The Zed Debugger Is Here

Ever since Linux support came out (2 years ago?), I go to check if they, finally, support “non-retina” “LoDPi” (a.k.a: a regular screen) yet, and sadly no :/

It's an ugly workaround, but if you install BetterDisplay (it's a free tool) and set your LoDPI screen to HiDPI, text rendering looks good.

They don’t support windows, they don’t support regular screens on Linux… are they a Mac shop basically?

Oh I'll have to try that. Zed looks woeful on my 1440p monitor when I was trying it at work, which is a shame because I quite like it otherwise.

The unofficial builds for Windows are good.

https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds

Installing the 'stable' build with scoop works a treat.

Most startups are

Using it daily on my 1920x1200 laptop screen in Linux and works just fine.

Using it with regular screen in Linux, works just fine.

Yes. Originally they were Mac-only, then they went open-source and the community added support for Linux and Windows, but AFAICT they've never invested in anything but Mac

In what way? I e been using it on my 1440p for over a year and it looks fine. Am I missing something?

On my system (Linux, 4k display without scaling) the fonts look awful, but bumping up the font weight more or less fixes it.

Are you using dark mode? To me, text looks absolutely awful in light mode, but okay in dark mode. Still noticeably worse than any other editors, though.

It's so incredibly frustrating. Text rendering is the primary feature of a code editor, but no one on the Zed team seems to use a non-retina screen.

Github issue for context: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

Zed developers themselves acknowledge the blurry font issue [1], so either you just don't notice blurry fonts or 1920x1200 on a small laptop screen is HiDPI-enough to kinda hide the blurriness.

My desktop monitor is 1920x1080. On my computer and display; Vim, Emacs and VSCode are all able to render their fonts crisply while Zed is a blurry mess.

[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992

This may be it.

I use it in dark mode and I am considerably less picky about font rendering than many people commenting on such threads.

Combined, while I can see a difference if I look closely, it doesn't bother me.

> but no one on the Zed team seems to use a non-retina screen

This is not that surprising to me. Surely no-one wants to spend their day looking at the pixels?

If nice monitors were free, sure. Sadly nice monitors cost money. When I worked office jobs, hidpi displays were rarely available.

I like looking at pixels as long as those pixels look good. Zed's pixels look awful.

The core team built Linux support and we're starting to work on Windows as well

Via Scoop:

  scoop bucket add extras
  scoop install extras/zed

It works really well on Windows, haven't had any problems, nor with any extensions.

And do what the the few devices with perfectly fine 1080 or 1440p displays? Just throw them away?

My laptop display is fine. My desktop's 1440p is blurry, any external display at the office is blurry. So what? use Zed on my laptop when I'm using the built-in display, then switch editors if I'm switching monitors?

Lucky you. It's very blurry. For me I open any other text editor next to it and immediately realize where that headache was coming from.

It’s blurrier, all UI elements and text, compared to every other editor and IDE on my machine

I can't remember the last time I touched a hi-DPI display. They really aren't that common still, even in technical office environments - regular 1440p or 4K ~150 PPI displays work just fine.

E: Actually, I suppose my Samsung counts. But the point stands w.r.t. "real computer" displays.