Visual Studio Code VS zed

For IDE-heavy teams, BYOK (bring your own key) can be interesting, no matter whether you live in WebStorm or VS Code. On the JetBrains side, the JetBrains AI plans and Junie BYOK docs allow it, and most VS Code AI extensions offer the same idea: keep the IDE, connect provider keys, pay the provider.

One can (maybe, probably) disable copilot completely in vscode: chat.disableAIFeatures

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/309947

I am considering pinning whatever the earliest version in which this setting was introduced. I can't think of a single feature VSCode has implemented in the last three years that I couldn't go without. The binary for 121 is like 50% larger than 120.

Option 1: Raw editing in IDE. You open the .md file in VS Code or whatever you use. Syntax highlighting shows you the structure. Maybe you toggle a preview pane. This works for quick edits but becomes painful for anything involving tables, diagrams, or complex formatting.

The Google Cloud Shell- available on every Google Cloud project — comes with a built-in code editor that allows you to browse file directories, view and edit files, with continued access to the Cloud Shell. The Cloud Shell Editor is available by default with every Cloud Shell instance, and is based on Code OSS.

You'll need Python 3.8+ and pip for the quickstart, with venv recommended for isolation. Install the requests library for HTTP calls. VS Code with the Python extension works well as an editor, though PyCharm or Sublime Text work equally well. You'll also need a free Foxit developer account.

Now here's the key point: Antigravity 2.0 is a huge departure from 1.0 in the sense that it is functionally no longer based on Microsoft's VS Code. That means a huge majority of all the personalizations from 1.0 will not carry over to 2.0.

There's a one-line pull request open against microsoft/vscode. It changes the default value of a setting called git.addAICoAuthor from "off" to "all". The PR is titled, with no embellishment, "Enabling ai co author by default." It was opened on April 15, 2026 by cwebster-99, a member of the VS Code team. By the time the HN thread on the PR hit 1,239 points and 646 comments in early May, the practical effect was already shipping: every commit you make in VS Code, regardless of whether you wrote the code yourself or had Copilot write it, gets a Co-authored-by: Copilot trailer in the commit message.

A bit O/T but:

> I have never been a big fan of pull requests.

I guess this partly explains why Zed (still) lacks a PR review flow, let alone a coherent one, despite some interest [1]. Pretty much the only reason I’m still with JetBrains.

[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/34759

Devcontainers + Claude + Pi

[1] Zed https://zed.dev/

[2] Terminal threads https://zed.dev/blog/terminal-threads

As sort of byproduct also replaced Alacritty + Zellij (i just don't have the need to use more, 3 weeks of new setup)

That said, sometimes you do just want an editor, not a full blown IDE, and for that for the last few months I've been experimenting with Zed. It's okay. I've had some weird issues with their terminal emulator; I don't know what they are doing but my ZSH config doesn't load right so it sometimes gets stuck in what looks like an infinite loop, and then my PATH is all messed up... IDK, I expect my editors to kinda just work, but overall, I like the look and feel and for when I just need to edit a file, it's fine.

That's a link to a hacker news post, which links to a reddit post, which links to https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589 if anyone wants to go right to the 'open' issue.

This is a post-mortem, not a launch post. Paneflow is a native terminal workspace, splits, panes, branch-aware workspaces, session restore, built in pure Rust on top of Zed's GPUI framework and the upstream alacritty_terminal crate. It started as a port of cmux, a macOS-only Swift/AppKit project, and the Rust rewrite forced a string of decisions I had no good intuition for at the start. I want to walk through the ones that mattered: which UI frameworks I tried and rejected, how the GPUI/alacritty boundary actually looks, how dev-server detection works under the hood, the N-ary layout tree that replaced binary splits, the cross-platform PTY plumbing, the JSON-RPC control plane that makes agents first-class, and four lessons that surprised me.

Copying my own comment below, with GH links and my (non-AI) summary after skimming:

> https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7054

> https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589

> TL;DR: Mix of language tooling, unsigned proprietary blobs, corrupted and/or GLIBC-dependent files, redundant copies of already-installed executables. The Node packages especially are able to run scripts on install. Personal preference aside, might also create issues with security laws, certifications. All without user consent.

> Issues opened in January and June 2024. They've been rejected, closed, and opened a couple times since then. No changes directly improving this yet as of April 2026.

So... If you want broad language support via LSP servers, then you're going to have to bring in other ecosystems, and Node/Typescript is a big one that doesn't always have alternatives. [0] That's not a Zed-specific problem.

IMO the real issue with Zed is the "runs them by default without asking" part. Plus the questionable practices with binary blobs and the cavalier attitude towards it, when I can just use an editor that... Doesn't do any of that.

[0] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/impleme...

Just injecting this here: What I've been missing is an equivalent for GitHub's "blame prior revision" feature to quickly follow through the history of individual source lines.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/42583

Thanks for building an awesome product :)

Zed - https://zed.dev/

Integrates a lot of agents (I use it with OpenRouter and directly with Pi) natively, is fast (you don't realise how laggy VSCode and its forks are).

Biggest disadvantage: lack of extensions. Lots of quality of life missing (e.g. gitignore integration to add/append gitignore files for different languages).