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Comment by lbhdc | Hacker News Reader

Zed seems like its gotten a lot of buzz on HN, and its great to see new players in the space.

For those who have used it, what are some of the killer features?

For me the "killer feature" is a graphical editor (like VSCode or the Jet Brains editors) but with performance more like vim. I'm also very much enjoying the modal editing, which VSCode lacks.

Wait, Zed is a modal editor? All i've seen is that it has vim mode, which most editors have and i generally find it insufficient.

Granted these days i still prefer Kakoune style modal editing (i use Helix, currently), so not sure i could move back to Vim style anyway. Nonetheless if Zed has real, first class support i'd be interested... but a second class compat layer is not sufficient in my view.

How's it work for you?

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40929169 this post suggests it's lacking. Which is always the problem to me with emulation :/

It's not a modal editor, it just has a modal (vim) emulation mode.

>> I'm also very much enjoying the modal editing, which VSCode lacks.

The VSCode Vim plugin works great:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevi...

When I specified the modal editing I was referring to how the workspace search in Zed brings up each result in an editable "window" allowing me to make edits across my whole project from 1 tab. VSCode's workspace search feels much more limited in comparison.

That sounds like an interesting feature. Could you provide a link that gives more information about it? I am not finding it in the docs.

We call them 'multibuffers' :D

https://zed.dev/features#multi-buffers

I'm not seeing it in the docs, maybe I should write up a little something on my editing experience!

Also to correct my self, I think I mistakenly said `modal` when I should have said `buffer` earlier.

So searching across the project brings up your results in multiple buffers, each about 5 lines (expandable to more) and you can do all of your normal editing within each/all of the buffers.

If I happen to write something up, I'll try and remember to share it in this thread.

That is a unique feature. Most editors I have used use the search as a way to jump to buffer locations of the matches.

The VSC Vim plugin barely works with default keybinds and not at all as soon as you start modifying it. It's also super slow

FWIW Emacs also fits that bill.

It does, though I found learning and setting it up to be more complicated. My preferred editor is one that's very simple to setup and use (e.g. Sublime, VSCode, Zed, nano). Emacs is cool, and maybe someday I'll get around to using it but so far it hasn't met my needs.

Fair enough, I have personally spent a decent chunk of time configuring my Emacs setup (though it has mostly stabilized at this point). You may be interested in checking out Doom Emacs[0] if you want to take a stab at it in the future. It sounds like it would be an out of the box experience closer to what you would want.

[0] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

For me, a couple things;

- fast enough to compete with neovim. Idk if it’s my previous interest in display engineering, but I substantially notice the speed

- vim bindings…. Satisfactory. I don’t struggle to navigate at all, feels pretty native to me. I can split panes every which way till Sunday

- collaboration mode is pretty great

- Ability to have your current pane magnified

- Ability to set your terminal font size to a different font size than your editor (been looking for this for years in a terminal emulator)

- Super clean and crisp ui. TBH it was too much ui when I first tried it, I stopped using it almost immediately. But I have it a second try and got used to it. It’s still a lot more than vim but hey

- Outline mode (pretty sweet)

- Multi-file buffers (makes editing text across multiple files stupidly easy)

- Cracked team. Awesome people, super transparent, just some sick engineers doing sick engineering

Besides speed, the other killer feature that Zed focuses on is collaborative editing:

https://zed.dev/docs/channels

I haven't used Zed in the last year, but Zed's search across codebase display was divine. I don't want to necessarily open the file when looking at search results to see additional context in the matching sections. Zed brings up a view with all the results where you can expand context, and IIRC even edit in the results panel without having to open the entire file.

It's also collaboration-first, and unlike VS code, I believe the software behind collaboration mode is open source

Its killer feature seems to be speed. Otherwise I dont see much of a reason to use it over VS Code.

Have you had much success with VS Code's multiplayer extensions? I've found them buggy to the point of useless, but maybe things have improved. Zed, on the otherhand, is developed by people who understand pair programming, which is my priority.

No not much experience there since multiplayer editing has never really been a part of my personal workflow (mostly a lot of screensharing), but I can definitely see that being useful for people that use it regularly.

Not the OP but I tried hard, looking for an easy pair programming solution. Worked decently a couple of times and inexplicably failed most of the time.

This is why I'm excited to try Zed. I regularly "pair" via Pop, but keybindings and lag make it hard to switch seats, so we basically decide at the beginning of the session who is going to hog the keyboard, and that's a crippling dynamic.

No killer features, just nice ergonomics and speed out of the box. I use it as my Vim replacement.

What motivated you to switch to it from vim?

Do you use it for Rust? Does it do "Show usages" well when the usages are through a macro?

Do you find it to be faster than vim/neovim?

The Vim emulation is pretty far behind JetBrains, VSCode, and Sublime Text. I wouldn't compare it to Vim as a replacement at this point.

I use it as my secondary editor (after Sublime) but could easily see myself switching in the not too distant future. It's incredibly fast, possibly even more so than Sublime, and really well designed. While the UI design of an editor is possibly not that important to a lot of people, I find it really matters to me for unknown brain reasons, I get anxious if I ever have to use VS Code as it has zero attention to design details.

I'm really pleased for the Zed team on reaching this milestone. I think the only thing holding me back from it being my daily driver is the built-in Pyright (which I hate) and lack of Ruff support.

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