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Top Reasons to Choose Zed Over VS Code for Your Development Projects
We as programmers cannot live without editors, and the most popular code editor at the moment is definitely VS Code. VS Code is good in every way, but has one big drawback: performance.
It runs in Electron’s sandbox, which uses a lot of resources and is slow, specially when you are using plugins, there is a noticeable delay. It’s also a bit bloated, with a 100MB install package and 500MB of disk space required.
So, when I heard about a new editor called Zed , which has outstanding performance and powerful functions, I installed it immediately. Here is my experience using it.
So what’s so special about Zed?
First of all, why does Zed attract me? I can give you not one, not two, not even there but four reasons.
- Zed is developed by the creators of the original Atom editor and the innovative Tree-sitter parsing library, combining expertise and innovation.
2. It is based on the Rust language, fully utilizes multi-core CPUs and GPUs, pursues extreme performance, and is extremely fast.
3. It has built-in VS Code plug-in functions, such as LSP (Language Server Protocol), code prompt completion, multi-person real-time editing, AI assistant, etc.
4. It is actively developed, over 50K stars on its GitHub repository.
After installation, I felt very refreshed as soon as I opened it. The minimalist interface and layout are similar to VS Code. There is no learning cost and I can get started right away.
It’s really fast, no matter what operation you do, it opens immediately. Most of the functions needed for programming are available out of the box. If not, you can look for them in the plugin market.
Some of the features I find very useful, for example, it has an outline panel (left in the image below) that lists all the functions in the current script, and you can jump to the function implementation by clicking on the function name. Also there’s support for AI Assistance with OpenAI…
