still:

    strace -fyp "$(pidof zed-editor)"
In fact Zed makes 800 syscalls per second when completely idle and unfocused.
nh2 11 hours ago|||
Syscall spamming is one of the main reasons why computers get slow when many apps are running.

Good software does not do that; when idle, it should only consume RAM, not CPU.

Aside: Browsers, and Electron, seem to always syscall-spam no matter what, which is probably a key reason why people feel that all Electron apps bog down their computers. When your computer gets faster, the software just does more syscall loops per second, for unchanged misery.

conartist6 5 hours ago||||
From what I recall they generally avoid caching anything and just try to repaint the whole UI really, really fast on every frame so I think that's the design.

It's like how a video game renders, which is their stated goal from the beginning.

I always thought their stated design goals were a bit... wonky.

chromadon 9 hours ago|||
I've found that some of the language servers can really grind up a storm but Zed itself is usually pretty lightweight.
nh2 8 hours ago||
Can you repro my finding?

I'm running on a Zed with only 1 empty text file in it. So language servers should not be in use.

How do you measure "pretty lightweight"?

netcoyote 49 minutes ago||||
I've tried a lot of editors, including Zed, and always come back to Sublime Text.

I use it every day. The #1 reason is because it never loses unsaved files (though I'm still working on breaking the habit of typing a few characters and pressing Ctrl-S). Column editing! Macros! Record/Playback! Configuration! Plugins! Responsiveness! Low resource utilization! Etc!

Why wouldn't I pay for it? I've bought all four versions. The author deserves to be paid.

I guess the question is: why don't you want to pay for it? Assuming here that you're a professional coder being paid a reasonable, US-equivalent salary. I understand not everyone fits that situation; plenty of us pirated software as starving college students / interns, folks in other countries don't get the same pay for the same work, etc.

We should all want to pay the authors of great software. We're on HN, which is a celebration of creating great code and awesome businesses.

"Pay him. Pay that man his money" - Teddy KGB

vunderba 12 hours ago||||
I finally moved off Sublime a few months ago because I wanted something open source and stumbled on KDE/kate. It's been a perfect substitute.

https://github.com/kde/kate

giancarlostoro 11 hours ago|||
Actually, I do like Kate, but Zed seems to give me the best of everything I want. It's like they know exactly what I want out of an editor, they provide way more than I need, but that is okay too.
vunderba 11 hours ago||
I think I need to give Zed another look. A while back, it seemed like they’d shifted gears toward prioritizing AI, and I lost interest because I was looking for a more pure IDE with solid LSP support, good debugging tools, and so on.
kstrauser 11 hours ago||
They've prioritized supporting AI for people who want to use it, but it's highly respectful of devs who don't want to.
sieve 11 hours ago|||
Kate is REALLY underrated. The UI is a bit meh, but it makes up for it in terms of features. It is actually a fantastic document editor. Don't really use it for coding.
daemin 1 hour ago||||
With Zed touting itself as an AI first editor, is it possible to completely disable all AI features so that you never have to look at the equivalent of a copilot icon ever again? I don't want to have to spend energy to actively ignore these things.
nacs 49 minutes ago||
I only installed it today for the first time but yes it does have a very prominent button to completely disable all AI.
Cthulhu_ 11 hours ago||||
The AI stuff was a lot more prominent in an earlier version, but they tweaked it a bit. It's the same with Warp forcing a login at first.

Jetbrains is a heavyweight IDE, but I'm not sure if the weight is worth the features it offers anymore, at least for the things I work on.

VS Code is also an IDE, but it's a bit easier on resources depending on what plugins you use and what you allow them to do. I've had combinations of plugins that caused my whole system to freeze up with too much memory usage because it spawned several Node processes each taking up multiple GBs of memory :/.

frizlab 12 hours ago||||
Given the price and the fact it’s a WinRAR-style model, I really don’t mind ST being paid.
Cthulhu_ 11 hours ago||||
I also loved / want to love ST but it seems its ecosystem has collapsed, a lot of plugins haven't had an update in over 5 years.
rolymath 9 hours ago||||
How much did you pay for doordash last month?
yieldcrv 12 hours ago|||
Oooh this is a thread about an IDE called Zed not a Typescript strict typing system called Zod

I was confused until here because I remember using Sublime until it went paid

ben-schaaf 12 hours ago||
Sublime Text has always been paid, it was never free.
hakunin 12 hours ago|||
I'm also sticking with Sublime for many years, and at this point it feels like it is some kind of old man stubbornness (like George R.R. Martin using WordStar 4.0 type thing). I don't know why its ergonomics for me have been just unbeatable. I gave others (VSCode and Zed) good weeks and months of configuring them to my liking and using them exlusively, and always returned to Sublime. All the AI stuff just runs on the side in the terminal (iTerm2 for me, but checking in on Ghostty sometimes too, waiting on them to figure out their minimal text brightness feature).
maratc 12 hours ago||
As you mentioned iTerm, you should also check out TextMate, the thing that Sublime Text was inspired by.
hakunin 11 hours ago||
I used TextMate prior to Sublime, but then I became into vim mode, which TM never got I believe.
frizlab 12 hours ago|||
Interesting! I tried Zed too, and not knowing Sublime, I switched to it instead after a while…

I’m not sure why though. I do not have the issue you do, but Sublime feels better.

