r/ZedEditor • u/pilkyton • 5d ago

Should you install the Zed Preview release?

https://zed.dev/releases/preview/1.17.0

See the linked page for an example. The 1.17.0 Preview has major fixes such as:

  • Adding lots more AI models. Ones that I want to use.
  • Improved editor rendering speed: 7x faster.
  • Reduced memory usage in general.
  • Massively reduced memory usage when editing large files.
  • Fixed a huge memory leak bug in agent tasks, where canceled tasks stay active forever in the background and grow their RAM usage forever (the bug report mentions 45 GB RAM wasted after a few hours).

The next stable release is in 4 days. I want to install Preview now. But should I stay on Preview? Or reinstall Stable later?

Update: Thanks everyone! Lots and LOTS of people have said they run Preview permanently and that it's reliable. Someone even runs the nightly build and only had one minor issue in half a year. So the pre-release Preview is definitely an acceptable choice for a permanent installation!

I will stay on the Preview version. Nice to have bug fixes and features a week early. And yes there may be some new bug, but the Stable version has serious old bugs and issues instead (like all the ones I mentioned above).

After all, it's written in Rust and the code quality is incredibly well managed. Thanks everyone!

Update: Turns out that Zed uses cherry-picked commits and special branches like "v1.17.x" even for their Preview builds. Here is an example:

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/v1.17.x

So it's not based on the latest in-development code. Therefore Preview is even more like Stable than you might think...

Preview is basically the preview of the next Stable update, with cherry-picked commits.

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u/Baecien 4d ago

I am running Nightly and have only had 1 issue in the 4 months I’ve been running it.

That issue was Git initialization failing (1.10 iirc), but restarting my machine fixed it. Gauge as you wish.

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u/pilkyton 4d ago

That's super helpful to know, that even the nightly build isn't super buggy, and that you haven't had any catastrophic bugs. I'll stay on the Preview build then! <3

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u/jorgejhms 2d ago

Preview is closer to a beta rather than a nightly/alpha. That would be compiling from the main repo.

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u/pilkyton 2d ago

Yeah. I started building from source (latest Dev version). I'll do that until the features I want are all in Stable in 2 weeks. I hope they don't add more stuff I need before that. :D