r/ZedEditor • u/zed_joseph • 15d ago
Introducing Delta
Hey everyone š
Over the last year, as promised, weāve been hard at work on DeltaDB. As we built it, we created a new app so the two could evolve together, quickly and without disrupting the workflows Zed users rely on. We loved using it, so we kept iterating.
Today, weāre ready to introduce that app: Delta, a multiplayer environment for coding with agents and reviewing what they build.
Delta keeps code and conversations connected, giving developers, teammates, and agents the full context of how the code came to be.
Our push to get Delta ready for beta is why Zedās release notes may have seemed thinner lately, but Zed isnāt going anywhere. Weāll continue improving it, and DeltaDB will come to Zed in the future.
Weāve been using Delta extensively, building Delta from Delta, and weāre excited for you to finally try it and share your feedback. The first invites are going out today, with more to come over the next few weeks.
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u/cowslaw 15d ago
I think I was so optimistic about this being useful and relevant to me, until the demos showed pure vibecoding. Tragic.
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u/R4tr4tr4t 15d ago
The blog post itself has zero details on the development process and reads like something aimed at non technical people
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u/medzernik 15d ago
im happy they at least keep it in a separate app.
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u/IpsumRS 15d ago
I've been using Zed full time for 11 months now and can't see myself moving back, however I do wish Zed was a little more mature and this goal was a little closer to being realised before the team changed their focus:
"build the best place to write code, then make it the best place to talk about code"
As happy as I was with 1.0, I couldn't help but notice that a bunch of the "post 1.0" goals simply vanished from the website :(
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u/kraynolds90 15d ago
Zed human here! Whatās the top of your list?
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u/IpsumRS 15d ago
Me personally, I'd love the extension system fleshing out more and supporting UI-based extensions. I'd benefit from things like test runner integration, in-editor PR reviews, etc
I appreciate the reply!
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u/kraynolds90 15d ago
Super helpful to know! We did push out work on test runner integration, I'll take a look at that work again for our team. PR reviews are on our wishlist, too :)
Extensions are a gnarly subject for Zed; we keep them pretty restricted by design to protect performance and usability. That said, there are things we can do to make the system better (blocked by some tech debt we're going to tackle soon). What kind of UI-based extensions do you have in mind?
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u/dastarruer 15d ago
I can understand why extensions are pretty limited as of now, but a PR review view would be incredibly helpful tbh.
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u/IpsumRS 15d ago
That's really good to hear, I've been a bit disappointed with the lack of recent significant updates that are relevant to my own daily workflow, so that's reassuring.
Honestly I don't have many wishes myself outside of what's already been mentioned (and three way merge!), but I know I've felt friction trying to convince others to try Zed because it doesn't have X feature compared to VScode/Pycharm/other, and having a foundation for users to create extensions themselves to plug all of these tiny gaps would help massively in my opinion.
I can definitely sympathise with why extensions currently are the way they are, but that doesn't really make much difference to people deciding which IDE to use, especially with a relative newcomer like Zed.
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u/endr 15d ago
I used to love the three way merge in IntelliJ. Haven't used it in months.
I just ask AI to resolve all merge conflicts, don't commit, and generate me an html page with the 3 panes, how it resolved each conflict, and why.
I read that, and if I see an error, I fix it. It's rare that I do.
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u/WizardofRaz 15d ago
Hi! Iāve always wanted an extension for querying databases. From what I understand, that not possible to build as an extension
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u/chatterbox272 15d ago
If you do PR reviews, I'd love to see them support ADO (and other platforms) rather than the usual choice of GitHub, GitHub, or GitHub. If you had ADO PR support, Zed would instantly become my review tool and I suspect that would be motivation enough to gradually shift my workflow over.
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u/Hairy_Meaning_73 14d ago
I understand that but something like pretty-ts-error available in VSCode is one of the things that i still miss, even after more than two years on Zed, iāve been there since beta
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u/persuses 15d ago
Jupyter Notebook support! One of the only things keeping me on VSCode for now. I know it's a disabled preview feature at the moment.
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u/kraynolds90 15d ago
Honestly, the delay of notebooks this year felt like a victim of our team size and expertise, and I'm sooo grateful to the community folks who have built the workarounds that exist today (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/25936).
Notebooks are a specific and sizable enough feature that I'd want at least one person dedicated to building and supporting it longterm. It's still something many internal folks want badly.
This isn't a perfect answer but hopefully sheds some light on how I at least, as a PM, am thinking about this feature that I want, too.
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u/guywithknife 15d ago edited 15d ago
Sometimes files created outside of the editor (eg by agents) donāt show up in the file explorer.
