I don't count myself as a Product Hunt audience, but I have visited the site couple, maybe dozens of times. However, it was just brief casual checking to see what's out there. I guess "#1 on Product Hunt" has somehow been burned into my subconscious.
Huh, I wish. This is loosely related, but early in my career I worked in a company where one of the projects I was involved in was a relatively large-scale web platform. The system had quite a lot of interactive UI elements, but for some reason we weren't allowed to use any off-the-shelf UI library/framework like React (it was already around for quite some time), despite presenting arguments countless times on why it would be the better solution and save a huge amount of time.
Instead, we had to use a buggy and incomplete UI library that was built within the company, and the results were as you'd expect. Making changes to the UI was agonizing, the library's behavior and API was inconsistent, components were difficult to reuse, and you had to jump through hoops and monkey-patched nonsense to update the UI. On top of that, nobody worked on fixing the library itself, and eventually the system using it grew so large that making any fixes to the library would break the system and would need a massive amount of time to fix or rewrite all the broken components. The saddest thing was that the UI library itself did not actually do anything "innovative", just some things that are available in countless other UI libraries, but worse.
Sure, maybe it was my technical incompetence and poor decisions, but on the other hand, even then, I knew JS/TS quite well and wasn't one of those people who swear by a particular framework and know nothing else. I worked on other web-based projects before with various technologies and never had that many problems.
I am sure Zed is great and I appreciate the effort put in to create it, but nowadays I just cannot imagine switching from VSCode to something else. In my limited understanding, none of the existing alternatives offer anything (and often misses at least something) truly innovative or anything else that VSCode extension wouldn't solve. On VSCode I have about 15 different profiles setup, each with different settings and dozens of extensions based on either a technology stack or a project - it would be really difficult to find a good reason to throw it all away. The idea of switching between IDEs does not appeal to me either. I do use Neovim a little bit too, but most of that usage time was spent on configuration.
It's really interesting point of view. I'm one of those people who avoid using VSCode at any cost. It's slow, it's bloated, the UI is not great, and it's slowly being locked down by Microsoft.
If Zed would not exist, I would be using helix, neovim, or emacs as I did before.
VSCode is actually not slow. The problem is to make it useful you need to add quite a few extensions, and those can be slow. That itself wouldn't be too bad but VSCode doesn't expose any information about what is causing the slowness. You end up with "VSCode is slow and it could be due to any one of the dozen extensions I have installed", which effectively means that VSCode is slow.
It remains to be seen if Zed can avoid that though.
VSCode (and all Electron based editors) have undeniable input latency. Zed is built by the same team that developed Atom and Electron and one of their stated goals is to make up for the shortcomings of these technologies.
If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it.
> VSCode (and all Electron based editors) have undeniable input latency.
Start up time, sure. But VSCode was lauded as the first performant Electron based editor. I just tested VSCode, Zed, and vim and I can't see any difference from when I press a key to when a character shows up on the screen (appears instantly). I'd be curious to see the results of a blind test, and wonder if people's biases against Electron are showing up.
>If you don't feel that VSCode is slow, it's because you are used to it.
I don't think this is a fair claim. When you start doing an apples to apples comparison, that is to say make full use of IDE and auto-completion features it's difficult to see a difference given that the latency and speed of the plugins starts to dominate any millisecond difference in input latency or rendering speed.
No. When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately. All other IDE features like auto-completion happen asynchronously.
> When a press a character key on my keyboard, it should appear in my editor immediately.
Seems to work the same for me in VSCode, CLion, and nvim. I don't doubt that you have issues with it (I've experienced slow editors & laggy input, it sucks) but I don't think it's inherent to VSCode. Doesn't mean it's not a bug, but if I had that issue I'd try with no extensions to verify, then binary search disabling the extensions I want until I find the one causing the lag.
>All other IDE features like auto-completion happen asynchronously
in the technical sense, but you as a developer don't use auto-completion asynchronously. It's not like you autocomplete and continue typing and then come back to the completion. When you complete at point you have wait. Whether that keypress takes 2 or 3 milliseconds isn't going to make a difference when the inter-process communication of your editor and its services is magnitudes slower. It's not like programming is like playing an FPS game. You're not in any meaningful sense limited by your mechanical input speed.
