Hey Theo, I'm Nathan, one of the founders. Awesome video, and thank you! You're absolutely right that catering to the needs of content creators is a no-brainer. It's one of the things I was excited about with channels, where you could write code and invite a live audience that you can put on stage. It's like participatory streaming. I think all of your critiques were pretty valid, and the team is taking a look at addressing your feedback. As for `div`... We use a layout engine called `taffy` that implements a subset of the layout model used in browsers. The name `Element` is used by the `Element` trait, and I really wanted GPUI to have a single namespace. So I thought, what the hell, "div" is as good a name as any other for a generic element. "Atom" was suggested, but we decided it felt too connected to our last editor. Thanks again! P.S. We're taking a deeper look at scrolling. There's no reason it shouldn't feel smooth. Maybe we need to raise our standards.

Your shirt used 3GB of my data

As much as I'm against Electron, the fact that it allows vs code to run on pretty much any platform is a big part what makes it so widely used. Zed really needs to get support on Linux and Windows before it can be a 'vs code killer'.

Zed looks promising but I wish they would focus on getting the base functionality ready first before some more advanced features

So sick of all these Mac only tools claiming to be the next greatest thing. If they are not cross platform, they aren't killing anything.

Zed cannot be anywhere near a "VS Code" killer until it's available for Windows. Being MacOS only makes it extremely limited, and destined for the sidelines.

From the creator of Atom AND TREE-SITTER, wow, that's a very huge plus! The tree-sitter grammars are a lot more powerful than what current VSCode supports (text mate?). Anyone familiar with "wtf, why can't I get syntax highlighting inside inline styles attribute in a html tag" should really appreciate the change! Oh... it's mac-os only for now. Yeah...

AGPL isn't Apache, its the Affero version of GPL which is specifically designed for server-side applications. So it's a quite expected and correct license split for a GPL project like this. :)

I love how Theo learning an IDE has the exact energy of someone learning a new fighting game character xD

I scanned your shirt and got a link to the create-t3-app repo

Ok, trying to write some Rust and Go code with the editor, and the experience is pretty damn good - I got autocomplete and syntax highlight out-of-box, JetBrains keybindings, a nice light theme and font customization and vim mode... I absolutely love the responsiveness of it. I'd love to see cross-platform tackled, I wanna use this editor on all my machines.

I kept Sublime and honestly nothing compares. You have all the plug-ins you need and the native speed makes up for a huge chunk of my daily DX

+1 to the licensing for open source idea. well researched for the current scenario (oss + biz)

The main reason VSCode is so popular is the same reason Go is popular: A huge org is bankrolling the project. Both these projects are so high quality and featureful because they can afford to be.

Yes! So glad you made a video on this when I saw the open sourced they project yesterday. Really looking forward to what comes next for Zed.

Thanks Theo, great video. Again, I learned so much beside of the main topic zed. Just awesome, big thumbs up!

as a comp sci major, I am mortally scared by the fact that my ide could CALL someone without my direct intent

@Theo, a correction, the AGPL has nothing to do with Apache. The A stands for Affero. The full name of the license is GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL) since v3. Before the v3 the AGPL, while being a modified version of the GNU GPL v2, was not under the GNU umbrella.

Great channel with an awesome host, mustache fits you perfectly. :-D And your thumbnail grimaces are top notch too. And btw thanks for mentioning two great plugins for VS code. Regarding Zed, I'll give it some time till it gets some traction. :-)

I like they chose flex as the layout primitive-just like React Native does. Designing a good layout system is hard, and using it can be even more cumbersome. The closest contender would be cassowary that, for example, Apple uses for their AutoLayout in macOS/iOS. But let's be honest it's not the easiest thing to manually deal with constraints and relations between views; and that shows in SwiftUI where you use more familiar Flex-like APIs for common layout that are then translated to AutoLayout under the hood.

There is also lapce, it's also written in rust. AFAIK it doesn't have any financial backing so Zed will probably become more popular. If you want native performance there is also Nova (from Panic), but paid and mac only.

