948: Zed is Ready For Primetime

Wes and Scott talk about what makes Zed—the hot new editor built in Rust—fast, beautiful, and finally ready for primetime. From Git UI to extensions and AI tools, they break down what Zed gets right, what it still lacks, and whether it’s time to finally ditch VS Code. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! Syntax San Francisco Meetup We need your Spooky Stories 02:37 Brought to you by Sentry.io 04:07 What is Zed? 06:46 Zed UI: fast and clean 10:17 General editor experience 11:44 Extensions marketplace 17:53 Git UI 22:03 Problems UI 26:01 Real-time collaboration Remote Development 27:39 Command prompt tricks and built-in tools 31:03 Zed’s AI features AI Coding Sucks 37:08 What kept Scott away—and why he’s back 40:33 What’s still missing Text Manipulation Kung Fu for the Aspiring Black Belt 46:43 Sick Picks & Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott: Zojirushi 5.0 Liter Water Boiler Wes: Syntax Keycaps Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  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 Bear Bottle Beer Garden in Salesforce Park. We're in town for Get Up Universe. You don't have to actually be going to Get Up Universe to go to this. It's open to anybody. We're going to 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 want to fly down, come on out, October 27th, it's going to be a who go to syntax.fm forward slash 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.

• 0:44Wes Bos?

  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 want to 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 forward slash spooky and submit your story. We keep absolutely everything anonymous. So tell us your worst.

• 1:27Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to syntax. Today we're going to be talking about Zed. Zed is the new hot editor that's built in Rust. It is not a fork of VS code and it is fantastic. So we're going to be talking all about why you should pay attention to Zed in this episode. My name is Scott Talinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me as always is Wes Boss. What's up Wes?

• 1:52Wes Bos?

  Hey, excited to talk about Zed. I've been like dipping into it every, I don't know, four or five months, just to kind of 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.

• 2:15Scott Tolinski?

  Is that so?

• 2:16Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 2:16Scott Tolinski?

  They do.

• 2:17Wes Bos?

  We do.

• 2:17Scott Tolinski?

  They don't say Z.

• 2:18Wes Bos?

  I don't. 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.

• 2:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Oh, I'm actually gonna push back. I think Zed's a cooler word than Z. I'll be honest.

• 2:33Wes Bos?

  Alright.

• 2:34Scott Tolinski?

  Sound off in the comments, folks. Z or Zed? What do you think? Alright. Before we get going, though, also a cool thing: Sentry. Sentry.io, the perfect place to solve your problems on the web. Man, let me tell you, I've been using so many of the Sentry 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 where you are using essentially all of Sentry'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 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.

• 3:17Scott Tolinski?

  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 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, yeah.

• 3:42Wes Bos?

  It's true. Like, debugging sucks because you are trying to figure out what went wrong, you know? Often, the code mistake is not huge. It's actually trying to piece it all together and get all the clues together.

• 3:56Scott Tolinski?

  It's solving a mystery where you were essentially the killer yourself, and now you have amnesia.

• 4:04Wes Bos?

  Why did I do this to myself?

• 4:06Scott Tolinski?

  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've had 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 plugins 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 on Zed. So I've been a long time observer of Zed,

• 4:51Scott Tolinski?

  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 going to be talking in this episode, a lot about why you should care, what does Zed offer, what is novel about it, and what are some little neat things about Zed? Basically, what's the deal with Zed? Is it ready for primetime? Spoiler, yes, it's ready for primetime.

• 5:32Scott Tolinski?

  It's sick. It's great. Cool. So, that said, what led me to start picking up Zed again? Big one, there is 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 VS Code, or any of the VS 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 M1, and it was just crazy. So that led me to saying, you know, like, maybe it is time to give Zed another try,

• 6:14Scott Tolinski?

  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 fixed. 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 going to 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, 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 UI-based text editor, the UI looks fantastic out of the box.

• 6:58Scott Tolinski?

