- We maintain a single VS Code setting that allows you to opt out of the AI features provided in VS Code: "chat.disableAIFeatures" (see also: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_104#_hide-and-disab...). If you can still find AI features appearing after you have configured this setting, then please report an issue at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode and we are happy to take a look.
It is possible that from time to time a new AI related feature slips in that does not respect that setting, but we try our best to push fixes as soon as possible.
Thanks!
Ben (VS Code Team)
- I've been frustrated by the constant nudges to use specific AI tools from within VS Code, but I made a different change. Rather than moving to a different editor altogether, I started using VS Codium. If you're unfamiliar, it's the open core of VS Code, without the Microsoft-branded features that make up VS Code.
I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium, and then adding in their own branded features, including all the AI pushes. If you like VS Code except for the Microsoft bits, consider VS Codium alongside other modern choices.
https://vscodium.com
by ashvardanian
5 subcomments
- I’m currently using a mix of Zed, Sublime, and VS Code.
The biggest missing piece in Zed for my workflow right now is side-by-side diffs. There’s an open discussion about it, though it hasn’t seen much activity recently: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/26770
Stronger support for GDB/LLDB and broader C/C++ tooling would also be a big win.
It’s pretty wild how bloated most software has become. Huge thanks to the people behind Zed and Sublime for actively pushing in the opposite direction!
by mark_l_watson
10 subcomments
- This article struck a personal chord with me: I bought a new MacBook a week ago and installed minimal software on it, specifically I did not install VSCode and I don’t miss it.
I use Emacs exclusively on my new laptop. I have about 40 years experience with Emacs and except for a treemacs automations, I am using my regular setup.
VSCode is a great project but I just didn’t feel “happy” while I was using it. I feel happy using Emacs and I only use very minimal LLM integrations with Emacs, preferring to separately running gemini-cli occasionally, or using a variety of LLMs (especially strong local models) with one-shot prompting.
- Sublime is quite good. I have always been using sublime for quick edits, dumping notes etc. But lately I came to appreciate it more as a lightweight IDE. I use go (lsp and some plugins) and ST (sqltools) in addition to package manager and project manager. I like how fast it is, how well polished the editor is. And generally all plug-ins i use work nicely. Also claude helped a lot (eg writing some shortcuts for specific scenarios that I tend to use a lot).
Not to say anything against Zed though. But sublime with one session of claude can help you build your very own customized ide.
- This article (and holiday spare time) made me update and check zed again. I really liked it when I tried it a few months ago, but it failed miserably when doing work on remote code. It would hang, and I couldn't find any diagnostics to debug it's fairly complex remote agent to find out what went wrong.
But now it works fine! Remote work is noticeably snappier than via mounting the remote server as a drive, and remote git seems to work nicely. A very nice Christmas present - thanks, Zed!
Good job Zed!
by throwfaraway135
9 subcomments
- I tried switching from VScode to Zed but unfortunately it doesn't have Jupyter notebooks and image/video preview which are deal brakers for me.
Other pain points:
- Format on save by default: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/29395
- VSCode Debugger UX seams to be much better
- Hi, I'm the author of the post. I hope it resonates with many who got tired of VSCode and found Zed.
I'd also like to add there are many small features I miss in Zed that I don't go over in the post, e.g. autodetect and respect file's indentation (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/4681). But I see Zed is actively shipping the missing features, so I believe they'll improve significantly over the next year.
- Zed has been one of the most consequential changes to my dev tools in years. It's noticeably faster in day-to-day use than VS Code (launch time, input latency, etc.), is way less of a resource hog, and has the best Vim mode of any GUI editor I've ever used.
by joelthelion
2 subcomments
- I've been using vim for 20 years. It's gotten me through all the evolutions of programming, from ctags, to language servers, to AI with copilot.
There's something extremely satisfying about having a dependable free software editor, available on all systems, and not having to change every time a new fad comes in, or a VC decides it's time to make money.
