Hacker News

Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

2025-09-0315:07683406zed.dev

From the Zed Blog: You asked, and here it is. Use Claude Code in public beta directly in Zed, built on the new Agent Client Protocol.

You asked for it. A lot.

So we built it: our Claude Code integration is now available in public beta, running natively in Zed through our new Agent Client Protocol (ACP).

For months, developers have been asking us to bring Claude Code into Zed. We didn’t just want to bolt on a one-off integration; we wanted to build something better. ACP is our new open standard that lets any agent connect to Zed (and other editors, too). Claude Code is a perfect example of what’s possible.

Now you can:

  • Run Claude Code as a first-class citizen in Zed's high-performance editor, not just a terminal interface
  • Follow along in real-time as it edits across multiple files, with full syntax highlighting and language server support
  • Review and approve granular changes in a multibuffer - accept or reject individual code hunks
  • Keep Claude Code's task list anchored in your sidebar, so you always see what the agent is working on
  • Define custom workflows with Claude Code's custom slash commands for your most common development tasks

Escape the Terminal

A walkthrough of Claude Code in Zed.

Claude Code has gained broad popularity among developers thanks to its powerful code generation and finely tuned tools. While the command-line interface is powerful, when Claude Code is making changes across multiple files or refactoring complex logic, you may want to see the bigger picture and have more control on what code you accept or reject. With Zed, you get the best of both worlds: Claude Code's intelligence, freed from the terminal and deeply integrated into a highly performant editor.

You can now run Claude Code directly in Zed and use it side-by-side with Zed's first-party agent, Gemini CLI, and any other ACP-compatible agent. Make sure you’re on the latest version of Zed and find your available agents in the Plus menu in the Agent Panel.

Built with ACP

Rather than creating a tightly-coupled integration specific to Claude Code, we built this integration using the Agent Client Protocol. We launched ACP as our open standard for connecting any AI agent with any compatible editor.

We built an adapter that wraps Claude Code's SDK and translates its interactions into ACP's JSON RPC format. This adapter bridges between Claude Code and ACP's standardized interface, allowing Claude Code to run as an independent process while Zed provides the user interface.

We are open sourcing the Claude Code adapter under the Apache license, making it freely available for any editor that’s adopted ACP to use; you can find the source code here. Since the popular CodeCompanion plugin for Neovim has already adopted ACP, Claude Code will also be available in Neovim.

We want to thank GitHub user Xuanwo for all his work since the ACP launch in building an ACP implementation for Claude Code - your speed to solution inspired us to work hard to keep up! We appreciate you for your contribution to the protocol's adoption. Give him a follow on GitHub and Twitter/X.

Bring Any Agent to Zed

We want every agent usable in Zed. Gemini CLI and Claude Code are a great start, and we have more on the way, but there are new agents released every week and many great existing ones not yet speaking the protocol. ACP makes it simple to bring any agent into Zed's, Neovim's, or any other ACP-adapted editor's interface!

This beta delivers as much core Claude Code functionality as possible via the SDK. We're adding features like Plan mode in the coming days, and more advanced capabilities as Anthropic expands SDK support; for example, many built-in slash commands are not yet supported by the SDK. From here:

We're always looking for feedback on ACP, and welcome contributions from other agent (and client) builders. The more agents that work in Zed, the more choice you have as a developer.

You can try Zed today on macOS or Linux. Download now!

We are hiring!

If you're passionate about the topics we cover on our blog, please consider joining our team to help us ship the future of software development.


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Comments

  • By agrippanux 2025-09-044:384 reply

    I love Zed but this has all the hallmarks of something being totally rushed out the door.

    It works off the Claude Code SDK, which mean it doesn't support many of the built in slash commands - it doesn't support /compact, which is 100% necessary because when you use this implementation enough, you'll eventually get a "Prompt too long" error message with no ability to do anything about it. Since you can't see how far you are in the context window, it's a deal breaker, since you have to start a fresh chat and might run out of room before you can ask it to create a summary prompt for continuing.

    There is no way to switch models that I can tell - I think it just picks up on your default model - and there is no way to switch to Plan mode, which has become absolutely crucial to my workflow.

    I didn't see Zed picking up on problems reported in the IDE, it was defaulting to running 'tsc -b' in my directories.

