Zed with SSH Remoting and Orbstack is pretty much my dream setup for programming on a Mac.

I can now spin up a Linux machine in Orbstack[0] in a few seconds and then SSH into it from Zed for a fast Linux development environment with a fast macOS native editor. It feels a bit like the macOS version of WSL and VSCode. Just a whole lot nicer (subjective of course)!

A couple of years ago I was inspired by what Mitchell Hashimoto was doing[1]. He was running a GUI VM via VMware on macOS so that he could have the best of both worlds - macOS apps and ecosystem and a Linux dev environment with his preferred package managers and a more reliable NixOS. That route still felt a bit heavy to me, but I related to the desire for the best of macOS and the best of Linux.

I tried with VMware and Docker Desktop with VSCode but it always felt like a lot of overhead and a bit clunky to achieve a smooth fast dev environment.

With Zed and Orbstack it finally feels like the fast elegant system I'll stick with. Thank you to the developers for these excellent tools!

[0] https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture#linux-machines [1] https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1346136404682625024

Can someone explain. What is the catch ? Zed is worked on by paid employees. So who is the product, how is the money made and is it open source and if so, how much ? (Vscode has strings attached too)

Just interested since building my workflows around a company's products usually ends in tears (figuratively).

Just a FYI, this feature will install a binary on the remote host and run it.

> Your local machine will attempt to connect to the remote server using the ssh binary on your path. Assuming the connection is successful, Zed will download the server on the remote host and start it.

https://zed.dev/docs/remote-development

I switched to Zed for C, C++, Rust, Angular, and am extremely happy with it. I use it with it's vim mode, which is very good.

For the record, I've tried the JetBrains suite for at least a year, vscode, vim, neovim, visual studio (windows), qtcreator, and at least one more I dont remember. Zed is superior for everyday coding, for me.

The only thing it lacks is debugging, so I can't use it for C#, but I also can't use vscode for C# so that's understandable.

And man, its so snappy.

Caveat emptor: "Zed downloads NodeJS binary and npm packages from Internet without user’s consent"[1]

This has been an open issue for 5 months. When I noticed it, I couldn't believe my eyes and it was the last time I've run Zed so far. Judge for yourself whether this is a deal-breaker for you; I wish I had known about it earlier.

[1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589

I also switch between a lot of computers (work computer at home/work computer at work) but have to develop on "big powerful machine at work". My current solution is tmux + nvim and it works really good. I can just pickup a session from whatever computer I'm in front of at the moment.

Am I correct in that neither Zed nor VS Code support this usecase yet?

How are people so happy with Zed? I've tried it, it's fast sure, but it lacks some very essential features like inline error highlighting and button for running code like how Intellij has it, there is no extensions that cover this either.

At the moment, the Zed IDE is more like an lightweight ai-assisted text editor for me.

I wonder if image based screen sharing (e.g. Google Meet) is the "worse is better" here?

Zed collaboration sounds great, but what about all of the other apps I use?

Image based sharing supports everything (poorly) automatically.

I'd really like a good remote editing solution that is genuinely portable. I don't think there's anything technical stopping that from happening (and I've tried some half baked solutions along those lines before).

For a variety of reasons relating to my line of work, this or vscode's solution are no gos since they require you to install a server on the remote, and that server is interpreted or compiled in a language that is absolutely not guaranteed to be present or stable on said remote (I'm saying my ideal extension, if a server is really necessary, would be in a reasonably widespread subset of C, perhaps ISO c99, which I'm sure I'll catch some flack for saying).

That is an underserved (although perhaps not large, but probably they would be enthusiastic) market given that remote editing is perhaps the most useful in situations where the remote environment is different to such an extent you can't easily copy a project over and expect it to just work. If I'm deploying to an x86_ 64 Linux box, I can totally just develop locally and do a lot of testing locally deploy to the remote after all of that, and so I tend not to get too excited about remote editing features for a platform like a normal x86_64 Linux distro.

I'm obviously being picky and demanding and people are free to ignore everything I just wrote. As far as Zed is concerned, the editor looks good and this functionality looks good and I'm happy to see it moving along. Please forgive me for indulging my personal pet peeve. It is a good thing by itself to have competition to vscode and so please don't interpret my post as being overly negative to Zed given it's main competitor has the same issue.

Also, I'm aware that a fair response to everything I just wrote would be "just use vi/vim/emacs"...which is actually really fair and does a lot to demolish my argument, at least as far as a remote editor being a necessity is concerned rather than just a nice to have.

I can find no mention of Emacs (or Tramp) in any of the documentation or a sampling of blog posts. It’s as if the authors don’t even know it exists. This is concerning.

(As is their apparent 100% all-in on the AI hype train.)

Personally, I need support for remote debuggers, e.g. debugpy on Python. Would this feature help me debug code that's already running on a remote server and I just need to connect to it?

I tried to use zeds SSH remoting for a work project. Typescript with big codebase and sadly the performance is a rollercoaster. Types sometimes load so slow that it's unusable. VSCode remote doesn't seem to have this problem, although I'm not sure yet if it's really just a zed problem. I would need to try it with some more isolated use-case. Still happy to see the progress! I switched to zed for a lot of my private dev work already

I tried to use Zed but the text rendering on macOS was so painful that I didn't get far. Hopefully they'll address so I can give it another go in the future.

How's Zed with WSL (now)? I've liked the ability to run the VS Code back-end in WSL and front-end in Windows, is this possible with Zed?

Someone reinvented tramp-mode.

I recently tried to use SSH remote editing with VSCode on a plane. It is so incredibly chatty that the in-flight wifi system thought I was trying to tunnel traffic via SSH and kept killing the connection.

I hope the Zed developers have taken bandwidth minimization into account.

"the language server is continually out of memory"

"8gb is enough for everybody"

I want to like Zed but two things are still an issue for me:

- Zed doesn't know how to highlight XML - I use a theme called FairyFloss which doesn't exist for Zed and Zed doesn't provide anything to import VSCode themes

Also works well in vscode. Just wish the remote instance would keep running forever. Currently it's only a few hours it seems. Then one needs to reopen the workspace window.

I cant wait to switch to something like Zed. VS Code can take up half of my memory and keeps crashing after updates. How much language support is there for Go?

A nice setup for Rust development where compile times are high. You can offload that to a beefy machine while using the editor on a MacBook Air :-)

There was discussion about Zed over at Lobste.rs ~9 months ago when it went open source. I tried it then (as it was compared a lot to VSCode or Visual Studio code, which according to comments here are two separate things, to my surprise?) and I just updated and tried it again, and my initial feeling about it is unchanged:

Something about the UI is just... off. I don't know what it is exactly, but it feels like one of those "web page trying to mimic a desktop environment" demos that were all the rage 15-20 years ago.

It's bizarre to think that IntelliJ, which is a JVM app, feels way more 'native' on macOS than Zed.

Has anyone tried this and ssh'd into a container?

IIRC VSCode struggled to correctly ssh into a container that's set up in your `.ssh` config file. Not sure if this fixed it: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/194879

Any chance for a iPadOS release?

I wish I would be able to start a dedicated server that could then be joined by both myself and my co-workers to work together.

From reading the article, it seems that collaboration is a wholly different layer, just like in VS Code.