Zed “kills” VSCode

What IDE is this ?

It's a code editor , baby .

What about Versus Code ?

Versus Code's dead , baby .

Versus Code's Brackets which is really nice , Versus Code and I unsuccessfully tried Vim .

And for me , Versus Code has been the killer .

Well , Zed is supposed to be really fast because for those that didn't notice , apparently , Versus Code is really slow .

Did you notice that ?

I I didn't notice that .

In fact , if you go to Zed's homepage , zed dot dev , right here , they have the latency times published 58 milliseconds for Zed .

Sublime , 75 .

Versus code , 97 milliseconds .

Well , apparently this is very important because people can actually perceive these responses down to 2 milliseconds .

This kind of tactile feedback , more like visual connection that you have with your screen , Z , and I've tried both Versus Code and Z , and it doesn't really matter .

Point , I've already downloaded zed and I've tried both v s code and zed , and it doesn't really affect me , but I'm only human .

So I tested it using a 900 60 frame per second recording and here's what I found .

I measured 70 frames for Versus Code , so that's about 72 milliseconds .

And for Zed , I measured 54 frames , which is about 56 milliseconds , and that's actually better than what they had on their site .

So yes , Zed is faster than Versus Code at rendering keystrokes .

Confession time .

I'm not a very good typist , so perhaps somebody who's better at typing than me would notice this difference .

There is , however , another test that I did that does show a huge difference .

Opening a folder or opening a file .

123 .

Go .

Okay .

Not bad .

Zed .

Oh , my God .

Are you serious ?

Let's try just a file here .

I don't think we need slow motion for that one .

This metric is not shown on their home page though because , well , you type a lot more than you open files or folders .

What makes Zed so fast is this new UI framework that they've created that lives on top of the GPU and talks directly to the GPU , sort of like a video game rendering .

This framework is called GPUi and it was created by the Zed team themselves .

You can find it under the Zed repository too , which by the way is now open sourced .

I'll get back to why that really matters in its fight against Versus Code in a moment .

When I monitor GPU usage in zed , we're getting what is that ?

Like 40% usage ?

And I navigate code , scroll really fast all over the place .

I'm not seeing any delays .

This is very fast .

When I do the same thing with v s code , it's about the same because Versus code also uses the GPU .

Definitely not in the same way as Zed , but I'm still not noticing any kind of delay here .

I am on an M2 Max MacBook Pro here .

I don't expect this to hit any kind of limit , but Zed has gotten up to , what is that , 40% usage maybe ?

Maybe there's a little spike nearing 50% .

Versus code is a little bit less usage .

More usage , of course , is better .

That means it's showing that it's actually utilizing the GPU .

However , it's just want to get some baseline readings on this machine , which is showing me that there is a little bit of a difference .

You can also start Versus code in this mode right here where you disable the GPU on startup .

So let's quit that , disable the GPU and let's have a look at that when I do a lot of scrolling .

I'm still not seeing any slowdowns and this is telling me that the CPU is handling the rendering here and is doing just a fine job .

Now , what I like about Versus Code is the zooming in ability and the separation of windows .

Let me show you .

So when I zoom in , I can do command plus command minus to zoom out , and the entire UI responds to my zoom .

I like that because it gives me , more power to do presentations when I do screencasts and video recordings and things like that .

With Zed , the code zooms in and out the same way , but the rest of the interface does not .

So if I'm zooming in and out just to show my code , that's fine .

But how do I zoom everything else ?

The menus , the rest of the UI .

I might need to dig through menus and see how it's done .

Maybe it's possible , but it's not immediately obvious .

Still , not a huge deal .

Now what about separating tabs to a new window ?

You can't do that with Zed .

Trying to drag a tab out and you just can't do it .

What I do like about Versus Code is that you can take a tab and drag it out to a new window .

And this window has its own controls , so I can zoom that window independently .

These are all features that can be added to zed , but Versus Code has them right now out of the box without any extensions .

These are the kinds of things that I personally use .

You might not even care about this kind of thing , but what a lot of people do care about is Copilot .

And Versus Code and Zed both have Copilot support .

With Versus Code , you also have extensions for other AI assistants other than Copilot , like , Cody .

I recently did a video on that .

Tab 9 is another popular one .

With Zed , you do have the ability to use AI through providing your own OpenAI API key .

Right now , they only support OpenAI and you're gonna have to pay per usage over there .

I just found the extensions menu item here in Zed .

They do have extensions , but it looks like that area needs to be developed quite a bit .

Right now , there isn't much going on here .

Extensions are in the form of themes and language highlighting support from what I understand here .

Not true extensions in the sense of the word that we get with Versus code , where they can actually augment functionality of the tool .

Let's try to change the theme here .

Let's go with , this one .

Nice .

Now one other thing I really enjoy in Versus Code is formatting .

And I do that by highlighting a selection , command k , command f , and it formats the document or the selection , I should say .

Let's see if this happens in zed .

Command k , command f .

What happened there ?

