Zed with SSH Remoting and Orbstack is pretty much my dream setup for programming on a Mac.
I can now spin up a Linux machine in Orbstack[0] in a few seconds and then SSH into it from Zed for a fast Linux development environment with a fast macOS native editor. It feels a bit like the macOS version of WSL and VSCode. Just a whole lot nicer (subjective of course)!
A couple of years ago I was inspired by what Mitchell Hashimoto was doing[1]. He was running a GUI VM via VMware on macOS so that he could have the best of both worlds - macOS apps and ecosystem and a Linux dev environment with his preferred package managers and a more reliable NixOS. That route still felt a bit heavy to me, but I related to the desire for the best of macOS and the best of Linux.
I tried with VMware and Docker Desktop with VSCode but it always felt like a lot of overhead and a bit clunky to achieve a smooth fast dev environment.
With Zed and Orbstack it finally feels like the fast elegant system I'll stick with. Thank you to the developers for these excellent tools!
Can someone explain. What is the catch ? Zed is worked on by paid employees. So who is the product, how is the money made and is it open source and if so, how much ? (Vscode has strings attached too)
Just interested since building my workflows around a company's products usually ends in tears (figuratively).
This seems pretty optimistic to me. I can't imagine any company I've worked for paying for those things. Especially because they're only going to be useful if everyone uses Zed which is unlikely.
You are the product. The editor is free afaik, and is very good. It has a plugin system and many languages have been added. It's really, really close to be my replacement to intelliJ. Sadly many bugs are stopping that for now.
They'll charge for integrations later, collaboration etc. I'm not sure exactly where the money is going to come from but I value a quality native IDE.
I hope they don't stuff crap down our mouth in the future and simply charge a one time fee per version. But that of course is unlikely to happen.
Every new version of IntelliJ I gasp that they F'd with something, and usually I'm right.
I assume they did the same as with Rider, and made the UI objectively worse, rather than solve a million other things that actually need improvement (performance!)?
Happy path is Open-Core where all enterprisesque features and plugins are part of a commercial pro model. Unhappy path involves switching licenses sometime later or project simply dying because of ROI.
Just a FYI, this feature will install a binary on the remote host and run it.
> Your local machine will attempt to connect to the remote server using the ssh binary on your path. Assuming the connection is successful, Zed will download the server on the remote host and start it.
As long as that is notified and correctly authenticated, it is a reasonable approach because the remote process can progress without having to send the whole workspace through SSH. I also expect most language servers would have to be on remote for the same reason.
That's how most of these remoting features work, by running the IDE backend on the remote host.
I'm not sure if IntelliJ IDEA has an equivalent, but CLion has an option to just do the build and run/debug on the remote host without running the whole IDE on it.
I switched to Zed for C, C++, Rust, Angular, and am extremely happy with it. I use it with it's vim mode, which is very good.
For the record, I've tried the JetBrains suite for at least a year, vscode, vim, neovim, visual studio (windows), qtcreator, and at least one more I dont remember. Zed is superior for everyday coding, for me.
The only thing it lacks is debugging, so I can't use it for C#, but I also can't use vscode for C# so that's understandable.
I've been using vim since the 90's, then emacs and helix. Never a GUI editor, always terminal. This year I just tried Zed and I'm super happy about it. It's open source, they offer a flake in their repo for me to get the latest version compiled to my NixOS installations if I want. It's fast, their LLM features are tasteful and they come with the open source version of the editor. It's written in Rust which is my main programming language.
This SSH feature is great, I can just remotely turn on my workstation at home and use it with Zed over tailscale.
I'm also waiting for a good debugger story, especially for Rust. It will come...
I can find no mention of Emacs (or Tramp) in any of the documentation or a sampling of blog posts. It’s as if the authors don’t even know it exists. This is concerning.
(As is their apparent 100% all-in on the AI hype train.)
Personally, I need support for remote debuggers, e.g. debugpy on Python. Would this feature help me debug code that's already running on a remote server and I just need to connect to it?
