Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limited understanding, none of the existing alternatives offer anything (and often misses at least something) truly innovative or anything else that VSCode extension wouldn't solve. On VSCode I have about 15 different profiles setup, each with different settings and dozens of extensions based on either a technology stack or a project - it would be really difficult to find a good reason to throw it all away. The idea of switching between IDEs does not appeal to me either. I do use Neovim a little bit too, but most of that usage time was spent on configuration.

It's really interesting point of view. I'm one of those people who avoid using VSCode at any cost. It's slow, it's bloated, the UI is not great, and it's slowly being locked down by Microsoft.

If Zed would not exist, I would be using helix, neovim, or emacs as I did before.

I think the point of ACP being an open protocol is so that other editors (e.g. VSCode, Neovim) can implement it as a receiver and integration with ClaudeCode/GeminiCLI/... would just work.

I had to use VSCode for some projects in the past because it was what was available on the clients workstations... I can't imagine having to use that laggy electron abomination all the time. For me Zed is sent from heaven, because my previously preferred editor (geany) hast basically zero developtment nowadays.

It’s not at all slow when compared to IntelliJ products or similar. It doesn’t compete with editors, it competes with IDEs.

Zed's main selling point over VSCode for me is the lack of a slight delay between when I press a key and when the character appears.

VSCode has always felt ever so slightly sluggish to me, and I find it maddening as I type.

I normally care a ton about latency and in the main project I work on I put extreme focus on reducing input latency in text input fields, but...

I've used VS Code for ages. I tried Zed. I don't really feel a difference. It's smoother but VS Code is more than smooth enough for me and has tons of features I rely on that don't exist in dev.

Meanwhile, when I tried Ghostty I noticed a significant improvement in "typefeel" compared to iTerm. So I'm not immune to detecting such a difference.

I will try Zed again though.

I switched to Neovim a year ago, and while I did spend a significant amount of time on configuring it, I haven't touched my config for months now - and I'm perfectly happy with it. There's things I can improve, but it does what I want.

I am sure some would have said the same about why would anyone switch to using Linux when there was Microsoft Windows.

>>I don't really feel a difference.

>>It's smoother but...

There is always a "better mousetrap", and there are those that continue to use the old one because they "know how it works and it's set up just the way I like it". And there are others that try every new mousetrap that hits the market. (and that's ok, not slighting either one)

I will say that I personally have never really gelled with VSCode no matter how much I try to customize it, it still is just a bit off. For me, it's like it's too much to be a simple editor like SublimeText or NeoVim, but not quite enough to be an IDE like IntelliJ or Visual Studio (full). It does just enough that I expect a bit more of it and it often fails to deliver. Right now I tend to just use 2 editors - one very simple one for viewing/editing text files and one IDE (currently IntelliJ) for coding in a project.

On topic - Zed is actually a really nice editor. It had some rough edges last time I tried it, but it's probably about time to give it another go.

I’m in the same boat. I spent a lot of nights for a couple weeks getting everything tuned just right, in the beginning. But now, several years later, it really doesn’t take much. I spend maybe 2-3 hours once every few months, and that’s usually just adding a bunch of features that sound nice to make my life better. I’ve easily gone 6+ months without touching neovim config, if not longer, because it’s unnecessary. It only matters if you want to further improve your editor

So glad to hear I'm not alone! I continue to use SublimeText for this reason. Yet it doesn't seem to bother others.

Interestingly I disagree with all your points about VSCode.

It's fast, barebones by default, UI is minimal and it's Open Source enough that competitors forked from it.

I guess YMMV because there is a comment in this post from another user about Zed being sluggish.

I tried VSCode many times in my life and just hated the experience so much. It put me away from GUI editors for years, didn't want to try any of them. So ugly and so sluggish.

Zed was the first one that put me to rethink my position. It is so snappy on my Linux workstation and I don't have any issues with it's GUI. I finally switched from vim et.al.

But I know I have "weird" opinions, I also really dislike Apple products and their software.

Especially now that Windows has WSL. You can even open GUI Linux apps just as if they were regular apps.