> Are you telling me that it was a delay when you type in vscode? If so, either your configuration or computer is doing something wrong
This is simply not true. There is inherent latency in any rendering pipeline, and VSCode and Atom both have input latency that is significantly higher than other editors like Sublime Text owing to a bloated rendering pipeline. You can read more about this and how easy it is to introduce latency simply by changing basic things like keyboards here: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ or editors specifically: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
vscode is noticeably slow compared to sublime text or zed, even without any extension. You instantly notice it when switching files or typing things that trigger auto-completions.
In the end the feeling is drastically different. It weirdly makes for a more peaceful experience to have such a snappy editor.
vscode wins thanks to all its extensions, where basically every language is supported and most features you can think of are there. But it's kinda like modern react. You know better alternatives exist, like solid or svelte, but the community is so big, it stays the easier choice in the end.
You can actually open the text tools on discord and see what's taking up memory and CPU.
They also have a new feature that's experimental that lets you offload extensions to a separate extension host so they don't block on the main thread for poorly designed or performing extensions.
I tried VSCode many times in my life and just hated the experience so much. It put me away from GUI editors for years, didn't want to try any of them. So ugly and so sluggish.
Zed was the first one that put me to rethink my position. It is so snappy on my Linux workstation and I don't have any issues with it's GUI. I finally switched from vim et.al.
But I know I have "weird" opinions, I also really dislike Apple products and their software.
I think a lot of people forget how long ago Electron/Atom were released, and the subsequent Cambrian explosion of Electron based apps and editors like VSCode. There's probably a huge amount of developers that haven't used anything else.
Ironically, I used JetBrains products for years before switching to VS Code because the latter felt so much faster. So it definitely depends on what you're used to.
Zed feels significantly faster than VS Code, but it also doesn't feel as polished and "complete" as an IDE, so I'm going to stick to VS Code for now for the same reason I stuck to JetBrains IDEs for so long.
Same here, still using Sublime Text due to its general snappiness, but can't wait for Zed to be released on Windows, it feels like a modern successor to ST that just keeps getting better.
Yeah it hooks into some blocking event that gets called on every keypress. At least that's how it worked last time I tried it many years ago. Very sluggish.
Fortunately standard editing shortcuts like Ctrl-D, Ctrl-left/right, etc. replace 99% of Vim "magic" and are way easier to remember and use.
I just opened the same project in Cursor and Zed and started typing around, and I can't tell any difference. I am usually very sensitive to this stuff; for example, I can detect when my Mac drops below 20% battery because ProMotion is disabled and the screen refresh rate drops to 60Hz.
This is why I cannot switch to neovim despite my attempts. I love the workflow, but the delay is too noticeable for me, and nothing helps. It's not a long delay, but long enough for me to feel like I have to wait for hours compared to Zed.
vscode started to intermittently freeze my whole desktop on arch linux recently. I rage deleted it. imho, it’s a valid compromise to choose a snappy lightweight editor over vscode with all available extensions.
sadly it reminds me of how visual studio used to be and and how much of a sluggish mess it is today. I don’t think the community can fix it either. it’s an uphill battle when MS is known to lose care as soon as they reach a critical mass of users.
VS Code is sluggish for me as well and crashes. I have minimal expansions, this is just a poor excuse for a lousy editor. Zed is much better, neovim is much better. My only real concern with Zed is what bait-and-switch is awaiting for us when they decide to make money. But it's a fantastic editor, no question about that.
There is always a "better mousetrap", and there are those that continue to use the old one because they "know how it works and it's set up just the way I like it". And there are others that try every new mousetrap that hits the market. (and that's ok, not slighting either one)
I will say that I personally have never really gelled with VSCode no matter how much I try to customize it, it still is just a bit off. For me, it's like it's too much to be a simple editor like SublimeText or NeoVim, but not quite enough to be an IDE like IntelliJ or Visual Studio (full). It does just enough that I expect a bit more of it and it often fails to deliver. Right now I tend to just use 2 editors - one very simple one for viewing/editing text files and one IDE (currently IntelliJ) for coding in a project.
On topic - Zed is actually a really nice editor. It had some rough edges last time I tried it, but it's probably about time to give it another go.
