FREE: Zed AI Better Than Cursor? 🤖 Open-Source Alternative Claude Sonnet 3.5 (Windows Compatible)

What's going on everybody Josh poock here and in today's video we're going to be looking at a free opsource alternative to cursor everyone's been talking about cursor you know using cursor and it's great I really do like it and I'm going to do more videos on cursor but as you guys probably are aware there is a cost associated with cursor so I'm going to show you how you can set up install Z Zed AI the code editor on your system for

Free whether you're using Mac Linux or even Windows yes that's correct I'm going to show you how to use it on Windows let's dive right into [Music] it all right guys so here is Zed's Z ai's website link for that will be in the description down below zed is a Next Generation code editor designed for high performance collaboration with humans and AI you clone the source code over here in the GitHub I'll leave a link to that as well now a

Few key features to go over just of z real quick before I dive into it and show you how to get it set up so fast it's extremely fast it's faster than vs code it's faster than cursor it's written from R uh scratch in Rust to efficiently leverage multip multiple CPU cores and your GPU intelligent so integrate upcoming llms into your workflow to generate transform and analyze code collaborative so this is actually a kind of cool feature too um chat with

Teammates write notes together and share your screen and project all included so really cool stuff um I would definitely suggest checking out this video too I believe it's by one of the creators or founder whatever the case may be he's going through all the different technical things um with zap how they built it how they got it so fast and yeah it's he even do some tests to show just how fast it is and show some of the other features right

So real quick world class developers use Zep Apple verell all these ones uh anthropic slack okay um some testimonials here some more um content and open source growing extension ecosystem right different themes and whatnot built with care and uh Diagnostics custom Snippets split planes breadcrumbs syntax aware selections rename Factor refactoring CLI markdown preview and uh many more so without Ado let's Dive Right In I would definitely too suggest checking out their docs if you're going to be using this and you

Can look at learn a lot more about you know all the different ins and outs for your specific use case now if you're on Mac or Linux at the time of recording this you're lucky because it's actually very simple to install Z Zed you just go here download right so you download and Mac OS is Right Here download now Linux is right here boom you're good to go with Windows not so much not so easy so you can build from the

Source code right now uh and you could join the Discord too so you can stay up to date on um when they do release it but um so yeah there is no ex executable file but I'm going to show you how to do it for all my windows users if you're on Mac or Linux um and you don't use Windows you can maybe skip ahead maybe about a minute or two here in this video and um but for those windows users

This is what you're going to do so you're going to clone down the Zep repository so if you're not familiar with how to do that you're going to go into your terminal right here and you're simply just going to run um get clone and then this repository link right here that is in the description that's going to clone the repository once you do that wherever you clone that repository you're going to CD into Zed all right once you change directory into

Zed um a few things you're going to need to do so you're going to need to install rust if you don't have it already so go here install rust on your system okay once you install rust you're going to want to run rust up update just to make sure that everything's up to date and then you're going to want to install this right here rust wassom tool chain so you're going to run this command once you do that um so this

I believe this is an optional thing I believe but I just clicked here and I did install this right here this is uh Visual Studio code 20 uh 2022 I believe you have to do that so install that if you don't have it already I believe you can just do the Community Edition right here um and you should be good and then install uh what is this I I think I did have to install the SDK archive yeah so I downloaded

This right here download the installer of the windows SDK and you're going to want to install that too once you have all that installed um I didn't do this part right here back in dependencies so this is if you're developing collaborative uh using the the collaborator features with in Zed and uh if you want to use Zed collab server you can do go ahead and and do this uh step right here I'm just going to skip that all we're going to

Do is build from source so all I did was once you have that you're going to your change directory into Zed and z uh Zed yeah and then you're going to run cargo run- Das release okay you're going to run that in the terminal once you run that as you can see here it was compiling and it took maybe about honestly about 10 minutes to compile uh maybe maybe 10 to 15 minutes took a little bit of time to compile once

It does compile though you're good to go and here is what Z looks like so let me just make it perfectly fit in the screen for you guys here you can see every part of Zed or Zep Zed there we go um I did another tutorial on a tool called zap so that's why I keep getting it mixed up okay so here is the interface so first thoughts I think it's a nice looking interface um you know it's a little bit

More minimalistic than uh vs code I mean yeah it's just newer it's faster so it kind of has that fast feel to it like it's lightweight you get that lightweight feel so um and I'll kind of go as I'm going through this I'll kind of give you a bit of comparison between something like VSS code cursor cursor and VSS code are fairly similar other I mean it's cursor is just a basically a fork of vs code with the AI functionalities and

I'm like I said I'm going to be doing more videos on cursor very soon just because uh it is it is awesome with their new composer feature but um so once you get once you open up zed going to look like this and you're going to it's just going to be a blank thing like this so you can change the theme first of all I'll just quickly tell you how to do that you just do F1 to get the the command

Uh pallet and then you're just going to type in theme and then you can select a theme because when I first join uh got this it was uh light theme and I do not like light theme it was you know bright on the eyes so especially when we're developing coding you know dark themes for me it's way better okay few things to note here um when you go to the bottom right this little anytime you see this little star icon that's

