Giving Zed Code Editor a Shot

Guh? What’s Zed?

Zed is a new and shiny free and open source code editor written in Rust, which automatically means he’s a fast boi. I saw Gabs using it and really liking it, so I thought “after all…why not? why shouldn’t I try it?”

In fact, I “tried” it once after Gabs’ first post was published, but I didn’t bother to understand and configure it, so I ended up not using it (classic me huh).

This time, however, I decided that it would be fair to actually try it before judging it. I already had it installed, so I went straight to the configuration. Turns out not much needed to be changed, in fact this is my entire settings.json:

{
  "theme": "Zedokai",
  "hard_tabs": true
}

Yes, I prefer real tabs to spaces. Go cancel me.

So why didn’t I use it the first time? I don’t know, maybe the lack of exact extension alternatives to VSCodium put me off.

So far I like it, it’s indeed super fast and minimalistic (in a good way).

I do like VSCodium’s font and rendering a bit more, but that’s probably because I just got used to it. No wonder, I have been using VSCodium continuously for over a year.

The built-in formatter is surprisingly good, better than the one in VSCodium; it wraps long CSS properties perfectly, formats automatically on save (VSCodium can do this too, but not as smoothly), and supports modern selectors like .element-1 + .element-2.

What I also like, surprisingly, is the lack of one particular feature: Git integration. In VSCodium it was just annoying and not useful, since it just didn’t work (GPG commit signing, SSH keys, and such) because of Flatpak, and I use lazygit for Git anyway, so I don’t need it at all.

There’s even a Monokai Pro theme called Zedokai. It took me a while to find it. It really feels like home, such a great theme.

I don’t exactly like the AI crap integration, but it’s optional, so I don’t mind.

Will see how it goes, but so far I like it.