I also switch between a lot of computers (work computer at home/work computer at work) but have to develop on "big powerful machine at work". My current solution is tmux + nvim and it works really good. I can just pickup a session from whatever computer I'm in front of at the moment.
Am I correct in that neither Zed nor VS Code support this usecase yet?
I use VSCode + SSH remote for this and works great. The only nitpick I have is needing to manually reconnect when I suspend my laptop and ssh connection breaks. It's a separate session though, which doesn't matter to me but may be a deal breaker for you.
I use Tailscale for a personal VPN so the beefy workstation is always securely available from my laptop, even when across the pond).
Not persistent sessions, but VS Code can run the GUI locally and connect to a remote server. When you reconnect it opens all your tabs, workspace settings etc.
I'd really like a good remote editing solution that is genuinely portable. I don't think there's anything technical stopping that from happening (and I've tried some half baked solutions along those lines before).
For a variety of reasons relating to my line of work, this or vscode's solution are no gos since they require you to install a server on the remote, and that server is interpreted or compiled in a language that is absolutely not guaranteed to be present or stable on said remote (I'm saying my ideal extension, if a server is really necessary, would be in a reasonably widespread subset of C, perhaps ISO c99, which I'm sure I'll catch some flack for saying).
That is an underserved (although perhaps not large, but probably they would be enthusiastic) market given that remote editing is perhaps the most useful in situations where the remote environment is different to such an extent you can't easily copy a project over and expect it to just work. If I'm deploying to an x86_
64 Linux box, I can totally just develop locally and do a lot of testing locally deploy to the remote after all of that, and so I tend not to get too excited about remote editing features for a platform like a normal x86_64 Linux distro.
I'm obviously being picky and demanding and people are free to ignore everything I just wrote. As far as Zed is concerned, the editor looks good and this functionality looks good and I'm happy to see it moving along. Please forgive me for indulging my personal pet peeve. It is a good thing by itself to have competition to vscode and so please don't interpret my post as being overly negative to Zed given it's main competitor has the same issue.
Also, I'm aware that a fair response to everything I just wrote would be "just use vi/vim/emacs"...which is actually really fair and does a lot to demolish my argument, at least as far as a remote editor being a necessity is concerned rather than just a nice to have.
I'm going the container route. To get the full seamlessness you're alluding to (easily switch between multiple parallel environments; easy migrations) still requires some additional features but perhaps you can find some inspiration.
Although I don't understand why you would still want to do that with modern processes, configuration management, CICD tools and the decentralization of git, you can just mount the remote directory via ssh.
People have been doing that for decades already. Works with any editor/ide/tool.
I recently tried to use SSH remote editing with VSCode on a plane. It is so incredibly chatty that the in-flight wifi system thought I was trying to tunnel traffic via SSH and kept killing the connection.
I hope the Zed developers have taken bandwidth minimization into account.
I wouldn't go there. These things are supposed to be helpful, any bug or chance of a bug will be detrimental to their stated purpose, just imagine scenarios were zed tells git to download a repo and you have to make sure it downloads to a linux directory and not a windows directory, otherwise you lose all of the access bits, and it's slow af.
I appreciate your concern and I will consider this.
The [VS Code] WSL back-end has access to things in WSL PATH, like compilers and language servers. I don't duplicate them in Windows, and would like to avoid having double installs. It's also nice to be able to open integrated terminal and use `fish` and other unix-only CLI utilities.
The default setup is pretty crappy but with some tweaking of the ssh connection setup, It does a decent job and I used it for actual work for several years.
Also works well in vscode. Just wish the remote instance would keep running forever. Currently it's only a few hours it seems. Then one needs to reopen the workspace window.
I don't use code editors, but when we had an issue with ssh sessions hanging, it was always coworkers that were using vscode and connecting something up with that.
Man, just ssh through the terminal like a normal person and transfer files with git.
Given my experience with the vscode remote instance, that actually sounds terrible as it can get bloated very quickly. The instance state can and should be retained without running the instance indefinitely.
