You can now disable all AI features in Zed

I use Zed too, and as a longtime magit devotee, I've really been enjoying using gitu [0] in Zed. gitu doesn't have everything magit does, but there's not much I find myself missing.

I have it nicely integrated with Zed by defining the following task, which you can then add a keybinding for if you want:

    {
        "label": "gitu",
        "command": "gitu",
        "reveal_target": "center",
        "hide": "always",
        "env": {
          "VISUAL": "zed",
          "GIT_EDITOR": "vim"
        }
    }

Not currently using Zed but low input latency is one of the things that’s kept me on Sublime Text over the years. Might give Zed a shot and see how it stacks up.

The other two editors I use a lot are Xcode and Android Studio, and while the first is usually fine, Android Studio (IntelliJ) feels servicable but a touch sluggish in comparison. Given the popularity of JetBrains IDEs I’m a bit surprised that there’s not more demand from customers to make it more responsive.

I took Zed for a test drive about a year ago, and absolutely loved how butter smooth it felt to use. It's impossible to describe to others... you must experience it to understand what you're missing.

However, at least at the time, Zed's extension/plugin ecosystem prevented me from making the jump off vscode. Just like it took me a long while to ween myself off JetBrains and their workflow/plugins, it'll take a long while to do the same here - that's if an equivalent plugin exists (yet).

It seems to me, it would be a killer feature for new IDE's to just embrace vscode's extensions and make them "just work". It would remove a lot of the barriers people have with switching IDE's.

Maybe that's an impossible ask... I have no idea, but it would be pretty sweet.

These were the comments I came looking for. What existing users of Zed migrated from. I'm pretty curious to try it, but lacking some time to tool yak-shave at the moment.

I'm in a very similar position, using Cursor just for their Tab model. My ideal choice would be Neovim, but I can't replicate the productivity I have with Cursor Tab.

I've been working on a better tab completion model that stays as an extension: https://ninetyfive.gg/

The main feature I really care about is low latency, which is my main gripe about Copilot. There's still a ways to go to match Cursor's quality but I'm chipping away at it!

I think we don’t talk enough about tab completion model quality. Recently Copilot’s model got a lot better (probably trying to catch up to Cursor) but I feel like there’s still so much room here (and I assume Zeds is worse from your description).

Smart context / big context is a really interesting question, I’m kind of surprised Google isn’t building here given how much effort they’ve put into big context (they have Jules and Gemini CLI but no tab completion UX).

On further thought I think one of the big 3 (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) should partner (ideally not buy) with Zed to get a foothold.

I went slightly differently:

I used Zed for about a year and a half exclusively, without using any AI features, and then switched to cursor to try AI features out. When Zed released its agent mode, I switched back to Zed.

I absolutely agree that Cursor’s tab completion is far superior to Zeds. The difference is night and day. Cursor’s really is that good. But the Zed agent mode works very well for me and Zed is, IMHO just so much better than an editor. I really hate having to use vscode or a vscode-based editor after using Zed so much (I used vscode exclusively before switching to Zed). And that’s enough for me to give up on the superior tab completion.

I hope Zed eventually improve theirs to a similar experience to cursor, but regardless, I love Zed.

The tab completion is the only thing that keeps me on Cursor.

I never cared for the LLM sidebar.

But the tab completion is basically mind-reading.

I’m in the exact same situation. Prefer Zed’s snappiness overall but the tab completion in cursor is the only reason I keep coming back.

But at the same time, I’m also doing more vibe coding instead of manual coding as time goes on, so Zed might eventually win out.

What kind of configuration did you use for tab completion? Did you try hooking up different LLMs?

Zed has SSH editing. But when I tried it a couple of weeks ago, their in-ui git didn't detect a repo in a folder that very much used git, and ports you want mapped have to be specified ahead of time, there's no way to do it at runtime like in neovim/vscode

Zed is not a great modal editor, modality is a strapped on afterthought. At least that the impression the vim keybinding give me. IMO the best chance I see for a fast modal editor that works out of the box is Helix.