- I would have switched in a pinch if Zed had their low-DPI font rendering in order. At the moment it just looks bad.
by the__alchemist
0 subcomment
- Concur that it's a great VSCode replacement! Also note on the Author's observation of it using similar keybinds: You can, easily, swap the keybinds for other common editors too; this is a big deal for transitions. Also, I love how they're doing things the right way using a fast language... and it shows in the consistently low latency.
It is not, IMO, a replacement for Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm, Rustrover, for example). I do substitute it on my tablet sometimes, where those IDEs can be too sluggish. Unless I'm missing something with plugins I should be installing, it is not on the same level for introspection, refactoring, import adding and moving, real-time error checking, and generally understanding the code base holistically.
So, I've settled into this: Jetbrains if on a sufficiently powerful PC. (It can still bring a 9950x to its knees though...) Zed for lower-power ones.
Sublime for editing one-off files, as both JB and Zed are project-oriented.
- To bad I can not change away from vs code. Most chip manufacturers use the vscode + Addons approach today to give you a toolchain to Programm for your microcontroller. They (thank god) abandon there proprietary IDE attempts and concentrate on chips and compilers again. They found VSCode and now you are required to use this. I’m very unhappy with the situation and on the job hunt to get away from embedded to application programming
- As much as I love Zed, I am of the belief that VScode (and its derivatives) will remain the dominant build-your-own IDE for a really long time unless something like Zed can support web based extensions. I created a VScode extension for chip designers and I would love to port it to Zed, but I can't because it's a visualization extension with a custom webview.
I realize the irony here that Zed is fast because it's not web based, but I stand by my claim that being able to optionally display web UIs would be a really cool feature to have. It would open the door to a lot of extensions.
- I used to be a daily Emacs user (both at work and for personal projects). Since trying out Zed a little over a year ago, now I only use Emacs for Magit and the occasional IRC message through the built-in ERC client.
For VS Code users, there's actually a special feature where a subset of VS Code settings can be migrated to Zed settings. Cannot vouch for its stability, but the functionality is there.
Sorely missing a REPL for Lisp languages, but for statically-typed languages like Rust and TypeScript, Zed works pretty well. I appreciate that Zed works smoothly with Nix and Direnv, even through remote projects. I do wish the collaboration features would receive a bit more attention, though. It feels like that functionality has slowly been bitrotting, and it's always unfortunate when my friends on Linux cannot share their screen. Then there's other little regressions, like the audio bit depth being incorrect on MacBooks connected to external monitors -- they did fix this with the experimental Rodio backend, but I am not sure if that is stabilized yet.
However, AI-related features are fairly stable and it's amazing how far it has come in less than a year. That and things like the debugger UI.
by awfulneutral
1 subcomments
- I am ahead of this curve, my trajectory was VSCode -> Zed -> Helix. Helix doubles my battery life from 4 to 8 hours compared to Zed. Zed is also on a bad trajectory IMO with the huge amount of updates being pushed constantly.
- Zed is faster and less annoying than VSCode, I hope to switch to it permanently sooner or later.
Annoyingly the only hard blocker I have right now is lack of a call-graph navigation widget. In VSCode you can bring up an expandable tree of callers for a function. Somehow I am completely dependent on this tiny little feature for reading complex code!
The annoying thing is: "can't you just use an extension for this?" No, Zed extensions are much more constrained, Zed is not a web browser. And I like it this way! But... My widget...
I also have some performance issues with searching large remote repos, but I'm pretty confident that will get fixed.
by traceroute66
5 subcomments
- Does Zed have something similar to VSCode Dev Containers ?
That is one of the few things keeping me going on VSCode.
For example, I frequently write Ansible playbooks. And with VSCode you can just fire up the Ansible-provided Dev Container with all the dependencies. Which means you don't have to clutter up your local system with them.
- Zed is nice. I use neovim as my main code editor, but when I want a private respectful UI code editor for use AI then I go to Zed, also there is a vim mode that is not so bad.
