Huh, I absolutely love Zed’s search UI. I just navigate back to my previous tab with ctrl-o when I’m done

Whereas I'm not a great fan of modals for anything where I'd like to refer back to what I'm working on. I guess I'd just prefer some tabs to open as a split by default and close with esc, maybe call them something like "ephemeral tabs"? Basically, steal some ideas from emacs.

This. I tried Zed for an entire month, but this "search thing" drove me nuts. It is also slow. If you work in a large project search is absolutely essential. Too bad.. Back to Visual Studio Code.

I love the search in zed. If it was up to me it would open a new tab on every search rather than reusing the same tab, so that I didn't have to redo past searches.

The multibuffer result is so nice for "hands-on" search and replace.

Personally I don't hate tab. Sometimes even it's more convenient to have a tab on the side with all the state, instead of reopening modal.

What I hate though is really unintuitive and "non-standard"[1] shortcuts in search tab.

For example "find in project": cmd+shift+f

Whereas for "find and replace in project" I'd expect: cmd+shift+r , but it's: first toggle find, then toggle find and replace. Ok, absolutely fine, but the keyboard shortcut to toggle is: cmd+shift+h - I never can remember it.

When already searching, for my "convenience", if I'd like to adjust my search or search for something new, I click cmd+shift+f and I am focused back to find input, but here's the kicker. Input have automatically changed to what word was under my cursor. So if I was looking for some long or weird string, I need to retype it again or find and copy/paste it again.

#first-world-problems though.

I got tired of babysitting vim/neovim and all it's plugins and use Zed for most of my editing. It has pretty good vim binding support and maybe I just need to remap some key bindings to have better search experience. Zed is much better at emulating vim than Cursor/VSCode.

[1] there's no standard obviously, but some things are the same/similar across most programs.

Agreed, this is the main reason why I keep switching back to other editors.

I use the television task described here (https://zed.dev/blog/hidden-gems-part-2) for that experience :)

> Sometimes I just want to have a quick glance at some code and close the search using escape.

How else are you going to have “a quick glance at code” *across* project files without using a new view for that? It sounds like you’re describing something impossible.

Zed’s across files search solves this in a similar way as other tools. Except that in zed you can also edit the code where your search results show up. Zed also has within file search.

I can’t relate to that, I’ve also struggled with this decision for quite some time, but I’ve gotten used to it. What I hate is that it doesn’t open several search tabs if I need to look for several things at once.

> When you search, Zed opens a new tab, which I hate.

You also have to validate the search, it doesn't start off immediately on its own, which annoys me a lot more.

I know not much about Zed and I am curious, can such changes be implemented via extensions?

That was og sublime/textmate behavior that I grew to miss with vscode, so was pleasantly surprised to see it exists in Zed.

I feel you. Same here.

yeah its quite silly they decided to mess around with this universally standard behaviour. The search is the reason why i always end up going back to other vs code based IDEs for real work. I open zed for perf reasons and something quick.

Also now they've introduced this "agent first" layout which i cannot undo. They're strength is in perf, idk why try to reinvent the wheel w.r.t DX.