[supernes]

On the topic of Zed itself as a VSCode replacement - my experience is mixed. I loved it at first, but with time the papercuts add up. The responsiveness difference isn't that big on my system, but Zed's memory usage (with the TS language server in particular) is scandalous. As far as DX goes it's probably at 85% of the level VSCode provides, but in this space QoL features matter a lot. Oh, and it still can't render emojis in buffers on Linux...

[extr]

I actually find Zed pretty reasonable in terms of memory usage. But yeah, like you say, there are lots of small UX/DX papercuts that are just unfortunate. In some cases I'm not sure it's even Zed's fault, it's just years and years of expecting things to work a certain way because of VS Code and they work differently in Zed.

Eg: Ctrl+P "Open Fol.." in Zed does not surface "Opening a Folder". Zed doesn't call them folders. You have to know that's called "Workspace". And even then, if you type "Open Work..." it doesn't surface! You have to purposefully start with "work..."

[veber-alex]

The issues you described show a critical lack of awareness from the Zed developers that people migrate to their IDE mainly from VS Code.

They are blowing their "weirdness budget" on nonsense.

[extr]

I don't think it's conscious or even a result of not caring about UX/DX. But I do think you're right - I've noticed the loudest voices in their Issue queue are people wanting things like better vim support, helix keybind support (super niche terminal modal editor), etc. Fine if they want to make that their niche but if you are migrating from VS Code like 99% of people you can't have these kinds of papercuts, people will just uninstall.

[fishgoesblub]

I've been attempting to use Zed as a VSCode replacement but between the lack of bitmap font support (Criminal in an alleged code editor), and the weird UI choices, it's been hard. I want to love it, but what is "performance" if I have to spend more time working around the UI and lack of features from extensions. Strangest issue I've encountered is the colours being completely wrong when using Wayland.. colours are perfect when ran with Xwayland. I'll give it a plus though for native transparency for the background. Much nicer than having to make the entire window transparent, including the foreground text like with VSCode.

[hypercube33]

Question since I'm currently digging through fonts trying to find one my eyes like...what's your preference?

[fishgoesblub]

Terminus. I personally love it. There's a TTF version called Terminess that includes the original bitmaps for certain sizes, and uses the more blurry style font for sizes the original didn't have. You can use it with certain programs like VSCode that don't allow you to select bitmap fonts, yet actually support them.

[tecoholic]

I agree. One of the strangest things I found was “in-built” support for a things like TailwindCSS. The LSP starts showing warning in all HTML/TSX files and confuses me to no end. I know, I can turn it off with the setting, but the choice seems so confusing. Tailwind is just one of the thousands of CSS libraries. Why enable it without any mention in the codebase.

I have actually ditched PyCharm for the snappiness of Zed. But the paper cuts are really adding up.

[avilay]

The point about papercuts adding up so resonates with me! I loved Zed initially and did find it more responsive than VS Code, loved the Zed Agent autocomplete, etc. However, I eventually and reluctantly went back to VS Code. The papercut that finally did it for me was [this open bug](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/36516) because of which I was not able to step into a packaged library's code when I was debugging my own code, this was in Python.

[rzkyif]

Same here: I found the multibuffers feature really useful, but the extension system really couldn't hold a candle to VS Code at the time of my testing

Spent a couple of hours trying to make the Svelte extension ignore a particular type of false positive CSS error, failed, and returned to VS Code

Will definitely give it another chance when the extension system is more mature though!

[udkl]

QoL features is where WebStorm shines! I don't look forward to when I have to open vscode instead sometimes.

Just the floating and ephemeral "Search in files" modal in Jetbrain IDEs would convince me to switch from any other IDE.

[fxtentacle]

my favorite is Ctrl+Shift+A which lets you search through all available UI actions (hence the A). That's just so helpful if you know the IDE can do something but you forgot where in the menu structure it was. And to top things off, you can also use Ctrl+Shift+A to look up the keyboard shortcuts for every possible action

[BoorishBears]

I still debate how much productivity I've gained from better AI compared to the loss from switching off WebStorm

But their tab complete situation is abysmal, and Supermaven got macrophaged by Cursor

[tuzemec]

I have 4-5 typescript projects and one python opened in Zed at any given time (with a bunch of LSPs, ACPs, opened terminals, etc.) and I see around 1.2 - 1.4gb usage.

I opened just one of the typescript projects inside VSCode and I see something like 1gb (combining the helpers usage). I'm not using it actively, so no extra plugins and so on.

That's on mac, so I guess it may vary on other systems.

[thejazzman]

I think there’s a bug? It used to be memory efficient and now I periodically notice it explodes. Quit and restart fixes it

I don’t have any extensions installed and I’m basically leaving it open, idle, as a note scratch space. I do have projects open with many files but not many actual files are open

Anyway idk