Zed Kills VSCode [video] | Hacker News Reader

Zed Kills VSCode [video]

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I've tried Zed and it is fast and that's nice. Sometimes VSCode does seem a little sluggish. However, Zed is missing so many capabilities who knows if it'll be just as fast when it can do more. For example, I find the git integration in vscode indispensable: see the changes, see the index, diff files between branches, see blames, do merges. Zed doesn't do any of this.

VSCode only really seems to slow down when it's doing a lot of LSP typechecking of JS/TS files. So you can just turn that stuff off. Presumably Zed is going to have the same issue if it implements the same features.

One thing I really like about VSCode is that you can configure the extensions per project, so I'm not weighing down the editor with extensions for everything I've ever worked on.

One of the most powerful features of vscode is extensions. Until zed has a comparable extension set to rival all the things I use in vscode, I couldn't care less about 50ms vs 70ms lag on keystroke renders.

Response time matters, but man, there's just such toxicity abound with people who act like speed is all that matters, and act all high and mighty that things are so bad.

These modern systems do soo much helpful stuff. The responsiveness out of the box is pretty not bad if not stellar, and then these plugins really layer in whole worlds of help. Like in so many places, this complexity & nuance can just get totally eaten to pieces by the hungry wolves happy to shred anything showing any signs of being insufficiently super l33t for their superb sensibility.

> such toxicity abound with people who act like speed is all that matters

Maybe it is a point of obsession to some.

But I've experienced that sensitivity to latency is very subjective.

Maybe there's an age component as well, with younger people being more sensitive.

When I use other people's computers and they have not optimized the latency (e.g. running a sluggish Windows with lots of background processes stealing the CPU, Alt+Tab taking several hundred milliseconds, etc.) I get angry, and I don't understand how anyone can live with a computer that is orders of magnitude slower than your own reactiveness.

Yea, I suppose Zed is better. Just tried it as VSCode has started to feel sluggish on my M1.

At a glance, only annoying things (so far) are the illegible hidden file names (really blurry) and no Markdown or other previews. Icons are also really plain which makes finding files a bit harder as everything looks the same. And no icons for extensions either? Feels a bit too brutalist, even. Seems default keymaps are quite similar.

But the performance is there. I'm not sure will I switch now but I will definitely keep coming back to it.

Hidden file name styling can be customised in the theming.

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