  The themes look great. I mean, obviously, there's a host of themes if you don't want the ones that come installed on here. Like, I've been installing, what is this, Lux Light? I like this theme a lot for a light theme. Picture me using a-

• 7:13Wes Bos?

  Yeah, what the heck, Scott? Why you switching, changing editors and using a light theme here? What happened?

• 7:19Scott Tolinski?

  Bro, uh, I started working in my car a lot during light time, when it was like, I'm taking the kids. My daughter has two hours of dance, now I'm working out in my car, so what am I gonna do? Oh, this, you know, it's like, the, working on a light mode in the middle of the day is actually really, really nice. 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 kind of style, so, yeah, I know.

• 7:47Wes Bos?

  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 Notion, light mode all day.

• 8:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, you know, all it took for me was like, finding the right light mode. And then once I did, it was like, uh, 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 Lux is the one I like the most, because this feels kind of nice. This Lilac one's pretty dope too, it's kind of like purply, yeah.

• 8:27Wes Bos?

  It is a nice-looking editor, though, and I think that's really important, because like, I'd spent all this time trying to tweak my VS Code, and I'm still not totally happy with it. And I find the same thing with 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 for me to be happy.

• 8:53Scott Tolinski?

  The one thing that VS Code has never had, it's never looked good. And I don't say that to be mean to anybody, but like even when Adam came out, there was Adam was the text editor and even Sublime Text looked better. When VS 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 looked 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 notice about Zed is that it's not just kind of the general editor experience that looks nice.

• 9:38Scott Tolinski?

  It's like all of the different panes and windows. I'll talk about a lot of these things as we go, like the Git UI and you know, 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 a, 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.

• 10:22Scott Tolinski?

  A lot of the shortcuts are the same as VS Code. So 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 VS Code. Extensions run from anything from language servers to themes to icon 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 a nice job of the filtering in Extensions UI. Like in VS Code, it's that little sidebar and you're kind of like always struggling to see a click on it opens up.

• 11:03Scott Tolinski?

  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 just find to be a nice UI. There is one complaint about this UI is 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 plugins, 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

• 11:47Scott Tolinski?

  as rich as VS 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 P npm, which is something I actually did kind of a lot. I don't know. Do you do that, Wes?

• 12:25Wes Bos?

  No, but I, I don't love my workflow for, 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 that. Or you're like, you send it to the background, whatever, like you FG, I'm not a for, no, you send it to the background and then it like pauses that and then you npm install something, you bring it back. Like, I don't love that either. So maybe the editor is the spot.

• 12:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know, the one extension I've been using in VS Code uses Ni, which is the one that detects if you're using P npm Yarn or NPM for that project and runs the appropriate thing. So like I've just been doing like me install whatever directly from the command prompt within VS Code and that to me has been like a really nice workflow. Cause again, what else am I going to do? I'm going to make a duplicate tab of the, the terminal window. Then I'm going to install it. Then I'm going to close that duplicate tab and then do it again next time. 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 that out.

• 13:41Wes Bos?

  I'm just 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 config based. 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 want to make like a, some sort of custom extension.

• 14:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:18Wes Bos?

  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 going to 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 VS Code 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 ES Lint as well. You know, people are just going to move to, to biome and be like, you know what?

• 15:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Wes Bos?

  I'm not going to try to fuss with this anymore. I'm just going to switch to something entirely different or similar, I guess.

• 15:10Scott Tolinski?

  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.

• 15:30Scott Tolinski?

  I, you know, it seems like a program with arguments, a shell with arguments could be

• 15:35Wes Bos?

  Anything.

• 15:35Scott Tolinski?

  done as a task, so.

• 15:36Wes Bos?

  Yeah, and I guess you use JavaScript in that point. This is probably a little different if you want to interact with the Z UI. But yeah, tasks you can, as long as you can run a command, right? You can, you can run whatever you want.

• 15:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah. So we'll see about that. But yeah, so 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 VS Code, they do just kind of exist out of the box. Like CSS, you know, the colors in VS Code, the color highlighting just is here out of the box. So it shows you the color.