- I love Zed. I switched full time from Sublime about 8 months ago, using the preview builds, and every release has been solid. The UI design is perfect and the attention to detail is top notch - it feels comfortable, like a really ergonomic pair of slippers.
by emilecantin
1 subcomments
- I switched to Zed from a tmux/nvim setup. I think Zed is the first editor I've tried that has a good enough Vim mode for me to switch and keep my built-up muscle memory.
by guiambros
2 subcomments
- Slashdotted :)
Here's a copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260105144155/https://tenthousa...
by callumprentice
2 subcomments
- I tried Zed for a few months but just couldn't get the JavaScript/Python syntax checking and Prettier type reformatting to work reliably. I would poke at it for a few hours, get it working and then mysteriously, a few days later, it'd stop working again.
I switched to VSCode now and whilst that piece of it seems to be much more reliable, I think overall I prefer the "feel" of Zed.
I've bookmarked the article to see if that helps me figure out how to make the settings stick.
- Zed is the only editor I've been using for maybe two months or so. But I find the extensions still sorely lacking and the API not extensive enough yet either. Still, I really love the design as well as how AI was builtin, and some more of the niche differences.
by childintime
1 subcomments
- Few people seem to recall that MS is making tsc, the typescript compiler, faster, and as a result VSCode: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/typescript-native-...
by _sinelaw_
1 subcomments
- I also got tired of the bloat and also prefer working from the terminal.
I'm building Fresh [0] [1] as an alternative to VSCode that runs in your terminal, with the main goal being ease-of-use out of the box (not a vi-clone modal editor), for example supports mouse, menu, command palette, etc out of the box. LSP as well. I'm focused on making it easy to use with minimum or zero configuration.
[0] https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh
[1] https://sinelaw.github.io/fresh/
- I'm happily using Zed for a few weeks now. What prompted me to evaluate it was it being written (mostly) in rust, so expected better performance and stability and I got that (UI redraws are stupid fast compared to VSCode), but I wanted to migrate my agentic code flow too.
I was pleasantly surprised to basically configure-and-use the AI part: GitHub Copilot login and use, MCP servers, custom MCP servers. VSCode made this part really annoying: Copilot would blow up every now and then, MCP server auto-starting is not there yet and you need an extension (which works for 8 things out of 10), I haven't even tried adding a custom server because I was already annoyed. In Zed I just copy-pasted the suggested custom server start-up command into the small JSON array it presents to add a custom server, and it just started the MCP server in a custom thread, no fuss. Autostart works reliably every time the editor is re-opened.
- I really love Zed, but my only issue is the Emacs keybindings they ship doesn’t seem to work as well as the VSCode Emacs extensions. Hopefully they can fix this in newer updates.
- I like that this article paints VSCode as bogged down by too much AI tooling and the first thing I see on the Zed website is how create it is with Sonnet 4.5 and there’s a subscription plan for AI features.
by jaredcwhite
0 subcomment
- I've been running "VSCode" via code-server as a self-hosted solution so I can fire up an IDE on any device including my iPad. I still use code-server, but increasingly when I'm at my Mac/Linux desktops (yes I have both!) I have been using Zed and it's gotten really good. The only major feature I miss is a visual Git Graph, but since I can still load code-server when I need that, no biggie.
I was genuinely surprised that I can use Zed to remote into my server and it works great with Ruby tooling like Solargraph LSP and Rubocop. Everything in the UI is refreshingly minimalist and quite snappy. Good stuff.
- My only complaint regarding the Zed editor is the inability to display two panes of the sidebar one below the other. Not only is it impossible to display them together, but switching between them requires clicking a tiny button in the status bar. To make matters worse, performing a search hides the symbols and the tree view.
So right now I'm sticking to Emacs.
- This weekend I gave Zed another chance, this time it didn’t make me uninstall it after one hour or so. It’s much more polished, there are a few wrinkles but overall it’s finally pleasant to use. I’m actually surprised how my muscle memory from VSCode is of use, kudos to devs for making the transition easier instead of reinventing the wheel. I hope to eventually get rid of VSCode, this AI everywhere at all costs is turning the editor (that wanted to be an IDE) into something (most?) users don’t want or need.
by whalesalad
0 subcomment
- The only thing keeping me on VSCode these days is the remote SSH development. All of my development takes place on a beefy Linux workstation in my home office. When I am not at my desk (on couch, backyard, coffee shop, traveling) I still remote-in to that box for all of my development using Tailscale + VSCode SSH. Unfortunately the open flavors like vscodium do not support this. It's a "privileged" extension like Copilot.