WD-42 13 hours ago|||
You should be able to just turn off the language server. Go to the lightning bolt icon in the bottom bar, "Stop all servers" or just the PHP one lighting up your source code.
kitsune1 13 hours ago||
[dead]
progmetaldev 3 hours ago|||
I've worked with mostly PHP from this era, or at least developers that are from this era. The code still runs fine, and not having things like return types don't make the code less able to run (just not as easy to catch bugs).

I haven't used Zed, but can you choose the PHP version, or point to a PHP executable for warnings/errors? I know in VS Code, you point to the PHP executable for the version you are using, to catch errors. I haven't created a new PHP project in quite some time, but I did work on many older PHP projects, and never had this issue with VS Code. I suspect even if you don't go about it this way, there has to be configuration to specify what is and isn't an error vs. warning.

ibejoeb 11 hours ago|||
I love Zed, but I hear you. It's a very fast and capable editor with lots of IDE features, but it's lacking comfortable ways of tuning it for specific projects. (This is a problem with every general purpose, everything-to-everyone kind of IDE versus stack "native" IDEs that are geared toward the one true way of developing for particular target.) The configuration file structure is arcane, and it certainly not clear what the boundaries are between language feature configuration, LSPs, built-in and third-party code quality tools, etc.

I eat the cost of configuring it manually when I start up something new because it's just not that big of deal, even when you're like me, working across myriad languages and frameworks and organization with varying standards. It's not ideal, but it's not deal-breaker.

I do wish that there was a better way to definitively set it up a particular way and know that it is doing what you want it to do. I want something like presets/profiles. If I'm working with typescript, I want to be able to set it up to use a specific version of tsc, eslint, prettier; I also want to be able to create a different one with biome; I want it to work correctly whether I have my source in the project root or in a sub directory or in a monorepo tree.

Fairness to Zed: it is difficult to support all of these permutations, but I do think that they ought to be able to do something better to abstract these things and make the reusable.

pverheggen 11 hours ago||
The standard approach these days is to have all of those declared in a config file somewhere in your project. That way, other contributors (and the CI) can lint/format consistently.

Even if it's for solo projects, it's nice that you don't have to update them in lockstep. As in, you revisit an older repo, you don't get bombarded with squiggly lines from your latest user profile, instead you can upgrade it at your leisure.

ibejoeb 10 hours ago||
True, and not disputing that. Two points:

1. I want to be able to readily duplicate that configuration for another similar project.

2. It's not always appropriate to co-locate those specific files within the project source itself, especially within a source repository. Notable cases are if we're working on different platforms with different binary paths, or if we're not standardized on a particular editor. I should be able to configure my editor without polluting the common source.

dmix 12 hours ago|||
Had the same experience with a rails project, it injected an LSP+linter we don't use in our project and it has really annoying to figure out how to disable it in a settings. Having to debug an editor's settings JSON the first time you use it is not a good UX, it should be optional to enable it instead of assuming we want aggressive on-save linting/autoformatting (that the repo doesn't even have configuration files).
bigstrat2003 26 minutes ago|||
Zed felt it had the right to download, install, and run node.js without any permission just to run some LSP (which I don't even use). When I mentioned it here, the devs said that they felt that was fine because their priority was to make things seamless for users such that they don't have to install the LSP manually. Sublime Text, on the other hand, has never installed anything I haven't explicitly asked it to.

I'm sticking with Sublime Text, as its developers actually respect boundaries on my computer.

levkk 12 hours ago|||
This is just a language server problem. I'm sure you can configure whatever language server PHP is using to disable specific warnings, etc.
swiftcoder 12 hours ago|||
> I'm sure you can configure whatever language server PHP is using to disable specific warnings, etc

You may be able to do this by editing a language server-specific config file in whatever arcane syntax they decided to offer. But there isn't any editor support for configuring languages servers, so it's a bit of a lift for a newcomer who just wants to turn off some warnings

Meekro 9 hours ago||||
I think the application should own its dependencies and its default config. In this case, it felt to me like no one had really looked at them.
charcircuit 11 hours ago|||
Editors should take full responsibility of the user experience. The user should not have to care about the existence of language servers.
Perz1val 12 hours ago|||
We use intelphense with vscode and it's only mildly red (zf1 mutant project). It also understands stubs from phpstorm. Default lsp for Zed is phpactor and it was just an inferior experience compared to intelephense (free) in vs code last time I tried. Now there's even a guide for adding intelephense to zed, but I'm yet to try it out.
sieve 11 hours ago|||
I was using JetBrains for more than a decade. Then I got into Python as well and so was juggling between WebStorm, PyCharm, CLion and Intellij Idea. Zed has replaced the first three completely. Put the appropriate config file in project root for whichever LSP/linter/tool is running, and most of these warnings disappear.

Writing C in Zed is a wonderful experience. The LSPs surface errors in an manner that is very easy to view and edit.

My main issues with Zed are:

- Word-wrap: I prefer on-demand, and I haven't been able to figure out which setting triggers that. Of if it is even possible.