• 16:29Scott Tolinski?

  So like stuff like that, that you may have installed an extension for just kind of exists inside of here. And that's nice.

• 16:36Wes Bos?

  My theme, so I, I made Cobalt 2 for Zed. Actually, somebody started it and then I tweaked it. And they passed it over to me. 20,000 installs already. So that's, that's not nothing. That's, that's a 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 ESLin or something popular that everybody wants. It's people that explicitly want that theme.

• 17:02Scott Tolinski?

  0.01 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.

• 17:13Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 17:14Scott Tolinski?

  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 got complete silence. You're not even gonna back me on?

• 17:27Wes Bos?

  You know what I was doing? I was installing it. Let's, here we go. And I'm, I'm going to turn it on in my own theme. Syntax looks nice. Okay, okay. I like it. I kind of want to go. Every now and then I think my Cobalt theme is a little light on the light side for, for me. I kind of want to go a little darker. And I turn this on, I see pure black. I like that.

• 17:51Scott Tolinski?

  It's black, baby.

• 17:51Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, that's for sure. Cool. All right, let's talk about the Git UI. Um, 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 VS Code and, uh, let me see, I can't really bump up the interface that much. I got really used to VS Code and the Git UI in VS Code, where you type in your commit message, you sync and do all that stuff directly from VS Code. 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

• 18:34Scott Tolinski?

  because I don't like using the in editor terminal anyways. So I had like ghosty over here and I don't want to 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, uh, this app, is that when they do something, they do it well. So the Git UI is really nice. The diff editor looks nice. Um, you can come and stage or restore, stage or restore. Um, nice language on everything, not just kind of like, I mean, there are icons throughout this, but the icons are fairly explicit. Um, oh, you can go to next hunk, so we can, we can browse hunks in Zed.

• 19:19Wes Bos?

  My nickname in high school.

• 19:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Go to next hunk. Uh, she sees Wes. Okay, go to next hunk.

• 19:27Wes Bos?

  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.

• 19:39Scott Tolinski?

  UI font size.

• 19:41Wes Bos?

  UI underscore font underscore size.

• 19:44Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. And that's not the editor font size. Okay, that's the buffer font size.

• 19:47Wes Bos?

  Which I love that because often I want to crank up one of the two and you can do that in VS Code, but it's kind of tricky where you have to make one, you have to zoom in and then make something a bit smaller. I like this a lot better.

• 19:59Scott Tolinski?

  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 VS Code that like, not having it actually became a bummer. It's not like I can't use Git on the command line, but again, it's just an annoyance, right?

• 20:25Wes Bos?

  So you'd say you've like moved like almost all of your Git interactions into, into the editor?

• 20:33Scott Tolinski?

  Hell, yeah.

• 20:35Wes Bos?

  All right, man. I've slowly been moving it over and the one thing that has, has got me is the AI commit description. Love that.

• 20:43Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:44Wes Bos?

  You know, can't think of what I did. I don't even know what I did, but the AI does.

• 20:49Scott Tolinski?

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

• 20:57Wes Bos?

  I, maybe. What's a change set?

• 21:00Scott Tolinski?

  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

• 21:07Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:07Scott Tolinski?

  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 where 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.

• 21:26Wes Bos?

  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.

• 21:38Scott Tolinski?

  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 uh, Zero Svelte, 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 versioning, automatic versioning and publishing via GitHub Actions.

• 22:02Wes Bos?

  Beautiful, yeah. So smooth.

• 22:03Scott Tolinski?

  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 pretty error, your linter, any of that stuff, VS Code, man, it just like

• 22:21Scott Tolinski?

  It's either like the inline problems view is like the only way to look at that in my mind. Cause when you pop open any of those problems panels in VS Code, man, that is like often very painful for me. I don't know how you feel about that.

• 22:33Wes Bos?

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

• 22:48Scott Tolinski?

