The discussion centers on whether immediate-mode GUI frameworks like GPUI and egui are fundamentally unsuited for complex desktop applications due to performance scaling issues, with critics arguing that full redraws are inefficient while proponents claim state management complexity is the true bottleneck. A secondary debate questions the credibility of a critique article used as a vehicle for promoting a new framework, zgui, amidst widespread criticism of the original text's AI-generated quality.
101 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4zed-industries
zed
Rust2024–2026
zed-industries / zed
zed
Code at the speed of thought – Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter.
221Distinct people
267Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
94.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Code at the speed of thought – Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
Critical Commenters note that Zed's GPUI toolkit faces usability issues on machines without GPUs and has limited accessibility support compared to mature web stacks. One user explicitly states the editor is not really usable on VDI environments lacking GPU acceleration.
A warning from this week’s discussion. Read the supporting reply
Also in these discussions
- gpui-ce/gpui-ce · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- microsoft/vscode · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Critical
Commenters note that Zed's GPUI toolkit faces usability issues on machines without GPUs and has limited accessibility support compared to mature web stacks. One user explicitly states the editor is not really usable on VDI environments lacking GPU acceleration.
Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · 3 discussions summarized
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
Read the discussion on HN. A full-thread summary is not available yet.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year267 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2024-01-24 17:11:20 UTC to 2026-11-01 15:34:32 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 85 | 9 | 76 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 102 | 4 | 98 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 80 | 5 | 75 |
What Hacker News says
267 sourcesARarach·Nov 1, 2026
you might enjoy learning more about this https://zed.dev/acp in case it sparks new ideas
ACP helps with agent interoperability and helps a lot of IDEs and ADEs integrate all the major harnesses seamlessly
zed https://github.com/zed-industries/zed
orca https://github.com/stablyai/orca/tree/main/src/main
I haven't looked at the cli implementation but you can get very far with integrating a harness while not invoking the model directly via API
In Show HN: Ultrafast Rust Based Agent WorkspaceSimilarly, I had to stop using Zed because the main thread would beachball for > 30s when trying to work in large repos on macOS. This behavior was clearly reported to them in a GitHub issue that they also closed without fixing (because they believed a partial fix was sufficient, and have ignored subsequent comments to the contrary): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/55746
In Replacing Pull Requests with DeltaI must say again, can not manual refresh the file tree in zed https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150
Zed is fast and good at many things but need to focus on basic fix or agentic edits broken
In Replacing Pull Requests with DeltaThis seems like the direction Zed has taken. Which they even enforce actively: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues?q=label%3A%22no....
In One Year of Sponsored Servo DevelopmentThe build time claim in the blog post is dubious, part of the problem is CGO isn't fast, but also if build time was really a motivator the null build path is entirely unoptimized for objects with long build times:
cached null (no changes) build:
~github/unstablebuild/rune % make
pre-commit not installed; skipping git hook setup
cd cmd/buildstamp && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/buildstamp
cd cmd/extension_chaos && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/
Read the rest
internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/extension_chaos
cd cmd/extension_color_palette && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/extension_color_palette
cd cmd/extension_fuzzy_search && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/extension_fuzzy_search
cd cmd/extension_go && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/extension_go
cd cmd/extension_python && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/extension_python
cd cmd/extension_rtc && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/extension_rtc
cd cmd/extension_rust && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/extension_rust
cd cmd/extension_zig && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/extension_zig
cd cmd/runefox && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/runefox
cd cmd/sshshop && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/sshshop
cd cmd/walkbench && CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Tag=$(git describe --tags) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.BuildDate=2026-09-11T20:16:22Z -X unstable.build/rune/internal/debug.Package=six" -o ../../bin/walkbench
make 35.90s user 5.88s system 191% cpu 21.846 total 1975848 rss
vs. cached non-null (changed) build:
~github/zed-industries/zed % touch crates/zed/src/zed.rs
~github/zed-industries/zed % cargo build
Compiling zed v1.18.0 (/home/raggi/src/github.com/zed-industries/zed/crates/zed)
Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 8.42s
cargo build 10.15s user 9.34s system 228% cpu 8.531 total 7930312 rss
Build times are a valid thing to care about and talk about, but the claims implied don't stand up to scrutiny.
I feel like I have to call out Zed for still having completely broken LLM support in almost entire continent of Asia for over a year now with no official response¹ just because they can't route http requests. Bad look for their LLM workflow push.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/29962
In DeltaSo, DeltaDB is not for Zed, but for an entirely new product? At least it won't bloat the editor...
Nevertheless another Zed post, another plea to focus on basics https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 [how can developers work with agents in zed when developers cannot see files agents create] best luck to Delta but please do not neglect the text editor!
In Deltalucky you, but here's the issue (note: there have been at least 3 issues before this one) https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/58651 crossing fingers it's solved for real now. i only use wayland on my laptop where it seems to be fixed, my go-to machine is with Xorg where there's no copy-paste problems
In Zed DeltaDBAlthough I agree and I hit same roadblock I found that wsl is working well when you open the project with special "projects: open folder in WSL" command, see my comment here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26857#disc...
Nevertheless it could have been working better.
In Zed DeltaDBAdding onto this I and many others have asked for a ui extension API to actually make use of AI tools and they've adamantly refused. Until someone else with the time and resources to fork and maintain it comes along, it's just in maintenance mode. These "AI" features are not useful at all.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/53403#disc...
In Zed DeltaDBI have been using Zed for about a year now on Debian 12 / Wayland and it works flawlessly. Even with Toshy (macOS) keybindings. I have it installed now on my Framework 13 Pro (also Fedora 44, and also with Toshy) and it works great aside from a subtle (100ms?) lag when using ctrl+arrow-key. Otherwise it is great.
The only thing that doesn't work well is inertial scrolling[0]. But scrolling is a fucking shit show on Linux no matter what... so I don't necessarily fault Zed for this. The same issue occurs in other apps.
- [0] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14473
In Zed DeltaDBUnfortunately their Zed agent is completely broken when running on Windows connected to WSL/SSH remote because the terminal tool checks for paths using the local Path style (windows) which breaks when applied to paths on the remote (linux).
I fixed this and a couple related issues in a PR but it hasn't gotten any attention yet. I guess they are a bit swamped. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/59937
In Zed DeltaDBHmm, yeah before "DeltaDB" I have a big list of things I would rather they develop/fix:
- Vertical activity bar (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/58868#issuecommen... - rejected because it "doesn’t match our design vision for Zed")
This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views.
- Don't crash my entire PC when there's a large (100+ MB) JSON file in the working directory
- Don't freeze when resuming from suspension (I suspect this is GPU-driver related on linux) forcing me to `killall zed-editor`
In Zed DeltaDBI had to stop using Zed because of this issue (which persists despite being closed): https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/38109
I can't use an editor where the file contents I'm being shown don't match the reality of the file. I guess this issue doesn't affect most people somehow, but in the age of CLI agents I'm not sure how more people aren't running into it.
I was really enjoying Zed for a short while before I ran into this fundamental issue.
In Zed DeltaDBShowing the 15 most recent of 267 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.