- Support for Devanagari and other scripts: I use it as a markdown editor to proofread old texts and it is inadequate for that purpose. Kate/Featherpad offers a superior experience for this, including the ability to zoom to see those visually difficult to parse conjunct consonants.

renticulous 10 hours ago|||
Going forward there will be one version of Jetbrains IDE and clion, webstorm, etc will be all just plugins.
vovavili 9 hours ago|||
I anticipate that Zed's rate of improvement will be faster that Jetbrains', a small team of highly competent developers always moves faster than a big business. I've been maining PyCharm/IDEA for years, but Zed has gotten so good that I already see few real reasons to come back.
andersonpico 9 hours ago|||
is this really the case ? I thought they had given up on fleet
mosdl 11 hours ago||||
A bit confused - Idea supports pythong and ts/js, why the need for three?
Sohcahtoa82 9 hours ago|||
> pythong

Glad I'm not the only one that frequently makes this typo.

kstrauser 8 hours ago||
You are not, I assure you.
sieve 11 hours ago|||
The UI is a bit different for each and I got used to the differences I guess. I have a lot of projects and I pick one IDE for each and then do not deviate from it.
andelink 2 hours ago|||
[dead]
sixtyj 12 hours ago|||
Sidenote: Sublime remembers all tabs even those unsaved. (Software update deletes this memory.)
askedrelic 11 hours ago|||
I use Sublime as a scratchpad and never save anything, so this is an important feature for me. It's worked flawlessly for years.

I've tried Zed several times like this and it continues to lose data.

ben-schaaf 11 hours ago||||
> Software update deletes this memory.

While there was a bug where the session was lost when updating, this was fixed years ago.

sixtyj 11 hours ago||
Great, good to know. Thanks. I wasn’t brave enough to test, so I hope you are a human not a dog that tries to prank me :))
nh2 11 hours ago|||
> Software update deletes this memory.

Are you sure? I believe Sublime preserves all your unsaved tabs even on update.

sixtyj 11 hours ago|||
Last time I have updated (half a year ago) it deleted tabs. And since that time I haven’t been brave enough to update it again as I have too many tabs unsaved :)
8note 11 hours ago|||
i lost all the open tabs last time i upgraded sublime.

burned once, twice shy; i wouldnt update without spending an hour making up names for random junk files

nh2 11 hours ago||
I have not lost any Sublime tab in 15 years (I have tabs this old).

Sublime also saves a backup of its state files next to the state files in your home dir, so you can restore in case anything ever goes wrong (e.g. bugs in the new version).

The .sublime_session state files are JSON, easy to read for a human.

> spending an hour making up names for random junk files

That is completely unnecessary. You can just backup the '.sublime_session' file that contains all that before an upgrade if you are worried. Sublime already stores all its state in 1 file; manually spreading that across N files seems unfun busywork. A quick web search reveals that by the way.

(I perpetually have 40 Sublime windows open, each one with tens to hundreds of tabs. My 'Auto Save Session.sublime_session' is 70 MB.)

sixtyj 10 hours ago||
It's a shame I didn't know that. Thanks.
lthi747 12 hours ago|||
It just doesn’t play bice with PHP, I always wanted to uniform my stack before with vscode, now with zed. But PHPStorm always win.

It really there is no realy good ide or tools for php

throwatdem12311 4 hours ago|||
I still stick with Sublime because when I give them money they haven’t given me reason to believe they’re going to waste that money putting in AI slop features I don’t want.
Nesco 9 hours ago|||
Same, I really want to like Zed but LazyVim covers my every need
thinkingtoilet 13 hours ago||
If you're using zed, couldn't you use AI to fix something like that? Those copy and paste type changes over a code base is something AI assistants are really good at.
Meekro 12 hours ago||
I could! I'd probably have to take it piece by piece, rather than telling an AI to edit hundreds of files in one epic session and hoping for the best. Even just reviewing a commit that large feels like it would be a bad use of time. Also, giving every variable a type (or using "mixed" everywhere), and giving every function a return type (more "mixed" or "void") would just make the code more verbose without any justification that I can see.

With Zed, I feel like I'm being dragged into a modern style guide that I never agreed to. It would be nicer if I could make it my own by turning off those parts that I disagree with and keeping the rest. I know this is technically possible, but they've certainly not made it easy.

kyleee 12 hours ago||
Have you investigated if the lsp and linter is configurable
LukaD 12 hours ago||
From what I can gather from a cursory glance at the docs, zed uses intelephense and its diagnostics can be disabled. The whole lsp can be disabled. At the risk of sounding like I'm saying "you're holding it wrong", I have to say that this is an OP problem and not a Zed problem. These are sensible defaults that work for almost everyone, in my opinion.
bmandale 7 hours ago||
There are no "defaults that work for everyone". Well designed tooling acknowledges that and makes it easy to tune the software to your preference.
jorgeleo 8 hours ago||
I was all for trying it until I saw this in the License Agreement:

"4.1. Zed's Use of Customer Data Customer hereby grants Zed a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable (except to service providers and Customer’s designees), non-transferable (except as set forth in Section 15.1) right to use, copy, store, disclose, transmit, transfer, display, modify, create derivative works from, collect, access, store, host, or otherwise process (“Process”) any materials that Customer inputs into or otherwise makes available to the Service (including prompts and other written content) (collectively, “Customer Data”) solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws. Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."