    At this point it's better to run a terminal inside Zed and work from there. The official response in the Zed Discord has been "talk to your local Anthropic rep" to get them to support Zed's Agent Client Protocol (ACP).

    • By dewey 2025-09-047:54

      The Agent Model came out very recently, I’ve been following the GitHub issue over the past days and you can see it was rushed out. But I don’t see anything wrong with that, many AI topics are being rushed out and adding slash commands and other small things are very small things to add once the foundation is there.

    • By manmal 2025-09-046:502 reply

      Tbf I never use /compact but clear instead, and load in the relevant context anew. I just haven’t seen compacted context to be very useful, so far.

      • By beefsack 2025-09-049:022 reply

        The model is usually so confused after a /compact I also prefer a /clear.

        I set up my directives to maintain a work log for all work that I do. I instruct Claude Code to maintain a full log of the conversation, all commands executed including results, all failures as well as successes, all learnings and discoveries, as well as a plan/task list including details of what's next. When context is getting full, I do a /clear and start the new session by re-reading the work log and it is able to jump right back into action without confusion.

        Work logs are great because the context becomes portable - you can share it between different tools or engineers and can persist the context for reuse later if needed.

        • By danielbln 2025-09-0411:453 reply

          The trick is to parametrize the /compact. Something like "/compact focus on the XZY, the next steps will be FOOBAR, and keep a high level summary of BARFOO"

          That makes the compaction summary a lot more focused and useful.

          edit: But a work log/PRD is essential regardless!

          • By felciano 2025-09-0412:531 reply

            I’ve been using PRD specs at kick things off, but curious about how to a “work log”. Are there examples of how to do this with CC?

            • By danielbln 2025-09-0413:04

              "Implement phase 1 of the PRD, when done update the PRD and move on to phase 2."

          • By raduan 2025-09-0414:42

            yep, exactly, using it like this myself

            I think both /compact and /clear are valuable / have their own use cases.

            my small mental mode: - really quick fix / need to go over board with context -> just /compact + continue pushing - next phase -> ask for handover document or update worklog, and then send fresh one to new phase.

          • By xd1936 2025-09-0412:43

            Thank you for this. I didn't know this was an option.

      • By furyofantares 2025-09-0418:10

        I notice when I'm getting close and I tell it how to document current state into an .md file. Then I hit /clear and @ the new file.

        This is probably very similar to /compact except I have a lot of control over the resulting context and can edit it and /clear again and retry if I run into an issue.

    • By mi_lk 2025-09-047:03

      Seems like those issues are largely limited by SDK so urging Anthropic to adopt is the only realistic move

    • By cmrdporcupine 2025-09-0413:45

      Yeah I was initially excited here, but it feels more like a demonstration of what's possible rather than a working tool.

      I found the interface very nice but quickly ran up against limitations on prompt length (it wasn't that long) for example. I am used to being able to give detailed instructions, or even paste in errors/tracebacks.

      I'll check back in in a few months.

  • By ppeetteerr 2025-09-0317:359 reply

    I love Zed and I'm glad you now have native support for Claude. I previously ran it using the instructions in this post: https://benswift.me/blog/2025/07/23/running-claude-code-with...

    One thing that still suffers is AI autocomplete. While I tried Zed's own solution and supermaven (now part of Cursor), I still find Cursor's AI autocomplete and predictions much more accurate (even pulling up a file via search is more accurate in Cursor).

    I am glad to hear that Zed got a round of funding. https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed This will go a long way to creating real competition to Cursor in the form of a quality IDE not built on VSCode

    • By hajile 2025-09-0318:397 reply

      I was somewhat surprised to find that Zed still doesn't have a way to add your own local autocomplete AI using something like Ollama. Something like Qwen 2.5 coder at a tiny 1.5b parameters will work just fine for the stuff that I want. It runs fast and works when I'm between internet connections too.

      I'd also like to see a company like Zed allow me to buy a license of their autocomplete AI model to run locally rather than renting and running it on their servers.

      I'd also pay for something in the 10-15b parameter range that used more limited training data focused almost entirely on programming documentation and books along with professional business writing. Something with the coding knowledge of Qwen Coder combined with the professionalism and predictability of IBM Granite 3. I'd pay quite a lot for such an agent (especially if it got updates every couple of months that worked in new documentation, bugfixes, github threads, etc to keep the answers up-to-date).

