Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

Recently I set up a virtual machine running GNU/Linux on Windows, so that I can continue to use Emacs and all my usual tools for developing software, while I am waiting for a friend to make a move in a turn based game. I decided to give Doom Emacs a try. Well, I like the keybindings so far. However, it got issues. When I use neotree, it gets confused with windows (the Emacs term "window", not desktop windows, or the OS). Also it has already crashed twice. Once I even lost some code, which I had to write again. Unacceptable. Why was there not even an Emacs backup file for the file I was editing? Anyway, today I thought: "Why not try one of these other editors in that VM and see, if I like any?"

Yesterday I looked again at LunarVim's website. While LunarVim seems to look pretty, it has a lot of dependencies, including pip, npm, and more. Seems like it is installing stuff from everywhere. Not so confidence inspiring, especially pip and npm installs.

And just now I see this Zed blog post linked on HN! But, unfortunately the website is not inspiring much confidence either. Can anyone explain to me, why I cannot see any _text_ on all of zed.dev, without running JS? I mean, I probably know the answer, or some possible answers, but man, that's already such a turnoff, I already doubt the editor is any good now. Would be good, if they could fix their website, and make simple text, simple text again, accessible and all that. Please get some craftsmanship into this website.

EDIT: 'pparently I said something some people don't want to hear, lol.

I recently un-borked my emacs config and re-downloaded elisp into my brain so I'd be happy to help walking you through the emacs stuff. I haven't used emacs on Windows natively in a long time but I did it for years and found it worked quite well so you may want to try that again.

FWIW emacs these days has native LSP support (eglot) and native tree-sitter supported, but you'll need to grab tree-sitter libraries and LSP servers. For MacOS I found just using brew to install most of these works great, and I wonder if Windows can't work the same way. If you're in a VM you should just be able to have your package manager do the work.

LLM support in emacs is still a bit primitive but there are packages like emacs claude-code that are changing things. Personally I wrote an elisp function which grabs the filename of the emacs window relative to the project root and copies it so that I can just paste it into claude code and have it ask questions or do things.

```

(defun copy-buffer-file-name-from-project-root () "Copy the relative path of the buffer in this project to the kill ring" (interactive) (kill-new (file-relative-name (buffer-file-name (current-buffer)) (project-root (project-current)))))

```

if you're curious but depending on how you have your clipboards setup with the kill ring, you may need to modify this.

---

As far as fighting the JS fight on the Zed website, well, I think this thread isn't one of those upvote-anti-JS-rant threads that spring up on this site all the time so shrug.

I'm extremely interested in pushing along these fronts even in a performative way, because I don't want to get bogged down in "switch away from Emacs" conversations with coworkers. I've done a lot of modernizing on my Emacs setup this year but I would love a current take on "getting close to cursor" that gets me beyond what I'd had set up with copilot and lsp.