Sorry, no I don't agree to make my source code and the product I am working to give you "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable (except to service providers and Customer’s designees), non-transferable (except as set forth in Section 15.1) right to use, copy, store, disclose, transmit, transfer, display, modify, create derivative works from, collect, access, store, host, or otherwise process (“Process”) any materials that Customer inputs into or otherwise makes available to the Service (including prompts and other written content)"

meantub 8 hours ago||
Aren't you forgetting the part that says "solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws. Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."

Seems like legalese to be able to take that data for support reasons, telemetry, and local laws that require that data be sent to them. I think ignoring this portion is a little uncharitable to them.

coldtea 5 hours ago|||
>Aren't you forgetting the part that says "solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws

None of the above I like, and (a) is so vague as to be useless, including if you read the obligations.

>Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."

Companies still do it all the time despite "applicable laws". And when the company is sold, all bets are off.

I'd rather they don't get, or keep, any to begin with.

coldtea 5 hours ago|||
Apparently you can do:

  "telemetry": {
    "diagnostics": false,
    "metrics": false
  }
gpm 5 hours ago|||
The telemetry section of the TOS explicitly clarifies that that does not restrict their ability to use the data that is sent to them.

> Customer may configure the Software to opt out of the collection of certain Telemetry Processed locally by the Software itself, but Zed may still collect, generate, and Process Telemetry on Zed’s servers.

Note that they have (or did have, I haven't used their editor in awhile) an AI tab completion feature... it's safe to assume that all of the code you edit is sent to them at least when that is enabled.

coldtea 4 hours ago||
>The telemetry section of the TOS explicitly clarifies that that does not restrict their ability to use the data that is sent to them.

Hopefully it does restrict them being sent to them in the first place.

I also found there are a couple of "Chromium" style builds.

>Note that they have (or did have, I haven't used their editor in awhile) an AI tab completion feature... it's safe to assume that all of the code you edit is sent to them at least when that is enabled.

There's also an option to turn ai features off. At which point of course, nvim is just as good :)

rootnod3 2 hours ago|||
That should be off by default. That alone is a "I won't use this" for me.
piker 6 hours ago||||
I had the same thought but if you chase down the definition of "Telemetry" as well as unilateral amendment rights pointed out in sibling comments, there's some broad authority implied.
halJordan 6 hours ago||||
This is a bad faith take. The terms are modifiable without the customer's consent or knowledge so "pursuant to these terms" is meaningless.

No one needs all those rights to do what this block says it's going to do. Any one would require that block to be changed in any contract between equals. But this is a contract of adhesion, so it's uncharitable for you to demand charity where they withhold their charity

KPGv2 6 hours ago|||
Can you cite the passage that authorizes Zed to modify the terms without the user's consent? Before I retired, my job was, inter alia, writing software licenses. I was GC for a tech company. I'd like to validate what you're saying, bc I'm the author of a Zed plugin and I wrote a language grammar that another plugin uses.

I don't use Zed, but I occasionally consider switching.

Shadowmist 5 hours ago|||
16.4
nathanmills 6 hours ago|||
What makes you think it's bad faith?
makeitdouble 5 hours ago||||
None of that would require the "create derivative works" part.

I honestly can't see any legitimate reason why they'd have the right to derivate work from yours, and you don't insert that kind of terms by mistake.

mkl 2 hours ago|||
AI tab completion and agentic edits are often derivative works.
sdenton4 5 hours ago|||
Probably 'we reserve the right to train our next version of smart autocomplete based on the text you send to the current version of smart autocomplete'
svnt 4 hours ago||
Which is not different in kind from “we use your source code to improve our products” and is functionally identical to “we own your output because you use our editor.”

How do people continually fall for this. Refusing to look at the playbook that has been run time and time again and then getting offended when it is too late.

anvuong 5 hours ago|||
Why do you need to see what I'm writing in my IDE for telemetry?
jonhohle 5 hours ago||
I had a long conversation about this with Gemini this morning. I described the telemetry practices and Gemini told me about all the local and federal laws that were being violated. Then I mentioned it was telemetry, and it turned on a dime and said it was fine because the user agreed to it in the TOS. Disgusting.
gpm 8 hours ago|||
I'm not a lawyer, but the only part of this that seems objectionable is the "telemetry" bit, the rest of it basically seems to say "we can use things you send us to do the things you asked us to do, including for support purposes. We can comply with the law as necessary (e.g. responding to warrants)".

That said the definition of "telemetry" is so broad that I think it would include training a LLM and the like. Telemetry is defined in section 4.4 as

> Zed may collect, generate, and Process information, including technical logs, metrics, and data and learnings, related to the Software and Service (“Telemetry”) to improve and support the Services and for other lawful business purposes.

