I love the spirit of Zed. From the principles to the low-level implementation details, it all screams "good taste". It's immensely interesting as an object of study (the code is great, from GPUI all the way up).
Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.
There was a time around ST2 when it felt like everyone was using it and it could've become The Editor, then something happened and it's been left in the dust. I wasn't even aware but apparently even fourth version of ST was released, and that was in 2021.
I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?
They didn’t “solve” it, otherwise it would be a thriving editor that everyone would be using.
In reality 70% of the people I see are using Cursor (Subscription), Vscode (Free) or some JetBrains products (Subscription). I only know of some people including myself that have ST for opening large files, where performance matters.
It does, or did, use dark patterns when showing upgrade notices -- prompting you to upgrade to a version that you don't own yet, without telling you you don't own it, leaving you with an unlicensed version. I was happy to use 3 but that felt really off.
They switched to a subscription model (3 year licenses are still subscriptions), and since the release of ST4 in 2021, there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025). All other releases have been bug fixes and "improvements".
I get that developers need to make a living, but 4 years of fixing bugs in your products is probably not what I want to be paying for, at least not when that is the only thing I'm getting. Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart.
I have used ST ever since the first version replaced TextMate for my use (TM2 spent something like a decade catching up to ST2), but I've since switched to Code and Zed (mostly Zed as of late, Code on windows until Zed is ready there).
ST was great back when it was still an actively maintained product, but in recent years (ever since ST2) it has felt like it was mostly on the back burner and other editors have passed it in functionality.
As for VC funding, it has done miracles for Code to have Microsoft sponsor it (and others). Code is currently the editor to beat for anything that doesn't involve opening large files.
The problem with accepting VC money is they will eventually demand a return on their investment, which means that the forces that drive enshitification will eventually come for Zed in some form. I suspect that we'll see more and more features locked behind a paid subscription and the open core of the editor will become neglected over time.
Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.
I might HAVE to learn EMacs (prefer over Vim) because I think eventually everything else will be tainted by mandatory AI features and/or subscriptions.
Sure, but given the existence of vim/nvim, emails, visual studio code, cursor, etc the price for editors has largely been driven to zero, or at least capped by what JetBrains charges. My concerns are more this is a big bet on a different thing, not the editor (which is quite nice, even if using typescript regularly makes it balloon to 15gb of ram), making them a giant pile of money. With the editor as a free complement.
Please, tell me what it's like living in your free-as-in-freedom house,
feeding your free-as-in-freedom offspring? Eventually demanding a
return on your investment? The audacity!
Counterpoint, apparently cursor's revenue is in the 300-400 million range. So it's not wildly inconceivable that you'd do 40m profit (although I too am doubtful).
I strongly doubt that Cursor makes anywhere near 40m profit. All they're revenue is spent on tokens with the LLM vendors. I'd be surprised if they are even running at positive margin and not just subsidizing usage with the VC money.
Unsure of what the end goal is, but I expect everything AI related to be a load-leader right now and then the goal being to figure out how to drive down costs or make even more money later.
If the world is moving towards open models which are "good enough" – the main winner will be the one controlling the distribution. So if you're controlling the web browser, the editor or the OS – you are the winner.
Obviously, the risk here is very high from this perspective, since nothing guarantees anything.
Zed isn’t just a text editor. It is the only working platform for code assistants.
Neither Google nor Claude nor anyone can’t at the moment get right basic operations like file edits. Zed is flawless in co-operating with most LLM models. And not just that - also switching models during conversation and more.
I am at Zed Pro at $20 but when Zed offers $200 Max plan I will sign up right away.
I switched off of Zed's agent system onto the Claude Code CLI because I was blown away by how much better CC was.
Even with "auto edit" turned on, Zed just kept asking me for confirmation. I'd be like "hey your code has this bug", and it'd be like "you're right, and this is why. here's how you can fix it" ??? just fix it man it's your code. Maybe this is fixed now, but Claude Code never has this issue and is very good at only stopping when truly stuck (and generally for good reason!)
Changing the topic a bit, Zed's collaboration features seem really good but it's quite hard to use when nobody uses it in the first place. With VSCode, I can use the LiveShare extension and everyone on the team can just join with no fuss at all. LiveShare is likely not nearly as technically great, but the simple fact that people can use it easily makes it win hard.