  It's not. And so in Zed, when you pop open, you'll see, when you see little problems and problem diagnostics in your, in your bottom toolbar, um, you can open them with shift command M, it pops it open and then it kind of gives you a file by file. Now again, I have this yellow unknown property warning that as again, it's a problem with my theme here. Um, but like here's this one box shadows 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 TypeScript error here, locals, it has implicitly any type. Okay. So, uh, so you could come in and fix it directly from here, or you could then do op, uh, it says option enter. But is it option enter or is it?

• 23:34Wes Bos?

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

• 23:42Scott Tolinski?

  Bro, I love that.

• 23:44Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 23:44Scott Tolinski?

  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 want to 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.

• 24:01Wes Bos?

  You could see, you gotta be able to do that because VS Code has all of those things, you know? Like in, if you're looking at a Git diff and you want to just see what has changed, you gotta be able to do that. Cause 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.

• 24:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I think my problem with it in VS Code is that it's part of this bottom panel. Like, yeah, they are kind of listed out here.

• 24:31Wes Bos?

  No, that, this is the UI I don't like.

• 24:34Scott Tolinski?

  Right. And like, the big problem with this to me is that like, this panel is probably the single, like, my least favorite part of VS 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're just like, a lot of stuff in here, like.

• 24:50Wes Bos?

  It's something to be said for, for like, the UX of it, because of course you can make it work how you want. But like, I don't, I don't know how to make it work better, you know, just show me like, like Zed, you know, the default experience is really good. And like, VS Code 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, kind of do this from the get go.

• 25:29Wes Bos?

  And, and that's the same for a lot of stuff with this Zed is 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.

• 25:41Scott Tolinski?

  And it shows. I think it really shows in the care that is expressed throughout this app, uh, 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 the stuff. So we got Git UI. That's a big one for me. The Problems UI, really nice. Uh, 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.

• 26:21Scott Tolinski?

  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 codebase running on one person's computer and actually even get chat through this. Again, 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.

• 27:01Wes Bos?

  Burke Holland from VS Code was tweeting the other day how, I think he was, how like Live Share is the VS Code version of that.

• 27:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 27:09Wes Bos?

  And in fact, they deprecated the voice thing and I don't think a lot of people use it.

• 27:14Scott Tolinski?

  That's what he said. Yeah.

• 27:15Wes Bos?

  It's there and not a lot of people, I don't think a lot of people pair program. And if you are pair programming, maybe you're probably using something else.

• 27:25Scott Tolinski?

  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 can do in VS Code, obviously, but it's an extension on VS Code. Convert to uppercase, upper, lower camel case. Is uppercase, okay, they call it, yeah. I would have called the screaming snake case, but it's just uppercase. So.

• 28:10Wes Bos?

  Oh, did it? Did it just, did you just do that on the, the import and it swapped it?

• 28:17Scott Tolinski?

  Did it actually swap it in the import?

• 28:19Wes Bos?

  Because I'm wondering if that's using the VS Code language server. Like, it communicates with the language server to do a smart replace. Do it again.

• 28:28Scott Tolinski?

  So, no, it just swapped what was underneath my cursor. So this one is now...

• 28:31Wes Bos?

  Oh, okay.

• 28:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. In VS Code, there's like usually like a rename symbol and that exists here too, just with F2 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 assistance, suppress, lint, all those typical type of code actions you might 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 stuff's there. So, I tend to like that quite a bit.

• 29:02Wes Bos?

  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.

• 29:11Scott Tolinski?

  Totally, yeah, especially... You know what thing I really like too? Is that on any given file, if you do Ctrl+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 .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?

• 29:56Scott Tolinski?

  Just to be able to have confirmation that things are running and actually like up with a little status light. If you want it, it's there. I just, I like that. Another cool thing is there's a zoom in, which is just Shift+Escape. A Shift+Escape just kind of pops open whatever file you're currently active and makes it fullscreen. 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 got a whole bunch of stuff open, your AI chat, any of that stuff. You can at any point just have it go fullscreen instead of closing all the other stuff. So that's a nice little UI.