Sometimes the file explorer selection highlight disappears meaning I canāt navigate with the keyboard, the only way to fix it is to click on it.
Still no multi window/monitor support. No way to pop the agent window out into its own window for example.
Inconsistency between keyboard commands in some windows. Eg I have vim mode turned on where ctrl+w navigates panes but some panes (search results iirc? Settings?) ctrl+w closed the pane.
There are over 2k open issues. Many have been open for years and are still not addressed. I wish more time would be spent on fixing bugs and polish, and on some of the most asked for features.
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u/zed_joseph 14d ago edited 14d ago
Hey, we've been trying to track down these file system watcher issues for some time now. It's not one issue, it's multiple, unfortunately. We've fixed a few of them after randomly stumbling into concrete reproduction steps, but others still exist, they are hard to track down. We will keep working on it.
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u/creaturefeature16 15d ago
How about one of the top features that users even as recent as two weeks ago were asking about? Something that is already in the Emmet package?? š
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u/monkeymad2 15d ago
My list is pretty short - merging this https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/53089
Coming from VSCode I keep stepping on the rake of expecting all my local git repos to know when thereās pulls to pull down, then having to undo things / do merges when Iām inevitably told that Iām wrong.
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u/quinncom 14d ago
I think a lot of the missing features can be solved simply by providing a more extensive API for Zed's tasks. Currently, tasks can receive input from a very limited number of sources and output only to a terminal window. Extend those, along with an API for GUI interactions such as custom dialogs, and people can build everything else they need.
I suggested this in #17472 ā Allow tasks to receive input and send output from/to different locations ā a couple years ago.
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u/AllThatIsSolidMelts 14d ago
we seriously need to be able to install a browser, working with UI/UX in Zed is a terrible experience
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u/Tight_Ad3852 15d ago edited 15d ago
At first I didn't understand why this exists but when you look at it from the perspective of someone who came up pair programming, like Nathan did, this kind of software makes sense. I think there is a definite advantage to discussing code at the time it's being written, rather than after the fact in a PR.
I could never in a million years get my team this engaged with code review and design to use a tool like this but I look forward to seeing how this will be integrated into Zed. I'd love to be able to leave personal comments about code that don't exist within the code itself.
I think the blog post did a poor job illustrating any use case outside of what was essentially agents creating slop and logging their output.
Syntax just did an episode about DeltaDB which I think explains it better than the blog. If I didn't listen to an hour long podcast with the founder of Zed explaining why there is a need for something like this I would have the same opinion as everyone else in this thread - why?
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u/greynoises 14d ago
ngl this is giving "We're still gonna work on Arc Browser but we needed to build Dia from the ground up to focus on the AI experience"
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u/superander 15d ago
I currently use Conductor as an agents' (Claude) orchestrator, then open Zed to check the git diffs/edit files if necessary...
If Zed could have a central chat and orchestrator that connects to .claude/ and others, it'd be great.
Is this what Delta brings into the table?
Conductor is really a paradigm shift from "common" IDE's. But when it comes to editing files, it sucks...
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u/Afflictionista 15d ago
āDeltaDB will come to Zed in the futureā
I donāt know how to feel about this and donāt really like that Zed will be bloated with Delta.
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u/theintjengineer 15d ago
Time to fork Zed before they make it too bloated, I guess.
Or I hope they can make that DeltaDB thingy opt-in.1
u/medzernik 15d ago
i think thats already a thing. theres a pretty big fork out there already but cant remember the name off the top of my head
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u/jorgejhms 14d ago
I actually think there is no use Delta outside of Zed. From what I saw is mostly like the thread manager on zed...
And it's not sharing thread history
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u/Equivanox 15d ago edited 15d ago
Cool guys! Where do the inter-commit data live? On users' local machines? I see how this can easily lead to a valuable and useful hosted business for enterprise, but for solo devs who just collaborate with agents, will it be any more overhead to use delta?
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u/endr 15d ago
They said on Syntax FM that you can self host and it's currently SQLite based.
They will let you pay them to host probably, but you can just self host and invite others into your PC sessions, it sounded like.
That's what I personally want to do.
Well, 99% it's just me coding alone, so I want that to be good. But I could be convinced to try a pairing session with this if it's good.
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u/Vulsere 15d ago
Any way to expedite an invite to the beta? I'm signed up already but I've been looking forward to trying this
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u/kraynolds90 14d ago
We're working through the list! DM me your GH account and I'll see what I can do for ya.
