Zed-supercollider (alpha)

Resources Libraries and Quarks
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STATUS: zed-supercollider is now feature-complete and roughly polished. A coherernt release/installation story remains to be hashed out, but everything you need to use it with a little legwork is now in the README.

Greetings everyone,

I’m not so much around here, but I’ve recently been learning how to do modern structured vibecoding with Claude Code & Codex and I decided to take on porting scnvim / vscode-supercollider to Zed as a test project.

I wasn’t really happy with VS Code (heavy, ugly) and the native IDE (no vim!), and while I do like scnvim, there’s something about doing SuperCollider in a proper IDE that just feels right to me.

This project has gone remarkably well given I’ve written literally zero lines of code. It’ll be a week or two until it’s wrapped up, but I figured I’d share now that it just about about works in case anyone else has been wanting this.

Screenshot 2026-01-07 at 08.36.59 PM
Screenshot 2026-01-07 at 08.36.59 PM2520×1694 315 KB

The main caveat right now is installation. In its current state, it only works reliably if you open the zed-supercollider project itself in Zed, because it expects certain files to be present in the workspace. Packaging this into something cleaner will likely involve coordinating at least three moving parts, and I don’t think it’ll ever be a true one-click install.

For now, if you run the build script, install the dev extension, and keep your .scd files inside the project, it’s close to feature-complete.

You’ll probably also want to set up keybindings manually. There may be config you can copy/paste from the repo into Zed’s keybindings file. (Note: Cmd-. is an LSP command in Zed, so you’ll want to avoid that binding.)

Features

  • Full LSP support via a fork of the LanguageServer quark (completions, go-to-definition, etc.)
  • A Rust server-launcher that manages the sclang process and brokers communication
  • Editor ↔ sclang integration with keyboard shortcuts plus gutter actions for evaluating code (nice touch—thanks Zed)
  • Post window in the terminal pane (currently broken)
  • Convenience actions: Boot Server, Recompile, Stop, Kill, Evaluate

The one major missing piece is documentation integration, which I haven’t explored yet.

If you try it, feedback is welcome. I’ll aim to keep the README installation steps accurate as things stabilize.

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You deleted your post, but if you still think it’s a legitimate question, I’m interested to understand what you mean.

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Updates:

  • Docs now work (custom scd → markdown parser, or links to web)
  • Many UX bugs squashed, and you can now set it up to be equivalently as smooth as any other IDE (with the extra that you can click buttons in the gutter to evaluate, or perform any action on the current block with an in-situ keyboard-shortcut driven dropdown)
  • Codebase refactored, no longer a single giant Rust file
  • Much reliability, the external SuperCollider process is managed responsibly with reliable tear-down
  • Added caching to the Language Server, so everything is lightning fast
  • Keybindings that make sense, SC IDE defaults out of the box, VS Code-compatible option, and a fix for the Cmd+. conflict
  • Recompile just works, LSP reconnects automatically after class library recompile, no restart needed
  • Quieter by default, verbose logging gated behind a flag

The only thing that’s left is figuring out the install for non-technical users. If anyone’s interested in using this, I’d love to know if you prefer any of these overall approaches:

  1. A Mac / custom installer / wizard binary
  2. brew install / curl
  3. Download the pieces separately (Zed plugin gallery + Quark + files for your repo)
  4. It’s a bundle and you need to work inside a single directory (current status, more or less)
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I should add, many of you probably don’t know anything about Zed. Here’s my summary:

  • IDEs can be cool, but the programming world has decided on VS Code and, to a lesser extent, JetBrains (outside of Microsoft and Apple)
  • The problem with these IDEs is they’re slow. They’re not just bloated, etc. etc. but the literal render time between typing a key and seeing it is slow.
  • They’re also, IMO, just ugly and feel inelegant to use
  • This leaves us with vim/emacs (and a faster terminal like Ghostty) or not-really-supported software like SublimeText and TextMate as viable alternatives
  • Enter Zed—an editor that aims to be fast, but also fully capable
  • It also has an interesting focus on collaborative editing … you can pair program remotely with people very easily
  • And … it’s also … not exactly “AI first,” but maybe “AI third.” They were instrumental in creating the ACP standard, which lets you run Claude Code, Codex, etc. in the editor with editor integrations. I’m not sure it’s worth it, but that was part of my initial impetus for using it.

All that to say, I recommend trying it if you’re not happy with your current tools. You can get VS Code keybindings out the of the box, it has a good Vim mode … the important stuff is there.

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Hey, this looks very interesting, thanks for the effort. I take your arguments against vs code and you are right, but adoption of it is very hard to beat :slight_smile:

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Truly, it’s hard to avoid using VS Code or one of its forks these days, especially for niche workflows :slight_smile:

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