I have been using zed for quite a while now and here’s my experience / appreciation of zed. Or any dev tool that is made in a spirit of tooling, passion and preferences.
Neovim and me
I have been a long time vim / neovim user and have dabbled with many editors. Even tried developing my own but that didn’t pan out well. Initially I used vscode like everyone else. Then switched to neovim due to sheer speed and performance boost it gave over vscode. I have also always adored lua so neovim was very good experience for me. But I soon I got caught up with work and often forgot to update my config and soon I was running way behind on latest neovim features. I still really like neovim and it’s philosphy and have it on my machine.
Zed - my current daily driver
Initially I was really skeptical of zed when it was still a browser based downloadable editor. Also I am still not big on all that collabrative editing thing. But here’s the thing. It’s quite faster than vscode. Not as feature rich maybe. I often compare it with sublime. I think of it as sublime with better vim encodings. I am huge fan of their in-built keymaps that they give which fits so well with editor behaviour. Extensions are currently community maintained which is fine with me but there are lot of my favourite ones missing like wakatime ( huge bummer ), full fledged git support ( I use lazygit ), no zed mode and more that I can’t think or right now. But I can live without those things. I like the sheer no fuck around policy. It’s simple and all the shenanigans it has are searchable or just easy to use. So it’s all install and go with neovim like speed and keybinds. This was what I was looking for all along. Maybe I will change my mind in future but for now zed does it.
Novelty bias
Well I can try and explain with some logical points but that’s all useless. It’s all a matter of preference. I have deep appreciation for anyone who tries to make tools targetted for developers. Open source tools especially. So I would anyday pick a project where developers are trying really hard to give people a preference and make something authentic and unique. It’s really a small bubble to live in and well I would like to have a bigger bubble. So If I see a tool that does something which I already have a tool even then I would try it. Helix, kakoune, neovim are all smaller editor trying to find a place / preference for someone. Each carries it’s own story. Each software, each tool carrying their person type. So while we have it try and experiment and help in improving it.
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