Trying Zed, Found a mysterious icon

Heard about Zed and figured I’d give it a spin. Everyone’s been saying it’s fast. They weren’t wrong. Zed is snappy. I like snappy things :)

I pressed Ctrl + ↑ to see if there was a shortcut. Nothing too much but I noticed this strange black person icon was poking around in between line number and the line content (red box in the screenshot above). Looked important. Some kind of Zed feature I hadn’t discovered yet.

Spent a solid minute wondering what it was. Tried clicking it. Hovering it. Checked the docs. Nothing. Scrolling aorund and the black person stayed in between the line number and the line content all throughout…thought is was some fancy feature for debugging maybe…

Pocked around a bit more. Closed the editor and saw the black person on my desktop wallpaper…

Turns out my IDE was slightly transparent and that “icon” was just my desktop wallpaper showing through. Peak detective work.

The real struggle though — learning all the new shortcuts. Every time I want to do something simple I either context-click like a caveman or open the wrong command palette. Asking perplexity to explain how to set up theme, what is the shortcut, what are some tips and so on.

It’s getting there though. One snappy keystroke at a time.

So far I do have to complain about not able to skip replacing things after finding the key words. Like how in vim with gc you can approve or skip to the next…need to learn and discover how to do that in zed.