      • By eli 2025-09-0321:10

        You don't have to buy a license; the autocomplete model is open source https://huggingface.co/zed-industries/zeta

        It is indeed a fine tuned Qwen2.5-Coder-7B

      • By rolisz 2025-09-0319:471 reply

        > I'd also pay for something in the 10-15b parameter range that used more limited training data focused almost entirely on programming documentation and books along with professional business writing.

        Unfortunately, pretraining on a lot of data (~everything they can get their hands on) is needed to give current LLMs their "intelligence" (for whatever definition of intelligence). Using less training data doesn't work as well for now. There definitely not enough programming and business writing to train a good model only on that.

        • By hajile 2025-09-0415:22

          If the LLM isn’t getting its data about coding projects from those projects and their surrounding documentation and tutorials, what is it going to train with?

          Maybe it also needs some amount of other training data for basic speech patterns, but I’d again show IBM Granite as an example that professional and to-the-point LLMs are possible.

      • By woodson 2025-09-0322:21

        There's an active PR providing inline edit completions via Ollama: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/33616

      • By kilohotel 2025-09-0322:181 reply

        You can use a local model! It's in Settings in a Thread and you can select Ollama.

        • By woodson 2025-09-0323:28

          But that doesn't work for inline edit predictions, right?

      • By slekker 2025-09-0319:40

        Ditto, that was one of the dealbreakers for me using Zed, the Copilot integration is miles behind Cursor's

      • By dcreater 2025-09-041:28

        > Ollama

        You mean an locally run OpenAI API compatible server?

      • By SquidJack 2025-09-043:22

        thats why i created myself nanocoder 0.5b FT for autocomplete in couple of days going to release a v2 version much better

        https://huggingface.co/srisree/nano_coder

    • By scottcorgan 2025-09-0318:375 reply

      I'll third this. AI autocomplete is THE most efficient and helpful feature of Cursor, not the agents.

      • By cardanome 2025-09-049:00

        I use Cursor solely for the agent mode and do all my editing in an proper IDE, meaning Jetbrains products.

        I genuinely don't understand why one would want to AI autocomplete. Deterministic autocomplete is amazing but AI autocomplete completely breaks my flow. Even just the few seconds of lag absolutely drive me nuts and then it often it is close to what I wanted but not exactly what I wanted. Either I am in control or the generative AI but mixing both feels so wrong.

        I am happy people find use for the autocomplete but ugh I really don't get how they can stomach it. Maybe it is for people that are not good at typing or something.

      • By danenania 2025-09-0321:251 reply

        Same sentiment for me. I barely use the agent, but love their autocomplete. Though I sometimes hear people say that GH Copilot has largely caught up on this front. Can anyone speak to that? I haven’t compared them recently.

        If performance were equal, I’d strongly consider going back to GH Copilot just because I don’t love my main IDE being a fork. I occasionally encounter IDE-level bugs in Cursor that are unrelated to the AI features. Perhaps they’re in the upstream as well, but I always wonder if a. there will be a delay in merging fixes or b. whether the fork is introducing new bugs. Just an inherent tradeoff I guess of forking a complex codebase.

        • By debian3 2025-09-0322:431 reply

          They haven’t. They had time to catch up, but they didn’t. They recently switched their auto complete model from 4o-mini to 4.1-mini. It’s not smarter at predicting what you are trying to do. Nothing magical like last year experience on Cursor (I haven’t tested lately, so it might be even better now).

          I heard Windsurf is quite good and the closest to Cursor magic, available on Windsurf free plan (unlimited autocomplete). I should give that a try.

          • By dcreater 2025-09-041:30

            They plan to allow defining your own endpoint for auto-complete soon and when they do switching to a better model like Sonnet or a fine tune should beat Cursor

      • By bastawhiz 2025-09-0321:55

        I don't know, I think it's a tie. I can have the agent do some busy work or refactoring while I'm writing code with the autocomplete. I can tell it how I want a file split up or how I want stuff changed, and tell it that I'll be making other changes and where. It's smart enough to ignore me and my work while it keeps itself busy with another task. Sort of the best of both worlds. Right now I have it replacing DraftJS with another library while I'm working on some feature requests.

