Unfortunately, "here" is not accurate. Not having a watch window, a stack trace view, and no mention of data breakpoints in the announcement still keeps the "beta" tag. I know those features will arrive eventually, but what is described is definitely not sufficient for 97% of my debugging sessions.
I would also have liked to see more in the announcement of multiple simultaneous debug sessions, and on how multithreaded debugging is planned. There are really cool things that can be done with multithreaded debugging further down the line that I'd be interesting in hearing about (like how RemedyBG has a DAW-like UI for freezing certain threads, or hitting one button to "solo" a thread and freeze all others).
We do have a basic stack trace view that basically all debuggers support. What's coming out in the near future is a stack trace view in our multi buffer system. In fact, you can use the "show stack trace" action while in an active debug session to expand the call stack in a multi buffer, where each excerpt is a frame. It's just not up to the quality that I and several others expect from Zed, so I didn't advertise it.
There's also a PR for a watching variables/expression that is going to be merged in a couple of days. The functionality is done, but we didn't want to add a feature so close to launch that wasn't fully tested.
Support for data breakpoints will come in the near future. I can't say when because we're planning on focusing on automatic configuration for a while, but it is a priority.
We do support simultaneously debugging multiple sessions at the same time and multithreaded debugging too. There's still more to do with it, but the support is definitely there!
Am impressed by the under-the-hood discussion though. Keep up the great work!
> New views: While we support all the fundamental views, we're planning on adding more advanced views such as a watch list, memory view, disassembly view, and a stack trace view
With that said, Zed has effectively replaced all of Emacs for me, besides Magit. Additionally, typing in other editors feels noticeably higher latency than Zed :)
I've been daily driving Zed for almost a year now -- works best on TypeScript, Rust, and Go projects, in my opinion.
There's just so much functionality Zed has to build out to compete with modern editors (agentic coding, collaboration, debugging, edit prediction, task runners, version control). With that said, for pair-programming sessions with friends, Zed has been perfect since Linux gained screenshare support. However, there's a noticeable "pause in development" for collaboration in order to implement major features like Agentic Coding, and smaller-but-essential features like direnv integration, IME support (typing Japanese in the terminal used to be a clunky, error-prone task), dealing with the endless permutations of Python tooling so that Python files aren't a sea of red lines, etc.
I don't think there's an issue for data breakpoints, but you can make one for us
I love how fast Windsurf and Cursor are with the "tab-tab-tab" code auto-completion, where nearly everything suggested is spot-on and the suggestions keep on rolling, almost automating the entire task of refactoring for you. This form of autocomplete works really well with TypeScript and other scripting languages.
IntelliJ / RustRover never got anywhere close to that level of behavior you can get in Cursor and Windsurf, neither in conjunction with JetBrains own models or with Co-pilot. I chalked it up as an IDE / model / language mismatch thing. That Rust just wasn't amenable to this.
A few questions:
1) Are we to that magical tab-tab-tab and everything autocompletes fluently with Rust yet? (And does this work in Zed?)
2) How does Zed compare to Cursor and Windsurf? How does it compare to RustRover, and in particular, JetBrains' command of the Rust AST?
I think they all use LSP, so whether you use neovim or Zed there shouldn't be a difference? (not 100% sure, but that's my basic understanding of LSP).
Every time I've encountered a vim emulator I've found it is just close enough that my fingers are doing the wrong things so often it's frustrating. Almost to the point where I would prefer a non-vimmy editor since at least then my fingers always do the wrong thing.
I'll just stick with Neovim until something better comes around. Which probably won't happen until after the "AI" bubble bursts.
I guess it's always possible to return to Vim if Neovim starts showing signs of being steered by its sponsors.
They're moving from "making awesome code editor" into yet another "buy our ai" product
Just like I want a terminal without AI features, which is why I'm no longer using iTerm2
Furthermore, Zed Agents are currently my favorite way of using LLM's during programming
"agent": {
"enabled": false
}
I started using Helix back around 2021-2022 and just couldn't get over the bugs and lack of integration. It was good, but PHP support (I was working at an older company) was bad.
Neovim felt closest to a nice editor but there were some popular community-driven plugins that were very stubborn, and alternatives were just very slow. I was also just overwhelmed by the choices I needed to make for something stable.
