Zed is Ready For Primetime

Before we get started, two things, meetup and spooky story submission. We need you for both. October 27, we are going to be doing a meetup in San Francisco at bare bottle beer garden in Salesforce Park. We're in town for Getup Universe. You don't have to actually be going to Getup Universe to go to this. It's open to anybody. We're gonna have a bunch of drinks, a bunch of swag, really good time. So if you're anywhere in the California area or somewhere in California or anywhere you wanna fly down, come on out. October 27 is gonna be a hoot. Go to syntax.fm/meetup, and you can grab a ticket. They are free, but you do have to reserve one because space is limited. Second, Halloween's coming up. We need your spooky stories. This is an episode we do every single year where we read off the most terrifying spooky stories about web development in general. So have you taken down prod by accident? Have you published something that you shouldn't have? Have you let an SSL certificate expire? Have you dropped a database by accident, deleted all the records? We wanna hear your most stick your head in the ground stories for Halloween. These are always awful to hear, but you learn a lot. So please go to syntax.fm/spooky and submit your story. We keep absolutely everything anonymous, so tell us your Wes.

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we're gonna be talking about Zed. Zed is the new hot editor that's built in Rust. It is not a fork of Versus Node, and it is fantastic. So we're gonna be talking all about why you should pay attention to Zed in this episode. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me JS always is Wes Bos. What's up, Wes?

Hey. Excited to talk about Zed. I've been, like, dipping into it every, I don't know, four or five months just to kinda see where it's at. Beta testing some of the features, but I've never given it a full, like, a college try. You know? So I'm curious to see where we're at right now with zed. Also, I appreciate that they call it zed, which is what Canadians call the letter z.

Is that so? Yes. They do. We do. They don't say zed. Zed Zed is actually

let's be real. Zed is a dumb name for a letter. We should have called it z. That sounds much cooler. But it's a good name for an editor, so tell me about it.

Yes.

Oh, I'm actually gonna push back. I think zed's a cooler word than z. I'll be honest. Alright. Sound off in the comments, folks, z or zed. What do you think? Alright.

Before we get going, though, also cool thing, century. Century.io, the perfect place to solve your problems on the web. Man, let me tell you, I've been using so many of the Century tools lately in some of my developer flow. There's a really great tool they have called Spotlight, and there's a new Spotlight MCP Wes you are using essentially all of Century's tools locally, which is so great when you're working locally because you can get access to better debugging tools. It's capturing errors. It's it's doing all kinds of things, and you're not having to necessarily rely on really deciphering, some awful error that's in your console that you have no idea. And with their MCP server, from your AI code, you can actually talk to Spotlight directly and see if it can help you get some answers on this stuff. Because oftentimes, Wes, we think that the hardest part of our our job is fixing the bug. But I was thinking about this a lot. The hardest part is not fixing the bug. It's finding the bug. Fixing the bug's the easy part. So

once you find it, you can fix it. Once you know what's going on, once you yeah. It's true. Like, debugging sucks because you are trying to figure out what went wrong. You know? Often, the the code mistake is is not huge. It's actually trying to piece it all together and and get all the clues together. It's solving a mystery where you Wes essentially the killer yourself, and now you have amnesia.

So now you're you know?

Why did I do this to myself?

Why? Yes. Why? Cool. So let's get into it. Zed. Zed is a you know, I say new because it's it's new relatively.

But I I've had a Zed installed on my computer for a while now, and, I pop open Zed every now and then.

The very first time I started working with Zed was pre plug ins and extensions.

And so it was like, here's this bare bones new editor. The main thing about it is that it's fast.

And then I, once extensions and plug ins came out for it, I was really quick to write a syntax theme. I was actually one of the very first extensions, was the syntax theme pnpm Zed. So I've been a long time observer of Zed checking it out. And more recently, I kind of put the snooze button on Zed for a while. There was a number of, key features that I use every single day that I just found myself missing and unable to get past.

And I am happy to say that most of those things have now been added along with a tremendous amount of other things inside of Zed. So we're gonna be talking in this episode a lot about why you should care, what does zed offer, what is novel about it, and, like, what are some little neat things about zed? Basically, what's the deal with zed? Is it ready for prime time? Spoiler, yes. It's ready for prime time. It's sick. It's great. Cool. So that said, what led me to start picking up Zed again? Big one. There JS a bug in the latest macOS, involving Electron, where Electron was using some private API on macOS, leading to just a massive memory leak on any Electron app that you're using. Yeah. So whether that was cursor or Versus Node or any of the Versus Code, forks or anything like that, man, my system, which shouldn't be grinding to a halt, was just dying. It was man, the fans were running all the time on this m one, and it was just crazy. So that led me to saying, you know, like, maybe it's time to give that another try, and maybe I can get past some of my annoyances.

And then when I popped it open, imagine my surprise when all of my annoyances had been totally And not only that, there's so much more. So let's talk about it. I have for video users, I will have the UI open, so you could just see this in action. But, like, audio listeners, you're not gonna be missing anything other than what it looks like. And let me tell you, the more one thing I like about Zed besides the fact that it runs really well, the performant doesn't eat up a lot of memory or anything like that, the number one thing I like is that the UI looks awesome. Out of the box, if you're working with a an a UI based text editor, the UI looks fantastic out of the box. The themes look great. I mean, obviously, there's there's a host of themes if you don't want, the ones that come installed on here. Like, I I've been installing Wes this luxe

lite. I like this theme a lot for a light theme. Picture me using a Yeah. What the heck, Scott? Why are you switching changing editors and using a light theme here? What happened? Bro.

