Trying out Zed
I've been following the development of Zed for a while. As a pretty diehard vim user myself, my interest was peaked after reading From Vim to Zed by Thorsten Ball, which documents the experience of a long time vim switching to Zed.
I also recently finished watching an interview with the founder (Nathan Sobo) on the Developer Voices Podcast
On a more personal note, I noticed the Zed team recently hired some super talented developers that I respect/look up to (so it must be good right?).
So a couple of weeks ago I decided to ditch neovim completely and try out Zed, using it for 100% of my day to day coding. After two weeks I thought I'd share how my experience went.
Things I liked
Change of scenery
A little weird to start with, but I've been using a pretty similar vim setup for a decade now, so trying something new was a nice change of scenery.
Kind of like switching to working from a coffee shop,co-working space, or outdoor space after being holed up in your office for an extended period of time
Was the code I wrote any better as a result? I doubt it. But was it refreshing and exciting to be writing code in an environment that felt completely new.
GUI Appearance
Whilst I do appreciate the aesthetic of my terminal neovim setup, it's difficult to deny a well designed GUI editor simply looks better.
Instead of having to hack together splits, tabbars and statuslines with unicode symbols and text UI elements in Zed just look way nicer.
Opening zed for the first time I feel like they've put a lot of effort into making things look beautiful. I'm a bit fan of their default font and the builtin colour schemes.
Sensible Balance Between Built-Ins vs 3rd Party Plugins
It's my understanding Zed has only recently opened up it's core to allow community members to start writing their own editor extensions. Instead of relying on community plugins the creators seem to be aiming for a more curated experience where core functionality is provided by the editor itself. To get an idea about what's included, check out the feature Just checklist on their site
Unlike neovim which is completely modular, Zed provides a lot of useful features out of the box such as git integration, auto completion, auto pairs, LSP support and tree sitter.
Vim/Neovim is pretty barebones in comparison, instead you have to reach for third party plugins to provide useful functionality.
In my opinion this is both the ecosystems biggest strength, and its biggest weakness. Although there's a healthy ecosystem of plugins to choose from, it's easy to feel a sense of decision paralysis when deciding which combination of plugins to use.
I love to tweak and tinker with my neovim configuration as much as anyone, but lately I'm seeing more value in using a setup that's curated from the ground up. Things are just guaranteed to work together in a way that a myriad of third party plugins can't.
I think it's a positive thing that text-editors like Zed (and helix) acknowledge the utility of certain functionality and provide these features out of the box. I think over time I'd like to see neovim do the same, (why aren't 'nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter' and nvim-lspconfig) just part of core neovim already?
This meant I was able to fire up Zed and actually start being productive with essentially zero tweaks to my config. I chose a colour scheme I liked, enabled Vim mode and suddenly I was writing code.
Comprehensive vim mode
Coming from neovim it's a non-starter for me if an editor doesn't support modal editing or provide vim key mappings. A lot of editors kind of get the basics right, but there's weird corners where things ends up not working as you'd expect. Unless you're a vim user this kind of uncanny valley behaviour is difficult to explain.
Thankfully in Zed the vim mode feels really well thought out, it complements the editor experience and usually does what you'd expect it to.
There's a really interesting discussion on zed's vim-mode and why they chose to not 'just embed neovim' and instead do their own things (spoiler they have different goals).
Performance
The editor feels super snappy, responsive and fairly light on resources. One of the things that prevents me from ever using VSCode for any length of time is that the experience feels sluggish, especially on older hardware.
At no point during my trial did the editor freeze or or feel laggy, everything felt pretty buttery smooth.
Click to open files
Something super simple (but something completely missing from my terminal workflow) is the ability to click to open a file in the terminal output and have this pop up in the editor.
This is great when running tests or linters and just directly jumping to the location in your editor to fix the problem.
In neovim I'm accustomed to highlighting the path to a file in a terminal tab,
switching back to my neovim tab and then opening with :e <filename>, which in
comparison is super inconvenient.
Now I've gotten used to the way Zed handles this it will be frustrating to ever revert back.
Multi cursors
There's a group of people in the vim community that are adamant multi-cursors ren't something that's needed. Technically you can do anything achievable with multi-cursors, but IMO that doesn't mean you should settle for it.
Zed manages to implement this feature in a way that feels like it complements vim and feels much more useable that whatever the vim alternative would be.
Built in terminal
When I decided I give Zed a try I told myself I'd go all in, abandoning a designated terminal app completely. So when running tests, scripts and services I've been doing using Zeds builtin terminal.
I like being able to quickly access the builtin terminal with Command+J, having a keybinding on the home-row makes it easy to access. Likewise being able to toggle full-screen this window with Shift+Escape means I was able to completely replicate what I was doing inside Iterm beforehand.
Things I Disliked
Buffer/Split Management
My brain has been altered by the way vim/neovim manages splits and buffers. Fundamentally this makes it difficult for me to adapt to a tab based workflow. In vim a split is just a window into underlying buffers. Splits share the same underlying buffers, meaning you can cycle between all open buffers in any split.
In zed (and most other GUI editors) if you make a separate window split, you can only cycle through tabs that belong to that split. Frequently, I found myself making new splits and having to do some manually tab management to get what I wanted.
Furthermore, one of the settings I have in enabled in neovim is splitright/splitbelow. This means when I create a new split it automatically focusses the new split to the right (or below) of my existing window. In zed the opposite happens, which I found quite jarring.
LSP Support
I'm used to running both ruff and pylsp at the same time, the former helps lint & format my code whereas the latter does more typical language server things like provide jump to definition and variable renaming.
Currently it's only possible to use Python with the default pyright language
server https://zed.dev/docs/languages/python
This really is one of major things preventing me from making the leap to Zed completely. I really hope in the future they open up the editor to support any LSP's (not just the default recommended one), and allow multiple of them to run at the same time.
Conclusion
Overall my experience was positive and I'm excited to see how the editor evolves/improves other time. If you're curious, I'd encourage you to give it a try yourself.
In the modern era of boated election apps and excessive RAM usage it's awesome to see the original authors of Atom (and it's electron framework cousin) take another stab at building an editor but this time with a focus on performance.
I think once the LSP support is more mature I'll definitely be giving it another go!