In my experience, the electron overhead is relatively negligible compared to the ressource usage of the language servers. And zed seems to use the same language servers.
It is certainly true that the language servers have the same speed in Zed, but there is something to be said for just never suffering from any UI delay for any reason.
Though I'll admit a LS that takes three seconds to respond is kinda indistinguishable from UI delay.
What kind of codebases do you work with? Other than with multi-MB files or thousands of multi-cursors, I've never had any performance issues with VS-Code. It's actually one of the fastest Electron apps, I would say. If I notice a delay, it's usually the language server or some support package's background command taking a bit of time.
with a little bit of work, vi/emacs works great as an IDE for most setups... The learning curve is steep but once you get the gist, you never go back to those bloated IDEs.
(Disclaimer: I haven't tried zed, but have been working throughout my career with Eclipse, Visual C/C++/Basic (!), Atom)
Unless you need a graphical debugger, then vi/vim/nvim/emacs all start to get creaky. That single requirement keeps me on vscode. I'd love a terminal based alternative.
Caveat emptor: "Zed downloads NodeJS binary and npm packages from Internet without user’s consent"[1]
This has been an open issue for 5 months. When I noticed it, I couldn't believe my eyes and it was the last time I've run Zed so far. Judge for yourself whether this is a deal-breaker for you; I wish I had known about it earlier.
Oops indeed. (Downloading can be fine in many---but not all---cases, but the lack of authentication is not really justifiable!) The latest comment does hint that it will change in the near future, as the change is required for remote development anyway:
> Status update: We are still working on this! The major blocker is that extensions have not been setup to interact with setting. However, we also need to change this API to support our upcoming remote development feature. So we're going to roll both of these breaking changes into a larger extension update, coming this November or December :)
By bundling, Zed guarantees or at least claims that those bundled executables can be trusted. The same level of trust is possible with on-demand downloading only when some sort of authentication is used [1] but Zed currently doesn't actually authenticate any downloads to my knowledge.
[1] Either by embedding cryptographic hashes to the distribution, or by having some means to distribute publicly signed hashes (e.g. minisign via HTTPS).
I tried to use Zed but the text rendering on macOS was so painful that I didn't get far. Hopefully they'll address so I can give it another go in the future.
I wish I would be able to start a dedicated server that could then be joined by both myself and my co-workers to work together.
From reading the article, it seems that collaboration is a wholly different layer, just like in VS Code.
Zed with SSH Remoting and Orbstack is pretty much my dream setup for programming on a Mac.
I can now spin up a Linux machine in Orbstack[0] in a few seconds and then SSH into it from Zed for a fast Linux development environment with a fast macOS native editor. It feels a bit like the macOS version of WSL and VSCode. Just a whole lot nicer (subjective of course)!
A couple of years ago I was inspired by what Mitchell Hashimoto was doing[1]. He was running a GUI VM via VMware on macOS so that he could have the best of both worlds - macOS apps and ecosystem and a Linux dev environment with his preferred package managers and a more reliable NixOS. That route still felt a bit heavy to me, but I related to the desire for the best of macOS and the best of Linux.
I tried with VMware and Docker Desktop with VSCode but it always felt like a lot of overhead and a bit clunky to achieve a smooth fast dev environment.
With Zed and Orbstack it finally feels like the fast elegant system I'll stick with. Thank you to the developers for these excellent tools!
[0] https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture#linux-machines [1] https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1346136404682625024
Can someone explain. What is the catch ? Zed is worked on by paid employees. So who is the product, how is the money made and is it open source and if so, how much ? (Vscode has strings attached too)
Just interested since building my workflows around a company's products usually ends in tears (figuratively).
This is answered in their FAQ: https://zed.dev/faq :
We envision Zed as a free-to-use editor, supplemented by subscription-based, optional network features, such as:
We plan to offer our collaboration features to open source teams, free of charge.This seems pretty optimistic to me. I can't imagine any company I've worked for paying for those things. Especially because they're only going to be useful if everyone uses Zed which is unlikely.