I started working in my car a lot during light time when it was like, I'm taking the kid. My daughter has two hours of dance. Now I'm working out of my car. So what am I gonna do? Well, this the you Node, it's like, the working on a light mode in the middle of the day is actually really, really Node, but I can't go full light. I have to do it like a sepia tone one. Yeah. So I had to go, like, solarized kinda style. So yeah. I know.

Okay. I believe you owe me an apology.

Light mode is awesome. I actually don't use light mode in any of my editors or, like, whatever, but I do use light mode in a lot of my, like, apps. Like, in Notion, light mode all day.

Yeah. Yeah. You Node, all it took for me was, like, finding the right light mode. And then once I did, it was like, oh, this is great. It's Noctis, by the way. Noctis is the package, and there's a ton of Noctis light and dark ones. But I use the Noctis light luxe JS the one I like the most because this just feels kinda nice. This JS lilac one's pretty, pretty dope too. It's kinda, like, purple y. Yep. It is a nice looking editor, though, and I think that's really important because, like, I'd ESLint all this time trying to tweak my Versus Node, and I'm still not totally happy with it. And I I find the same thing with my my warp editor as well. I'm just not happy with how it looks at all, and there's no control. But, like, out of the box, this thing looks fantastic. I don't know if it's that. It's different, but it's, like, the right density of information Oh, it's for me to be happy. The one thing that Versus Node has never had, it's never looked good. And I and I don't say that to be mean to anybody, but, like, even when Adam came out there was Adam was the, you know, text error, and even Sublime Text looked better. When Versus Code came out, I was so reluctant to use it at first back in, like, what, like, 2015 or whatever. I was so reluctant to use it because it looks so much worse than what I was using.

And they never really got a handle on how it looks. And for some reason, whether it's the icons or the spacing, the text, whatever, this thing looks great out of the box. So, shout out to the Zed team for having good design chops. One thing that you'll you'll notice about Zed is that it's not just kind of the general editor experience that looks nice. It's like all of the different panes and windows.

I'll talk about a lot of these things as we go, like the GitHub and, you know, the the diff modes and stuff like that. Every single window in this thing looks really nice and doesn't feel like it was just kind of slapdash put together. It feels like it was all made for this. Video users will see that there is some, like, white text on a yellow background. That is a problem with my theme specifically. So if you see that, that is, that's egg on my face, not the Zed team's face. So, really, what it is is that I built this theme before that feature existed, so I need to update my theme. Cool. So let's talk about, besides just general editor experience, it should feel very at home. A lot of the shortcuts are the same as Versus Node, so you'll you'll really feel like getting back into this thing should feel pretty normal to you.

There is an extensions marketplace, which, came about a little while ago. A shift command x does in fact open that the same way it does on Versus Code.

Extensions run from anything from language servers to themes, Scott themes, grammars, MCP servers, snippets. So there's a lot of, like, nice things in here. What's interesting about this is that they do nice job of the filtering and extensions UI.

Like, in Versus Code, it's that little sidebar, and you're kind of, like, always struggling to see. You click on it, it opens up. Where here, it's like, it's the kind of the star of the show. They have a nice little, UI for installing extensions, which I I just find to be a nice UI.

There is one complaint about this UI JS that you cannot get to the read me of any of these things, without clicking on the GitHub logo. You click on the GitHub logo. It pops you open in another window.

So you can't just get to that that I mean, that's not that's not a huge annoyance. You always have a browser open, but it would be nice to click on this and have it expand or open up to be able to see the UI for what these things are. Because sometimes the the plug ins, they they're not exactly explicit as to what they're doing. So that that's a bummer.

And the extension marketplace, I will say, is not as rich as Versus Code. So that's another slam on on Zed. There are just like there's a handful of extensions that I would like to see in here that, like I was trying to think about, like, what extensions am I really missing? And one of the big ones for me would be, like, being able to Npm install something.

So, like, if if I wanted to command p NPM install, you know, that that doesn't exist in here out of the gate as a command, and there's no extension for it. Same with, like, PNPM, which is something I actually did kind of a lot.

I don't know Node do you do that, Wes?

No. But I I don't love my workflow for Yeah. For Npm installing something. Because, like, to me, that's that's probably something that should be done in the terminal. But then I find myself having to open up a second tab to NPM install something because I'm running a process in there. Right. Or you, like, you send it to the background, whatever. Like, you f g. I'm not a foreground. No. You send it to the background, and then it, like, pauses that, and then you Npm solves it, and you bring it back. Like, I don't love that either.

So maybe the editor is the spot. Yeah. You know, the one extension I've been using in Versus Node uses Ni, n I, which is the one that detects if you're using Pnpm, Yarn, or NPM for that project and runs the appropriate thing.

So, like, I've just been doing, like, knee install whatever directly from the command prompt within Versus Node, and that to me has been, like, a really nice workflow. Because, again, what else am I gonna do? I'm gonna make a a duplicate tab of the the terminal window, then I'm gonna install it, then I'm gonna close that duplicate tab, and then do it again next time I or I forgot to install something. Right? So, I've been doing all my installs directly from there. It would be nice to have that in here. Probably feels like a fairly trivial extension to add.