I just tried it with PHP. I liked that the LSP and highlighting worked out of the box. On the 10k lines file, VSCode’s highlighting crashes and editing that file feels painful. Zed, on the other hand, had no problem whatsoever. However, it felt like the UI wastes space (like tabs are tall, file path is taller than vscode’s and non-interactive). It’s impossible to hide ai and collaboration icons. A lot of small features are missing like lines indicating indentation, sticky current block names, inlay hints, no visual studio-like theme and vim keybindings don’t import nvim config. VScode used ~1GB of RAM while Zed was 200MB. Which is great but I feel like VSCode without plugins and many of its features would actually be comparable. So far Zed felt barebones and a worse experience overall. However, I’m all for the native technologies and I’ll keep an eye of the project. Hopefully, the Rust community and extensions make improve Zed’s featureset a lot!

When I was learning on my own I used VScode because it was so prolifically mentioned everywhere and the plugins were helpful for my vision, but when I went to college they had us use Sublime and I definitely felt the performance you mentioned. I will have to take a look at Zed and would love to see you cover more things like this!

thanks for bringing up swift ui and gpui comparison in as well, i found that very useful for builder pattern

LiveShare in VSCode is quite nice. If it was built-in it could probably be more seamless but considering it's an extension, it's awesome.

I'm at work so I haven't had the opportunity to watch the video yet, but here's my prediction of what this will turn out to be. A promising editor, that's missing _the_ feature that VS Code has, that no one else currently has to anywhere near the same extent: the extensions. Open a file, almost any kind of file, and VS Code fetches everything needed to just make things work the way you expect them to. If a language has official support for an editor, it's going to be VS Code. My preferred editor is Sublime Text, but I still end up using VS Code quite a bit because of this. While I would be quite happy for something better to take the crown from VS Code, it's a hella tall mountain to climb. Starting mac-only makes it seem like they're aiming for a niche following rather than a broad one, so my expectation is I won't hear much more about this one.

Thanks, John Stossel. I've been intrigued by it for awhile, but I'm waiting to see what the extension and support ecosystem is like after awhile.

"Become a standard first, monetize later" - also known as enshittification. They wanna be the Discord of editors yay

AGPL is not "Apache GPL" but Affero GPL. According to wikipedia: It is intended for software designed to be run over a network, adding a provision requiring that the corresponding source code of modified versions of the software be prominently offered to all users who interact with the software over a network.

I am a Sublime Text diehard. When I use VSCode is when I have no choice or I want to learn something that is taught by default in VSCode. I have been looking at Zed for a year and want to use it for my Rust programming exclusively. I can't wait to see where this goes.

I don't know about features for creators, but prioritizing features that demo well definitely helps your sales team in those weird chance encounters, and also at conferences. And specifically for something like cloak (which I was unaware of), everyone is something of a content creator these days because we all share screen in zoom, or recorded lightning rounds, so these features and use cases aren't as niche as they were 4 1/2 years ago. I dunno if I'll ever trust a system to keep creds from accidentally leaking tho.

Their blog post about why they did a rewrite was really interesting, and I'd be pretty keen for Theo's reaction to it

I don't think its possible to "beat" vscode at this point. The extension network is just way too vast. For any other software to support good number of extensions will need contributors who will need motivation, but most people wouldn't be using the editor if it doesn't have all the extensions.

I love where this is going, but it's not even close to "VS Code Killer" status yet. As a Rust dev, I would LOVE to find a performant tool that can surpass VSCode, but I need more than just an editor. Also, there are pretty strong rumors that VSCode (or major chunks of it) are moving to Rust. It will be interesting to see how all this progresses!

Really like that zed has build in support for tailwind css 🔥

Yes, please make a video about the licenses in open source. I have no idea how they work except that some of them are more restrictive than others. Clearing that up for me and similar viewers would be a game changer!

4:59: "Lets be honest: With the things that they are targeting, Mac devs are gonna be the majority of the users anyways". How is that? I would love to try that editor, but Mac is out of the question for me. I don't see why the editor is, in particular, aiming for Mac users. Can anyone elaborate on that?

