Zed “kills” VSCode 

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I got laid off last week because I was coding too slow. Had I been using Zed, I could have closed more tickets 10-15ms faster. Dammit

It has a lot of potential. But it’s no way near feature complete enough to be considered a vscode killer. Yet.

Lmao. That 97ms to 58ms marketing is just marketing 101.

No windows support yet. Like it or hate it, it still is the big fish in the pond. Zed should get to level 6 first to get their ult and then try killing vscode

My opinion on zed is..... ( waits 2 years )

The bad thing about Zed (for now) is that VSCode has a ton of extensions; yes Zed automatically integrates using LSP but that's pretty much it. But it's VERY promising.

Zed's response times wil be fantastic for use in films where everyone 'programming a computer' seems like they're on speed.

It's nowhere near a vscode killer, being MacOS exclusive still.

I'm in a similar position: I'm not using Zed as my main editor for now, but I am keeping it installed and periodically checking things out as it gets updated. It has a lot of promise for me and I'm really looking forward to seeing where it goes in the future

Taking the crown from VScode is very difficult, there is a lot of work behind it, it takes years to offer the developed benefits that it offers.

Thanks for your great videos. I even sometimes watch them twice because there is soooo much useful information in your videos. Greetings from Belgium & Germany

Definitely will be checking out Zed. Thanks!

I realize how valuable extensions are for VS Code. They're the only ones keeping me from moving to Zed.

VSCode works on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Web browsers. With so many extensions like WSL, SSH, Docker, etc. With SSH extension I can view pictures and videos over SSH on my server and browse files like I'm working with Files Explorer or Finder on the local machine. Zed is not a VSCode killer 😂 I don't think they going to kill anyone anytime soon.

There’s an extension for VSCode to enable zooming font size in the editor separately from the rest of the UI. I think it’s called “Responsive Font Weights”.

Performance matters a lot more when low on resources. I've driven a baseline MacBook Air to its limits and beyond for years, most of the time VSC had little to no noticeable delays but whenever running out of memory or having the CPU catch up, it was BAD. Particularly the vim mode plugin (ergonomics, yo) would swallow inputs and become generally unreliable. That aside, VSC also uses much more memory than it needs to, as any Electron based app does. 300-600mb may be nothing for my current computer, but when you're running 8GB with your base system already using 2 of those, you've got some containers (another 1-2GB), browser tabs and other dev tools open, you'll appreciate every bit of extra memory you can save.

What code editor did they use to create Zed?

Alex went full fuzz testing bloodbath, the poor editor wan't ready for such intensity.

Thanks for doing this comparison!

I think the problem here is that nobody is complaining that VSCode is slow - we use it for its convenience and its extensions. if you want a fast no-frills code editor like this, you're gonna use nano or neovim or Sublime, etc. Nobody asked for "VSCode but stripped down to the essentials and also slightly faster," so while Zed is getting a lot of coverage and that is good for competition, there is absolutely no reason to use it over VSCode.

Yeah, killer only for mac user

Excellent work, thanks!

I'm using Zed for 2/3 months now and it became my main editor as VSCode is the backup because of the extensions. Zed still has a long way to go but it's quiet impressive what they have done so far and I'm loving it.

Do you have all extensions disabled? I recently switched to NeoVim because VSCode becomes too slow and memory hogging for large project. Frequently got VM OutOfMemory issue. Moreover the extension can eat up loads of space as well

I dunno if I'm the only one that doesn't care about an extra 50ms or whatever input delay, but just having good features, like what you get with Jetbrains

Learned a few things. Thanks.

Hi Alex! Your videos are a must for any developer, I really enjoy your attention to detail and really professional tests, oriented to the developer ecosystem.

VSCode does slow down with large projecțs (like multi-project mono repos). I switched over to JetBrains WebStorm and the usability with these large projects was terrific! Yes, you have to pay to use WebStorm, but it’s worth it for my projects (plus JetBrains’ AI Assistant is just as good if not better than copilot).

How did you do the voice dubbing that perfectly sounds like Bruce Willis? Which tool?

its actually not just the input, its everything with it

Im here to thumbs up for the preview) Yippie Ki Yay, VSCode!

No support for linux nor windows, no dark mode in their website .... long ways to be even close to vscode killer.

When something becomes a "killer" of something, it's usually all hype.