So who knows? Maybe I'll even knock out looking at the type of extension. Right? They have themes and icons. There's there's languages and grammars for highlighting. There's language servers, which, like, you talk back and forth to, like, a TypeScript server, MCP server snippets and debug adapters.

I don't know that any of these like, these all seem that. Yeah. Config based. I I don't see anything that would have, like, custom logic in it. So, like, do they have the ability to do that? You know? Like, maybe they don't have the the UI stuff in place yet so that people who wanna make, like, a some sort of custom extension to do let's see. Let's let's look it up. Zed extension authoring.

Looks like the debugger extensions can be written in Rust, and that's the the benefit and the downside to a lot of this stuff is that if the extensions must be written in Rust, they're probably gonna be faster and great. But, like, not every idiot like me can just go ahead and whip up an extension really quickly, like like like JavaScript. Right? That's the the huge benefit to the Versus Node ecosystem.

But the I think there's also some some benefit as well of just, like, leaving a lot of that stuff behind.

You know? Like, at a certain point, you have to just, like you see it with, like, ESLint as well. You know? People are just gonna move to to Biome and be like, you know what? Yeah. I'm not gonna try to fuss with this anymore. I'm just gonna switch to something entirely different

or similar, I guess. It does seem like extensions can define tasks, and tasks are a thing within Zed that are repeatable kind of actions.

So I'm not verifying that, you can, in fact, do this, but I you know, it seems like a program with arguments, a shell with arguments could be

Deno as a task. So Yeah. And you I guess you use JavaScript in in that point. This is probably a little different if you wanna interact with the Zed UI.

But, yeah, tasks, you can as long as you can run a command, right, you can you can run whatever you want.

Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see about that. But yeah. So I I found that to be to be pretty interesting. But, again, the extensions, as you can see, the fact that you can, like let's see. Go to any of the extensions page, and you can actually scroll to the bottom of it should give you an indication that, like, the extension market isn't as rich. But there's also probably not as much junk. Another thing I found to be commonly true with this editor is that a lot of the things that you would have turned to historically an extension for in Versus Node. They do just kind of exist out of the box. Like CSS, you know, the colors in Versus Code, the color highlighting just is here out of the Bos, so it shows you the color. So, like, stuff like that that you may have installed an extension for just kind of exists inside of here,

and that's nice. My theme so I I I made Cobalt two four zed. Actually, somebody started it, and then I tweaked it, And they they passed it over to me. 20,000 installs already, so that's that's not nothing.

That's that's significant amount of people, like, going out and looking for my theme on zed. You know? Like, it's not like it's HTML or or ESLint or something popular that everybody wants. It's people that explicitly want that theme. 0.1

version of the syntax theme also has 20,000 downloads. So, I gotta update this just a little bit to make sure that yellow on white text thing doesn't happen.

Yeah. You're right. 20,000, not bad. It's a good looking theme. I will, toot my own horn there. It's a good looking theme, folks.

Thanks for no selling me on that, Wes. You just complete silence. I say my theme is good looking. It's a syntax theme, and you just Scott complete silence. You don't know what I was doing. I was installing it. Let's here we go. And I'm I'm gonna turn it on in my own theme

syntax. Looks nice.

K. Okay. I like it. I kinda wanna go every now and then, I think my cobalt theme is a little light on the light side for for me. I kinda wanna go a little darker. And I turn this on. I see pure black.

I like that.

It's black, baby. Yeah. Yes. That's for sure. Cool. Alright. Let's talk about the Git UI.

This is one thing that held me back from using Zed in the past, which seems silly because it's it's like, I can use Git in the command line. You know? But in the same regard, like, I got really used to coming into Versus Code and let me see. I can't really bump up the interface that much. I got really used to Versus Code and the Git UI in Versus Code Wes you type in your commit message, you you sync, and and do all that stuff directly from Versus Node. Again, specifically for the reasons that I I mentioned about the terminal thing. I just got so used to doing it without having to pop open another term window, especially because I don't like using the in editor terminal anyways. So I had, like, ghosty over here, and I don't wanna have to pop open a new term. So I I can just do it directly from here. And I was really pleasantly surprised with the Git UI, especially since they didn't have it before. And that's something I think rings true for most of, this app JS that when they do something, they do it well. So the Git UI is really nice. The diff editor looks nice.

You can come in stage or restore, stage or restore.

Nice language on everything, not just kind of like I mean, there are icons throughout this, but the icons are fairly explicit.

Oh, you can go to next hunk. So we can we can browse hunks in Zed. My nickname in high school.

Yeah. Go to next hunk.

She sees Wes. Okay. Go to next hunk.

Oh, brutal.

By the way, you can update the font size of the sidebar. Just go to your settings and change UI font size to something a bit larger.

UI font size. UI underscore font underscore size.

Okay. And that's not the editor font size. Okay. That's the buffer font size. Which I love that because often I wanna crank up one of the two. And you can do that in Versus Code, but it's kinda tricky where you have to make Node you have to zoom in and then make something a bit smaller. I like this a lot better.

