The Zed Debugger Is Here

I'm very happy to see work on the debugger. This is the main feature preventing me from switching full time to zed.

Unfortunately, "here" is not accurate. Not having a watch window, a stack trace view, and no mention of data breakpoints in the announcement still keeps the "beta" tag. I know those features will arrive eventually, but what is described is definitely not sufficient for 97% of my debugging sessions.

I would also have liked to see more in the announcement of multiple simultaneous debug sessions, and on how multithreaded debugging is planned. There are really cool things that can be done with multithreaded debugging further down the line that I'd be interesting in hearing about (like how RemedyBG has a DAW-like UI for freezing certain threads, or hitting one button to "solo" a thread and freeze all others).

I have to try out the debugger yet. However I share your sentiment but for the Git feature. The basics are there but it is just not complete yet to fully replace my current git workflow. Hope they keep focus on that as well.

Nothing has been able to replace Magit for me, yet. Having a Zed UI for Git like Magit is my dream feature request.

With that said, Zed has effectively replaced all of Emacs for me, besides Magit. Additionally, typing in other editors feels noticeably higher latency than Zed :)

I've been daily driving Zed for almost a year now -- works best on TypeScript, Rust, and Go projects, in my opinion.

There's just so much functionality Zed has to build out to compete with modern editors (agentic coding, collaboration, debugging, edit prediction, task runners, version control). With that said, for pair-programming sessions with friends, Zed has been perfect since Linux gained screenshare support. However, there's a noticeable "pause in development" for collaboration in order to implement major features like Agentic Coding, and smaller-but-essential features like direnv integration, IME support (typing Japanese in the terminal used to be a clunky, error-prone task), dealing with the endless permutations of Python tooling so that Python files aren't a sea of red lines, etc.

Zed reminds of the days when Atom was big.

It was a good time, but it always left me wondering how long it would last as it leaned heavily on community support for nearly everything useful outside a few packages

Such a situation makes me worry about it keeping up if popularity wanes. With JetBrains for example at least I know that paying for the editor it will keep getting proper updates and support even if it isn’t the most popular (though it is quite popular currently)

You can pay for Zed too. I am.

Paying for zed isn’t the same as paying for extensions to be well maintained. They’re not all in house