Where basically where you can do some AI cool stuff right I'm going to show you the different spots in just a second but this is the AI assistant panel we're going to come back to that in just a moment here's the terminal panel okay here is um so this is where you can activate super Maven or go GitHub copilot I'm not going to use either one of those um and then notification panels here you can go to specific lines there um

And then yeah that's the some of the main stuff initially okay so once you get turn this little AI icon on let me just move my head down here for a second you're going to want to um let's see so if you click up here yours probably won't say the the model at the moment uh you're going to go to configure configuration okay this is where you can configure your assistance so you're going to see the different potential models we got

Zed's model okay and this is really cool because at the moment of recording this video they're doing a basic access to models from anthropic through zai for free so you can essentially use anthropic for free on Zed's open source tool really cool stuff then we have anthropic um any any time in coding anthropics as of now it's the best right so anthropic can use GitHub aut pilot Google AI o llama you can even hook up your local models here whether that's

Quen 2 uh llama 3.1 we got open AI of course and as you can see here some of these Keys uh API Keys set in open AI environment variable so if you did already have your key set up in an environment variable it would be loaded but you can also um just uh input the key here so you would copy and paste that key okay once you have that if we go back over to are um this is called context so

You can create new context which is are like new chats um you can basically like for example we could just say hi like I just did and as you uh oh we have to do shift enter shift enter not just enter and as you see we will be chatting with the Claude 3.5 Sonic here once it loads okay so that's actually interesting so if you press shift enter it's actually just going to like make another message from you like a thread

Almost and then you actually have to press control and enter to fully send it okay so that is that you can see we're talking to it right now you can select different models one thing I really like about this is that it actually shows context of how much tokens you're using which to my knowledge I don't believe cursor does that at the moment um some other AI pair co uh programming tools that we've covered does do do this like claw Dev

Other ones like that I think uh continued Dev may have just started doing this but um anyway so that's the whole sidebar you can go here see your uh history chat history now if we toggle this off um another place you can um basically leverage AI so like say if we created a new file which I have one here so you just right click create new file create new folder we have a a folder right or a file right here um

What you can do is up here in the top right you can see inline assist all right so there's inline assist there's selection uh controls so you can do stuff like that um there's more settings here but we're going to look at the AI and this is where you can actually prompt it to generate refactor or refine code right here so if we just said generate me a uh task manager using HTML CSS JS as you can see it's starting to

Generate the code really really quickly and it's pretty impressive right um there we go about 111 lines of code right there and so yeah we'll come back to this in just a second one thing too you could even go into like a specific part of the code like you wanted to go here um in the body and you wanted to click right here click the icon again you could actually add a prompt in the middle of you know wherever your code

Base is you could say hey change this part right I'm not going to do that right now but that you and I like how it continuously shows the context uh how much context you've been using so another place you can add prompts is in the terminal so this is really cool as well like if we go here we go to our terminal which is here and I'll bring myself up here again um as you can see uh where is it here

So we toggle on the Little Star icon and we can actually go ahead and prompt it saying like Okay so I said make a folder called test in this directory and it just gave me the command I said that in plain English and then it made I just ran it um like I just ran it see make a folder called test and then I clicked enter and then it made this specific folder so you can actually use AI within the terminal

Which is pretty cool um and like like I I said at the start you can install extensions you can do all that one other thing too guys in order to use the uh Zed um the the Zed AI um that they give you for free through anthropic you have to sign in So at the top right here um you'll see I have my image right here it's because I signed in so it will say sign in if you're not signed in

You're going to sign in it's going to ask you to authenticate through GitHub once you do that you'll be able to access all this for free one other thing guys is if you're in your chat talking to the assistant right here if you do forward slash this is where you'll get access to bunch of different options we have diagnostic uh Diagnostics prompt workflow terminal symbols default fetch file tab now so you can insert files give it context you can do these

Things called workflows insert a prompt that opts into the edit workflow so there's a bunch of different options that you can use to enhance your um AI output and generation and coding experience not going to cover each and every one of those I would definitely recommend checking out the dogs as well as that video I mentioned on the website he kind of really talks about which each one uh how each you can use each one of these features but of course

You're probably going to use the file one a lot okay guys so other than that um what do I think comparative to some of the other AI tools that we've covered I think it's really good that it's an actual editor that has um this AI these AI functionalities because that's very powerful when the AI is actually the backbone of the editor editor now in terms of comparisons to um you know cursor I'll talk a little bit more too even mention some

Stuff about that in some of the Cur future cursor videos but just to kind of touch base I think that cursor's new composer functionality is really really cool and it definitely is hard to beat in terms of that um other than that I do like the fat the lightning speed functionalities of um Zed and and yeah I do like a lot of some like a lot of these features that Zed has is definitely really good especially with it being open source

100% free that's obviously a huge plus I know a lot of you will like that but um yeah cursor definitely has had some really big improvements so in terms of the AI generation I definitely think you would probably get a little bit more quality with them um but we'll have to see I'll do some more testing in future videos and if you're new to the channel you got some value here make sure to smash that like button smash that subscribe button

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In tomorrow's video keep hustling keep grinding and of course guys accelerate your stride take care