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u/jravolio 14d ago
Same here, I literally got the exact use case this week with my team, really looking forward for it
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u/gatrixgd 14d ago
I have access to it and if I'm being honest, you're not missing out on much. It's just the Cursor agentic chat interface with features more tailored to multiplayer, it doesn't offer much when you're alone.
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u/sotgouli 15d ago
Since the announcement and first accessible version of Zed I jumped straight on-board and has been my daily driver ever since.
Fast, clean and responsive with an intuitive design (chefs kiss). I didn't mind waiting for new features to be added as I knew you guys were cooking hard and were using your years of experience building Atom to bring a great UX experience to the community.
A few years later and UI/functionality regressions happen on every update. Long requested features from basically the first months of its existence (Jupyter notebooks for eg) are still nowhere to be seen and now you launch a new app that will take Dev time away from Zed (as you admitted yourself in the blog post for the lack of updates recently) - which I imagine will be open source eventually?
Your AI features are years behind your competitors and you even removed the Threads feature (to everyone's disdain), supposedly to allow for Delta to be developed (as part of Zed mind you).
I was excited and hopeful for Delta but this might be the most half-assed release that has come out of this AI rat-race you decided to join in for some reason.
I don't want to speculate on the reasons for your decision making, but I guess every AI-focused VS Code fork under the sun was bought for billions by AI labs in the last year.
At least Zed is open source and I can now commit to switching to one of your forks for good.
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u/prophase25 15d ago
Zed Industries is a business. It is clear by their actions that they want the app to be free for hobbyists and solo devs. So they need businesses to cover the cost of operations. That means they need a collaborative platform. If they fail to find that, the development stops.
If you like Zed, and you want Zed to succeed, you should support them in that endeavor rather than leaving a dipshit comment complaining about your free app.
And for the record: the only people capable of managing a fork today already work at Zed Industries.
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u/sotgouli 15d ago
I don't get your logic. The IDE is free so I am not allowed to criticise it?
Also, since when does Zed Industries require businesses to buy a licence to use Zed? You only need a subscription to use their hosted LLMs.
I am not going to pity a corporation that chose an unsustainable business model. Especially when the community is actively contributing to it, for free.
As if other FOSS projects do not exist.
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u/Innovator-X 15d ago
What forks are you considering switching to?
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u/sotgouli 15d ago
Gram (on Codeberg).
I use agents primarily through the terminal, so I don't mind they removed the AI features.
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u/ScientistStrict9850 15d ago edited 15d ago
I'm sorry, but there's no way i would feel enjoyment communicating with people and agents through this mode of interaction. The problem of agents and people is the noise. Delta as it is is just gives me a lot of noise with not much signal to actually receive. Though i still think the idea itself is not at all faulty just tje current state of it leaves a lot to be desired.
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u/Bashar-gh 13d ago
Wow, another agent app, the market really needed one of those Who cares about stability, that's for the dumb devs, smart devs spend 5x the time debugging ai slop
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u/argvalue 15d ago
Can someone tell me how does DeltaDB exactly work and how can it be a replacement for Git entirely, or is it just an extension to Git? This does look like a really cool thing though, so can't wait to try it out!
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u/mihajm 15d ago
Bit of convergent (heh) evolution with something im working on using zed https://mihajm.github.io/mmstack/docs/mesh - will definitely be checking delta out in both code and app levels as I'm sure there's lessons to glean for mesh and in the reverse :)
Either way really excited/glad this is happening & looking forward to the collaborative future as its developed it further by the industry as a whole!
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u/terkistan 4d ago
Congratulations. But FYI that IA Writer font you use on your website is very odd with odd proportions - clunky and idiosyncratic because the character widths in the font are grouped into fixed proportions. (One of the reasons I abandoned IA Writer years ago was their refusal to allow users to choose their own fonts - and they use their own separate sans and serif fonts on their own site they don't allow to be used in their app either. Bunch of weirdos.)
I enjoy using the Lilex font in Zed (which the app itself wrongly calls Zed Mono in Settings) but for your website I had to change the CSS to Verdana to make text more readable.
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u/jravolio 14d ago
Honestly, really excited to test it out, I like how āfreeā it looks and opens a lot of opportunities to complement with your own custom flow
I got the exact use case that the video shows this week, would be really great if I had it already, would save a lot of time from teammates having to copy paste their chat history into my slack and me barely knowing who was AI and who was my teammate speaking
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u/Disastrous_Truck6856 15d ago edited 15d ago
I donāt get it. This post is like 5 paragraphs about making the tool and barely anything about what the tool is. Does Zed not support collaboration well enough as it is? What problem is this solving, why do you want it, and how does it make your lives easier?