Lapce just felt like a VSCode clone that didn't do anything special. Looked cool, but I did not feel like it was ready for a daily driver (And it still doesn't).
Zed became a favorite in a short amount of time, and I'm extremely grateful for it every day. The debugger is a nice addition.
I wish more "Vim successors" would focus more on integrating with existing IDEs, rather than becoming one themselves. I don't want to have to set up an entirely new workflow when I change how I edit text.
That's also why I haven't tried using Neovim as a standalone IDE. It looks like I'd really like it, but I don't want to be locked in to using Vim.
Not sure why PHP needs a qualifier like this.
Interesting way to qualify the most popular editor of human history.
IMHO Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) and Language Server Protocol (LSP) are the best things happened to programming tooling in the last decade.
(I wrote this comment in another thread about the same link but didn't hit the frontpage)
Github issue for context: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
This is not that surprising to me. Surely no-one wants to spend their day looking at the pixels?
https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds
Installing the 'stable' build with scoop works a treat.
scoop bucket add extras
scoop install extras/zed
My desktop monitor is 1920x1080. On my computer and display; Vim, Emacs and VSCode are all able to render their fonts crisply while Zed is a blurry mess.
Upon reading the Rust code implementing the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) in Zed, some very junior SWEs will quickly point out that they would prefer only "self-documenting code" and would go as far as to removing all comments or even believe that "If it has comments, its probably bad code".
For sophisticated software that implements a defined protocol that is architected to be scalable in any piece of complex software, I prefer these comments that explains why a particular interface is designed the way it is and how it fits into the software (Zed) in this case if it were to be widely re-used like a plugin system.
This blog post is excellent in explaining this debugger integration in the editor and it makes me want to consider using Zed; it just needs an improved extension ecosystem.
I wouldn't complain about this stuff if it wasn't for their tagline being 'it's fast' and they're losing to Emacs Lisp (not a language amenable to being very fast) with a highly optimized C core.
I looked at their plugins, they're compiled into WASM and run in some VM. Maybe that's part of it?
In contrast, all my attempts at emacs ended up in dropping it due to latency issues (mostly because I work on remote machines)
No. The ones I've looked just set up stuff, like launching a language server. They shouldn't be involved in typing.
I think it's related to the GPU usage. It's easy to introduce delays when you do GPU compositing, and the OS will already be doing its own.
As for emacs, IIRC they did some ugly things to update the UI directly instead of going through the normal event loop, which was causing compatibility issues later on.
https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/dape.html
The way it's designed (incl. having no dependencies) suggests that they will be angling for it to be included with stock Emacs at some point.
Zed on the other hand works perfectly fine for me. Goes to show how a slightly different stack can completely change one’s experiences with a tool.
it's a delightful little editor if it weren't for this thing...
So nice to have an option that doesn’t repackage the whole damn chromium engine (again)
They got the baseline feature set right, IMO, but probably could've spent some more time looking at the actual, real demographics of development (and who is most likely to appreciate performance as a feature and share those ideals).
In Zed, login is only required for internet features like some of the commercially hosted LLMs, and the multiplayer editing feature.
It's that it doesn't have an installer for Windows. That's what I was stuck on.
I could just build it... I guess.
Because I am accustomed to a non-US keyboard layout that doesn't make the regular key bindings for changing zoom easy, I got too used to doing it this way.
It's honestly looking to be a great modern IDE with almost everything I'm wishing for.
Does that work if my build is Docker based?
It is finally at the review stage, I really hope it can get merged soon!
I'm guessing that this extension support problem will continue to be a barrier to uptake for a while.
That said, it's getting better; as another commenter pointed out, LSP is one of the best things to happen to this space. There should be a standard for editor plugins, too.
Zed only supports language extensions, so it is in part responsible. If you're using embedded rust then PlatformIO isn't really needed; probe-rs is extremely capable and straightforward.
Otherwise maybe the platformio cli might be enough
https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds/releases
The opengl one fails on my PC but the "regular one" (?) zed.exe seems to work. Didn't test much as I have discovered that today :-)
Jokes aside, after SublimeText as the main tool, and VSCode for Rust debugging, I'm trying this one. Now with more themes and plugins than a year ago, it can be set up to look and function a lot better.
Now, seeing that it's a GUI application, why would I use it, given that it seems to:
1. have no menus,
2. have no toolbars,
3. be AI-focused?