It's awesome they have vim mode. I prefer Helix key bindings but I could deal with this. And if the keybindings are customizable, perhaps I can make it work like Helix. It doesn't appear to have a Linux version though. I hope they have that eventually, especially now that it's open source.

@23:53 Tailwind autocomplete and hover is a tailwind-css language server feature. It's a language server just like tsserver hover and auto complete. The class name formatting is just about configuring prettier with correct plugins, and running it as a formatter according to that specification. It's not really an editor specific feature, since I have those exact same things inside my neovim.

I switched over to Zed recently from VS Code (which was getting increasingly laggy w/ project size). I'm using preview version of Zed (based on open source engine), and can definitely feel / appreciate the perf diff -- even for small projects, the diff is subtle, but satisfying (responsiveness to keystrokes, auto-actions, etc.). Also, while the UI is not quite as "pretty" as VS Code, I find it to be more focused (which in-turn focuses me more). The switch over was second attempt for me (tried it several months back, but no tailwind support back then, which has since been added and very well done). There are def some VS code features I miss (better refactor, and add-ons like rainbow brackets, tag completion), but there are also several features unique to Zed (e.g., the collab, gpt panel). Overall, I'm very happy w/ Zed, and it grows on me the more I use it.

Mac only, so it's a big no-no from the get-go.

30:13 As someone who has written a from-scratch text renderer in C#, I can confirm this is very true. Rendering unicode text in a very performant way is very hard and I would not wish it on my worst enemy.

I've been using helix, a neovim alternative in Rust, and I'm very happy with it. The transition from neovim wasn't easy but I prefer the defaults in helix, plus it has almost all the features I want from my editor out of the box without having to install a dozen plugins which I really appreciate!

Just posted this in our company chats, thank you for sharing.

Disagree on the millisecond debounce for the autocomplete. I'd rather train myself to ignore the suggestions until I decide to look at them for help, rather than train myself to WAIT after each keystroke. I'd focus on making it less of a photosensitive epilepsy liability rather than artificially reduce the impressive responsiveness. (Can we have both?)

Mildly amusing after your last video about Web Dev and defending electron because otherwise native apps wouldn't be on certain platforms. Be fascinating to see where Zed will go, VSCode is a large hurdle to get over BUT it does keep happing (macOS Textmate for ages, BBEdit, VSCode, Nova, and of course ATOM, Sublime and many more)

I love Zed. Been using the Preview (not Beta) for months now and it’s so fast and beautiful. My needs are light: HTML, CSS, and a sprinkling of PHP so I am more than happy for its current state and look forward to seeing it evolve.

That icon for sure looks like source control. Will be test driving it for a while. Initial impressions are very good tho

I think the only vscode "killer" is neovim if you want to work faster and "better". The thing is no editor will get as popular as vscode in this market becouse overall is a decent editor, really easy to write and edit code, good plugin support etc.. Yes it's bloated, but from my experience you only notice it for big projects, for small / personal projects ( so for casual users ) is fine

i think neovim is a good alternative for vs code

It looks exciting, but I will wait until its more polished out before I try it. I like the way collaborating is integrated but I agree the layout and the way it works at some points looks janky. Performance does look faster which is good. They 110% need to fix the way the layout and boxes flash when you type and they need to give priority to words you are spelling first. But, with this being open source now I think a lot of devs will work on this platform and speed its development up and fix a lot of the areas that need polish. Ill definitely keep my eye on Zed.

For deleting a section click then scrollup to where you want and hold shift and click again it will select a range without you having to slow scroll up. it allows you to jump around alot faster

The great thing about using (neo) vim/Emacs is that all editors come and go while you can just add a plugin to add some novel feature introduced in these hip editors

2:25 AGPL has nothing to do with apache 😅 it is from Affero (startup that existed somewhere in the past)

Would love to see more content on these projects and the rewrite

This seems really cool! I would love to use this instead of VSCode, but I am on Linux. I wish they had made it available for Mac and Linux since these are the two hottest platforms for developers to work on. The moment they support Linux, maybe with an AppImage or a distro package like .rpm and .deb, I will instantly switch over. For now, I will watch and see where this goes.