Does Helix fit that bill for you? It's fast, modal and very little config required.

I think there's also a fork if you can't let go of the VIM bindings.

Why? Neovim exists.

You're not alone. The only reason I struggle to onboard to Zed is the design. They're doing an incredible job with the editor, but I have never seen a more bland design in any IDE. It's genuinely so bad that it affects my productivity in it. I'm a fan of Visual Studio and VS Code dark themes, I don't need anything special.

There's a forum thread [0] where users share their custom themes.

There's also an importer tool [1] that lets you convert any VS Code theme to a Zed theme. You might still need to compile the importer yourself, but it's all pretty straightforward.

0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/7337

1: https://zed.dev/blog/user-themes-now-in-preview#using-a-vs-c...

Push through it. You get used to it. Then start to like simplicity of it.

And then, due to speed, there is no going back to the lag infested chromium derivative made by Microsoft.

I agree. I couldn't get over any of the existing themes, they just seem so low contrast... So I spent a bunch of hours porting then favorite theme I've been using in Sublime Text, to Zed, named iPlastic. Sublime Text has a theme back of classic TextMate themes, and it came in that pack. I have to say, the porting process was not very easy, but it was worth it. Now, I prefer Zed to ST and VSCode because of the theme, not just the UI and other features :)

Wish I could just import my ST4 settings and theme into Zed. That'd help a lot. For now I consider it too much hassle and ST4 with LSP is good enough.

I spent a couple hours recreating the theme I was using previously in Sublime Text. The end result was not identical but close enough to feel OK.

I feel you. I still haven't found the light theme that would work for me. In VSCode I use Better Selenized. Even tried to import it to Zed but experience was a bit subpar.

I really like One Dark Pro, but you have to install it from the additional themes link.

The multi buffer is the most amazing thing about Zed. AI be damned. It now feels wrong to use an editor that doesn't have it. It is so obvious in hindsight.

I think this is one of the best innovations in Zed, though it could use some more polish to work really great. Being able to edit the diff directly surely is a great thing?

Honestly, this is a weak point of Zed IMO. I just find it a bit confusing to deal with. I don't know exactly how to get it to jump to the location of a specific block in the multi-buffer view, e.g. a Find in Files view. I double click various places in the UI until it goes to the file and sometimes I have to scroll to where I was at in the multi-buffer view. It's very frustrating.

I think it could be made to work better, but as it is now, it feels cumbersome to work with.

> It seems backwards to me to use a fancy IDE, but then run all your code in the terminal.

Having literally spent days at a time just to get a working run configuration at various employers and clients over the past decade, I find it backwards to use anything besides the terminal and version-controlled scripts & task runners / CLIs to fire up anything. (: People rarely document their JetBrains setup fully and even if they do, JetBrains IDEs are not exactly known for their reproducible behavior or for not occasionally messing up your configuration (in case you do decide to check in your IDE config & share with your team).

Besides, you will need those terminal scripts for your CI pipeline, anyway.

That being said,

> I love IDE features like clicking on the test I'm editing to run it, and setting breakpoints in the IDE.

I agree, that is very useful. However, to me it's the cherry on top of proper self-contained run scripts for the terminal.

I love these too. I have a run config checked into my repo that runs three run configs, for `fastapi dev`, npm start, and launching a JavaScript debugger, with one click. I also like clicking on a test or script and just hitting "ctrl+shift+d" to launch that particular code with the debugger.

VS Code can launch a fleet of dev containers but it's just not as good of an experience to restart and debug.

Same here. Zeds task configurations are not nearly as versatile, easy to set up and run as pycharms especially when it comes to virtual envs. The debugger is superior in Pycharm too. But in terms of overall use Zed is good.

My other complaint is that pyright (used by Zed) isn’t nearly as good as pycharms type inspection.

For personal projects I just use npm scripts or make