Glad to see that Scharzenager got broken out for the true test 👍

Great you didn't post a link, it's so more fun searching for it 👍

Alex - why are you not wearing Apple vision pro? Scared of seing Zed being 10ms faster on your own eyes? :D

Is not how fast is vs code, but is how many resources consumes when is running. Sometimes it crushes the entire system… at least on my Mac.

zed is awesome. im not ready to change over. but for sure looks like an exciting project.

font used in Zed seems cool. Whats the font name? Is therer similar theme like Zed in vscode?

But what if we compare zed with sublime text? 😊

8:10 how did you call up that FPS monitor on that MacBook Pro ??😮😉😉

So, how many times do you open your editor? Not running all the time because of sleep mode in the computer? Sure Zed is quicker but at no point have VSCode been a problem for being slow.

I have switched to Zed only this whole week at work and I really love it. Think I will stay on it in the future.

I’m sorry but if the speed of opening files is what’s killing your productivity then congrats. Maybe remove some plugin bloat?

"stability" lol saw this thing crashing a suspicious amount of times :P

What makes VSCode so strong for me is the extensions. If they catch up, especially when it comes to remote development, I'm super fine with going over.

In every way possible, the $20/month for GHCP is superior in efficiency and cost-effectiveness to using the chat API endpoint. Also, that pop out to new floating window is a new feature and took VSC a long time, but it’s still limited since you can’t pop out a Jupyter NB.

my sudo nano opens faster than zed

I’m still going to use IntelliJ IDEA to do my actual work because it does so much for me, and can handle working on massive projects well. The only time I run VSCode is when I need a dumb text editor, as long as it has a cli tool to open a file it does what I need.

Did i hear - Hasta lavista baby??.. You are so hilarious mate. Love your analysis

tryed Zed for a while. looks ok for some simple tasks considering perfomance, thx for suggesting new software

Zed is good, but UI/UX in VS Code is much more convenient. And VS Code is fast enough.

As a vim user, vscode is noticably slow.

Looks cool. Thanks for sharing! I didn't manage to try Zed though because of some problems since I am using macOS developer preview.

I’m excited to see a new player in the space. I’ve been happily using Helix for a while now (I think Kakoune’s way of doing things makes a lot more sense than vim), but I originally switched from VSCode because I got tired of all the popups, notifications, and random obtrusive features getting added without warning, forcing me to read for hours through release notes and settings descriptions trying to figure out how to turn it off. I want my editor, and I don’t want it to change unless I ask it to. Hopefully Zed turns out this way

not surprise since VS Code using electron.. so you're technically writing code in a browser xD

Good but nothing can kill vscode

The response time differences may have a lot to do with the simplified extensions that Zed supports compared to the more complex extension interface of VS Code.

Hi Alex. When you installed it, did you have any problems with VSCode already being present? Or Sublime Text?

The thing I don't like about VSCode, is that is not really OSS, you can create your own plugins but guess who is going to benefit from it? not you, not me, the only one that benefits is Microsoft. So please stop making plugins for VSCode :)

I've been using Zed and it really is snappy. I was able to customize the colors a bit and I'm really happy with the interface. I was never a big fan of the VSCode icons on the left.

Zed is like Arc. Reinventing the wheel for the sake of it.

Does Zed have Emmet? I downloaded Zed but it doesn't seem to have it, unless its something that has to be enabled?

Love to watch your video alex.

So does Zed load at start and stay fully resident in ram but with a hidden window?

I just installed it on my personal Mac and I have to admit I absolutely love the clean and smooth interface. Thank you Alex! I might try it on my company's Mac too, I'm curious to see how it will manage our huge codebase.

Interesting app. I will definitely keep an eye on this project.

Killed me with that intro:)

I've switched from vscode to helix for my daily editing. It is amazingly fast and has most of the features I normally use already baked in. Loving it thus far. There's even an extension dance for vscode that stress up a similar keymap to helix so I can use the same key commands if I have to use vacode. It's not perfect but very helpful. All that being said I haven't needed to switch from helix in a while.

Ok... now i will try use zed too, looks so nice

They improved upon the Notepad code base and called it Zed. As you can see both include e and end with d.

are the cpus so slow... that we need gpu for text display?

One thing I realised is if you want to create a Monopoly, building extension ecosystem is big part of that. Scenarios like this shows it very well. Developers put years of effort into building these awesome extensions and now its harder to competition to break in. Thats why even Google's new cloud ide, project idx is based on code - oss and they can use well established vs code extensions.