You are the product. The editor is free afaik, and is very good. It has a plugin system and many languages have been added. It's really, really close to be my replacement to intelliJ. Sadly many bugs are stopping that for now.
They'll charge for integrations later, collaboration etc. I'm not sure exactly where the money is going to come from but I value a quality native IDE.
I hope they don't stuff crap down our mouth in the future and simply charge a one time fee per version. But that of course is unlikely to happen.
Every new version of IntelliJ I gasp that they F'd with something, and usually I'm right.
I’ll have to give it a look. I’m an increasingly disenchanted IntelliJ customer also.
I assume they did the same as with Rider, and made the UI objectively worse, rather than solve a million other things that actually need improvement (performance!)?
Happy path is Open-Core where all enterprisesque features and plugins are part of a commercial pro model. Unhappy path involves switching licenses sometime later or project simply dying because of ROI.
Just a FYI, this feature will install a binary on the remote host and run it.
> Your local machine will attempt to connect to the remote server using the ssh binary on your path. Assuming the connection is successful, Zed will download the server on the remote host and start it.
https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development
As long as that is notified and correctly authenticated, it is a reasonable approach because the remote process can progress without having to send the whole workspace through SSH. I also expect most language servers would have to be on remote for the same reason.
What’s the resource footprint of that binary?
The VS Code equivalent has been unsuitable for resource-constrained servers in my experience.
That's what VS Code does too, BTW.
What a perfect attack vector even if Zed and Vscode people are completely honest
Intellij IDEA does that too, and the installer is a very big file. I suspect an entire headless IDE is installed in the remote host.
That's how most of these remoting features work, by running the IDE backend on the remote host.
I'm not sure if IntelliJ IDEA has an equivalent, but CLion has an option to just do the build and run/debug on the remote host without running the whole IDE on it.
I wonder if image based screen sharing (e.g. Google Meet) is the "worse is better" here?
Zed collaboration sounds great, but what about all of the other apps I use?
Image based sharing supports everything (poorly) automatically.
I switched to Zed for C, C++, Rust, Angular, and am extremely happy with it. I use it with it's vim mode, which is very good.
For the record, I've tried the JetBrains suite for at least a year, vscode, vim, neovim, visual studio (windows), qtcreator, and at least one more I dont remember. Zed is superior for everyday coding, for me.
The only thing it lacks is debugging, so I can't use it for C#, but I also can't use vscode for C# so that's understandable.
And man, its so snappy.
I've been using vim since the 90's, then emacs and helix. Never a GUI editor, always terminal. This year I just tried Zed and I'm super happy about it. It's open source, they offer a flake in their repo for me to get the latest version compiled to my NixOS installations if I want. It's fast, their LLM features are tasteful and they come with the open source version of the editor. It's written in Rust which is my main programming language.
This SSH feature is great, I can just remotely turn on my workstation at home and use it with Zed over tailscale.
I'm also waiting for a good debugger story, especially for Rust. It will come...
I use vscode (with omnisharp not c# devkit) for c# every day. Did you try it out?
Is devkit better than Rider ?
I can find no mention of Emacs (or Tramp) in any of the documentation or a sampling of blog posts. It’s as if the authors don’t even know it exists. This is concerning.
(As is their apparent 100% all-in on the AI hype train.)
Personally, I need support for remote debuggers, e.g. debugpy on Python. Would this feature help me debug code that's already running on a remote server and I just need to connect to it?
I really wish there was a good alternative to vscode for remote debugpy
Same. I don't like VSCode, but debugpy is, for me, a killer feature for which I'd pay if I had to.
I also switch between a lot of computers (work computer at home/work computer at work) but have to develop on "big powerful machine at work". My current solution is tmux + nvim and it works really good. I can just pickup a session from whatever computer I'm in front of at the moment.
Am I correct in that neither Zed nor VS Code support this usecase yet?
I use VSCode + SSH remote for this and works great. The only nitpick I have is needing to manually reconnect when I suspend my laptop and ssh connection breaks. It's a separate session though, which doesn't matter to me but may be a deal breaker for you.