      • By 3uler 2025-09-048:06

        I feel like this is the big divide, some people have no use for agents and swear by autocomplete. Others find the autocomplete a little annoying/not that useful and swear by agents.

        For me my aha moment came with Claude Code and Sonnet 4. Before that AI coding was more of a novelty than actually useful.

      • By mac-monet 2025-09-042:121 reply

        I have recently been using Zed much more than cursor. However, the autocomplete is literally the only thing missing, and when dealing with refactors or code with tons of boilerplate, its just unbeatable. Eagerly awaiting a better autocomplete model and I can finally ditch Cursor.

        • By andreygrehov 2025-09-043:152 reply

          Out of curiosity, why not just stick to Cursor instead?

          • By barkerja 2025-09-043:482 reply

            For me, the editor is still the most important component of my tooling. The AI features are secondary to my needs/wants when it comes to an editor.

            Zed is hitting all the checkboxes when it comes to performance and user experience (yeah, I care about that in my editor).

            I'm not a hardcore user of AI, but I do make use of Zed's inline suggestions and occasional use of Opus 4.1 through my Zed subscription.

            • By kar1181 2025-09-047:11

              This is it, in terms of pure text editing zed is the best GUI land editor I've used.

              Not quite there with emacs/vim but it's a much more accessible environment and more convenient for typical workloads.

            • By dkersten 2025-09-048:56

              I agree. I used to use vscode, then switched to Zed and used it for over a year (without AI). In February of this year, I started using Cursor to try out the AI features and I realised I really hated vscode now. Once Zed shipped agent mode, I switched back, and haven’t looked back. I very strongly never want to use vscode again.

          • By komali2 2025-09-0412:56

            I'm in the same boat but a neovim/cursor user. I desperately wish there was a package I could use in nvim that matched the multiline, file-aware autocomplete feature of Cursor. Of course I've tried supermaven, copilot etc, but I've only ever gotten those to work as in-line completions. They can do multiline but only from where my cursor is. What I love about Cursor is that I can spam tab and make a quick change across a whole file. Plus its suggestions are far faster and far better than the alternative.

            That said, vscode's UX sucks ass to me. I believe it's the best UX for people that want a "good enough and just works" editor, but I'm an emacs/vim (yes both) guy and I don't like taking my hands off the keyboard ever. Vscode just doesn't have a good keyboard only workflow with vim bindings like emacs and nvim do.

    • By cnqso 2025-09-0318:096 reply

      What Zed lacks in code generation quality it makes up for in not-being-an-Electron-app

      • By llbbdd 2025-09-0320:051 reply

        Every single new HN thread should come with an automod post badmouthing Electron to save everyone time.

        • By dcreater 2025-09-041:342 reply

          its a bad anti-pattern that trades developer convenience for performance, UX etc. Its fair to hate on it

          With the advent of coding agents, I really hope we see devs move away - back to the traditional approach of using native frameworks/languages as now, you can write for 1 platform and easily task AI to handle other platforms.

          • By llbbdd 2025-09-045:323 reply

            This will never happen and it's a bizarre, legacy fantasy, borne of a fixed imaginary ideal of what computing should be. Programming will continue to move in the direction of ease-of-use and every time I see an out-of-topic reference to Electron in this forum I feel insane, like I'm fighting upstream. You will not see this - you will see more Electron apps, because that is the modern way of building cross-platform apps, and if you genuinely don't understand why that is I don't know how to explain it to you. You won't see another version of those because nobody is going to waste their time building cross-platform native apps at a native layer to performatively impress posters on HN. You, and seemingly everybody else on HN, can continue to pretend that devex doesn't matter, but that's the difference I guess between caring about devex and shipping products.

            • By arianvanp 2025-09-046:111 reply

              It's not out of topic. We're discussing the Zed editor. Their whole marketing ploy is "we are not electron", "we are rust", "we are native", "we are not slow" alternative to VScode.

              This is literally their whole distinguishing feature and people are switching because of it and just it.

              • By llbbdd 2025-09-046:221 reply

                It is! If the thing runs like shit, say it runs like shit. Say it's native or not, like every topic title and comment on HN until we weep of boredom. I know it's rust! everything is rust here! Is there any other reason I should care? Are we a forum for discussing interesting technology or are we a forum for discussing alternatives to VSCode? And again, who is switching? People shipping products or HN posters with their dumb metrics?

