Git diff UI: Ability to see diff between staged and unstaged changes

[alshdavid]

Body

This is the only thing that actively prevents me from using Zed as my daily driver. Everything else is a QoL or minor feature that I can wait for.

For me, the most important aspect of agentic workflows is reviewing the agent edits. In-editor workflows are great for tight "prompt, review, prompt, review" loops.

VSCode

VSCode will split the git diffs into;

• Staged
  • Compared against current branch
• Unstaged
  • Compared against staged

This unlocks an agentic workflow where I accumulate agent edits by incrementally staging agent edits each turn. I am able to quickly prompt-review partial updates as unstaged diffs, adding or veto/retrying the turn.

The final commit I generate represents a complete idea which aggregates several individually reviewed turns.

Screencast_20260921_084829.mp4

I love this workflow as I can write high quality code with AI, distribute the review burden into smaller digestible blocks which empirically outperforms my peers (at least for now, haha) who use completely headless approaches to agentic coding.

Zed

The git diff view in Zed combines staged and unstaged edits into a single diff against the current branch.

Screencast_20260921_085750.mp4

Why this is a deal breaker

Blending agent edits into a single giant diff against the current branch means I don't know what edits were made in the last turn. This makes it essentially impractical to accumulate edits incrementally.

I can get around this by committing the last turn and eventually squashing the turn commits into a single idea - but that extra friction is annoying enough that I never do. It also makes it much more annoying to revert changes if you get 5 turns deep and realise you have to scrap the approach.

It also doesn't give you an overview of the complete feature vs the current branch.

You can create a branch every time you want to start working with the agent and commit the diffs - but I use the agent constantly and creating a branch every time is even more friction.

[alshdavid]

Sorry, I know I repeated myself. I really really want to use Zed but this is a deal breaker

#63278