So folks who are now seeing on video, the UI definitely looks uglier that I bumped up the font size, but you'll now at least be able to read things or see things a little bit better here.

So, hey, the Git UI on this thing, I think, rips, and I'm happy it's here because, again, this is something that I really, really wanted in this. I just got so used to it in Versus Node that, like, not having it actually became a bummer. It's not like I can't use Git on the command ESLint, but, again, it's just an annoyance. Right? So you'd say you you've, like, moved, like, almost all of your your Git interactions

into into the editor? Hell, yeah. Alright. Man, I I've slowly been moving that over. And the one thing that has has got me is the AI commit description. Node that. Yeah. You know? Can't think of what I did. I don't even know what I did, but the AI did.

You know what? I've I've been using instead of, like so I've I've I've been using change sets a lot. Have you been using change sets ever?

I maybe. What it what's a change set?

Change set, you're kind of like it is kind of like a commit in a way, but you are creating a file that defines, like, a description of, like, what was changed, and then it can apply version updates and write a change log for you. So I've become the kind of opposite of that Wes I'm becoming, like, more intentional with releases

and change sets and, like, really writing things out. I don't know why, but I like it. I especially like when projects use that because then you can just go into the change set and see what has changed. Or if you're in a branch that's not yet released, you can take a look at the change set and see what has

has been done in this branch. I've been working on a handful of, like, open source projects that I just like it becomes very nice when you're changing versions via CI for that kind of stuff. Like, zero Svelte. I I got into change sets just because I was like, you know what? I'm sick and tired of manually updating the versions and doing all this stuff. Let me get deep into GitHub actions. I added change sets. I added all that kind of some versioning automatic versioning and publishing via GitHub actions. Yeah. So smooth. Back to Zed, the problems UI is really nice. And let me bump that open over here. So when you have problems in your code, again, whether that is from your Prettier, your ESLint, any of that stuff, Versus Code, man, it just, like it's either, like, the inline problems view is, like, the only way to look at that in my mind. Because when you pop open any of those problems panels in Versus Code, man, that is, like, often very painful for me. I don't know how you feel about that. Yeah. It's

not a great UI. I I'll I'll give you that as well. Like, I don't often, when I need to go into it, like, if you wanna see what's wrong with a file, you wanna go through it. I I don't love it. You know? It's just it's not a great UI.

It's not. And so in Zed, when you pop open, you'll see when you see little problems, the problem diagnostics in your in your bottom toolbar, you can open them with shift command m. It pops it open, and then it kinda gives you a file by file. Now, again, I have this yellow unknown property warning that JS, again, that's a problem with my theme here.

But, like, here's this one. Box shadow JS already defined here. So I have a duplicate, definition for this box shadow for some reason, probably because I was tweaking the style at some point. And then you have, like, a a a TypeScript error here, locals. It has implicitly any type. Okay. So, so you could come in and fix it directly from here, or you could then do op it says option enter. Full.

But is it option enter, or is it

It that's alt alt enter JS you have the alternative option of taking the stairs. It's a little man on a escalator.

Bro, I love that. Yes. It's like, why yeah. I'd never heard that. So you do alt or option on the MAC key, enter, and it jumps you right to that file, and then you can fix it from here if you wanna do it outside of this interface. But, man, this is this is a great little let's knock out all my problems. Let's take them out. You could see Yeah. You gotta be able to do it because Versus Node has

all of those things. You know? Like, in if you're looking at a git diff and you wanna just see what has changed, you gotta be able to do that because that is a really nice UI. You know? Show me the code. I can edit it right there, but you show me all of them, and you can you can fold them.

That's that's great. I like that a lot. Yeah. But I think my problem with it in Versus Node is that it's part of this bottom panel. Like, yeah, they are kinda listed out here. No. That this is what I don't like.

Right. And and, like, the big problem with this to me is that, like, this panel is probably the single, like, my least favorite part of Versus Code. And it's the one reason why I don't use the terminal because I just don't like it. It's always popping up in the way, and then you there's just, like, a lot of stuff in here. Like It it's something to be said for for, like, the UX of it. Because of of course, you can make it work how you want,

but Yeah.

Like, I don't I don't know how to make it work better. You know? Just show me. Like like, that you know, the default experience is really good. And, like, has so many users that, like, if they were to change the default experience on that, they they have changed the default experience on several things. And what they do is they roll it out for a certain number of people initially and and see if what the feedback is. But, like, man, there's so many people. It's so nice that Zed can just, like, kinda do this from the get go. And and that's the same for a lot of stuff with this Zed JS they can choose

what all of the stuff will be like instead of having to tack it on after the fact because they're they're still building it. And it shows. I think it really shows in the care that is expressed throughout this app, which I really love. And, like, every single little menu on it looks nice. Every UI looks nice.

Find and replace looks nice. Yeah. All this stuff.

So we got GitUI. That's a big one for me. The problems UI, really nice. They also have a real time collaboration feature, which isn't something that, like, I personally have been dying for. It's not a feature that I would use extensively, but I think it's really neat. So the collaboration tools is that, like, you can essentially, invite someone to your, project.

If somebody has a Zed account and they're in your contacts, you can add them and invite them to a call, and then they can get voice chat along with that. So it's pretty neat that you can collaborate in a code Bos running on one person's computer and actually even get chat through this. Again, it's this is not a feature that I've been dying to use, so my experience in this is nonexistent.