I use Tailscale for a personal VPN so the beefy workstation is always securely available from my laptop, even when across the pond).
Not persistent sessions, but VS Code can run the GUI locally and connect to a remote server. When you reconnect it opens all your tabs, workspace settings etc.
I'd really like a good remote editing solution that is genuinely portable. I don't think there's anything technical stopping that from happening (and I've tried some half baked solutions along those lines before).
For a variety of reasons relating to my line of work, this or vscode's solution are no gos since they require you to install a server on the remote, and that server is interpreted or compiled in a language that is absolutely not guaranteed to be present or stable on said remote (I'm saying my ideal extension, if a server is really necessary, would be in a reasonably widespread subset of C, perhaps ISO c99, which I'm sure I'll catch some flack for saying).
That is an underserved (although perhaps not large, but probably they would be enthusiastic) market given that remote editing is perhaps the most useful in situations where the remote environment is different to such an extent you can't easily copy a project over and expect it to just work. If I'm deploying to an x86_ 64 Linux box, I can totally just develop locally and do a lot of testing locally deploy to the remote after all of that, and so I tend not to get too excited about remote editing features for a platform like a normal x86_64 Linux distro.
I'm obviously being picky and demanding and people are free to ignore everything I just wrote. As far as Zed is concerned, the editor looks good and this functionality looks good and I'm happy to see it moving along. Please forgive me for indulging my personal pet peeve. It is a good thing by itself to have competition to vscode and so please don't interpret my post as being overly negative to Zed given it's main competitor has the same issue.
Also, I'm aware that a fair response to everything I just wrote would be "just use vi/vim/emacs"...which is actually really fair and does a lot to demolish my argument, at least as far as a remote editor being a necessity is concerned rather than just a nice to have.
I'm going the container route. To get the full seamlessness you're alluding to (easily switch between multiple parallel environments; easy migrations) still requires some additional features but perhaps you can find some inspiration.
https://github.com/legobeat/l7-devenv
E.g.
https://github.com/legobeat/l7-devenv/pull/144
https://github.com/legobeat/l7-devenv/pull/153
Although I don't understand why you would still want to do that with modern processes, configuration management, CICD tools and the decentralization of git, you can just mount the remote directory via ssh.
People have been doing that for decades already. Works with any editor/ide/tool.
I recently tried to use SSH remote editing with VSCode on a plane. It is so incredibly chatty that the in-flight wifi system thought I was trying to tunnel traffic via SSH and kept killing the connection.
I hope the Zed developers have taken bandwidth minimization into account.
Afaik the problem are big file directories, at least that what I noticed.
How's Zed with WSL (now)? I've liked the ability to run the VS Code back-end in WSL and front-end in Windows, is this possible with Zed?
I wouldn't go there. These things are supposed to be helpful, any bug or chance of a bug will be detrimental to their stated purpose, just imagine scenarios were zed tells git to download a repo and you have to make sure it downloads to a linux directory and not a windows directory, otherwise you lose all of the access bits, and it's slow af.
Asking for trouble.
I appreciate your concern and I will consider this.
The [VS Code] WSL back-end has access to things in WSL PATH, like compilers and language servers. I don't duplicate them in Windows, and would like to avoid having double installs. It's also nice to be able to open integrated terminal and use `fish` and other unix-only CLI utilities.
A nice setup for Rust development where compile times are high. You can offload that to a beefy machine while using the editor on a MacBook Air :-)
I have been using code server over ssh for this purpose for years.
Used Zed for a week or so, loved it! But the lack of mypy / git integrations forced me back to VS-code :'(
Someone reinvented tramp-mode.
This appears to be a significantly better implementation. Tramp mode is god awful slow and does not maintain a persistent connection.
The default setup is pretty crappy but with some tweaking of the ssh connection setup, It does a decent job and I used it for actual work for several years.
