before i can replace vscode with zed

[HeavySnowJakarta]

i enjoy zed's speed and memory occupation, but before i could give up vscode...

• rainbow brackets
• rainbow indents
• enough language servers
• TODO highlighting support
• print and image generating
• enhanced markdown
  • full GFM grammar support
    • TODO lists
    • tables
    • strikethrough
    • emoji marks
    • footnotes
    • definition lists
  • chart painting
    • mermaid images
    • vega-lite
    • js-sequence
    • flowchart.js
    • echarts
  • export to PDF, HTML, etc
  • custom CSS
• non markdown docs
  • typst
  • others like latex, ascii docs, etc
• debug support
• code runner
• remote support
  • remote Git repositories (especially GitHub) for viewing codes locallly and small PRs
  • SSH servers
  • if possible, mosh
  • WSL
• do Git operations (like switching branches and do commits) with Zed, not only showing diffs

[solvworx]

My list is a lot shorter (because I use JetBrains tools for most of my dev work instead of vscode).

• print like vsc-print
• markdown export to PDF like vscode-markdown-pdf

Does anyone have a workaround for printing from zed?

[athyfr]

I would recommend using a CLI such as pandoc.

You can use the (relatively new) Zed tasks system to be able to access it from GUI, and if you want to customize the PDF styling (if you don't like the defaults,) you might draw inspiration from this guide.

Alternatively, if you want to keep using what you've already been using (under the hood), you could look for a CLI equivalent of vscode-markdown-pdf. You might have better luck with Pandoc, though.

I realize that this isn't the same as first-party support by Zed, but I'd personally prefer more user-customized interfaces like this over that first-party support, as that gives more features faster (because of Zed's limited workforce), potentially at the same or better quality.

[nickheyer]

My list is more-so a list of "why was this done like this it makes no sense":

An extension "store" that isn't comprised of 99% themes for the ui.

Also a git panel, I actually dont understand how this wasn't included before the AI integration.

Don't install AI "features" by default, do you know how many compliance standards you break by doing that?

Why is there a public chat room panel? Do you intend to provide a teams chat interface or a code editor? If it's intended to be used as a collaboration tool between team members, why in the world would you throw users into a public chat by default? It's now not clear to users that its intended to be used with your team, instead it makes your editor seem insecure to use with a proprietary code base.

It feels like zed was designed by project managers and tech youtubers. Calls itself minimalist, yet it takes the least minimalist features from the hat and calls it a day.

[HeavySnowJakarta]

About the extension apis we can see that extension api built-in with zed is much limited. For VS code, every element is considered as DOM objects (I've never understood VS Code's source and I really hope it was right). And we revise them as if we are operating HTML objects. Thus we can do almost anything with vs code. You can even add a clock or a live2d character on the panel. GPUI is brand new and with Rust and I thought there are really a lot to do for that. For now, many functions that actually can be done with extensions have to be built-in.

AI is good but I don't understand that why so many models are buillt-in which can just be done by installing extensions. Even OpenAI-compatible providers cannot be ported with Zed easily, but OpenAI, Anthropic and Google's apis are available out of the box. Deepseek model itself is good but only the official API is built-in while multiple providers are not really available which really does not make sense. Many providers' API is actually compatible with OpenAI, but we cannot use them just because we cannot set the url. So I think the design may be not as proper as it should be.

About chat rooms, it is a key feature of Zed. What I expect is that Zed should open the server's source and allow the user to build self-hosted service. Be relaxed that Zed is more like a solution of coding, rather than just an editor.