- [delayed]
- I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach because i know anthropic or openai acquiring zed is inevitable. They have too many good ideas and their software is too good.
- Seems like where anthropic or openai want to go, there are no editors anymore.
I personally want better read-only code tools, or maybe the return of UML?
- They drove up to my house with a dump truck full of money... Im not made of stone!
- Just what we need, a new kind of version control %]
- so i think the thing that everyone building these git alternatives is missing is a multi-repo story - unless the expectation is that everyone is going to start operating out of monorepos
i've settled on all of this context attached to issues in a project management system and referenced from commits
it works just fine - its not like your agent cannot read your issue tracker
- I've built some skills to help work with multiple repos, but it's really annoying how e.g. repo-specific .claude/ configs are only read when you start the agent in the repo folder. There's a ton of low hanging fruit to improve dev experience.
- I'm glad to see this feature and looking forward to see how it evolves.
Many of the product decisions that Zed's made caused me to switch to Zed for my daily driver IDE (previously JetBrains). The recent AI agent threads and improvements around diffs really solidified the move.
- JetBrains’ AI offering peaked last year when Junie was briefly better than Codex. Now it’s a wash.
Honestly all of this drives me back towards nvim or notepad sometimes.
I have had a jetbrains subscription since pycharm came out, and the killer feature was always the visual debugger. Seems nearly quaint now.
What specific things do you like about zed?
- Sad to see zed going the same route everybody is screaming them not to. Altough, I never expected otherwise.
- What route is that, and why is everyone screaming at them, for someone out of the loop?
- I hate software tools now. I really do. A hammer would never ask you to think about it constantly. If you think about your hammer it’s because something is wrong with it.
- From a Casey m podcast I think of agentic driven software dev as code extrusion. I guide and massage the steady output of content
- It's not just tools. Pretty much all software is like that.
The problem is, is that it works, if you assume "working" means the software sellers get wealthy.
There's a reason that most waitstaff wear black. They should blend into the background, and not be what the folks at the table are talking about. In rare instances, restaurants exist, where the waitstaff is the service.
In software, though, you're being served by a waiter wearing a clown suit, screaming slogans at you, and serving you lukewarm, pre-chewed goo.
- I use OpenBSD as a daily driver (but could use Alpine or VoidLinux too) and my setup is pretty much silent. No notifications, no rainbows of colors, no glitz. Let’s take mail. I use a combination of mutt hto directly connect via imap) and fdm/mu4e (to have them locally). I”m not interested in having counters or notifications for any of those.
The “calm technology” book has an handful of advices, but one of the best example is the xbiff program. It switches picture when you have new mail on your local spool.
- Ah, McDonald’s isn’t that bad.
- I really like Zed. It's customisable enough for me to make it look how I want, it's faster than every other editor I've tried (scrolling is silk, zero lag anywhere), it has enough features that I don't need an IDE (debugger, refactoring tools), and it generally gets out of my way.
I also like the AI tools, the inline assistant is good and the agent is also pretty nice and well integrated into the editor without it being the focus point. I'm not against using AI but I certainly don't use it as much as a lot of people do.
That being said, I really dislike this recent push towards becoming more like a cursor wannabe. They have a new (for now) opt-in default layout that almost hides the editor panel in favour of the agent threads and agent panels. And now this. I don't want to switch editors, but if they keep pushing a different workflow from what I use it might send me back to Jetbrains...
- I'll probably get more hate for saying this but fine: I use Zed 50% of the time (the other 50% dedicated to vim) for two reasons:
1. It is fast and snappy. Nothing comes even close besides vim (and I don't mind going full time to it if I have to)
2. The ability to completely shut off and block any slop machine features from interfering with my workflow or leak code back to sloppenai, sloppus or any other self-installed-worst-security-practice-backdoor garbage.
Having said that, I hope they don't remove that ability in the future and enforce the "slop is so good man, you should try it" philosophy.
- there is a fork of zed against ai: https://gram-editor.com/
I am happy about even though I've never tried gram, because if zed goes to shit there will be an alternative, which hopefully pressures zed to stay sane
- Oh, that's a breath of fresh air. And they are on codeberg. Nice! Thank you!
- [dead]
- [dead]