I guess that it's so opaque is also objectionable. Contracts don't have to be inscrutable.

seb1204 3 hours ago|||
Wow, so why not just write that instead of the legalese? Reads like an overjustification to me.
lowbloodsugar 5 hours ago||||
The problem is that I don’t send them anything. So it’s “we can use whatever of yours that the application we wrote sends to us”.
mwigdahl 5 hours ago|||
"Other lawful business purposes" sounds awfully close to "all lawful use".
mandeepj 7 hours ago|||
wait, there's more [copied from the top comment of their youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Bns1T77HM)] -

1. Mandatory arbitration by default. You waive your right to a jury trial and cannot join class action lawsuits. You have only 30 days to opt out after agreeing to the terms.

2. 1-year statute of limitations. You must file any legal claim within one year, which is much shorter than the default period under most state laws.

3. Zed can terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with no liability. No notice is required, and they owe you nothing if they pull the plug.

4. Autocomplete sends your code to AI providers in the background unless you turn it off. Worth knowing if you're working on proprietary or sensitive code.

5. No guarantees about data retention. If your payment lapses, they reserve the right to delete your account and all associated data with no liability.

6. All fees are non-refundable except where required by law, with one narrow exception for disagreeing with modified terms.

7. Zed can modify the terms at any time. For existing users, material changes take effect after just 30 days, and continued use counts as acceptance.

8. Zed can use your name, logo, and brand in their marketing without asking. You'd have to send a written request to stop them.

9. No warranties whatsoever. The service is "as is", they disclaim all responsibility for errors, data loss, or AI-generated output being inaccurate or harmful.

10. Liability is capped very low, at most, whatever you paid in the last 12 months, or $100, whichever is higher.

astafrig 2 hours ago|||
Some of these are questionable, but 3 and 5 stick out. Being included makes it sound like whoever wrote this list doesn’t really know what Zed is?

It’s a local text editor. The only thing an account gives you is access to their specific flavour of coding agent and a collaboration server.

> If your payment lapses, they reserve the right to delete your account and all associated data with no liability.

Pretty much the only associated data is your payment info.

marshray 4 hours ago||||
Yeah, screw that.

I am literally shopping for a new editor. A once-a-decade thing for me. I want something that can effectively sandbox local models for code gen.

So I was looking at Zed yesterday. Cloned the repo. Then I noticed they were funded by our favorite VCs.

Between this and CVE-2026-31431 ("Copy Fail"), it seems like I dodged a bullet.

jeena 10 minutes ago|||
What I do is to have two things, a simple editor, I use helix for normal editing. And in a second terminal a docker container solution where I put opencode or claude in https://git.jeena.net/jeena/agent-container
komali2 3 hours ago|||
By sandbox you mean limit to certain files, certain actions, or both?

I've been wanting to look into better emacs integration for agents. Imagine an agent making direct elisp function calls, or using macros... One could limit which functions are allowed to run similar to how cli harnesses work, but plug straight into LSP and etc.

Andrex 3 hours ago||||
Why does a text editor have such a defensive license? This is extreme and reckless levels of paranoia.

Zed devs reading this: just release it as GPL. It will be better for literally everyone.

Nevin1901 4 hours ago|||
These are all fairly standard terms.... nothing crazy
shimman 4 hours ago|||
lol those are extremely anti-consumer and anti-human behaviors. Some of us don't want to live in a corporate hell holes.
OccamsMirror 3 hours ago||
Yes, but the companies want to reserve the right to turn evil later.
komali2 3 hours ago|||
Is it? My editor's terms of service seem much more user friendly:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

aljaz823 8 hours ago|||
I understand that differently. The last part of the statement is important I think. It reads as if this grants them the right to "Process" "Customer Data": 1. to perform its obligations, including support obligations, 2. to perform telemetry, 3. when required by law.

This is sensible, no?

nomel 8 hours ago||
> when required by law

Suggests there's a longer term storage, available for hackers.

LinXitoW 7 hours ago||
There doesn't have to be storage, NSA could always just force them to add it in later without telling you. Like every single USA company.
jacobsenscott 7 hours ago|||
Can't you just build the source and run it without giving them any information? Or does the editor itself require information and phone home while running?
marshray 3 hours ago|||
Initializing the http client is one of the very first things this text editor does in "app.run()": https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/a7c9c24f40d7e9169... Line 497 suggests it fails without it.

There are hundreds of references to http requests in the source tree, though most seem associated with calling particular AI model providers.

This looks to be the telemetry struct: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/a7c9c24f40d7e9169...

It appears to crawl your worktrees collecting an inventory of the types of projects you have and is interested in certain named files specificaly: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/a7c9c24f40d7e9169...

xpe 3 hours ago|||
1. Yes, Zed is open source, you can build it yourself.

2. Telemetry defaults to on. So turn off telemetry as explained at https://zed.dev/docs/telemetry#configuring-telemetry-setting...

    "telemetry": {
        "diagnostics": false,
        "metrics": false,
    },
fittingopposite 7 hours ago|||
You made me curious. Found this fork https://github.com/zedless-editor/zedless Wdyt?
still_grokking 2 hours ago|||
Wasn't that legalize the reason Gram got created?

https://gram.liten.app/

nextaccountic 3 hours ago|||
Is Zed open source or not?