• 30:35Wes Bos?

  Does it, does it pop over everything?

• 30:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, pops over everything.

• 30:40Wes Bos?

  Oh, 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 kind of nice, you know?

• 30:54Scott Tolinski?

  And it's an easy, it's an easy shortcut too, you know? So it's not one you're going to be like reaching for or like scrambling to hit.

• 31:01Wes Bos?

  I'm going to be implementing that. That's great.

• 31:04Scott Tolinski?

  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.

• 31:11Wes Bos?

  CJ crashing out over AI.

• 31:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, CJ absolutely going nuts over AI. Yeah. 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 inline 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 Claude code with their, not even like Claude code's UI. So if I pop this open, it just inherently uses Claude code and it uses your given Claude code setup. It's not some like weird sandboxed version of it.

• 31:58Scott Tolinski?

  So I asked it 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 Claude code and I already have it all set up, I don't want to have to set that up again inside of the editor. I've been using this instead of my ghosty terminal for Claude 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.

• 32:35Wes Bos?

  Make this purple.

• 32:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, make page.

• 32:40Scott Tolinski?

  Purple. Okay, this is a Svelte page, so it's probably gonna try to add some styles here, whatever. It's gonna do it. It's gonna give you that approval, right? Always allow. Okay, I'm not gonna 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 not, and there it's gone, right? So 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.

• 33:17Wes Bos?

  Like if you're paying for Claude code or Copilot or whatever, you can bring it along. You don't have to pay another fee for this.

• 33:26Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, or you can pay them to use theirs. You can install MCP via their extensions if you want, or you can use the Claude code, or yeah, any of that stuff. And the Copilot stuff was easy. I just clicked whatever. I installed via GitHub, and next thing you know, I can use any of the Copilot models if I want to throughout this, or I can use Claude 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?

• 34:00Wes Bos?

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

• 34:11Scott Tolinski?

  So command, so you, oh, that's interesting. So let's see, let's see if I, I probably just don't know the open in terminal, copy, 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 assistant, there is a An inline chat, AI chat directly in here, but I don't see an add to chat the same way you do in VS Code.

• 34:46Wes Bos?

  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. Cause 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 VS Code. I try it every now and then, and the tab completions on Cursor are just 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 and you can, I use that quite a bit

• 35:29Wes Bos?

  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?

• 35:38Scott Tolinski?

  You know what? It could be a user error at this point. And what's weird is 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. 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 VS Codes at the same time. So for me, I was like, is this just something that is wrong with my curtain setup? 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.

• 36:17Wes Bos?

  All right. Cause I'm pretty sure they had that at one point. I remember DMing with several of the people that worked there and 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 of the new features? Or how do you migrate them from where they were into the new one without making it too obnoxious as well?

• 36:51Scott Tolinski?

  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 the last time you opened this, it was a completely different app.

• 37:05Wes Bos?

  Oh.

• 37:08Scott Tolinski?

  So, the reasons why I avoided using Zed again was there was no plugins 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'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 Split and Move pane, I have it locked to HyperS. 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. VS Code had that

• 37:51Scott Tolinski?

  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. Now, luckily, inside of here, inside of, I think, Keyboard, Open, Keymap, I don't even remember what the setting is. It is... I think it's just like "move to the left" or something. Either way, I have it now and I do HyperS and look, boom! Look at that. People, how am I the only person that works like this? Where you have two files open, you want to have them split side by side, one command, now you have two different files open side by side instead of splitting it.

• 38:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I've never understood the default of that being the same file. Like, who wants that?

• 38:34Scott Tolinski?

  Right.

• 38:34Wes Bos?

  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 want to see two files at once."

• 38:47Scott Tolinski?

  I've got my CSS or whatever over here. When I 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.

• 39:06Wes Bos?

  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 want to 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.

• 39:29Scott Tolinski?

  What configured provider did you use?