I wanted to like VSCode but it has enough input latency on my machines that it's not that enjoyable when I'm "locked in". Also if I'm running a bunch of services in Docker on MacOS (which means they're running VMs sigh) the overhead of VSCode is just too much and the system starts swapping constantly grinding the whole thing to a halt. I also find configuring it a pain. Every configuration pane feels ad-hoc and not part of a holistic, configurable system. Emacs has lots of crusty bits and an annoying event loop that you have to really work around but is designed a lot more holistically than VSCode.
Zed to me feels like a great batteries-included editor and I still run it as my non-emacs alternate editor. I wish its configuration was a bit more discoverable (especially with configuring linters/formatters), but it's 95% of what I need 95% of the time.
I had to use VSCode for some projects in the past because it was what was available on the clients workstations...
I can't imagine having to use that laggy electron abomination all the time. For me Zed is sent from heaven, because my previously preferred editor (geany) hast basically zero developtment nowadays.
I normally care a ton about latency and in the main project I work on I put extreme focus on reducing input latency in text input fields, but...
I've used VS Code for ages. I tried Zed. I don't really feel a difference. It's smoother but VS Code is more than smooth enough for me and has tons of features I rely on that don't exist in dev.
Meanwhile, when I tried Ghostty I noticed a significant improvement in "typefeel" compared to iTerm. So I'm not immune to detecting such a difference.
I mainly used VSCode on locked down corporate laptops. Usually good hardware but running windows and corporate security bloat.
But where I was allowed to install alternative editors they were snappy.
Zed succeeds at reducing the switching cost. I used NeoVim for ten years daily and configured it way back in college days.
I thought I would be unable to move to a GUI editor and it turns out that the speed and efficiency of Zed plus the almost one-to-one mapping of Vim features means that I am extremely productive in Zed.
I think the point of ACP being an open protocol is so that other editors (e.g. VSCode, Neovim) can implement it as a receiver and integration with ClaudeCode/GeminiCLI/... would just work.
OTOH I'd ten to prefer as less plugins as possible in VSCode, just because they are inherently dangerous, I'd like Zed plugins that are WASM, so they don't have access to the world.
But I agree that VSCode Typescript support is better than Zed, it works with weird projects setup, while Zed has more troubles. I at work VSCode and Zed/Helix for my projects, generally I use Zed when want to do some AI stuff, otherwise I just use Helix.
It sounds like you haven't tried Jetbrains IDEs. I understand still preferring VsCode in that case, but I think you would be saying "I prefer VsCode" vs "I don't see a reason". A big con with JB is they are very slow. The upside is that they manage multi-file projects, refactoring, and introspection far better than VsCode.
I switched to Neovim a year ago, and while I did spend a significant amount of time on configuring it, I haven't touched my config for months now - and I'm perfectly happy with it. There's things I can improve, but it does what I want.
I’m in the same boat. I spent a lot of nights for a couple weeks getting everything tuned just right, in the beginning. But now, several years later, it really doesn’t take much. I spend maybe 2-3 hours once every few months, and that’s usually just adding a bunch of features that sound nice to make my life better. I’ve easily gone 6+ months without touching neovim config, if not longer, because it’s unnecessary. It only matters if you want to further improve your editor
Interesting. I was just about to write the opposite. I tried Gleam to solve last year's Advent of Code, and it felt like a weird mix between Rust and Elixir. You can't write code as elegantly as you'd do in Elixir, which was somewhat disappointing. I switched back to Elixir after a couple of days. I think the biggest advantage of Gleam is static type system.
Depending when this was, it was likely pre-1.x days? Things moved very quickly there for a while - it's worth checking back in again.
Gleam seems to have a lot of obvious influences from Rust, and the creator is a rust dev.
While the Gleam ecosystem is vastly less mature than Elixir's or Rust's (because it's literally younger), the language itself, I've found, is vastly more pleasant to read/write. YMMV of course.
> Gleam seems to have a lot of obvious influences from Rust, and the creator is a rust dev.
Hi! That's me!
Gleam the language doesn't have any Rust influence really. It's a happy accident that some of the syntax ended up looking the same, but that's likely due to both being inspired by similar languages such as OCaml and the C family. Most the syntax and the semantics predate Gleam's compiler being rewritten in Rust.