Not quite sure if it formatted , but it , it went down to the bottom of the file .

To really see it , I'm gonna have to change the bottom of the file .

Oh , it formats on save .

That's that's good .

Yeah .

It formats on save .

I like that .

You can do the same thing with Versus Code .

So you probably have some preferences here , like format on save , off .

There we go .

Now , one of the things about Zed is that it's focused on stability .

This is something that , Versus code has a history of , let's just say , I'm really used to reloading the window .

It's one of my favorite things I do in Versus Code .

Developer , reload window .

Boom .

And that should tell you something about the stability of of an electron based project .

It's not always the most stable thing .

Here , they're saying that they're focused on doing something called fuzz tested for stability , whatever that means .

It's supposed to eliminate the kinds of issues you might run into , like I do with Versus Code sometimes where things don't sync up or they freeze and I need to reload the window .

That said , Zed does have a workspace restart function .

Just in case .

Let's check out the collaboration feature .

Here on this machine , I'm logged in as a one GitHub account into Zed , and here I'm logged in as another GitHub account .

On this one , I want to share this project with this person .

I'm going to add a contact and I'm going to type in their name .

This will only pop up if this person is logged into Zed .

I selected this person and now here I get an invitation .

There we go .

It's under requests and I accept my invite .

Boom .

Zysken accepted your contact invite .

Now what ?

In case you're not aware , this is not a tutorial .

This is me trying it out for the first time .

On this machine , I'm gonna just start typing and see if this does anything .

The only way to share my project is to actually call the other person .

Maybe that's not the only way , but that's how I'm finding it out .

Oh .

Zed just crashed over here .

Okay , accept the call .

Zed .

Alright , I finally got it to where it's not crashing .

I think , I'm gonna give this another shot .

So I've got the same file opened on both sides , and I'm gonna start typing .

It's working .

There is a significant delay , but it's working .

It doesn't show me who's editing the file here though , so that would be kind of nice if it did .

Maybe if there's more than one other person working on this , it would .

Let's go the other way , and that's working too .

Now this is actually giving another person complete access to your project .

So if they mess something up oh , Zed crashed again .

So if they mess something up , they will mess up your local copy , so be careful .

Now , Versus Code doesn't have a built in function to share the project .

They do have something called live share .

It's an extension by Microsoft that you can enable , and then I can live share my project .

It just gives you a link you can join .

I'm gonna go over here , paste in that link .

This pops open Versus Code .

Now , it did open up Versus Code in the browser .

It works in the browser because , well , it's web technology .

So I can keep working here in the browser , or let's see if I can open up Versus Code .

Let's pop open that same file that I was working on , and here we are .

And this works much , much better now .

Of course , it's a little bit more mature .

Anything I type here is instantly shown over there on that side .

And not only that , it also shows me who is making the change .

So if I continue typing over here , the changes are coming through instantly on the other side .

Collaboration is definitely something that's a little bit , better implemented , I think , at this point in time in Versus Code using live share .

The Zed team is really experienced as they are the folks behind Atom and Electron on top of which Versus Code is built .

But they are also a small new startup going up against one of the biggest companies on the face of the earth , Microsoft .

It doesn't mean that they can't do it better , but even if we give Zed the benefit of the doubt and say that it's better than Versus Code at its core , they have many years of hard work ahead of them to catch up in developing this product .

Adding support for multiple platforms because it's right now , it's Mac OS only , so they need Windows , they need Linux , and opening up Zed for extensions and plugins .

But now that it's open source , they might speed things up a little bit , which is probably why they did it .

Now speaking of supporting Linux and Windows , they're gonna have to completely rewrite their UI layers Because right now , Zed uses GPUi and that's a special UI library that they created that's Mac OS only and it's so new that they're constantly discovering new bugs and fixing them .

Here's a blog post on their site .

By the way , they're being really transparent about everything .

They have a YouTube channel .

They're documenting everything and now they're open source .

So really cool .

And here in this blog post called 120 FPS , they documented some of the issues they've recently uncovered , and this is in their GPUi framework or library , whatever it's called .

It's a framework .

So they have to deal with multiple layers here of the onion to get this thing working .

Whereas , Electron is now a mature product and constantly getting better too .

So , Versus code ain't leaving and it's not dead yet .

It's only getting better .

A good David and Goliath story has to have a bad guy and while Versus code might be a little bit slower , as my tests have shown , it needs to be bad so we can all get behind the little guy who's good .

And Versus code is just not bad .

It's the opposite .

I'm gonna keep using Versus code as my main tool because of all the extensions that I depend on , but I'm going to keep zed installed .

Because if I need to edit a file , I do find it frustrating when I need to open a file through the command line and Versus code takes a couple of seconds to get it going .

Zed is really excellent for that right now .

And who knows , maybe give it a couple years , it's gonna catch up , maybe it'll overtake Versus code .

Who knows ?

Have you tried Zed yet ?

What do you think about it ?

Let me know down in the comments below .

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