                • By arianvanp 2025-09-048:14

                  People who install zed are switching. I don't understand what you're trying to "get" at. You're complaining about people talking about Zed in a topic about Zed.

                  Zed seems to have been hugely succesful recently and their only real distinguishing feature is "fast from the ground up". It has less features than vscode. Worse AI features than Cursor. but people seem to love it nonetheless.

                  Turns out there is a market for people fed up with VScode-derivatives.

            • By komali2 2025-09-0413:17

              Cross platform application development is cool but the guys who made Zed are the guys who made Atom are the guys who made Electron, and they pointed out that long term the devex sucks and that Electron simply isn't a good platform for native applications that need any kind of memory control or similar features: https://zed.dev/blog/we-have-to-start-over

              > My experience in Atom always felt like bending over backwards to try to achieve something that in principle should have been simple. Lay out some lines and read the position of the cursor at this spot in between these two characters. That seems fundamentally doable and yet it always felt like the tools were not at our disposal. They were very far away from what we wanted to do.

              > Nathan: It was a nightmare. I mean, the ironic thing is that we created Electron to create Atom, but I can't imagine a worse application for Electron than a code editor, I don't know. For something simpler, it's probably fine, the memory footprint sucks, but it's fine. But for a code editor you just don't have the level of control I think you need to do these things in a straightforward way at the very least. It's always some... backflip.

            • By dcreater 2025-09-0420:37

              Thinking Javascript was a language meant for desktop applications is what is insane - even more so than the convenience of using it, which is comparatively less insane.

          • By evilduck 2025-09-044:111 reply

            Absolutely nothing new has been said about Electron since like 2015, it's boring as hell to downvote and scroll past.

      • By ffin 2025-09-043:47

        I find Zed has some really frustrating UX choices. I’ll run an operation and it will either fail quietly, or be running in the background for a while with no indication that it is doing so.

      • By iamsaitam 2025-09-0319:381 reply

        and then loses by not having plugin support

        • By nextaccountic 2025-09-0319:42

          It does have extensions, but they are much more limited. In particular they can't define UI elements inside buffers, so you can't replicate something with rich UI like the Git integration in an extension.

      • By shreddit 2025-09-0318:152 reply

        Does it really? At the end of the day i need it to do my job. Ideal values don’t help me doing my job. So i choose the editor best suited and the features i need. And that’s not zed at the moment.

        • By mikepurvis 2025-09-0318:311 reply

          There's an analogue here with programming language iteration— Python, Ruby and friends showed what the semantics were that were needed, and then a decade or two later, Go and Rust took those semantics and put them in compiled, performance-oriented languages.

          Electron has been a powerful tool for quickly iterating UIs and plugin architectures in VSCode, Brackets, Atom, etc, now the window is open for a modern editor to deliver that experience without the massive memory footprint and UI stalls.

        • By ics 2025-09-0319:17

          I agree with the main point but I am on battery often and the difference between native vs. one or multiple Electron apps in "doing my job" is easily several hours lost to battery life or interruptions for charging. Not a huge deal, but it's not my ideals that make me frown at charge cycles occurring twice as often.

      • By diss 2025-09-0323:46

        This is simply not true… that’s the problem. As much as I like Zed, using it for the sake of not being an electron app doesn’t make any sense when Cursor’s edit prediction adds so much value. I’m not starved of resources and can run Cursor just fine – as far as Electron apps go VS Code is great, performant enough. I value productivity. I’ll very happily drop Cursor for Zed the second edit prediction is comparable. I’m eagerly waiting.

      • By TiredOfLife 2025-09-0319:122 reply

        Zed includes node.js runtime and 100s of megabytes of javascript. It is essentially Electron.

    • By atombender 2025-09-0322:49

      I wonder if Augment [1] are working on a Zed plugin.

      I've been using Augment for more than a year in Jetbrains IDEs, and been very impressed by it, both the autocomplete and the Cursor-style agent. I've looked at Cursor and couldn't figure out why anyone needed to use a dedicated IDE when Augment exists as a plugin. Colleagues who have used Cursor have switched to Augment and say it's better.