VSCode has really become such a nightmare to use recently I am strongly looking for a way out. Recently I had some odd corruption take place where I had to blow away essenitally my entire VSCode install on my Mac. Going from zero to hero and bootstrapping back to good state should have been trivial with a single conf file that could be used to rehydrate state (like a lockfile for bundler or node) but - particularly with the remote ssh stuff - it becomes a mess. This extension is installed locally but not remotely, this is remote but not local, ... like dude figure it out and just make it all consistent.
I should expect this from Microsoft, though. I did this to myself.
Revisiting Zed... I am glad to see they have SSH support! Going to give it the old college try today. It's absolutely insane to me that they do not have a first-class Debian/Ubuntu apt repo, though. This has been an issue for quite some time.
by artur-gawlik
1 subcomments
- I'm using vscode for couple of years now. I have disabled all AI related features with "chat.disableAIFeatures" option and it worked really well in my case.
But I was convinced by this article to checkout zed mainly tempted by the promise of much better performance because it is written in native language instead of javascript. So to test it out I've opened https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/src/compil... file and zed after "ctrl + o" command frizzed. Also when scrolling this file in zed there is noticeable drop in FPS, where in vscode scroll with checker.ts file opened is very smooth.
So I guess I'm staying with vscode :)
- Zed, VSCode, Antigravity, Sublime Text... They all have the same workflow.
For writing the code by hand I recommend Helix, batteries included, fast and efficient. For AI-assisted development it doesn't matter and you'd have to switch the app every 4 months if you want to choose the best one.
by bargainbin
1 subcomments
- I switched to Helix and ZelliJ, ZelliJ really allows you to setup some IDE features and helix is like the surface layer of Vi.
Combined it becomes a very powerful setup!
- > With Python, it wasn't so smooth, and I had to spent half a day to get it working. Next is boring details that I wish I knew from the start.
that's not unusual for python. in fact, that is why I avoid python.
- Zed is great and close to being my favorite text editor over Vim but there are constant rough edges.
I spent a fair bit of time this weekend tracking down bugs in a project caused by format on save in Zed occasionally deleting the first line of Python classes.
I turned off format on save and life is good now but data loss bugs like that are pretty annoying in a text editor.
by meander_water
0 subcomment
- For those looking for a better language server for python, I would recommend ruff. As of v0.4.5 it's completely written in rust, and much faster than pylance.
If you've got the ruff plugin installed it should use it by default. Should be able to use it in zed as well.
by temporallobe
0 subcomment
- I tried switching to Zed, and was even able to get it use identical themes and key mappings as my preferred ones in VSC, but ultimately I switched back due to lack of plugins that I’ve really come to depend on, not to mention some key feature differences. I didn’t notice that much of a performance boost over VSC (given that I was on an M4 with 32GB of memory), so in the end, the switch wasn’t worth it. I really want to like Zed, so I will be sure to occasionally check out any new releases. By the way, I did indeed notice that Zed was a heck of a lot faster than VSC on an old Intel-based MBP!
- So did I. I was just curious if it would really be noticeable faster and … wow yes it is. It’s really nice to use.
VSCode is still more polished and I’m going to keep it installed, but I’ve been using Zed for a month now and loving it.
- Others have echoed the same, but I also switched from VSCode to Zed, but then put in the effort to learn Neovim (Lazyvim) properly, and I haven't looked back. Writing code feels exciting again.
I recommend something like https://github.com/adomokos/Vim-Katas to accelerate muscle memory.
And also Vimium in the browser is great.
by mirawelner
0 subcomment
- I really love Zed bc it’s fast and doesn’t try to run the code for you. I really dislike the “play” feature of IDEs. I learned Java in eclipse and for the linear time don’t know how to run it from the terminal. It has all the editing and highlighting features of a full ide but makes you run it from the terminal. And if you have Zellij or another muxer set up, it runs it in the Zed terminal automatically.