I'll tell you that. I've read the docs. I've checked it out. But for those of you who do like, remote paired programming and that kind of thing, I think this could be a really interesting feature. Bert Holland from Versus Code was tweeting the other day how, I think he was,

how, like, Live Share is the Versus Code version of that. ESLint in fact, they deprecated the voice thing, and I don't think a lot of people use it. That's what he said. Yeah. It's there, and and not a lot of people I don't I don't think a lot of people pair program. And if you are pair programming, maybe you're probably using something else.

Yeah. If I recall correctly, during my live chat with him, he said it was, like, the one feature that was, like, really requested and then never used. Like, people would say they want it, and then nobody was actually interested in using it. But it looks neat. I will say that. Some other little neat things about this app is that there's a lot of nice little stuff baked in to the, command prompt.

So if I, like, select a variable, I can convert to title case. And, like, this is stuff that you Node do in Versus Node, obviously.

But it's an extension on Versus Node. Convert to upper case, upper lower camel case. Is upper case okay. They call it yeah. I would have called the screaming snake case, but it's just upper case. So Oh, did it did it just did you just do that on the

the import and it it swapped it? Did it actually swap it in the import? Because I'm wondering if that's using the the Versus Node language server. Like, it it communicates with the language server to do a smart replace. Do Do it again. So no. It just swapped what was underneath my cursor. So this one is now

yeah. In Versus Node, there's, like, usually, like, a rename symbol, and that exists here too just with f two, rename symbol. So that certainly exists. Code actions is the same. So command period does code actions as well. So, like, you can fix with AI assistant, suppress, lint, all those typical type of code actions you might ex expect. And that's the one thing I think kills is that, like, so many of your cheese has not been moved. Right? Like, your your stuff's there.

So

I I tend to like that quite a bit. Yeah. You gotta you gotta be able to move over and feel comfortable relatively quickly with these new tools. Otherwise, it's just frustrating all the way down.

Totally. Yeah. Especially, you know, thing I really like too is that on any given file, if you do control option l or just click on this little icon, it shows you every single one of the language servers that is currently running, and this changes based on which file you're in. So, the package version server is not running, and the JSON language server is not running because this is a dot Svelte file. But I do have Biome.

I have live server. I have, markdown oxide. I have all of these things that are currently running, and you can again restart all language servers or stop them all from here. So that's a nice little UI. You know how many times you're like, restart TypeScript language server or any of that stuff? Just to be able to have confirmation that things are running and actually, like, up with a little status light. If you wanted, it's there. I I like that. Another cool thing is there's a zoom in, which is just, shift escape.

A shift escape just kinda pops open whatever file you're currently active and makes it full screen, and a shift escape will make you back to your editor. So that's just like, if you wanna get rid of the distraction instead of hiding your chat windows and all your other stuff, let's say you Scott a whole bunch of stuff open, your AI chat, any of that stuff, you can, at any point, just have it go full screen instead of closing all the other stuff. So that's a nice little

Oh. UI. Does it does it pop over everything?

Yes. Pops over everything. Yes. That's really nice.

I like that a lot. I never thought to do that because, like, I have, like, three or four little shortcuts

that I use to close everything, or you can just flip into, like, Zen mode. But this is kinda nice. You know? Zoom. And it's an easy it's an easy shortcut too. You know? So it's not one you're gonna be, like, reaching for or, like, scrambling to hit.

I'm gonna be implementing that. That's great.

Yeah, brother. And, let's talk about AI stuff because, you know, we just had a monster video on the channel talking about, how much AI stuff crashing out over AI.

Yes.

CJ, absolutely going nuts over AI.

Yep. You know what's cool is that the AI stuff you're probably used to is in here too. So there is hints if you want ESLint hints inside of your editor. Lm provider is not configured. Okay. So I I'm sorry. I'm using Copilot, so my, things are a little bit different here. Either way, there are inline hints, which are nice. I don't feel like it's cursor good, but it's it's there. The chat panel can use cloud code with their not even, like, cloud code's UI. So if I pop this open, it just inherently uses Cloud Node, and it uses your given Cloud Code setup. It's not some, like, weird sandboxed version of it. So I asked at the MCP servers, and it listed all of my global MCP servers. So it required no configuration.

And since I am already using and paying for cloud Node, and I already have it all set up, I don't wanna have to set that up again inside of the editor. I've been using this instead of my ghosty terminal, for cloud code, which has been nice because it gives you, like, a approval UI too. So, like, I can reference files the same way you would in, like, Copilot, say, make this I don't even know what to say. I don't even know what to tell AI these days.

Make this purple.

Yeah. Make page purple.

K? This is a Svelte page, so it's probably gonna try to add some styles here or whatever. It's gonna do it. It's gonna, give you that approval.

Right? Always allow. Okay.