VSCode is actually not slow. The problem is to make it useful you need to add quite a few extensions, and those can be slow. That itself wouldn't be too bad but VSCode doesn't expose any information about what is causing the slowness. You end up with "VSCode is slow and it could be due to any one of the dozen extensions I have installed", which effectively means that VSCode is slow.

It remains to be seen if Zed can avoid that though.

Weird, I tried it recently and found it actually a bit laggier than VSCode. The rendering is much worse quality too.

Are you using Vim mode or something like that?

I use zed when I need to quickly edit something, it pops up so fast- everything else feels sluggish.

vscode started to intermittently freeze my whole desktop on arch linux recently. I rage deleted it. imho, it’s a valid compromise to choose a snappy lightweight editor over vscode with all available extensions.

sadly it reminds me of how visual studio used to be and and how much of a sluggish mess it is today. I don’t think the community can fix it either. it’s an uphill battle when MS is known to lose care as soon as they reach a critical mass of users.

Yeah, but you still have to deal with all the other Windows shit.

VSCode (and all Electron based editors) have undeniable input latency. Zed is built by the same team that developed Atom and Electron and one of their stated goals is to make up for the shortcomings of these technologies.

If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it.

VS Code is sluggish for me as well and crashes. I have minimal expansions, this is just a poor excuse for a lousy editor. Zed is much better, neovim is much better. My only real concern with Zed is what bait-and-switch is awaiting for us when they decide to make money. But it's a fantastic editor, no question about that.

This is why I cannot switch to neovim despite my attempts. I love the workflow, but the delay is too noticeable for me, and nothing helps. It's not a long delay, but long enough for me to feel like I have to wait for hours compared to Zed.

I think a lot of people forget how long ago Electron/Atom were released, and the subsequent Cambrian explosion of Electron based apps and editors like VSCode. There's probably a huge amount of developers that haven't used anything else.

Even not counting the LSP, for a text editor, it eats quite large amount of RAM.

I begrudgingly gave up vim mode in vscode a few years ago, because that seemed to make it so much more sluggish.

>If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it.

I don't think this is a fair claim. When you start doing an apples to apples comparison, that is to say make full use of IDE and auto-completion features it's difficult to see a difference given that the latency and speed of the plugins starts to dominate any millisecond difference in input latency or rendering speed.

Zed succeeds at reducing the switching cost. I used NeoVim for ten years daily and configured it way back in college days.

I thought I would be unable to move to a GUI editor and it turns out that the speed and efficiency of Zed plus the almost one-to-one mapping of Vim features means that I am extremely productive in Zed.

vscode is noticeably slow compared to sublime text or zed, even without any extension. You instantly notice it when switching files or typing things that trigger auto-completions.

In the end the feeling is drastically different. It weirdly makes for a more peaceful experience to have such a snappy editor.

vscode wins thanks to all its extensions, where basically every language is supported and most features you can think of are there. But it's kinda like modern react. You know better alternatives exist, like solid or svelte, but the community is so big, it stays the easier choice in the end.

No. When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately. All other IDE features like auto-completion happen asynchronously.

I wanted to like VSCode but it has enough input latency on my machines that it's not that enjoyable when I'm "locked in". Also if I'm running a bunch of services in Docker on MacOS (which means they're running VMs sigh) the overhead of VSCode is just too much and the system starts swapping constantly grinding the whole thing to a halt. I also find configuring it a pain. Every configuration pane feels ad-hoc and not part of a holistic, configurable system. Emacs has lots of crusty bits and an annoying event loop that you have to really work around but is designed a lot more holistically than VSCode.

Zed to me feels like a great batteries-included editor and I still run it as my non-emacs alternate editor. I wish its configuration was a bit more discoverable (especially with configuring linters/formatters), but it's 95% of what I need 95% of the time.

> When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately.

Seems to work the same for me in VSCode, CLion, and nvim. I don't doubt that you have issues with it (I've experienced slow editors & laggy input, it sucks) but I don't think it's inherent to VSCode. Doesn't mean it's not a bug, but if I had that issue I'd try with no extensions to verify, then binary search disabling the extensions I want until I find the one causing the lag.