If it's open source it can't have a license agreement to use the software itself

Or is this an agreement to use some cloud service? Supposedly you can opt to not use it

Elsewhere people said that "even if you disable telemetry, Zed can still collect telemetry" but, it being open source means you're still in control

No open source license can force you to run misfeatures

uneekname 8 hours ago|||
Oof. Is this for the software itself or their add-on LLM subscription?
lokar 3 hours ago|||
Why would they have your code in the first place?
aljgz 4 hours ago|||
Curious, how does this compare to the editor you use?
desireco42 8 hours ago|||
Yeah this really makes you wonder... now, they are to best of my knowledge fantastic people, so I guess some lawyer slipped this in. I would love to hear some clarification and will always give them benefit of the doubt.

So far they've been great and product is fantastic as you know.

bigbadfeline 7 hours ago||
> now, they are to best of my knowledge fantastic people,

They could be the next "don't do evil" people but practice shows that doesn't last for long. And then the messy license terms become very handy for what comes next.

If they went to the trouble to specify all of their rights over your data, their glossing over about what they can do with it is a solid reason to push for complete clarity or pull out completely.

ouraf 5 hours ago|||
I encourage you to mail them specifically about this concern.

If it is a matter of communication, they can fix and clarify it. If it's genuinely scummy, they can change their approach now that they know they were caught in the act

yobid20 3 hours ago|||
wouldn't touch this editor with a 10 foot pole. no i am not giving them the rights to use my code for their product. hell no. thanks for highlighting this. people need to making a bigger deal about it. maybe they will rethink their tos.
sneak 5 hours ago|||
Any local editor that includes any sort of telemetry whatsoever is an instant nonstarter for me.

What’s local stays entirely and totally local, always and every time, otherwise what’s the point?

xpe 3 hours ago|||
This language fits common SaaS templates. Let me illustrate by removing chunks and labeling them:

    Customer hereby grants Zed
    {{ broad list of rights }}
    solely:
    {{ for these purposes }}
IANAL, but the term "solely" seems essential to understanding this. Pivotal. As in "if you get it wrong, you'll be wearing a tinfoil hat" essential.

Also see "4.4. Telemetry: .... For avoidance of doubt, Telemetry expressly does not include Customer Data."

My two cents: I'm not worried about Zed's contract here. Much more important to pay attention to when your data goes to third-party AI providers: read _their_ contract language.

Meta-comment: Don't let a well-meaning comment like the above trigger a panic. Better to get familiar with typical contracts and/or build your personal network for legal advice.

P.S. Look out for shameless legal slop on the Web, I "promise.legal" it is out there.

Razengan 3 hours ago|||
Oh no.. fuck them, not this shit again..

With AI being so good why isn't someone making fully open source alternatives to all this crap by now?

Oh Zed is open source, maybe Codex/Claude can make a VSCodium-like fork off it?

xpe 2 hours ago|||
The comment above has started a sh-tstorm. Please, slow down and learn about the details before jumping to conclusions. Most of us here did NOT "go pro" in the law. [1] For those that want to educate themselves, you could do worse than immediately leave HN and go _learn_:

1. SaaS Agreements: Key Contractual Provisions https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/bu...

2. Cornell Law School's Wex: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex

3. Coursera : American Contract Law I (Yale prof): https://www.coursera.org/learn/contracts-1

4. Software as a Service (SaaS) Agreements: Thomson Reuters/Westlaw (paywalled; trial available) https://content.next.westlaw.com/practical-law/document/I61c...

If anyone has good detailed resources that are free, please add.

[1] IANAL but I wasn't that far from going down that path. I've worked for a legal-tech startup, did really well in an undergrad Constitutional Law class, incorporated several small companies, managed lots of contractor agreements. So, I know from experience: legal language is weird and specific in ways you may not realize. So be intellectually humble and defer judgment until you talk to a legal expert. Hopefully people more experienced than I can weigh in with more specifics.

coldtea 5 hours ago|||
[dead]
Hilliard_Ohiooo 3 hours ago||
Please don't be a buzz kill. Probably agreed to something 10 times worse just by using this website and whatever device you're visiting on.
f311a 13 hours ago||
Too bad they did not include better search UI into this release.

When you search, Zed opens a new tab, which I hate. Sometimes I just want to have a quick glance at some code and close the search using escape.

Telescope style search in vim, helix or JetBrains tools is so much better.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/46478

pastel8739 12 hours ago||
Huh, I absolutely love Zed’s search UI. I just navigate back to my previous tab with ctrl-o when I’m done
WD-42 11 hours ago|||
Same, and then sometimes I navigate back to it again when I need it. The multi-cursor edit in the search results is a thing a beauty as well.
zamalek 11 hours ago|||
I love it too, but instantly knew it would be polarizing the first time I used it :)
chuckadams 13 hours ago|||
Whereas I'm not a great fan of modals for anything where I'd like to refer back to what I'm working on. I guess I'd just prefer some tabs to open as a split by default and close with esc, maybe call them something like "ephemeral tabs"? Basically, steal some ideas from emacs.
tensegrist 13 hours ago|||
in emacs with embark you can export the contents of an ephemeral buffer into a persistent one, which is the best of both worlds and more besides