I'm gonna click allow because always allow is kind of whatever. But if you allow it to edit the file, it does give you the keep or reject, and it is a nice little command y or command n for yes or no. So if I wanted to accept this or or Scott, and there, it's gone. Right? So the the AI chat interface is great. You don't have to use Claude Code. There's even a Zed specific AI,

like their own, which I have not used. Like, if you if you're paying for Cloud Code or Copilot or whatever, you can bring your bring it along. You don't have to pay another fee

for this. Yeah. Or you can pay them to use theirs. You can install MCP via their extensions if you want, or you can use the cloud Node ex or, yeah, any of that stuff. And the Copilot stuff was easy. I just clicked whatever I installed via GitHub. The next thing you know, I can use any of the Copilot, models if I want to throughout this, or I can use Cloud Code throughout this.

So AI features, they feel very comparable. They feel very nice in here. They're not giving me, as far as I know, an AI commit message, but, hey, can't win them all right now. Right? What about, like,

something that I'll do is if you have either you have an error or you wanna, like like, copy some code and add to chat, does that exist?

So command at so you'd, oh, that's interesting. So let's see. Let's see if I I probably just don't know the, open in terminal, Scott, reveal in finder, show code actions for yeah. I don't see an add to chat here. What was interesting is that there was a fix with assistant when there was a problem, but when I would just highlight something normally and do a code action on it, if I do fix with the system, there is a an in line chat AI chat directly in here, but I don't see an add to chat the same way you do in Versus Code. That's something I need a lot of. Either adding a slice of code or,

like, referencing other yeah. You can reference other files in it just with the the at the ampersand. That's good. Because I'm trying to think, like like, what are the ways that I use AI in the editor? Right? There's, obviously, the tab completion is is probably my favorite, meaning that, like, I can't live without that. And that's one of the things that stops me when I go back to Versus Code. I try it every now and then, and the the tab completions on cursor is so good. Then there's the AI commit message. I can live without that. There's the agents.

Seems like that's pretty good as well. And then there's also the, like, fix this error, where you have, like, a squiggly in it. You can I use that quite a bit as well? So it seems like they have most of those except the tab completions. They have them, but they're not as good. Is that what you said?

You know what? It could be a user error at this ESLint. And what's weird JS that I have them working. And now if I click, it says LLM provider is not configured or does not support the configured model, which, honestly, I've been tweaking this stuff. I don't know which LLM provider it's even trying to use for that. Mhmm. So, I gotta figure out that part of it. But when I was I was I was having issues, but I was also having issues with Versus codes at the same time. So for me, I was like, is this just something that is wrong with my current setup? I I I wouldn't say I have

evaluated it to a professional degree to to give you an answer if it's good or bad. Alright. I guess I'm pretty sure they had that at one point. I remember DMing with several of, the people that worked there in in trying it out. They gave me some key where I got, like, a a message, but it's not something yeah. I can't get it to to show up either. That's another frustrating thing about these things is when somebody hasn't touched the product in six months and they go back to it to to try it out, how do you let them know about all the new features? Or how do you Yeah.

Migrate them from where they were into the new one without making it too obnoxious as well?

Totally. I actually ended up having to go through my settings file and manually delete things from my settings file that existed from prior versions. It was like, your settings file is super invalid because last time you opened this, it was a completely different app. Oh.

So the reasons why I avoided using, Zed, again, was there was no plug ins, which are solved.

There was no Git UI, which is solved.

There was no split and move pane, which I feel like I'm the only person in the world that uses this feature, but I do. And I I'm, like, upset about when it wasn't here. And then there was no AI chat or completions, which there now is. People who don't know the the split and move pane, I have it locked to hyper s. Nobody understands why I need this. But sometimes you're working in this file, and I would like to have this file and another one open at the same time. And, typically, what a lot of people do is they split and then close the one window.

Versus Node had that in one fell swoop where you could split a window and then move it instead of just splitting and having the same file open twice.

Node, luckily, inside of here, inside of, I think, keyboard, open key map, I don't even remember what the setting is. It is I think it's just, like, Node to the left or something. Either way, I have it now, and I do hyper s. And look. Boom. Look at that. People. How am I the only person who works like this Wes you have two files open, you wanna have them split side by side, one command, now you have two different files open side by side instead of splitting it. Yeah. I I think I've never understood the default of that being the same file. Like, who wants Right. That? I guess the people who want that is, like, you have a really long file,

and you want to, like, scroll to the bottom while you keep the top open. But that's

not nearly as common as I wanna see two files at once. I wanna Scott my my CSS or whatever over here. I wanna have two components open. Whatever. Yeah. So, thankfully, this is here now. So the answer is is that it's, workspace colon colon move item to pane in direction, and then you can give it the direction.

Thank you, Zed team. This is the one thing I really wanted. The tab completion actually is very good in Zed. I just got it working as well. It detects where you should jump to, which I really like. So if you make an edit and it thinks that you wanna put your cursor eight lines down to continue on, it will it'll tab that. It seems to know what I want with the little ghost text. So, yeah, big fan big fan of that. What configured provider did you use? I think I'm using the man. I've I've had this thing hooked up to my own LM at one point, like like, my own key. Mhmm. I had the old Zed version. I had, like, a pro version. I think that I'm just on the right now, just on the free ZedLM trial. Okay. Because I don't I don't see any other agent.

Oh, no. It says agent. Default model provider zed.dev.

No. This is from this is from over a year ago. Last time I tried it, that was for the agent talking back and forth. The actual tab completions are, I think, built into Zed.

