ZED Posts
I've been using the Zed editor for... checks previous blog ...about 3 months now. I've used it exclusively for projects, I don't even have VS Code on my taskbar anymore. The 1 feature I missed most from VS Code was the ability to drag and drop text in the editor. Fortunately, I realized just today that it was added, so I can't even complain about that. In my defense, it was a recent addition. Honestly, that was it, that was the 1 con I had.
So, what do I like about it? It is a more complete editor out of the box. VS Code has a lot of great extensions, but I like a very clean workspace. I don't set up a lot of things to be always on. Zed does a lot of things on its own, like checking imports and even sorting them in alphabetical order or removing unused ones. I don't need to dig into extensions for those things, they are just simple settings. If you want something different, there's probably an extension and you just change the setting, but out of the box prettier and eslint have just worked for me. I love the import sorting and cleaning, that is one of my pet peeves and it just fixes it for me.
It runs very smoothly. I have a kinda middle of the road PC, by today's standards. It's not weak, but it's not anything crazy. Zed doesn't seem to use as many resources as VS Code or any modern editor. I do think the way it works can cause resource usage to go up or down, depending on what you are doing. It's not like VS Code though; if I leave VS Code running all day or over multiple days, it will continuously consume resources at about the same amount. Zed has a smaller footprint and, unless I'm actively working in Zed, it maintains that smaller footprint, even with multiple windows open.
Finally, the 1 thing that peaked my interest in Zed in the first place, it uses Claude for it's edit predictions. I've used several in VS Code and it was nearly always just a starting point if it recommended something or it would replace a huge chunk of code that didn't need to be replaced, even breaking it most of the time. The Github suggestions were a bit better than others, but still not consistent. With Zed the prediction is nearly always right or at least enough to save some typing. I've been very happy with predictions in Zed, because most of the time I don't need them anyway, but sometimes it's a time saver and that's really what it should be all about.
I definitely recommend trying Zed editor, if you aren't too resist to some change. It's been really great for me and the simplicity of it all makes it a perfect editor.
I've been hearing more and more about the Zed Editor lately. I don't really like change, but I do like to see what is new sometimes and potentially add things to my toolbox. I tried Theia IDE, but I couldn't find anything that made it better than VS Code, other than it wasn't VS Code, but kinda was. I can use Codium for that. When VS Code added the "free" Copilot support, I noticed someone mentioned they may have done that because of Zed.
Zed is an IDE written in Rust. So that kinda peaked my interest, mainly just out of curiosity of resource usage. From what I can tell, Zed uses about 1/4th of the memory that VS Code uses on my computer, with the same files open in the editor. It was around 300mb compared to 1.3gb, when I checked memory usage. What's crazy though, is I decided to see how that may escalate. I opened all of the files in a project that totaled about 15mb of TS files in VS Code and the memory usage jumped to about 3gb. Zed only went up to about 370mb. That is pretty crazy, kinda expected, but also we aren't used to that kind of efficiency anymore with all of these electron apps running every where. Zed is not an electron app and I quickly remembered the difference.
I like the themes in Zed and love that it includes the Gluvbox themes. In fact, I was reminded of my love for those and re-themed my desktop with a similar styling. I only used Zed a little, but it feels like an IDE that I want to use. It's light-weight. It isn't cluttered with a ton of features I never use. A lot of the things you'd need an extension for in VS Code is just built in. It's kinda refreshing. Give it a try if you want. I just installed the flatpak, because the one in the Tumbleweed repo is kinda old.