      Seems to me like Augment is an AI tool flying under most people's radar; not sure why it's not all over Hacker News.

      [1] https://www.augmentcode.com/

    • By epolanski 2025-09-0323:521 reply

      I now plain hate Cursor's auto complete, it's too aggressive I cannot write any code anymore, it seems to have hijacked CMD too, not just tab.

      • By 3uler 2025-09-048:151 reply

        This is why I’m not a fan of auto complete in my editor. Much rather pair program with an agent.

        Give the agent as much context as possible and let it go, review and correct the implementation, let it go again, finish it off…

        The I just find the autocomplete a little annoying in my workflow, especially with the local self-hosted models I need to use at work.

        Claude Code on corporate approved AWS Bedrock account.

        • By epolanski 2025-09-048:38

          I like autocomplete when it used to be a bit slower and only act on tab.

          Right now it's borderline impossible to write code, the autocompletion results are loaded ultra fast and Cursor maps different buttons to autocompleting functionality.

          It's no longer usable for me.

          I'm fine getting autocompletes, but I decide when to trigger it, ideally after reading it, like this I can't even type.

    • By metadaemon 2025-09-0318:03

      I'd also like to second this and probably will in every Zed post. This is the primary reason I'm not ready to switch to Zed just yet.

    • By kelthuzad 2025-09-0320:371 reply

      >One thing that still suffers is AI autocomplete. While I tried Zed's own solution and supermaven (now part of Cursor), I still find Cursor's AI autocomplete and predictions much more accurate (even pulling up a file via search is more accurate in Cursor).

      It's not only the autocomplete. I've never had any issue with Cursor while Zed panicked, crashed and behaved inconsistently often (the login indicator would flicker between states while you were logged in and vice versa, clicking some menus would crash it and similar annoyances). Another strange thing I've observed is the reminder in the UI that rating an AI prompt would send your _entire chat history_ to Zed, which might be a major red flag for many people. One could accidentally rate it without being aware of that and then Zed has access to large and potentially sensitive parts of your company's code - I can't imagine any company being happy with that.

      >I am glad to hear that Zed got a round of funding. https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed

      There are plenty of great VCs out there, going with Sequoia will definitely come with some unpleasant late consequences.

      >This will go a long way to creating real competition to Cursor in the form of a quality IDE not built on VSCode

      There are many "real competitors" to Cursor, like Windsurf, (Neo-)Vim, Helix, Emacs, Jetbrains. It's also worth being aware that not everybody is too excited about letting AI slop be the dominant part of their work. Some people prefer sprinkling a little AI here and there, instead of letting it do pretty much everything.

      • By svara 2025-09-0320:39

        > I've never had any issue with Cursor

        Glad it's working for you but I think you might be the only one!

    • By benswift 2025-09-0411:27

      Glad it was helpful :)

      I’ll keep an eye on this ‘proper’ Zed support for sure, although the current setup is working just fine so I might wait for v0.2.

    • By hn_saver 2025-09-0321:01

      "even pulling up a file via search is more accurate in Cursor"

      Huh? it takes it sometimes like 40s to find some file with the fuzzy search for me. In that time im going to the terminal running a "find" command with lots of * before I get some result in cursor

  • By unshavedyak 2025-09-0317:058 reply

    I want to try Zed but the Helix mode seems quite young. Vim mode sounds good, but i just can't move away from Helix mode. (oh and of course, my own modifications to Helix's input config)

    My difficulty in finding editors that fit my desired input scheme kinda reminds me of the old pre-LSP days. Where you'd chose an editor based on it's language features. I wonder if we need some sort of common editor interface to allow these sort of text editing primitives to work in new editors, as it seems to be considerable friction.

    • By diegs 2025-09-0318:501 reply

      I agree, I've fantasized about an editor with a truly pluggable editing model which is decoupled from the other parts.

      Yi was kind of designed like this, I believe. You could compile in an emacs-like model, a vim-like model, or presumably make your own model.

      I've used Helix and Kakoune in addition to Emacs and Vim, but dealing with the limitations/featureset/plugin treadmill gets a little tiring.

      I have been following Zed, and it seems that they have rearchitected things to enable adding Helix mode and making the editing model a bit more modular, but it's still fairly new. They are fixing bugs pretty quickly. I will have to try it again.