- I would love to switch but the battery draw on my mac is just too much! I like to move around to different places in my home as I work so being able to be on battery for a while is a must for me (not to mention that I do travel occasionally)
- I adore Zed, started on the day of the windows release and never looked back. My theme is perfect, the team works super hard, and I get a nice bit of satisfaction installing their frequent updates in barely over a second.
- I haven't tried zed and vscode for a while, but I didn't like the amount of distractions from vscode, such as info about methods.
The problem I had with zed when I tried it is that I'm on linux with kde and zed had a hamburger menu on linux, whereas on Mac it has a proper application menu. It also didn't have keyboard shortcuts for menus that I expected, e.g. Alt-f to open file menu. This is a Windows specific convention that many applications bring to linux too. I still prefer Sublime Text for its user interface.
by gdotdesign
1 subcomments
- I'm still waiting to evaluate Zed because I work with/on my programming language which has LSP Semantic Highlighting, but Zed doesn't https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/39539 once it's merged I'll give it a go because it looks like a modern Sublime Text (which I still use). I just wish they would focus on basic editor features instead of adding AI and other non-related features.
- One of my favorite features with zed is the really nice keyboard and window management shortcuts. I can have my terminal just be another tab, easily switch between em and the file explorer
But to the authors note, one might find a single behavior in zed really annoying. Mine is how zed appends a new line at the end of files on save. Used to be able to disable this in settings but an update broke that long ago. Maybe some can tell me its fixed but seems like I’ll need to journey down git hub issue fix but did not find one while back.
- I am not much of a programmer only fool around a bit for fun and occasional profit. I find Helix to be very good for coding. Compared to Neovim, I could get LSPs going for go, c without any effort. Only thing is I haven't figured out much of debugging which I guess is must have for a serious coder. My favorite is printf and is enough for me across go, awk, c , Excel VBA macros and JS!
- Zed feels way snappier to me than VSCode and I love the vim mode too.
by RamblingCTO
0 subcomment
- Also made the same switch and very happy. Sometimes Zed (I guess due to claude code?) would hog my CPU, but that's fine by me. Works very well. Had one crash so far due to CC.
by unethical_ban
1 subcomments
- Does anyone else have issues wrapping their head around the UI and configuration of VSCode? Or is this a symptom of my losing touch with how IDEs work vs. my old habit of solo coding in Vim and running scripts?
Everything is monocolored, everything feels like it's an add-on, and settings are in weird different places rendered as json or a web page feel.
Last time I used a "real" IDE was 2008, so I may be the problem here.
- Does Zed still have an unremovable login button right in the window title? It’s been a constant eyesore for me last time I’ve tried it.
- Zed also pushed their AI features hard though. When it first came out it was like "your editor, but Rust / not Electron based, so fast", but two years or so ago they were pivoting hard to being an AI editor. Nowadays, thankfully, it's there but it's not intrusive.
The author also mentions missing the sidebar with files but it's one of the icons at the bottom left.
- Golly
I have been using Emacs since 1989. I have seen so many editors come and go, and Emacs was never the best, but it was always good. And it has stuck to its (very broad) knitting.
There are AI tools I can incorporate into Emacs, and one day I might. But I have so much choice, it gets distressing
Articles like this remind me why I keep loyal....
- An easy switch for an individual, for an organization the ecosystem is typically too much to give up. Hopefully this changes in a few years.
by capitanazo77
0 subcomment
- I'd love to read articles like "I didn't switch editors because mine is perfect, neovim btw"
- I want to switch to Zed from JetBrains but I am too used to [1] and it seems no other editor besides JetBrains IDEs seem too interested in implementing it the way JetBrains does.
1 - https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7721
- I tried moving from Cursor to Zed but the LLM integration still seems very early. Cursor is very far ahead in terms of DX and the various models/tokens you get is very reasonable price wise. Zed would be a good half-way point for the people using terminal LLM CLIs and prefer the more structured approach rather than a deep IDE integration.