The build tool is a rip-off of Cargo for sure though.
more like both gleam and rust have a strong ML influence (gleam might actually consider itself an ML? not sure about that, but it's definitely a descendant)
I prefer Elixir's syntax over Gleam's, but my main issue with Gleam is architectural. Specifically, Gleam had to bastardize BEAM and OTP to implement static typing. To me, static typing vs. dynamic typing is like having a shelf with a doily vs. one without a doily (the shelf works fine either way), so messing up a solid Actor Model implementation, for instance, for the sake of static typing seems like the wrong thing to do.
It has been a while since I looked at Gleam. Some things may have changed. However, the last time I used Gleam, I was forced to switch back to Elixir because Gleam:
• Lacks support for named processes.
• Has limited actor abstractions.
• Doesn't support OTP system messages.
• Has implemented supervisors in a way that can lead to improper shutdowns, data loss, and deviations from the expected BEAM behavior.
• Doesn't support pattern matching directly in function definitions. Instead, it requires you to use case statements.
• Doesn't support global mutable variables because it has no way to track variable types and state changes when BEAM modifies these variables, which is one of the hallmark features of BEAM.
• Doesn't support hot code reloading.
All of these features, which are readily available in Erlang and Elixir, are far more important to me than static typing. I've used statically typed languages like C, C++, C#, and Java, and dynamically typed languages like Python, Ruby, and Elixir throughout my 30+ years career. I've never once lamented not having static types, nor have I ever jumped for joy when I do. For me, static vs. dynamic typing is largely irrelevant and doesn't affect my work one way or the other.
I'm curious to know what the parent meant, as well. My understanding, which is incomplete admittedly, is that Gleam's type system lives in Gleam and isn't carried over into the produced Erlang/BEAM code, since BEAM has no concept of types, etc.
Gleam also has an OTP implementation[1] available, which includes Actors and the like. My understanding is that every BEAM language must implement OTP themselves, so there's nothing unusual here.
>People have over time seem many cases of due process being corrupted by money, power or just incompetence. Many times it has happened to them. Due process is often opaque, complex and lengthy so they decided to bring that in-house and make their own judgements.
I doubt that's the case here. People just love maltreating someone for a "good cause". It's the most delicious of moral treats.
> People just love maltreating someone for a "good cause". It's the most delicious of moral treats.
My theory is that people do it (hey I do it too) to get the kick of "look at that piece of shit, I'm glad compared to them I'm a better/smarter/etc person.".
look at that piece of shit, I'm glad compared to them I'm a better/smarter/etc person
I mean, that’s the entire basis of human ego. That’s never going away. It’s the reason we have in-groups and out-groups. Nations and foreigners. We had slaves and free people for this very reason.
If the requirement is to get rid of that kind of thinking, then get ready to simply deal with this forever. Because that type of thinking is human nature, and it’s never going away.
We need fixes that acknowledge and align with human nature.
The next part of that theory of mine is that with a community, you can feel good without needing to look down on others, maybe it's as simple as being too busy laughing with friends to be looking for those faults in strangers. Maybe it's knowing that no one's perfect but you like them anyway (e.g. some of your friends might have dumb views but you enjoy their company anyway and don't shun them).
So the loneliness epidemic is making assholes out of all of us.
I also think that feeling prosperous means you're friendlier to the less fortunate (e.g. refugees). Europe suffered austerity under the Merkel/Schaüble regime and they don't see themselves as prosperous, so they have bile against the people who had to abandon their properties and communities, fleeing bombs and bullets.
I wish I could find surveys to prove that idea, I just have the feeling that rich Norway is more welcoming towards refugees, compared to e.g. less rich Poland (citation needed...).
Plenty of people make the basis of their ego "look at me, at the things I'm capable of," with no reference to anyone else's capability.
If your ego is reliant on not merely being good yourself, but on being better than everyone around you, then it sounds like you've got some serious insecurities to work out...?
If your ego is elevated in anyway, you might want to work on yourself a bit.
Ground yourself and don't focus on whether or not you are better than someone else. Just be content that you're not better, not worse, not the same, not different, just a person.
>"I'm absolutely right about this, and I'm going to make a decision that kills vast numbers of human beings because I know I'm right and your deaths are a sacrifice I'm willing to make."