      They have a nice discussion here:

      https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/6447

      They reference Ki, which also looks cool, and they out some of Helix's inconsistencies in their comparison: https://ki-editor.github.io/ki-editor/docs/comparisons/

      I prefered Kakoune to Helix (it was more consistent). But to your point, being able to swap these things out more easily would let you choose an editor based on features, and not tradeoff between features and an ergonomic editing model.

      Ironically you can use Ki inside of VSCode (and I know you can use Vim that way too), but VSCode is so darn bloated and slow...

      • By onehair 2025-09-0320:481 reply

        The truly pluggable editor is emacs. I too spent months trying out neovim, then emacs, then finding helix. Spent a year on helix, then zed because I would rather have something more complete, and brought with me all i could of helix modal editing.

        But emacs. Emacs is the one that can truly become anything you like. And with lsp and treesitter being finally in it. I've finally came to my senses and started building my helix in it.

        • By yewenjie 2025-09-0322:372 reply

          I wish some radical team just says fuck yes, we're gonna make Emacs fast and actually accomplishes it.

          It's definitely easier with LLMs now, but still considerably hard.

          • By conartist6 2025-09-048:10

            LLMs don't make it any easier at all.

            But the team is out there ; )

          • By haute_cuisine 2025-09-047:53

            Epsilon is fast emacs

    • By lemontheme 2025-09-046:18

      It’s exciting that Zed even has a Helix mode. That was a big moment for Helix.

      Last time I tried it, though, I immediately ran into parts of the keymap that hadn’t been translated yet. I’m already at my limit of tools in beta mode/built from my own fork, so I switched back to Vim mode – where the team is on record explaining their thorough testing methodology.

      As a Helix user of two years, I sometimes wonder if I actually like the Helix keymap (certainly some parts are nicer than Vim’s) or if I simply tolerate it because of how nice it is to get a polished TUI IDE out of the box. Either way, my muscle memory expects Helix mode now, rather than Vim.

    • By bobbylarrybobby 2025-09-0321:05

      Neovim can run in server mode, where other editors send it user input and then Neovim sends back the buffer. This is how I use vim in VSCode — not the Vim extension but the Neovim extension, which uses the real Neovim, which of course reads my Neovim config and plugins and makes them available to VSCode. So it seems like helix “just” needs a server mode, and then you can integrate it into any editor.

    • By Karrot_Kream 2025-09-0318:18

      Helix seems to have good LSP support from what I can tell? The only language I use at $WORK that doesn't have full support is GraphQL which lacks auto indent.

      If you want to try something similar to Helix in emacs, there's meow-mode. While I'm not a helix user myself, it shouldn't be too difficult to get meow to work like helix.

    • By yes_but_no 2025-09-0318:132 reply

      If you are already familiar with Vim bindings is Helix's object then action really worth that much?

      • By sxg 2025-09-0319:29

        I thought the same, but I gave Helix a shot for fun a couple years ago and never looked back. It really does feel better/more ergonomic, but the greatest benefit is that almost everything you need is built in. I spent way too much time fiddling with Vim and NeoVim configs.

      • By unshavedyak 2025-09-0319:06

        For me, definitely. Plus it's quite the muscle memory switch. I switched to Kakoune ages ago, and then eventually Helix because i liked its design a bit more.

    • By ricardobeat 2025-09-0319:111 reply

      Helix itself seems quite young - and first time I’m hearing of it.

      • By dcre 2025-09-0319:551 reply

        It’s about 4 years old, twice as old as Zed!

        • By valtism 2025-09-0321:331 reply

          Same age:

          commit b400449a58507cca1fa007197929c2cfd6beabbe

          Author: Nathan Sobo <nathan@zed.dev>

          Date: Sat Feb 20 10:02:34 2021 -0700

              Start rebuilding with a cleanly-separated UI framework

    • By chamomeal 2025-09-0319:04

      I had the exact same problem. I was so stoked to try helix mode and then realized it obviously doesn’t have any of my backspace shortcuts. Duh, but still… back to helix!

    • By artdigital 2025-09-042:47

      Oh what, there’s a Helix mode now?

      Been wanting to learn Helix more and using it for small edits but never saw a Helix mode in any editor yet

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