• 39:32Wes Bos?

  I think I'm using the, man, I've, I've had this thing hooked up to my own LLM at one point, like, like my own key. 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 Zed LLM trial.

• 39:49Scott Tolinski?

  Okay.

• 39:50Wes Bos?

  Cause I don't, I don't see any other, here, agent, default, this is agent, default model provider, z.dev. Now, 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.

• 40:10Scott Tolinski?

  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.

• 40:19Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 40:19Scott Tolinski?

  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-5, 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 would just want that. You don't always need it, but it's nice to be able to see what's going on.

• 41:04Wes Bos?

  I don't know if I could write some rust to make this happen or not, or like, maybe they could make a compatibility layer with some of the VS Code APIs. That would probably be a big, big project, but I would find it very hard to leave all of my comfy extensions.

• 41:23Scott Tolinski?

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

• 41:42Wes Bos?

  Here, 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, and then there is-

• 41:58Scott Tolinski?

  SCM is a Starcraft map file.

• 42:04Wes Bos?

  Uh, this seems, 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 Z 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.

• 42:39Scott Tolinski?

  Somebody did. Hey, you know what? I'm going to also link a post in the show notes here, or at least I'll give you a, you know, tell you right now to check this thing out. Z.dev blog, 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 line, select all matches, convert case, uh, being able to do so in a fast way. This was a really cool blog post, you know, how to review multi cursors, um, with keyboard commands. You're setting up all these multi cursors at once. There's a lot of neat stuff

• 43:24Scott Tolinski?

  inside of here. I also really appreciate that their example uses iconic kung fu actors. God, I 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. 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 will say that, you know, we're used to, and not all Electron apps are bad. And VS Code is one of the better performing Electron apps. But there are times in VS Code where you get an extension that will just crush your computer. Like, what was that, Wix's version?

• 44:09Scott Tolinski?

  There were version, package version plugin. Man, if you're still using that thing, get it off your system and it'll just crush you.

• 44:17Wes Bos?

  Yeah, and now 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, will we even need more powerful computers than these MacBook M1s? And here we are, a couple of years later, being like, I need like nine of these just to run all this crap at once.

• 44:38Scott Tolinski?

  Just to all run all this crap. I know, I've moved to like, 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.

• 44:55Wes Bos?

  It just feels good. And it's a weird thing. Like, if there's any reason to use Zed, it just feels good. And like, I wouldn't say VS Code is slow. You know, people always talk about that with Sublime. They'd be like, it's so slow. You're like, how fast 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 0.2 milliseconds to highlight the entire file. It's like, how often are you opening new files and waiting for the syntax highlighting? But then you, I often have this. Like, I'll say, like, who needs more than 60 Hz? And then you use it. My new iPhone.

• 45:37Scott Tolinski?

  I never said that, I'll be honest, folks.

• 45:38Wes Bos?

  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 understand this now.

• 45:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. 60 Hz, man, I can't imagine going back to 1994.

• 45:52Wes Bos?

  Wait, what's your, what is your monitor? 60, 120?

• 45:57Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, which one? Which monitor?

• 45:59Wes Bos?

  Your, your main Apple display. This Apple Studio Display has a refresh rate of 60 Hz. That makes sense. Most, most monitors are unless you have some crazy gaming monitors like 120. But there's something about having the phone being a higher refresh rate.

• 46:16Scott Tolinski?

  It's the touch latency.

• 46:17Wes Bos?

  It 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.

• 46:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Hey, I want a higher refresh rate monitor now. Time to get rid of this.

• 46:33Wes Bos?

  Oh, man, I just, I just baited Scott into realizing he didn't have a, a 120 Hz monitor.

• 46:42Scott Tolinski?

  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?

• 46:51Wes Bos?

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

• 46:58Scott Tolinski?

  Nice.

• 46:59Wes Bos?

