My initial impressions as a VSCode user

[KieranP]

Firstly, I want to give a shout out to the Zed engineers. You're doing an excellent job creating a great editor. I've being trying Zed here and there for a while now. With the recent icon theme support and the new Git integration, it's getting very close to being a decent rival for VSCode, which is a phenomenal achievement. Keep up the great work!

I've been using Zed today in some side projects, and the core features are working great. It feels so much snappier than VSCode. However, there are just a couple of things that I've found coming over from VSCode that I'm really missing. I did a search and most of them have already been ticketed by others, but I wanted to group them together here for reference, and in order of most important to least for my use cases:

1. Highlight all occurences across all open (visible) files #21549 - I found myself so many times today double clicking a variable or function name to see references in all other open (visible) files. Of all the tickets I'll mention here, I find the lack of this feature perhaps the most missed, enough to drive me back to VSCode for now.

2. Combined "Go to" and "Command Pallet" #26634 - Unifying the various action panels and using the first character to denote which action is being taken (e.g. none = go to file, # = go to symbol, : = go to line, and > = command). Coming from VSCode which supports this, I'm always having to go to the menu options in Zed to remember which key combo opens which box.

3. Pin to code structure while scrolling (aka "sticky scroll") #5344 - Very helpful when dealing with OOP languages, like Ruby, there you can have a larger method inside a class, which itself is inside a module. Having the module/class (or all code "block" starter lines) stuck to the top is quite helpful to know where you are at a glance.

4. Add a setting to prevent gitignored files from showing in the sidebar browser #17543 - I posted a comment in this ticket with more info, but in short, when you work on a project with compile related files or directories, having all these unneeded entries in the file project panel really clogs things up and makes it harder to see what you want to actually see.

5. Conditional / per-machine settings / profiles? #16392 - Though the ticket and its comments focus on key maps/bindings, my use case for Profiles is for having the ability to have Extension sets. I have several projects, each of which uses different extensions. e.g. I don't need the C++ extension in a Ruby project and vise versa. VSCode has a profile feature where each profile has their own settings and extensions. And it remembers which profile I was using in which directory. So when I open project 1, it uses profile 1 with the extensions I need. This means I'm not loading extensions I don't need, and speeds things up. Zed currently only supports one global set of extensions. So across all my projects, I have 15 languages, each with their own extension, all of which Zed is loading, even when editing a project that only needs two of them. And worse yet, some extensions throw errors when open projects not designed for them (admittedly, that is more of a extension issue than Zeds fault)

I really hope some of these can be addressed in future versions. The first in particular is a blocker for me; the rest I could get used to overtime, albeit with friction.

Thanks again for your hard work.