Comment by mattnewton
2 days ago
I want to like zed. I keep trying it.
Ultimately though none of the rendering speed improvements or collaboration ideas make a difference to me. Then there are major feature gaps like not being able to open Jupyter notebooks or view images when connected over ssh that keep bringing me back to vscode editors where everything just works out of the box or with an extension. The developers have great craftsmanship but, they are also tasked with reimplementing a whole ecosystem.
And ultimately I think native performance just keeps being less and less of a draw as agents write most of the code and I spend time reviewing it where web tools are more than adequate.
I want craftsmanship to be important as someone who takes pride in their work and likes nice tools. I just haven’t seen evidence of it being worth it over “good-enough and iterate fast” engineering. I don’t think this vision of engineering will win out over “good enough and fast”
I think Zed has the potential to become a good editor some day, and it might be the only editor with that potential. But yes, right now VS Code is more acceptable.
> I just haven’t seen evidence of it being worth it over “good-enough and iterate fast” engineering.
Aren't things bound to come to a point where quality is a defining feature of certain products? Like take video game software for example. The amount of polish and quality that goes into good selling games is insane. There video game market is so saturated that the things that come up on top must have a high level of polish and quality put into them.
Another thought experiment: imagine thousands of company startups for creating task managers. I can't imagine that those products with strong engineering fundamentals wound't end up on top. To drive this point even further, despite the rise of AI, I don't think I've seen even one example of a longstanding company being disrupted by an "AI native" "agentic first" company.
My biggest motivation to use Zed is that it's not by Microsoft, and so far hasn't strayed from the open source path.
Feature-wise, it's been close enough for my use. Some things are missing but other things were buggier with VSCode.
> I want to like zed. I keep trying it. ... Ultimately though none of the rendering speed improvements or collaboration ideas make a difference to me.
I feel this way as well. I've tried to incorporate Zed into my workflow a few times but I keep getting blocked by 30 years of experience with Emacs. E.g. I need C-x 2 to split my window. I need C-x C-b to show me all my buffers. I need a dired mode that can behave like any ordinary buffer. Etc. etc.
Sadly the list is quite long and while Zed offers many nice things, none are as essential to me as these.
>don’t think this vision of engineering will win out over “good enough and fast”
Oh I'm sure of it. However that won't be good enough for the MBA'S. My prediction is that AI slopware is going to drive the average quality of software back down to the buggy infuriating 1000 manual workarounds sofware of the late 90's and early 00's.
Then the pendulum will swing back.