Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

What Zed lacks in code generation quality it makes up for in not-being-an-Electron-app

Does it really? At the end of the day i need it to do my job. Ideal values don’t help me doing my job. So i choose the editor best suited and the features i need. And that’s not zed at the moment.

There's an analogue here with programming language iteration— Python, Ruby and friends showed what the semantics were that were needed, and then a decade or two later, Go and Rust took those semantics and put them in compiled, performance-oriented languages.

Electron has been a powerful tool for quickly iterating UIs and plugin architectures in VSCode, Brackets, Atom, etc, now the window is open for a modern editor to deliver that experience without the massive memory footprint and UI stalls.

Zed includes node.js runtime and 100s of megabytes of javascript. It is essentially Electron.

I agree with the main point but I am on battery often and the difference between native vs. one or multiple Electron apps in "doing my job" is easily several hours lost to battery life or interruptions for charging. Not a huge deal, but it's not my ideals that make me frown at charge cycles occurring twice as often.

I'm gonna need you to back that claim up dawg, because the only thing I see the node runtime used for, is for when the user loads a js project.

then it's basically just a proxy for node/npm afaik.

and then loses by not having plugin support

It does have extensions, but they are much more limited. In particular they can't define UI elements inside buffers, so you can't replicate something with rich UI like the Git integration in an extension.

Complete nonsense.

https://zed.dev/blog/videogame https://zed.dev/blog/we-have-to-start-over

Every single new HN thread should come with an automod post badmouthing Electron to save everyone time.

This is simply not true… that’s the problem. As much as I like Zed, using it for the sake of not being an electron app doesn’t make any sense when Cursor’s edit prediction adds so much value. I’m not starved of resources and can run Cursor just fine – as far as Electron apps go VS Code is great, performant enough. I value productivity. I’ll very happily drop Cursor for Zed the second edit prediction is comparable. I’m eagerly waiting.

its a bad anti-pattern that trades developer convenience for performance, UX etc. Its fair to hate on it

With the advent of coding agents, I really hope we see devs move away - back to the traditional approach of using native frameworks/languages as now, you can write for 1 platform and easily task AI to handle other platforms.

I find Zed has some really frustrating UX choices. I’ll run an operation and it will either fail quietly, or be running in the background for a while with no indication that it is doing so.

Absolutely nothing new has been said about Electron since like 2015, it's boring as hell to downvote and scroll past.

This will never happen and it's a bizarre, legacy fantasy, borne of a fixed imaginary ideal of what computing should be. Programming will continue to move in the direction of ease-of-use and every time I see an out-of-topic reference to Electron in this forum I feel insane, like I'm fighting upstream. You will not see this - you will see more Electron apps, because that is the modern way of building cross-platform apps, and if you genuinely don't understand why that is I don't know how to explain it to you. You won't see another version of those because nobody is going to waste their time building cross-platform native apps at a native layer to performatively impress posters on HN. You, and seemingly everybody else on HN, can continue to pretend that devex doesn't matter, but that's the difference I guess between caring about devex and shipping products.

Fucking Amen.

It's not out of topic. We're discussing the Zed editor. Their whole marketing ploy is "we are not electron", "we are rust", "we are native", "we are not slow" alternative to VScode.

This is literally their whole distinguishing feature and people are switching because of it and just it.

It is! If the thing runs like shit, say it runs like shit. Say it's native or not, like every topic title and comment on HN until we weep of boredom. I know it's rust! everything is rust here! Is there any other reason I should care? Are we a forum for discussing interesting technology or are we a forum for discussing alternatives to VSCode? And again, who is switching? People shipping products or HN posters with their dumb metrics?

~/.local/share/zed/

People who install zed are switching. I don't understand what you're trying to "get" at. You're complaining about people talking about Zed in a topic about Zed.

Zed seems to have been hugely succesful recently and their only real distinguishing feature is "fast from the ground up". It has less features than vscode. Worse AI features than Cursor. but people seem to love it nonetheless.

Turns out there is a market for people fed up with VScode-derivatives.

No one's debating your first sentence, they're debating your second.

Cross platform application development is cool but the guys who made Zed are the guys who made Atom are the guys who made Electron, and they pointed out that long term the devex sucks and that Electron simply isn't a good platform for native applications that need any kind of memory control or similar features: https://zed.dev/blog/we-have-to-start-over

> My experience in Atom always felt like bending over backwards to try to achieve something that in principle should have been simple. Lay out some lines and read the position of the cursor at this spot in between these two characters. That seems fundamentally doable and yet it always felt like the tools were not at our disposal. They were very far away from what we wanted to do.

> Nathan: It was a nightmare. I mean, the ironic thing is that we created Electron to create Atom, but I can't imagine a worse application for Electron than a code editor, I don't know. For something simpler, it's probably fine, the memory footprint sucks, but it's fine. But for a code editor you just don't have the level of control I think you need to do these things in a straightforward way at the very least. It's always some... backflip.

Thinking Javascript was a language meant for desktop applications is what is insane - even more so than the convenience of using it, which is comparatively less insane.