for file search, edit in the persistent buffer can rename files

for grep, edits in the persistent buffer edit across files

and so on

f311a 13 hours ago|||
Tabs will still be supported. Also, when you search for references, it also opens a new tab, even when all references are in the same file.
chuckadams 12 hours ago||
That definitely sounds subpar to me. I suppose there's still a reason to keep paying for an IDEA Ultimate subscription.
Aldipower 12 hours ago|||
This. I tried Zed for an entire month, but this "search thing" drove me nuts. It is also slow. If you work in a large project search is absolutely essential. Too bad.. Back to Visual Studio Code.
iknowstuff 10 hours ago||
They both use ripgrep, weird for it to be slower? Especially with the multibuffer it's more pleasant to use
Aldipower 9 hours ago||
IDK if both use ripgrep it is even more strange why it's so slow in Zed.
jeppester 12 hours ago|||
I love the search in zed. If it was up to me it would open a new tab on every search rather than reusing the same tab, so that I didn't have to redo past searches.

The multibuffer result is so nice for "hands-on" search and replace.

frio 5 hours ago|||
I use the television task described here (https://zed.dev/blog/hidden-gems-part-2) for that experience :)
cowboy_henk 13 hours ago|||
Agreed, this is the main reason why I keep switching back to other editors.
leshenka 9 hours ago|||
I can’t relate to that, I’ve also struggled with this decision for quite some time, but I’ve gotten used to it. What I hate is that it doesn’t open several search tabs if I need to look for several things at once.
malcolmgreaves 12 hours ago|||
> Sometimes I just want to have a quick glance at some code and close the search using escape.

How else are you going to have “a quick glance at code” *across* project files without using a new view for that? It sounds like you’re describing something impossible.

Zed’s across files search solves this in a similar way as other tools. Except that in zed you can also edit the code where your search results show up. Zed also has within file search.

atombender 10 hours ago|||
Look at how Jetbrains IDEs do it. It's a solved UX problem, as far as I'm concerned.

Jetbrains opens up a lightweight floating panel which can also be docked. So you can choose how to view the results. Like Zed, the results view is live editable, even when searching across multiple files.

The floating panel mode is good because you can do a quick search, look at it, and just whisk it away with one key. Opening results as a tab isn't terrible, but mixes one UI (search, very ephemeral) with another (editing, less ephemeral). (Zed also has this thing where search results also show in the right-hand side panel, which I've always found confusing.)

Another thing Jetbrains does better here is to remember your search settings. Your last search is always the default, whereas Zed forgets it every time. Jetbrains also has really nice file scoping via a dropdown, so it's very quick to search all non-test files, for example.

Zed keeps stealing great features from Jetbrains, so I'm sure it's just a matter of time before this gets better.

f311a 11 hours ago|||
Just look at the PR, it's shows how it will look like. It's modal instead of a persistent tab.
masklinn 12 hours ago|||
> When you search, Zed opens a new tab, which I hate.

You also have to validate the search, it doesn't start off immediately on its own, which annoys me a lot more.

gnufied 12 hours ago|||
I know not much about Zed and I am curious, can such changes be implemented via extensions?
moritzruth 11 hours ago||
No, Zed's extension API is very limited at the moment. In particular, it does not allow adding any new GUI elements.
whalesalad 13 hours ago|||
That was og sublime/textmate behavior that I grew to miss with vscode, so was pleasantly surprised to see it exists in Zed.
selfawareMammal 7 hours ago|||
I feel you. Same here.
smashah 12 hours ago||
yeah its quite silly they decided to mess around with this universally standard behaviour. The search is the reason why i always end up going back to other vs code based IDEs for real work. I open zed for perf reasons and something quick.

Also now they've introduced this "agent first" layout which i cannot undo. They're strength is in perf, idk why try to reinvent the wheel w.r.t DX.

cassianoleal 10 hours ago||
> Also now they've introduced this "agent first" layout which i cannot undo

You can just collapse the sidebar with the agentic stuff.

inickt 12 hours ago||
I'd love to see the Alacritty terminal backend swapped out with libghostty (or more likely libghostty-rs). The work Mitchell is doing with Ghostty and the approach Zed has taken seem super aligned.

And Mitchell definitely seems to want to make Alacritty an easy target for conversion, he was just talking about being open to help support Warp with it: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2049159764261925005

avarun 12 hours ago||
Looks like Mitchell said he's already on it https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2049514540505964549
inickt 12 hours ago||
He gave me a quick response, should have checked back before posting here
arijun 12 hours ago||
What is Ghostty's advantage over Alacritty?
inickt 11 hours ago|||
I think Mitchell outlined his vision for libghostty pretty well here: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming

Alacritty is already pretty performant (relative to a lot of the other terminal emulators), but my read is Ghostty has been going hard over performance/standards/protocols (like Kitty).

iammrpayments 11 hours ago||||
The maintainer doesn’t have bad temper.
arijun 10 hours ago||
I did consider that. I remember nope-ing out of alacritty in the early days after seeing the developers response to people requesting a scrollback buffer. It amounted to something like "I use tmux, and if you don't, you use the terminal wrong." It left a bad taste in my mouth.
maxnoe 11 hours ago|||
One would be support for ligatures
zamalek 11 hours ago|||
Ligatures are a renderer issue, so using alacritty as a lib wouldn't have this issue (it does demonstrate their hardline stance). Another example that would translate is how long it took them to support disambiguation of key combinations: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6378 (2019-2023). Of course, the maintainers are free to do whatever they want with the project - but such things do make alacritty-as-a-lib an exceptionally bad choice for situations where you want things to just work.
LucasOe 10 hours ago|||
The Zed terminal already supports ligatures.
poetril 12 hours ago||
I quite like Zed, I've consistently driven it for months at a time. But there are two things that add enough friction that over that month or so I end up bailing back to one of my other editors (vscode/neovim). The search experience being a new tab with no sidebar option and the diff viewer being a multibuffer view with no option to see the entire contents of a file you are diffing.