It does say that you can use Copilot to do so at some point here, which is maybe when mine was working and now it's not. Yeah. At some point, I need to, like, change whatever the configured, model is and change it to Copilot.

Copilot's great because it gets you access to all of the models that Copilot has. So GPT five, all that stuff directly in here. Before we get out of here, things that it's missing, I think that it's missing some extensions still. I'd mentioned, like, really wanting some quarter of, like, Npm install extension. Not that I need it, but I I think I just like that workflow.

I was trying to really think about it, and I don't know too many other extensions that don't exist that I I want, but I'm sure I'm very positive there are some. Extensions read me in the editor. I I would just want that. You don't always need that, but it's nice to be able to see what's going on. Man, like,

I I don't know if I could write some some Rust to make this happen or not or, like Yeah. Maybe they could make a compatibility layer with some of the Versus Node APIs. That would probably be a big, big project. But I would find it very hard to leave all of my comfy extensions.

We found a Zed comment here, which is a, looks like it's a better comments kind of alternative to do hack, fix me, whatever, and it does highlighted colored comments. Looks like the, you can config too. So, that seems like a nice little,

Yeah. Let's let's look at the code for this. Like, how hard is it to write this? What what's the link? Can you send me this? So it's a dot SCM file.

This looks like a like a syntax grammar

file where it's Yeah. And then the SCM is a StarCraft map file.

This seem it's 30 lines of this weird code. What the heck is this? Oh, that's a tree sitter. Oh, tree sitter highlighting grammar written in Scheme.

Oh, for the zed editor or any editor that uses tree sitter syntax highlighting.

Okay. So that's it's just adding custom rules so that if you hit any of these things well, maybe maybe it will be easier to write. I like I don't know if I could write that, though, but somebody did.

Somebody did. Hey. You know what? I'm gonna also link a post in the show notes here or at least, I'll give you a I'll, you know, tell you right now to check this thing out. Zed.devblog text manipulation text manipulation kung fu for the aspiring black belt. This thing should give you some ideas about the commands and things that exist that we didn't talk about. Like, this is how I learned about, the convert case prompt just existing. And what they do is they give you a number of challenges to, you know, move lines, select all matches, convert case, being able to do so in a fast way. This Wes a really cool blog post. You know, how to review multi cursors, with keyboard commands. You're setting up all these multi cursors at once.

There's a lot of neat stuff inside of here. I also really appreciate that their example uses iconic kung fu actors.

Gotta love that.

These are some great films, folks.

Other than that, yeah, check this blog post out. Check out Zed. Let us know what you think. Are you been have you been using Zed? What do you think? What did we miss in this? Is there anything that we did not cover that you think is, really much required, knowledge about zed? Again, it is a nicely performing editor.

I I will say that, you know, we're used to and not all electron apps are bad, and Versus Node is one of the better performing electron apps, but there are times in Versus Code where you get an extension that will just crush your computer.

Like, what was that Wix's version their their version package version plug in. Man, if you're still using that thing, get it off your system, and it'll just crush your GPU.

Yeah. And Node, especially, everyone's got 500 MCP servers and agents running in the background as well. There was a time on this podcast where I said, like, do will we even need more powerful computers than these MacBook m ones? And and here we are a couple years later being like, I need, like, nine of these just to run all this crap out of what Just to all run all this crap. I know Node moved to, like, a, like I I went from, like, a very maximalist setup where, like, Comet was eating up my RAM to I'm using now Helium Browser, which is, like, really nicely tuned to be really fast.

Zed, very fast.

Ghosty, very fast. It feels just feels good. And it it's a weird thing. Like, if if if there's any reason to use Zed, it just feels good. And, like, I wouldn't say Versus Node is slow. You know? People always talk about that with with Sublime. They'd be like, it's so slow. Node like, how fast do you do you need characters to show up on the page? You know? And, like, how often or they would show, like, opening up a 600 line file, and it takes, like, zero point two milliseconds to highlight the entire file. It's like, how often are you opening new files and and waiting for the syntax highlighting? But then you I I often have this. Like, I'll say, like, who needs more than 60 hertz? And then you use it. I my new my new iPhone I never said that on the Internet phones. No. I know. You're the opposite. You're always just like, yes. This is so good. But then I use it, and I'm like, I I understand this now.

Yeah.

60 hertz, man. I can't imagine going back to, nineteen ninety four.

Wait. What's your what is your monitor? Sixty? One twenty? Which one? Which monitor? Your your main Apple display.

This Apple Studio Display has a refresh rate of 60 hertz. That makes sense. Most most monitors are unless you have some crazy gaming monitors, like Node twenty.

But there's something about having the phone being a higher refresh rate. It just feels so good. Yeah. Well Yeah. No. I for me, it's just scrolling. Like, when you're you can read things as you're you're scrolling.

You and on the on the old one, I couldn't read things as I was scrolling because it would be blurry.

Yeah.

Hey. Wes, I want a higher refresh rate monitor now. Time to get rid of this. Oh, man. I just

I just baited Scott into realizing he didn't have a a 120 hertz monitor.

Yes. He did. Let's get into sick picks and shameless plugs. We don't need to do a shameless plug, but let's talk about sick picks. Wes, is there anything that you're finding to be particularly sick these days?

Yes.

I'm gonna half shameless plug and half sick pick this. So we just launched these in our merch store.