Looks pretty nice. Maybe in a few years it'll be at least competing with VsCode. I mean, performance is nice, but it's not that annoying to me most of the time. But all the plugins, different languages and things like that, it's definitely necessary. Small things you can't live without win over "wow autocomplete is so fast it's annoying" :P

Terms of service are a blocker for me to use it unfortunately. It looks promising, but I will hold fire for now. "INVESTIGATIONS, MONITORING, & NO OBLIGATION TO PRE-SCREEN CONTENT. Zed may, but is not obligated to, investigate, monitor, pre-screen, remove, refuse, or review the Service and/or Content, including Your Content and User Content, at any time. By entering into the Agreement, you hereby provide your irrevocable consent to such monitoring. You acknowledge and agree that you have no expectation of privacy concerning the transmission of Your Content, including without limitation chat, text, or voice communications. In the event that Zed pre-screens, refuses or removes any Content, you acknowledge that Zed will do so for Zed’s benefit, not yours."

It's using native code for rendering via Metal, but it's not using native OS components like the win32 API. So it can use javascript idioms and render them on the GPU, but there's no javascript involved, and there's no expectation of it looking native. For example Blender, Godot, and Unreal all have their own UI libraries that render on the GPU and use all sorts of ways to organize the UI code. They use native code for rendering quite complex UIs but it's not like your typical native application using Windows or Qt. But most frontend programmers are used to the way things are done on the web so it's a good choice to call back to some of those idioms.

Thanks for sharing this info!

Could you share the c alias that you use to open vscode directly to skip the inefficient parsing? 😃

I don’t get Electron hate. VS Code is way more responsive and quick to load than any of the native IDEs I’ve used (I’m talking about you, Oracle Developer and Spyder). Sure, it’s no VIM, but I don’t think that’s necessarily Electron’s fault.

I suggest taking a look at Lapce, which is also an IDE written in pure Rust, which uses tree-sitter as well. I think it's more advanced than Zed right now (supports all major platforms) and is also open source

Looks pretty good, tried it for a few minutes today, found the same issues as you did. Better plugin support and Astro support would be nice!

Important to note that it is at this point not available for people who understand value of items and are not willing to pay 3x their PCs value for a logo ;)

it's written in rust and mac only what

7:42 if you want to delete a section just set the start point for the cursor and scroll down to where you want to delete, then hold shift and click the other end , and the whole section will automatically be selected, no need to hold shift while scrolling, just make sure you don't click anywhere when scrolling to not lose the start point.

great video, do you have a video or a source for the custom `c` command to open vscode faster?

Strange that they started with Mac only support. Really strange, even.

A text editor not being shipped with a plugin system upfront is crazy.

Definitely get into your thoughts on open source licensing. Yes! Don't forget Meta's choices for LLama, please.

There are a lot of features that I cannot find with Zed. Column selection and select boundary are two of them. I also I didn't see the sub-word navigation keybinding in the defaults, even though it exists (ctrl-left/right). Also, the find references UI is hella clunky. I'm going to stick to TextMate and vscode for the now. But this project has a lot of potential and I'll be keeping my eyes on it.

To be vs code killer you need to have users

I'mma stick to Neovim and GNU Emacs. Though I might take a look at it. Edit: never mind, fuck that. It only supports MacOS. This is why I stick to things like Neovim, or just normal vim... wherever I am, there likely is a way to use it.

ZED is definitely available in Arch Linux via the AUR. Just putting that here since video said not available on linux. Good find though. Excited to try this out.

Hey what is that "c" alias you are using instead of "code", i would love to have the solution since i struggle a lot with those 1sec+ opening time everytime ty :)

I really don't get this obsession with Apple. You would think, that the developers are more independent thinkers.