I've been using Zed for 1 week now. No regrets moving to zed. (the only missing feature is the capacity to work over ssh on a remote server)

Not sure if I'll replace vscode with Zed. But I'll still like to test it. When is Zed coming to windows?

have your vs code loaded with lots of extensions during the test?

Tried it out myself too, it's honestly a great experience. It really needs ssh support like vscode has and maybe a better ecosystem, but as soon as the ssh support is there I'll be ready to jump ship from vscode on to it.

Great content.

Same on you. I installed Zed, for emergencies.

Biggest benefit: battery consumption is much lower on Zed. Gotta love that Rust performance! But I agree with Alex. Zed's not quite there yet, but they're making quick progress. Gonna keep checking back to how they crack VSC's "moat": the extensions.

I had assumed that there was no competition for the VS Code, but Zed proved me wrong

If you wanna quickly edit a file, focus editor is really nice too Currently it's basically just a text editor with some code highlighting features But the text editing part works really well and a lot of short cuts that help you just around and make changes

Nice informative video

ZED = Zombie Extermination Device Sincerely, Tower Battles

Sublime is the GOAT. 🐐 It’s as fast as Zed (look at dev build performance), native and has a great plugin ecosystem. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. UI is hardware accelerated too.

Ok, thx for rewiew. Gonna wait for lunux version to touch it

Great comparaison.

Thanks for the review! Now I don't have to waste time testing it,

- no extensions - no copilot chat - no extensions - no theme store - no extensions - no windows app - no extensions But yeah, rust, it opens quickly, it scrolls quickly, and uses gpus. As if that is what I needed from my code editor that I run on an M2 chip.

The Arc Browser of code editors

Does Zed let you print? I was surprised by VS Codes lack of a print menu item.

So one thing I appreciate about this video is now I can do more in vs cause I didn’t know you could do some of those things

have you tried Qt Creator?

I deleted zed after all the syntax and type hints suddenly stopped working for me...

Do I need an Nvidea rtx4090 to maximize the performance? Does it support Dlss and dlaa to make my code look sharper? What frame rate does it run with?

When opening files, mske sure to switch it up do you don't always open using VS Code first because the operating system may coache recent files.

The response time is more noticable on higher refreshrate monitors 60 fps is good enough, but damn 120-144 hz feels smooth

With respect to the increased speed found with Zed loading files, starting approximately at 1:35, the testing did not take into account two important things. The first is the time to start or switch to the app. The second is that after the first test the file or directory is held in cache memory by the operating system. To properly test how fast each opens a directory or file a new directory or file must be selected for each test. For each pair of tests the two directories or files should be as close to the same size as possible. I was part of a team that was responsible for changing a process which ran once a night into one that could be started from a website. The process involved a large number of small programs that each performed a tiny bit of the process and used temporary files to communicate between the different stages. The process originated on a six bit mainframe and there had never been enough money or time to integrate them into them all. Programming wasn’t the issue. Verifying the outcomes stayed the same was the highest priority as the application was used during the process of business incorporation. Any differences and lawsuits could occur. The data was still stored using six bits and every small program read data, converted it from six bits, ran, converted the output to six bits, wrote the data to a file, and exited. A script was used to control the flow of the small programs and that had to be modified to prevent them from overwriting one another temporary data. Time and extreme caution limited our choices. Instead of making each of the small programs able to run instances at once it was easier and safer to lock each one to a single instance. When it came time to testing we ran a request through the nightly version and it took somewhere around 45 seconds. We then switched over to our project and ran it in a two or three seconds. We were all thrilled but it seemed way too much of an improvement for me as we could not implement the chances we identified as having the biggest performance improvements. I asked the person running the test to retry the old method again and it ran in three to four seconds. We eventually determined that the gigabytes of data the application uses was cached in during the first running. Because we were running on a server with lots of memory and set up to cache as much as possible we had to fill the cache with approximately 96GB of junk between tests if we wanted to compare times. This was 25 years ago on a Silicon Graphics server. Ever since then I’ve remembered to take caching in account.

I'm curious how much of a hit the battery takes from using GPUI. Although interesting, the benefits just don't seem to be worth it for me if it affects battery. I'd like to be able to be remote when I want/need to.