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Comment by CapeTheory | Hacker News Reader

I have fallen in love with Zed on Mac, so glad to see it will still be an option when I switch back to Linux. My main concern is the collaboration features; just seems like a nonsensical addition. I have zero influence over what editors my teams use, and I work with dozens of different people on collaborative development every year - I'm not going to be persuading anyone to switch, and so that feature is just dead code and security risk. Even if I worked on a small and consistent team, I don't think the value-add justifies the complexity and risk.

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For what it's worth, other major code editors Jetbrains and VS Code also offer real-time collaboration built in. For Jetbrains, it's a paid feature. For VS Code, it's free.

I love the VS Code implementation (haven't reviewed the other two). If I'm pairing with someone remotely, I don't have any issue having them download VS Code. We provide a config in our project repo for VS Code, so it's really quick for people to get set up enough to join the real-time collab session with me. `brew install visual-studio-code` and then `code .` in our repo, plus OAuth with Github to authenticate the collaboration feature.

I think it really is great. Makes pairing much easier, and really speeds up drugery like refactoring 500 cases where it doesn't quite make sense to do a codemod. It's not quite like the upgrade from Word97.exe to Google Docs since we have git, but it feels similarly amazing to "just" to be talking about some code, click the other user's icon to jump right to their cursor and help them get unstuck.

I personally bounce between VS Code, Xcode, and nvim+tmux, and I don't have a problem with keeping a "lowest common denominator" editor around for collaboration or pairing. I also keep a regular keyboard at my desk so I don't force people to type on my Glove80/Kinesis Advantage.

I do believe one can join collab sessions from https://vscode.dev/ as well? So no need to install anything, it runs well and officially in the browser

And for those with installed VSCode they need to add the Live Share extension to get this functionality, it’s not built in from the start, but offered through that official extension? https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliv...

And you need to login using a Microsoft-account. Even if both computers are on the same LAN.

That part leaves a terrible taste in my mouth. Also debugging in a collaborative session has been broken for years now for us.

And it is proprietary, and only works with official VS Code builds (i.e. not VSCodium).

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/MS-vsliveshare.vs...

My experience with the VS Code implementation has been constant desyncs between the editor state on the different users computers. At least some of them I could reliably reproduce by using language server commands.

The main reason I'm excited for zed is for an editor that built this in from the beginnings and has the same feature with less bugs.

As someone who hates Microsoft, I just wish that other colleagues wouldn’t force me to use their editor to collaborate. I wish there was more effort to build something editor agnostic.

You could use vnc and allow the remote user control. This is how I used to do IT help for relatives in the early 2000s. It's certainly far less secure, but I'm not sure what you're asking for will ever happen.

I have felt similarly about collab tools. Even if the tools in an editor look cool, someone on the team is gonna get left out because they use a different tools. It feels a bit like the wrong layer for the collab tools to live.

Indeed, Tuple is a better solution. That said, I think Zed is a great text editor.

Absolutely agree, the collaboration features put me off a bit. I think it can very well become a very successful and popular editor without those features. Perhaps they can invest in those feature when they have a much bigger market share.

The collab features are actually what got me to try it, and why it’s still installed on my machine.

I have no reason to use Zed over Kakoune or VS Code for working on my own (open-source VS Code, so no Liveshare).

I wanted to work on code with someone a few weeks ago, and we both downloaded Zed and started collaborating very quickly. It was a very smooth experience.

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