I'm so glad it's not just me. M1 MacBook Pro, here, and I quickly gave up on Zed because it felt so laggy to me. Thought it was something wrong with my MacBook (or maybe me).

Most people can't perceive "micro stutters" and many who can don't care. It's a fairly niche feature requirement.

Excel doesn’t have microstutters it has full blown stutters. It is ridiculous that it takes 3 seconds to open Save As on my Dell Workstation let alone yesterday when it took 30 seconds for a local server.

I really utterly despise this kind of exceptionalism.

You know, you probably don’t feel that your car has air in the fuel line or that your transmission is holding on to old oil.

What you will “feel” is that your car feels “worse” and you won’t be able to put words on why.

Just because non-technical people lack the understanding to put into words the things they feel: does not mean they don’t feel them.

Give them Office 2008 on a 10 year old PC and ask them how it feels, I guarantee they’ll say “better” without knowing why.

Probably true, but maybe you should also ask them how much they would be willing to pay to fix that. I guess it would be less than $100 for the lifetime of their device.

That would pay for so many millions of dollars of dev time. It would be a big win-win if you could organize that deal. In the tradeoff between more dev time and better hardware, typical consumer software is way too tilted toward the latter and wasting lots of money.

If you don't think people are willing to pay, phrase it as $100 more for software and $200 less for hardware with better overall performance.

The problem is that hardware performance is easy to upgrade and software performance isn't.

> Probably true, but maybe you should also ask them how much they would be willing to pay to fix that.

Clearly at least $100 (not adjusted for inflation) based on trends from 1990-2015.

Peoples primary reason for upgrading computer was better performance for years, after all.

This implies that a better version is on offer. It is not. You get the telemetry stuffed, stuttery garbage, and your company pays for it.

That wasn’t what I meant. I am saying that the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough. The average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care, so there’s no pressure to change.

I understand what you meant.

  > the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough

I wouldn't say that's THE reason, or even a contender. The average user has little agency over what the established tools are. There is no pressure to change the tools because there is no competition. You use what your employer dictates. office and/or gsuite.

Whether or not people 'want it enough' has very little to do with whether something actually occurs.

  > average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care

this part is still true.

But this only explains why software used for work is like that. What about software people use privately and where they could chose a different one?

When you go buy a CPU you have twenty different points on the price versus performance curve to choose from, if not more. And they all have roughly the same feature list.

When you buy software to do some task, you have a lot fewer choices, they differ wildly in other features, and it's unclear which ones perform well.

That's because VS Code is hiding everything behind a bunch of non-real-time tricks of perception. Zed is giving you actual real-time feedback.

"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data."

The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz. Those that can are overwhelmingly skewed towards under 30 years old. Fighter pilots have a floor of something like 200hz for an idea of how rare it is. Just fun info.

I have 3 different displays on my desk, and they are 60hz 120hz and 240hz.

The difference between them when scrolling is.. obvious. I'm in my 40s. I'd love to see a study demonstrating that my ability to perceive this is some rare capability - that's very hard for me to believe.

Comparing side-by-side is always easier. The question is never that (should not be). The question is, would you approach a random coworker's desktop and really, sincerely, notice if they have a 120 vs a 144 Hz (or 240) monitor?

I'd say maybe if you are a professional in the sector of multimedia processing, you would be so accostumed to the smoothness of high FPS that a meager 60 fps monitor would be obviously noticeable. But for the untrained eye, I feel most people wouldn't even notice in a random scenario like that, whether the screen is 60 or 120 (and that's the range with highest ROI on FPS increments!)

As I've aged, my ability to see tiny text has diminished, but I can still see 60Hz vs 120Hz perfectly well.

> The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz

This isn’t true. Unless you’re saying I’m some kind of fighter pilot at 35!

I personally avoid Visual Studio Code as much as possible due to the scroll latency, so I think it is noticeable as long as you know what to look for.

I spent an admittedly tiny amount of time looking into the Zed scrolling stutters after experiencing them myself and I think it's just a matter of their line layout caching not being as good (perhaps unsurprisingly) as the Chromium/WebKit layout engine. It's especially noticeable if you have word wrapped files with lines >10kb in length (yeah, don't ask).

Zed is also at the bleeding edge of rust GUI development, which doesn't have the same mature libraries as other low-level languages. I'll give them the longer-term benefit of the doubt, but the attention to detail does matter.

To be fair, one could say the same for Zig, but Ghostty does extremely well in this regards. While it maybe doesn't have the same complexity that Zed does, it does have to deal with a lot of historical cruft of terminal emulation...