I suggest you try it and compare it to tramp-mode and see for yourself how different it is(and just how much better it is to tramp-mode)
Also works well in vscode. Just wish the remote instance would keep running forever. Currently it's only a few hours it seems. Then one needs to reopen the workspace window.
I don't use code editors, but when we had an issue with ssh sessions hanging, it was always coworkers that were using vscode and connecting something up with that.
Man, just ssh through the terminal like a normal person and transfer files with git.
"Man, just put it on tape and walk over to that machine to load it there".
Sorry, I know such low-effort puns are shunned on HN, but once in a decade I grant myself the permission to not resist.
Given my experience with the vscode remote instance, that actually sounds terrible as it can get bloated very quickly. The instance state can and should be retained without running the instance indefinitely.
Is somewhere a comparison of Zed to Visual Studio Code?
for a start, zed doesn't work on Windows. I'm not exactly a fan of MSFT but at work, I must use Windows...
It does work.
Automated builds are here: https://github.com/deevus/zed-windows-builds
Memory footprint, startup times, overall responsiveness. At the end of the day VSCode is still Electron app.
VSCode does not necessarily require Electron.
Unlike Zed, VSCode can actually run on a server, and Google Chrome can be used as a client.
You can even take advantage of all VSCode features and plugins using Google Chrome Mobile.
In my experience, the electron overhead is relatively negligible compared to the ressource usage of the language servers. And zed seems to use the same language servers.
It is certainly true that the language servers have the same speed in Zed, but there is something to be said for just never suffering from any UI delay for any reason.
Though I'll admit a LS that takes three seconds to respond is kinda indistinguishable from UI delay.
What kind of codebases do you work with? Other than with multi-MB files or thousands of multi-cursors, I've never had any performance issues with VS-Code. It's actually one of the fastest Electron apps, I would say. If I notice a delay, it's usually the language server or some support package's background command taking a bit of time.
How old is your computer? Some people have longer upgrade cycles than others.
I remember that my computer in 2016 was already fast enough.
"the language server is continually out of memory"
"8gb is enough for everybody"
with a little bit of work, vi/emacs works great as an IDE for most setups... The learning curve is steep but once you get the gist, you never go back to those bloated IDEs.
(Disclaimer: I haven't tried zed, but have been working throughout my career with Eclipse, Visual C/C++/Basic (!), Atom)
Unless you need a graphical debugger, then vi/vim/nvim/emacs all start to get creaky. That single requirement keeps me on vscode. I'd love a terminal based alternative.
why is there so much hype about yet another editor?
Caveat emptor: "Zed downloads NodeJS binary and npm packages from Internet without user’s consent"[1]
This has been an open issue for 5 months. When I noticed it, I couldn't believe my eyes and it was the last time I've run Zed so far. Judge for yourself whether this is a deal-breaker for you; I wish I had known about it earlier.
[1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589
Oops indeed. (Downloading can be fine in many---but not all---cases, but the lack of authentication is not really justifiable!) The latest comment does hint that it will change in the near future, as the change is required for remote development anyway:
> Status update: We are still working on this! The major blocker is that extensions have not been setup to interact with setting. However, we also need to change this API to support our upcoming remote development feature. So we're going to roll both of these breaking changes into a larger extension update, coming this November or December :)
I don't see how this is different from having all these pre-bundled with a new version of Zed? Either way I'm going to download all of them again.
By bundling, Zed guarantees or at least claims that those bundled executables can be trusted. The same level of trust is possible with on-demand downloading only when some sort of authentication is used [1] but Zed currently doesn't actually authenticate any downloads to my knowledge.
[1] Either by embedding cryptographic hashes to the distribution, or by having some means to distribute publicly signed hashes (e.g. minisign via HTTPS).
I tried to use Zed but the text rendering on macOS was so painful that I didn't get far. Hopefully they'll address so I can give it another go in the future.
What’s the issue exactly? I’ve been using it on macOS for a few months now and while it has its issues, text rendering hasn’t been one of them.
Text looks very blurry when compared to Sublime Text with the same font family and size. There's an active issue about it on GitHub with screenshots.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992