- I just love how Zed is used to develop Zed. For this reason I'm thinking it could emerge as the Rust editor of choice.
by wateralien
0 subcomment
- I also switched my editor to Zed recently, from Cursor, and brought my custom theme along too: https://zed-themes.com/themes/ldw3jOWS7edS-gifHtZg9?name=Dar...
- i never understood why people like vscode. visual studio used to be great back in the day because it was really thoughtfully designed and everything was nicely integrated. vscode always felt like a hodgepodge of random features and extensions that don't really fit together all that well at all.
- Just tried this out for the first time and found their implementation of the "Outline Panel" (Ctrl+Shift+B) to be very useful, at least for the C++ code base I tried it with.
- Switched to Zed from Webstorm. Only issue is Zed has no vertical tab support. Did create a PR but it got rejected as it does not align with their milestones. Well, using it by monkeypatching the dev build after every upstream sync.
by btbuildem
3 subcomments
- Zed is great and lightweight, one thing that stops me from it becoming my daily driver is the weak git integration (specifically, the lack of a history tree). From what I understand, eventually those features will get there.
- NeoVim, Yazi, and Tmux are my go-to tools. When I need AI and Agents, I create multiple instances of Claude Code or Codex. However, I don’t let them interfere with my workflow if I don’t need them.
- To do this, I had to switch to Rust first which means I had to change my entire career. I love to switch to linux desktop now but before that I'm gonna need to clear some time. Which probably means I have to retire?
- I switched from VSCode back to Sublime Text lol. If I want AI involved I use claude-code or other cli in a terminal. Its been nicer and less distracting
by throw-12-16
0 subcomment
- VSCode's plugin architecture is a security nightmare and an extremely juicy target for supply chain attacks.
Does Zed address this in any meaningful way?
- Sadly momentum scrolling doesn't work on Zed for Linux. This is a big reason I haven't jumped ship.
It's also a reason I still use Firefox based browsers instead of chromium based browsers.
by coopykins
1 subcomments
- Vs code became unusable on a not so big monorepo on a MacBook Pro M4, which is concerning. Zed has been much smoother, even there are a couple of extensions or features that I miss.
- I also recently made the jump from VSCode to Zed on my personal laptop. I've never thought VSCode to be slow, but I have appreciated the responsiveness of Zed.
by globalnode
0 subcomment
- vscode's become a laggy mess (admittedly only when i have 2 games open in the background, but c'mon!). i'll give zed a try.
- I like zed. I just wish they’d support running multiple agents at once + chat history. If they did, I’d pay for zed just to support them.
by _mrinalwadhwa_
0 subcomment
- I love the minimalism and speed of Zed.
The Zed Agent is exceptional!
It doesn't easily allow for parallel work like Claude Code in a Terminal but for a single session it is just as good plus it makes it really easy to switch between models. I also find it super useful when I'm working on our large monorepo, the minimal and fast ui makes it super easy to pull in the right context of folders, files, snippets etc to help the Agent.
- I use Zed only for million line json log dumps. Everything else stuggles to scroll or ctrl+f but those are instant in Zed.
- Zed is nice. When I need AI features I use it. Otherwise I am using Neovim.
by giancarlostoro
0 subcomment
- This yeah I'm switching from JetBrains to Zed after being with them nearly 10 years now. I just can't justify my yearly subscription now that they've bundled AI that I can't justify paying for if I can just use Claude Code directly. At least Zed has richer Claude Code integration than JetBrains. If I even bother to renew it will be only if they announce something worth my while.
- I am finding that AI assisted coding is greatly reducing my interest and reliance on "IDE" type features.
A back and forth "conversation" with Gemini with extreme amounts of copying/pasting/executing in Geany (a relatively simple editor) is now faster than whatever I was trying to do before, hopping between emacs and vim and IDES, etc.
by lifetimerubyist
0 subcomment
- I switched from VSCode to Zed and clicked the "disable AI" button so gd fast. Bliss.
