Declaimer: I am not a heavy keyboard/keymap user.
I use PyCharm / JetBrains IDEs for long time now, but since last few years I feel the amount of changes (mostly UX) made my experience bit subpar. I use VS Code but feels slow and I dont want to update my IDE every month, on top of that I need to install way too many extensions.
I tried Zed in the past but it was still developing so I switched back to Pycharm, This week after learning Zed is v1.0.0, I decided to try it one more time, this time I evaluated for 2 full days for real project,
Good Things,
Its feels fresh and less bloated comped to VS & Pycharm
Integrated perfectly with Claude chat, clear Git, terminal, project view and other views available
Running / Debugging Python code worked as expected.
Opens in a snap but I keep my editor open for weeks so not a real benefit, but still good.
Features I didn't try,
Remote development
Full scale refactoring (moving/renaming things big repo)
I am not into heavy LLM use
In my limited usage of 2 days, First and major blocker for moving to Zed is missing Test Runner and I could not find any alternative for that is lack of test runner, I like test runner that shows passed/failed tests and ability to run all or selected tests from test runner sidebar.
I searched but there is no test runner nor there is a plan to add one in the IDE, most of them are around AI/LLM stuff. The suggestion is, use Tasks; they are very flexible, but still everything runs on shell, so no consolidated view of tests. even neovim has plugin to do this.
If there is anyway to get this working with view in sidebar, I would love to try that out.