Nice. And this is a set of Syntax key caps, and it comes with a solid gold it's not extra solid gold.

Vibe key, which is the shape of a tab.

And then it also comes with a hyperkey, which is black gold. It's these are like the pure metal. They're nice and heavy.

And then there is three just regular keys, one syntax one, one that says ship it, and one escape one.

Those are plastic. Those are not metal, but they feel really good. So it comes on this little clicky thing where you can just use it as a fidget, or, of course, you can you can take them off and and put them on your actual mechanical keyboard.

So if you ever wanted a custom hyperkey, a custom vibe tab key for your monitor or for your keyboard, mechanical keyboard, or any of these custom syntax escape ShipIt keys, grab it from our merch store. Go to syntax.fm.

Click on swag in the URL bar.

Yeah. My kids been fidgeting with that thing. They love it. Yeah. It's I love it. I find it Yarn. Like, I I have to move it away from myself when I'm recording because otherwise, I'm just pushing it all the time, and you can hear it in the in the background.

I've never been a fidget guy. Maybe I maybe I gotta get fidgeting. Oh, man. I'm going to want a fidgety person, but Scott, like, a fidget, clicker kinda guy. I'm gonna stick pick at my new waterer cooker. I've I had a three liter Zojirushi, water heater, water boiler for, like, fifteen years. It, like, survived various door or, not dorms, apartments and then houses and moves, and this thing was an absolute beast. And, sadly, we did not take care of it as much as we could have in terms of, like, flushing out minerals out of the water. And, eventually, the age just caught up to it. Right? The the fact that this thing lasted so long and that I didn't take great care of it should tell you that these things last forever, especially if you take care of them. So we took it upon ourselves to say, you know what? Let's upgrade. We're going five liters. We got a five liter water boiler from Zojirushi.

It's, like, two 95 at Amazon.

But, again, it will last forever.

Man. And what it does is it keeps your water, yeah, keeps your water at a specific temperature all the time. And if it's five liters, it lasts forever. So our kids use this for oatmeal in the morning.

We use it for tea every day.

And it's just like, you got water set to one ninety five anytime you wanna push the button. You got it. Node. Coming right up. Big fan of Zojirushi as a brand overall, but, man, this thing just rules. Is this a a countertop Sanity, or does it go under the sink? Countertop unit. Yes. Countertop Sanity. We don't have a lot of stuff on our counters, and it it it is it looks kind of tall in the picture,

but it does fit underneath, like, cabinets and stuff Node problem. So I've been looking at this because we have, like, a like, a kettle. Right? And we have so much crap on our counters, and I'm always like, let's get rid of this. You know? There's there's people that put their toasters away every day, and we're not that family.

Do you put the toaster away. Corny toaster away. I'm putting it away every day. I'm putting it away. Right? Yeah. I ain't no. I ain't got time for that. And I often think, like, even when I'm cooking, where like, we have a gas stove, and it's it's not as fast as, like, an induction to boil water. Oh, yeah. So I'm wondering, like, what if we just had then we drink a lot of tea. What if we had that under the sink and just came out through the countertops? How sick would that be?

Yeah.

Just a little tap. Water tap. Yeah. I like that. Cool. We have a fancy neighbor who has one of those. They have they also have this. I I I kid you not. They have two dishwashers.

Oh, man. We let me tell you. We just got a new dishwasher, and we are planning we're getting our countertops redone. And when we get them redone, we're gonna have two dishwashers.

It makes so much sense.

Yeah. We I I got four kids, and, like, not every day you need two dishwashers. Nope. But, like, the amount of times where you need to, like, parallel process two things. Like, you got multiple cores on your laptop. Why can't you have multiple dishwashers?

Wes don't have any room for two dishwashers in our house. Like, there there would be literally no place to put it. But, like, to me, that's luxury, baby. Like, give me save me who knows how, you know, how much and and install a second dishwasher for me, and I'll be, like, living like a king. That's for sure. That's it's such a flex. And, like, a dishwasher JS not expensive. You can get, like, a nice dishwasher for The Bosch ones. Yeah. They last forever. Yes. What we just got. I'll sick pick that in a a future thing. We'll talk about we'll do dishwasher talk, but

my goal in life is to have two dishwashers.

That would be a kidding. Right? Ultimate flex and, like, ultimate just help yourself out when you got to me. Just everything goes in dishwasher in our house. You know? I put everything in the dishwasher. I have no time for washing. Yeah. Let's talk about let's talk about flex, or not even a flex here.

Life upgrade, stainless steel pans.

Stainless steel pans, they're harder to cook with, but you you could use metal utensils with them. You can toss them in the dishwasher.

You don't have to worry about microplastics on them. And, like, yeah, they take there's a learning curve to using them. Yeah. Your eggs are gonna stick if you're not doing the right things. You're not doing the water Wes in them. But, man, the Sanity steel fans. Carbon steel Carbon steel family over here. I switched Yeah. From cast iron to carbon steel, like, two years ago.

Man, it's the best.

You gotta still season it,

every Okay. You don't have to do any of the same stainless steel. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Bar keeper's friend to scrape off some of that stuff every now and then. But because it burned the whole pan every time you use it. Yeah. Every time. Yeah. Let me tell you. Eggs. Scrambled eggs. How you do it?