[ricardobeat]

Currently on this machine: using 900MB of RAM, including all language servers, with nine open projects - that is pretty phenomenal. VSCode could barely keep one open with the same memory.

The perception of 'fast' is very subjective. To me having a smooth, jitter-free UI, low input latency, and instant startup, all matter a lot.

[coldtea]

It's amazing that a gig of ram is considered lightweight for having 8 project dirs open in an editor, which normally means 8 tree views and a few open file tabs per project :)

[ricardobeat]

Even more amazing that 10GB for the same purpose is considered acceptable. ± 100MB for window, project files, LSP servers, ASTs etc is something very few editors can achieve - I'm pretty sure Zed beats both Emacs and Neovim in memory consumption.

[Dylan16807]

"Including all language servers" is a big part of that. I hope.

[psychoslave]

I’ll stick to my butterflies.

[nosrepa]

Good 'ol C-x M-c M-butterfly

[Zetaphor]

I understand wanting your software to be well optimized, but at no point in my years of using VSCode have I ever actually had to care about how much RAM it's using. I have 32GB, I'm going to use it.

[bigstrat2003]

I, too, would like to use my RAM. And I would like to be able to use it on the things I deem important, not to subsidize the laziness of devs who reach for Electron.

[coldtea]

>I, too, would like to use my RAM.

I'd like to BETTER use my RAM, and have faster programs to boot (as programs who overuse RAM also are slower than more optimized ones).

[chamomeal]

I made the mistake of buying an 8 GB macbook air m3 a while ago, thinking it would be enough. I wasn't accounting for docker or vscode. It REALLY lags. The vim mode plugin will regularly lag on nearly every keystroke, until I kill everything and restart.

On the topic of vim, the built-in vim mode in zed is really good. The helix mode is great too!!

[jimbokun]

Maybe use it to run a small local LLM + Zed instead of just VS Code?

(I’m probably off on how much memory it takes to run a small LLM, but still.)

[PurpleRamen]

VS Code is also offering significant more ability than Zed at the moment. If you want to sell RAM-usage as a phenomenal benefit, then you should compare it with similar editors, like Sublime or (Neo)Vim.

[bluecheese452]

But why have 9 open projects?

Like the vast majority of the time I have one. If I want to switch projects I close and then reopen.

On the other hand if it was smoother on one large project that would be an advantage.

[OccamsMirror]

My experience with Zed differed. On Linux I found it to be very memory hungry.

[pjmlp]

A side effect of Electron crap, before Zed many editors and IDEs on Atari, Amiga, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, Mac OS, NeXTSTEP, were written in fully native code.