Woah, slow down there. One of your requirements to a code editor is video preview?
I didnt even know this existed.
Gonna spin up VSCode at home and find out.
I had a miserable experience with it. It could not do as simple task as discovering my python interpreter! IDEs are a dime a dozen these days — most are fast enough. But common workflows need to be air tight.
The issue there is what you expect; when Sublime Text came out and later VS Code, they intentionally didn't have the same features as IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA had. The ecosystem of those is very impressive and feature rich, but for a lot of tasks that was overkill and the performance cost was too big.
X years later and VS Code is the one with the biggest ecosystem and therefore also has the largest and most complex addons.
Zed is starting from scratch again, relying on developers to create extensions. However, I'll argue that because Zed is Rust based instead of web tech based like Code, it'll be harder to get as big an ecosystem as Code has. Same with IDEs, some of the biggest plugins have corporate backers who pay people to develop and maintain them.
Yes! I also got bitten by format_on_save when working with legacy projects with inconsistent formatting. Given another discussion I saw, the maintainers didn't think about this use case much, i.e. "why don't you want to have a proper formatting?". It can be turned off now, so not sure if they'll change the default.
It's like Excel changing .csv files after opening them so a simple load/save cycle can corrupt the file and your original copy is nowhere to be found.
I imagine the damage is smaller in case of auto-formatter but still - not something I would expect a program to do to my file in a simple "open file - close the program" cycle.
The VSCode Debugger is the only thing that keeps it installed on my work machine.
Lately I've been doing all my editing in Helix and switching over to Xcode for debugging though. It's even more consistent than VSCode, which occasionally leaks memory and blows itself up. I haven't had time to really learn lldb at the command line but it may have to be the next step.
The only other thing I miss is VSCode's Find-All/Replace-All because it maintains the include/exclude paths and Helix doesn't (that I know of)
I find myself using VS Code for "things like this" (its visual extension ecosystem).
I've grown attached to the git diff view, so I use it for reviewing PRs mostly (especially larger ones as github UI has been struggling with them as of late).
The rest of my code is written in Vim or by Claude.
I really like Zed, and I want to use it but I keep going back to VSCode when I need to be productive on my code instead of messing with my editor. I use both at the same time because Zed feels so much nicer, but so far, VSCode's features are quite a bit head.
I was also disappointed by the lack of Jupyter notebooks support: I ended up not using Jupyter notebooks that much anymore, and when I do, well, I run them in Jupyter
Other pain points:
- Format on save by default: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/29395
- VSCode Debugger UX seams to be much better