  And this is a set of Syntax Key Caps and it comes with a solid gold, it's not actually solid gold, vibe key, which is the shape of a tab. Um, and then it also comes with a hyper key,

• 47:17Wes Bos?

  which is black gold. It's, these are like the pure metal. They're nice and heavy. Um, and then there is three just regular keys. Uh, one Syntax, one, one that says ship it and one Escape one. Um, 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 hyper key, a custom vibe tab key for your monitor or for your keyboard, mechanical keyboard, or any of these custom Syntax Escape, Ship It keys, grab it from our merch store. Go to syntax.fm, click on swag in the URL bar.

• 48:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, my kid's been fidgeting with that thing. They love it.

• 48:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's, I love it. I find it hard, 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 background.

• 48:16Scott Tolinski?

  I've never been a fidget guy. Maybe I, maybe I gotta get fidgeting.

• 48:19Wes Bos?

  Oh, man.

• 48:20Scott Tolinski?

  I'm going to want a fidgety person, but not like a fidget clicker kind of guy. I'm gonna stick pick my new water cooker. I've, I had a three liter Zoji Rushi water heater, water boiler for like 15 years. It like survived various dorm, 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?

• 49:06Scott Tolinski?

  Let's upgrade. We're going five liters. We got a five liter water boiler from Zoji Rushi. It's like $2.95 at Amazon, but again, it will last forever. And what it does is it keeps your water, yeah, it 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 195. Anytime you want to push the button, you got it. No, coming right up. Big fan of Zoji Rushi as a brand overall, but man, this thing just rules.

• 49:46Wes Bos?

  Is this a countertop unit or does it go under the sink?

• 49:49Scott Tolinski?

  Countertop unit, yes. Countertop unit. We don't have a lot of stuff on our counters and it, it is, it looks kind of tall in the picture, but it does fit underneath like cabinets and stuff, no problem, so.

• 50:01Wes Bos?

  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.

• 50:14Scott Tolinski?

  I put the toaster away.

• 50:15Wes Bos?

  You put the toaster away?

• 50:17Scott Tolinski?

  I'm putting it away every day. I'm putting it away, right? Yeah.

• 50:20Wes Bos?

  I ain't, 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.

• 50:30Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:31Wes Bos?

  So I'm wondering, like, what if we just had, and 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?

• 50:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Wes Bos?

  It's a little tap.

• 50:42Scott Tolinski?

  Hot water tap?

• 50:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I like that.

• 50:45Scott Tolinski?

  We have a fancy neighbor who has one of those. They have, they also have this. I kid you not, they have two dishwashers.

• 50:51Wes Bos?

  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.

• 51:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 51:04Wes Bos?

  We, I, I got four kids and like, not every day you need two dishwashers, 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?

• 51:16Scott Tolinski?

  We 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.

• 51:32Wes Bos?

  That's, that's such a flex. And like a dishwasher is not expensive. You can get like a nice dishwasher for.

• 51:37Scott Tolinski?

  The Bosch ones, yeah, they last forever. Yes.

• 51:40Wes Bos?

  That's what we just got. I'll sick pick that in 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.

• 51:49Scott Tolinski?

  No kidding, right?

• 51:49Wes Bos?

  Ultimate flex and like ultimate, just help yourself out.

• 51:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 51:56Wes Bos?

  Everything goes in dishwasher in our house, you know? I put everything in the dishwasher. I have no time for washing. Yeah.

• 52:02Scott Tolinski?

  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 testing them, but man, stainless steel pans. Carbon steel?

• 52:32Wes Bos?

  Carbon steel family over here. I switched from cast iron to carbon steel like two years ago. Man, it's the best. You gotta still season it every, every two months.

• 52:44Scott Tolinski?

  Stainless.

• 52:45Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:47Scott Tolinski?

  You gotta use Bar Keeper's Friend to scrape off some of that stuff every now and then, but...

• 52:50Wes Bos?

  Cause it burned the whole pan every time you use it, yeah.

• 52:53Scott Tolinski?

  Every time, yeah. Let me tell you, man, eggs, scrambled eggs, how you do it?