Nothing beats the collaboration experience with tmux

That is incredible!

How do you feel about JetBrains fleet?

I dont understand what you mean @ 4:58 .. why would mac be the main target group for a fast and collaborative code editor?

For highlighting text like that, click to put your cursor where you want to start, then scroll to where ever, then hold shift and click again, and all text will be highlighted.

the test of any "modern" is how it handles longstand annoyances in editing software. For example selecting text inside long lines and html-esque wrapping. If you select text in a line the goes offscreen does it jerk the window around if you even just barely move the mouse up or down so you no longer even see what you are trying to select. HTML isn't going anywhere so first class support of wrapping things in html tags or finding/hightling matching closing/open tags or mismatched tags is a must out of the box.

Only issue: I’m on windows… :(

What I don't get, if it is written in Rust, why is there no release for Linux?

Honestly I'm not leaving Electron any time soon. I designed and wrote a file server with it's own UI, virtual filesystem, native encryption, data striping, parity and everything. The primary interface? A web page so it's available on mobile, with electron-specific logic that sits quietly unless loaded specifically inside an electron window, from where it has the ability to access FS APIs and sync files between my computers. Thanks to Electron and Node I have literally a single codebase for an extremely extensive project. As long as there aren't any good alternatives for what I just described, Electron will live on, and sadly or not - there aren't any.

That first 45 seconds is why I could never stand Gedit on Linux back in the day for a text editor and would always run Notepad++ in Wine. That tiny input lag makes such a big difference. I don’t think I’ve ever used VSCode, but I’ll be interested to see what it’s like now.

i still use sublime for everything it doesnt do there is jetbrains

I use Mac and Linux so there not being a Linux version is a no-go for me. Honestly thinking of getting off of VSCode and trying neovim but I don't want to disrupt my workflow

Looks very promising! I really like VSCode for the most part, it brought a lot of innovation and improved DX, but has its pitfalls and annoyances. So I have been looking for VSCode alternatives for a while now and have seen some interesting attempts already (e. g. Lapce), some of which seem already discontinued (e. g. Onivim 2). Zed seems to be pretty far already, I hope it will be a real alternative soon!

AGPL has nothing to do with Apache. It's more restrictive. GPL only requires open source if you distribute it, AGPL also requires open source if people talk to it over the network.

Only available on mac, RIP

I tried Zed for a couple of weeks. And yes it is fast, but my development did not feel faster since it misses a lot of really useful extensions like eslint, priettier etc.

Looks promising. I'll check back when their "extensions" support allows for true extensions, not just themes and code highlighting. It be fun to get in on the ground floor and contribute to making some extensions before anyone else takes all the ideas I can think of.

I'm an endangered Sublime Text user, paid for it and everything. This doesn't look like an upgrade for me. I don't like the idea of a huge (135M) binary for a text editor. I'll wait this one out and see if we can't get a less bloated option. I don't own a mac either, but I probably won't get this even when it comes to Linux. Just being honest in case the devs are checking for intrest.

This sounds awesome. Havent heard of Zed before. Im not a fan of VSCode it always seemed less polished then Intellij for my limited uses but now that I am branching away from Java based apps i need a better all arounder. Plus my student license is going to disappear someday and JetBrains is pricey lol. Curious how the paid version of this will look/cost

Mac only = pfft.

I am using Webstorm for a year for a Vue2 and Electron project. It's a work project so it's pretty big. I do not expect any IDE to be better than Webstorm, especially in terms in UI/UX. From what I see here Zed is not even close. In terms of performance I run WS on a 13900k with 64gb ddr5 ram from a solidigm p44 pro 1tb. It is super smooth.

I'm trying out Zed with a REALLY large codebase and the performance difference compared to VS Code is significant. Zed is orders of magnitude faster when doing file search and intellisense suggestions and I haven't had the typescript language server crash a single time.

In my experience, what makes vscode slow is not the editor itself, but, ironically, the extensions. How will they make sure that all the extensions are just as fast as the core editor?