>All other IDE features like auto-completion happen asynchronously

in the technical sense, but you as a developer don't use auto-completion asynchronously. It's not like you autocomplete and continue typing and then come back to the completion. When you complete at point you have wait. Whether that keypress takes 2 or 3 milliseconds isn't going to make a difference when the inter-process communication of your editor and its services is magnitudes slower. It's not like programming is like playing an FPS game. You're not in any meaningful sense limited by your mechanical input speed.

Same here, still using Sublime Text due to its general snappiness, but can't wait for Zed to be released on Windows, it feels like a modern successor to ST that just keeps getting better.

Strange.

I just opened the same project in Cursor and Zed and started typing around, and I can't tell any difference. I am usually very sensitive to this stuff; for example, I can detect when my Mac drops below 20% battery because ProMotion is disabled and the screen refresh rate drops to 60Hz.

It sounds like you haven't tried Jetbrains IDEs. I understand still preferring VsCode in that case, but I think you would be saying "I prefer VsCode" vs "I don't see a reason". A big con with JB is they are very slow. The upside is that they manage multi-file projects, refactoring, and introspection far better than VsCode.

You can actually open the text tools on discord and see what's taking up memory and CPU.

They also have a new feature that's experimental that lets you offload extensions to a separate extension host so they don't block on the main thread for poorly designed or performing extensions.

It's definitely not slow in its default for .

Are you telling me that it was a delay when you type in vscode? If so, either your configuration or computer is doing something wrong

I've never once experienced delayed input typing even with a lot of extensions

My experience is the exact opposite

Vscode has never had any input delay for me

How big was his project bc I've never had any input away and I've worked on some pretty good size projects.

Are you using an old computer or something?

It's super noticeable on a high refresh display. VSC is like playing a video game at 20FPS.

Vanilla settings on a high end gaming PC.

Ironically, I used JetBrains products for years before switching to VS Code because the latter felt so much faster. So it definitely depends on what you're used to.

Zed feels significantly faster than VS Code, but it also doesn't feel as polished and "complete" as an IDE, so I'm going to stick to VS Code for now for the same reason I stuck to JetBrains IDEs for so long.

OTOH I'd ten to prefer as less plugins as possible in VSCode, just because they are inherently dangerous, I'd like Zed plugins that are WASM, so they don't have access to the world.

But I agree that VSCode Typescript support is better than Zed, it works with weird projects setup, while Zed has more troubles. I at work VSCode and Zed/Helix for my projects, generally I use Zed when want to do some AI stuff, otherwise I just use Helix.

Yeah it hooks into some blocking event that gets called on every keypress. At least that's how it worked last time I tried it many years ago. Very sluggish.

Fortunately standard editing shortcuts like Ctrl-D, Ctrl-left/right, etc. replace 99% of Vim "magic" and are way easier to remember and use.

No offense, but if you think ctrl-shortcuts are easier to use you don’t really get the appeal of vim

The thing their computer might be doing wrong is just being a slightly older budget laptop, which is not a particularly rare setup.

Just try to use vscode on a ~500 dollar laptop from 2019 or something

> Are you telling me that it was a delay when you type in vscode? If so, either your configuration or computer is doing something wrong

This is simply not true. There is inherent latency in any rendering pipeline, and VSCode and Atom both have input latency that is significantly higher than other editors like Sublime Text owing to a bloated rendering pipeline. You can read more about this and how easy it is to introduce latency simply by changing basic things like keyboards here: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ or editors specifically: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

If you press a key in VSCode, it does appear immediately.

Latencies associated with typing and switching files are imperceptible on any laptop I've used with VSCode.

The difference in startup speed is measured in seconds, bit milliseconds. And difference in input speed can be dozens of ms, which is also noticeable

> VSCode (and all Electron based editors) have undeniable input latency.

Start up time, sure. But VSCode was lauded as the first performant Electron based editor. I just tested VSCode, Zed, and vim and I can't see any difference from when I press a key to when a character shows up on the screen (appears instantly). I'd be curious to see the results of a blind test, and wonder if people's biases against Electron are showing up.

I mainly used VSCode on locked down corporate laptops. Usually good hardware but running windows and corporate security bloat. But where I was allowed to install alternative editors they were snappy.

May be Helix editor will be fast enough? In my opinion it feels considerably faster then vim with addons