- For such an incomplete product, Zed sure is popular among devs. I guess they love to waste time working with a tool missing key features. I can forgive all that but Zed has one of the worst UIs I’ve experienced in a long time.
- No CMake support (VSCode, emacs, nvim all have it).
by brianzelip
0 subcomment
- Here's a good, 1.5 year old podcast interview with the Zed founder, https://shows.acast.com/software-unscripted/episodes/664fde4....
- I switched Zed to neovim, I had a blast on speed and productivity.
by sabareesh
2 subcomments
- I have switched to terminal
by Octoth0rpe
0 subcomment
- I'm a very early Zed adopter, and have gotten much more confident in it in the last 6 months mainly because of their AI plans. Note that my strongly positive opinion on this actually has very little to due with the _utility_ of their ai functionality, but rather in that it appears to be a sustainable funding model.
My biggest worry with Zed since I started using it (again, early adopter) was that it would eventually need to be monetized, and likely enshittified. I'm not at all a fan of subscription software, but probably would've happily handed over $20-$50 for a one time purchase (or, maybe $20 for a 1 time purchase of a major version, with another $20 at least 3+ years out or something).
In the last year, Zed has become a sort of AI reseller. You can buy their 'pro' plan, get so many openai/anthropic/gemini tokens, and set a max budget.
For me, this is probably as good of a business model gets in terms of staving off enshittiffication. Zed can happily take a cut, I can preview a bunch of different services, and if you don't care about ai at all, well the core editor is still free. My only worry about this model is that I think I'd have a hard time getting my employer to pay for a Zed pro plan over copilot, so I think they may have trouble monetizing enterprise users with this plan.
In any case, seeing an obvious/relatively innocuous method of sustainable dev has been a tremendous relief to me (and I'm sure the Zed devs as well).
Its biggest remaining flaws IMO remain its small extension ecosystem which hopefully is simply a matter of momentum. I'm sure they could do something like provide richer examples of how to port an extension from vscode, so it's not an intractable problem.
I also continue to have concerns re: the security of their chat/cooperative editing system as it's currently difficult (impossible?) to self host, but perhaps that will also be improved.
- What country is Zed based in?
- Same. I did long time ago and won’t go back.
- Zed is basically the new Sublime.
by Heidaradar
0 subcomment
- do you use ANY AI tools like Claude Code etc? if not, why not?
- Microsoft trying to push copilot on me is just the kind of thing that would drive me to investigate alternatives. This is the same kind of annoying as all those cookie pop-ups which more and more often lead me to think "fuck it, I'm not actually that interested in this content" and close the browser.
I wish Microsoft would make software that just respects that I do not want to use copilot rather than enshittifying VSCode.
by HackerThemAll
0 subcomment
- Good luck. It cannot even preserve unsaved files across restarts.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/15098
by CuriouslyC
0 subcomment
- Agents are going to kill IDEs. A good editor is all you need.
- Don’t tell bro about SublimeText
- me 2 brother
by huflungdung
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by Kindercrusher
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by css_apologist
1 subcomments
- css syntax highlighting has been broken in vs code for years now.
how in the world is this possible in THE web dev editor?
- Obligatory Zed takes money from bigots: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
- I'd love to try Zed, but it's unusable on MacOS (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/20806 seems to be the issue).
If that ever gets fixed then I'd look at replacing Sublime (which is still my go-to for quick editing) and then see if it can handle more advanced coding (which one the rotating list of various vscode forks handle today)
- My daily driver is JetBrains. I never liked VS Code, or rather VS Codium. I use it as text editor and only when i want to open a directory i do not care about(ie. some old or foreign code) or really need syntax highlighting. I had high hopes for Zed, despite that built-in AI crap, but after I tried it I still could not configure my syntax highlighting theme, like i can in jetbrains, and for some reason going to definitions in std libraries does not work(i tested with odin). I am not fan of JetBrains and their pricing policies or their new ui changes. So i am working on my own editor/ide right now and I just wanted to mention that zed was the final nudge for me to do it.
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