That being said, I love the software and will continue to check back on it with the hopes that it sticks one day. Congrats on the 1.0!!

tacitusarc 11 hours ago|
These are also two of my primary gripes.

There has been substantial improvement, but the search and symbol follow UX is really bad. Hoping the fix that.

alternatex 13 hours ago||
The only thing that bothers me about Zed is the theme. It's so bland it actually gives me reading difficulties. I'd be surprised if some of the color combinations don't pose an accessibility issue. Grey text on grey background is quite the choice.
Enpece 13 hours ago||
I do agree that Zed's default themes aren't great. They look too 'plain' for my taste. Bit more contrast can't hurt either.

BUT: It's very easy to just choose a different theme and there are plenty to choose from by now. It's even possible to make your own theme and they even have a first-party theme editor (https://zed.dev/theme-builder) which works great. They should maybe include some descriptions for each color instead of just the name but that's the only negative thing I can say right now.

I'd even say that it's easier to theme Zed than VSCode because there are fewer variables.

alternatex 12 hours ago||
Thank you for the tips. I didn't know it was possible to install other themes as extensions.
Lapel2742 11 hours ago||
There is also https://zed-themes.com/ with theme previews.
watt 12 hours ago|||
And the icons are too small. It's vaguely a mystery meat navigation.
tfrancisl 13 hours ago|||
As far as I can tell you can theme nearly everything in the app. I've got custom colors for diffs and some syntax, and my base theme is ripped from Monokai.
dmix 11 hours ago|||
Cursor has the best default dark theme IMO

It also has a much better edit prediction model than Zed

yard2010 9 hours ago||
Personally Cursor feels like a vibe coded slop these days, I canceled the subscription and went back to vscode with AI features off. Claude Code is my third hand and that's it. I need to try Zed though, I remember Atom changed the way I use text editors, I'm certain Zed will provide the same experience.
raverbashing 13 hours ago||
[flagged]
OnionBlender 12 hours ago||
I found it funny when an American customer support person I was talking to over the phone had no idea what "zed" meant. I was reciting some code and they asked, "what is zed"? I said, "uh, the last letter of the alphabet".
Sohcahtoa82 9 hours ago||
If you really wanna confuse them, use "Zulu". Unless they have exposure to military or aviation, they'll have no idea what you're talking about.

Fun related anecdote, my wife works in a medical lab and occasionally has to call a doctor to report critical values. She frequently uses the NATO phonetic alphabet (her dad was Navy) for patients with names that are hard to pronounce or have an odd spelling (Who names their kid "Heathyr?"), and one time, the nurse taking the note actually filed a complaint against her for using "weird" words to spell out a name.

entropyneur 10 hours ago|
I've tried switching from JetBrains IDEs just a few days ago. The speed and memory footprint are very impressive. I ended up badly missing refactorings and some other features and configuring a debugging session looked like something that needs more time than I had on my hands. So went back for now. I hope they add more IDE features eventually. There's not much a pure text editor can offer over Emacs after all. But this announcement sounds like they are prioritizing agents integration - the same thing that seemingly made JetBrains drop the ball on their core advantages.
steve-atx-7600 2 hours ago||
no emacs key bindings??? Makes me taking this is another hipster text editor that isn’t “an ide” (vscode)
atraac 9 hours ago|||
Was in the same boat. I ended up not using Zed because it had a bunch of minor quirks that annoyed me but I moved to vscode. I primarily write Typescript and C# these days. I was a JetBrains fanboy for years and it feels way too bloated now, stuff notoriously hangs or takes too long on my M3 Pro. I also love Claude Code integration with vscode just a bit too much to give it up for CLI.
DangitBobby 7 hours ago||
Zed's CC integration is really good now.
wiseowise 9 hours ago||
JetBrains should really start investing into porting to Rust/C++ over their bootleg Java.
DangitBobby 7 hours ago||
Seriously. I love the IDE but given that my idle workload of Electron apps and Docker Desktop VM brings my discretionary allotment of RAM down from 32GB to 8GB, I have absolutely no headroom when running JetBrains IDEs so I keep them closed unless there's a specific feature I want.
dhosek 3 hours ago||
What OS are you running? I currently have three Jetbrains IDEs open on my MacBook (M3 Max/36GB) and don’t notice any issue (although I don’t have any electron apps running which probably helps).
DangitBobby 2 hours ago||
MacOS. I have Slack, Teams (different clients use different chat apps), Notion, Docker Desktop VM, several browser tabs, some corporate machine management stuff, and probably some things I'm forgetting about, all open all the time.
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