Sounds like human nature. That's what politicians do even to this day and anyone objecting to it is called "a traitor" and/or "not a real man" (whatever that means). Humanity loves its death rituals. Go on, downvote me to oblivion.
For a mere mortal like myself, those definitions aren't mutually exclusive. I think I tried reading "Blindsight" a long time ago but never got past a few dozen pages. Maybe I should give it a try again someday.
I'm certified dumb as a box of rocks 19 Wonderlic and I was able to follow most of it without issue or pause. It's possible that it's a bell curve and I'm too dumb to realize I was missing things. Hard to say.
My understanding is that the central thrust is that consciousness as we know it which separates us from all other animals may not be the deciding factor in advanced vs simple cognition and a state to which evolution and development is geared as we've always assumed, but rather an evolutionary aberration that doesn't necessarily exist in other advanced life forms and may cease to exist in humanity eventually.
At first I felt a bit depressed and devalued, but then recognized that even if it was true, it made consciousness and my conscious experience even more valuable than if it were a foregone conclusion, and added that much more importance to art and religion.
Okay gotcha gotcha. I don't know what a "Wonderlic" is but for what it's worth, up to now, you're the only other person in this entire thread I'm convinced has actually read the book.
Either that, I suppose, or you're a very skillful prompter. I confide you won't take the qualification too personally, recognizing that 2025 merely requires it.
I'd have to be a real psycho to use AI to pretend to have read books. Reading is probably one the most important parts of my existence, and yet I don't do it nearly enough.
I do experience the same phenomenon where I feel other people haven't actually read books. The book I've experienced this with the most is Infinite Jest. It's twofold in that people both misunderstand basic pieces of the story ("what ethnicity is Hal (arguably the book's protagonist)?" is a common mechanism by which I determine people didn't read or didn't understand the novel), and that I've never ever once online or in person seen commentary about the central "thing" the book is doing, although it's blisteringly glaringly obvious and I'm afraid everyone else just knows it and it's too obvious to state rather than being something only I noticed.
But, you know. There's a lot of social cachet in talking about whatever's trendy lately, as long as you don't make it obvious that you actually studied it among people who are only pretending in front of someone they want to impress. That may constitute defection and attract harsh punishment.
I say what I like here because I don't care what internet randos think of me, and no one with a life reads or comments on this website. I avoid such carelessness with great care in real life, at least unless I intend to give so grave an insult.
That need is most rare, but when I do find it, people often quietly introduce themselves to thank me after. In the meantime those who know me tend to find me kindly and somewhat retiring, if not at first positively shy, despite or perhaps because of my imposing size and build and carriage.
The thing is, what they see isn't a lie. That's why I value this website so highly. It offers a venue for the love of pettifogging disputation and waspish propriety that's always flawed an otherwise I think quite solidly respectable sort of character. Doing that on here, I feel no urge to do it out there. I believe the term is "harm reduction?"
Blindsight is known to be a slog for a lot of people including myself.
I love sci-fi, I love challenging ideas, and I really liked the concepts explored in Blindsight - except that I learned those concepts through summaries and selective reading.
Yes, there were definitely parts where I felt maybe I was picking up on a vibe or a hint, and later realized that was now a structural part of the story without which I would be quite lost.
I found this INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS explanation of fundamental plot points to be helpful in confirming or summarizing some things I missed[0].
>Most people don't have political views, they have political tribes
Agree with this. Also, I do believe most people are appallingly stupid (I might not not be an exception either), cruel and easy to manipulate, and as a result are incapable of making rational decisions that benefit society as a whole. I try to never ever discuss politics with anyone, it's one of the most damaging and useless activities there is.
Usually, interactions with people on (arguably) political issues just leave me stupefied - no, I don't think people born in certain geographical locations are subhuman because of decisions of their current government; no, I don't hate nor wish death and suffering to anyone; no, I don't think the war is necessary and I don't want anyone to be blown to bits by a drone; no, I don't think artificial lines on a map ("countries") define who is wrong and who is right and worth throwing your only life away for; no, I don't think decisions of the government reflect the opinion of the entire population of that country; yes, I do think people I disagree with are real human beings with capabilities of sense, emotion, and thought just like I am; and the list goes on and on. Anyway, most people have a very different idea on the aforementioned examples.
I don't care about the replies, just wanted to offload this filth off my head somewhat.
