I installed Zed because it had been on my radar for a while.
There is a lot of hype around it, especially around performance. Zed is supposed to be special because it is written in Rust and does not use Chromium. That sounds attractive, especially when compared with Electron-based editors like VS Code. In theory, it should mean lower overhead, better responsiveness, and a cleaner native experience.
So when I came across a larger codebase that I wanted to skim through quickly, I thought this was the right moment to give Zed a try. I was not planning to replace VS Code immediately. I just wanted to test whether Zed could give me a noticeably better experience when browsing through unfamiliar code.
After about 20 minutes, I uninstalled it.First impression: yes, it felt fast
To be fair, Zed did feel quite fast.
I was running my laptop in power saver mode, so I was not even using the full performance my machine could offer. Even then, the editor felt responsive enough. But I did not see any dramatic improvement compared to VS Code Studio. That was my first small disappointment. Not because Zed was slow, but because the performance difference was not big enough to justify the change in workflow. When a tool is promoted heavily around speed, I expect that speed to be obvious immediately. In my case, it was not.I struggled to orient myself
The next issue was navigation.
When I opened the project, I expected the file structure to be visible and immediately usable. In VS Code, I am used to seeing the project tree clearly, opening files quickly, and understanding where I am in the codebase.
In Zed, individual files were not available to me right away in the way I expected.
I had to scan the interface and search for where the files were. Eventually, I found a very small icon in the corner that revealed the file view.
Maybe this is just a matter of getting used to Zed’s interface, but for me, that first moment matters. When I open a code editor, especially for a large codebase, I want orientation to be instant.
I do not want to hunt for the file explorer.
Jumping through code did not work
Once I managed to open some files, I wanted to move through the codebase.
In VS Code, I often use F12 to jump to a function definition. This is one of those basic developer features that becomes part of muscle memory. When you are exploring a large project, this matters a lot.
In Zed, I right-clicked on a function and saw the option to go to definition. The menu even displayed F12 as the shortcut for that action.
But it never worked. This was not a case where I expected a feature that was not visible. Zed itself showed me that the feature existed and that F12 was the right key to use. But when I tried it, nothing useful happened.
Maybe it required additional configuration. Maybe the language server was not ready. Maybe something about the project was not detected correctly. But from my perspective, I installed the editor, opened a codebase, saw the correct command in the menu, pressed the shortcut Zed showed me, and it did not work At that point, the editor was already slowing me down instead of helping me. Then my computer froze
After that, I started looking through the menus to understand what else was available.
I noticed something that looked related to agentic or AI-assisted work. I clicked on one file, and at that moment my computer froze.
Not just Zed.
The whole computer froze.
I am using Ubuntu 24.04, and the system stayed frozen for around two or three minutes. I could not do anything.
Then the computer restarted itself.
After the restart, Ubuntu did not boot properly. It started booting, but it never reached the password screen. I had to physically power off the laptop and turn it back on again.
Only after that did Ubuntu finally boot.
That shocked me.
I am a relatively new Ubuntu and Linux user. Coming from Windows, I had assumed Linux would be more stable in this kind of situation. Maybe that assumption was too optimistic.