I've been hearing more and more about the Zed Editor lately. I don't really like change, but I do like to see what is new sometimes and potentially add things to my toolbox. I tried Theia IDE, but I couldn't find anything that made it better than VS Code, other than it wasn't VS Code, but kinda was. I can use Codium for that. When VS Code added the "free" Copilot support, I noticed someone mentioned they may have done that because of Zed.
Zed is an IDE written in Rust. So that kinda peaked my interest, mainly just out of curiosity of resource usage. From what I can tell, Zed uses about 1/4th of the memory that VS Code uses on my computer, with the same files open in the editor. It was around 300mb compared to 1.3gb, when I checked memory usage. What's crazy though, is I decided to see how that may escalate. I opened all of the files in a project that totaled about 15mb of TS files in VS Code and the memory usage jumped to about 3gb. Zed only went up to about 370mb. That is pretty crazy, kinda expected, but also we aren't used to that kind of efficiency anymore with all of these electron apps running every where. Zed is not an electron app and I quickly remembered the difference.
I like the themes in Zed and love that it includes the Gluvbox themes. In fact, I was reminded of my love for those and re-themed my desktop with a similar styling. I only used Zed a little, but it feels like an IDE that I want to use. It's light-weight. It isn't cluttered with a ton of features I never use. A lot of the things you'd need an extension for in VS Code is just built in. It's kinda refreshing. Give it a try if you want. I just installed the flatpak, because the one in the Tumbleweed repo is kinda old.
David D.
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