Honestly it would be cool if Zed can somehow become more popular thanks to this investment. As long as it can keep its speed and technical excellence. VSCode used to be super lean and cool, but now it's just another fat IDE with unlimited bells and whistles. It feels like how Eclipse felt back in the day.
No....there is value in having many developers use your tool for daily code development. You should think if it as a lot more than a text editor as well, just like Github is a lot more than just hosted Git (also VC backed at first).
I love working in Zed. It really is a delight to use, and I think the Agentic coding integration is really well done. I'm excited to see them investing in this space more.
I understand people's concerns about VC funding, but I think building quality products takes capital. The funding is still relatively small, especially when you compare it to players like Cursor, etc. And I think Zed is a much, much better product!
Zed being OSS is a gift to the community, and I suspect DeltaDB will be as well. And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human.
Maybe you can comment on this. I saw in the Zed demo that they're using "rewrite optimized version Claude". My first thought was wondering how big the bull is going to be.
> And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human.
Hate cancel culture as much as the next techbro, but since y'all point out they're "a delightful human", it'd be interesting to see how Nathan then responds to concerns raised in some quarters: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
I think a lot of people are missing the sarcasm here. that said, I agree that its absolutely horrific. yesterday I saw a video where a girl who couldn't have been more than 9 or 10 years old carrying water was hit by an idf strike. Poor kid was basically rendered into chum. The fact taht this stuff is going on right in front of our eyes and our government is complicit in is horrific.
With so many new AI editors popping up, it feels like the Zed team is in a tough “lose/lose” spot.
If they stick to their current path—focusing on craftsmanship and letting their world-class talent build the best editor—they risk falling behind giants like Cursor. Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there) in just two years. With that kind of momentum, Cursor can now buy their way into a superior product.
On the other hand, if Zed takes more VC money, it likely means doubling down on AI in ways they clearly don’t seem eager to—but at least it would give them a fighting chance.
I really feel for this team. It couldn’t have been an easy decision, and from the few interactions I’ve had, they strike me as incredibly talented, kind, and genuine folks. I truly wish them the best.
I hadn’t thought about it that way but it’s an interesting point. The cursor folks probably have 99% of the work already done for them, for free, funded by Microsoft, probably in perpetuity.
And on top of that, since it’s essentially just vscode, it costs users almost zero effort to make the switch. It’s the perfect crime!!
I hope zed does well though. I love their blog, and all of the cool open source stuff they’ve made. I recently heard they added a “helix mode” which might be enough to get me to switch from vscode…
this is where the advances in collaboration come in; it's a way out for them because existing editors are largely stuck with git and are patching ai on top of everything.
zed came at the incredibly (un?)fortunate timing where they were just able to build a solid base before the editor wars began. their only path now is to fully maximize the few advantages they do have:
* a fresh base that is far more flexible
* really good experience with performance, design, general craftmanship
* a buzzy community and fresh/boldness that attracts vcs
for zed to truly win (at least in sequioa's eyes) they will need to completely take over vscode as the new default, and that will require a big lead when it comes to collaboration and ai
> Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there
Revenue, not profit. I’d imagine cursor loses a dollar for every 50 cents of revenue and makes it up in volume. Meanwhile JetBrains is a profitable company not beholden to the whims of outside investors.
Tbh: I think git is not the century-tool that a lot of people think it is, and we're in an era now where its decreasingly serving the needs of its users. I'm ready for deeper ground-up innovation in the space of code collaboration.
Developers don't think in terms of commits; they think in terms of Tickets and PRs. Git doesn't have any native representation of either of these things. Getting tickets into the repository is something the community has talked about for years, and Linus himself has said he wants, but it hasn't happened yet. Branches work fine enough to start a PR, but then Github, again, has to take over for comments, CI execution, even the decision on how you want the commits on that branch represented on the main branch (squash? merge? rebase? why should I care?). LFS has been years in the making. Monorepos are still weird.
Idk, I think there's capacity in the industry to take the concept of a repository back to square one and think more holistically about how we all interface with the repository. The way they talk about DeltaDB gives me hope that they'll start thinking more about this with this funding; commits just aren't a useful primitive anymore, and a repository, locally-downloaded, open source, ultratight connection between diffs, merges, communication, and automated tooling is how I want to be coding in 2030.
Totally agree. git notes might help a bit with some of those points, but what most shops need / want is something like GitLab. git itself is usually too low level.
Is IntelliJ "bad"? Aren't the reactions here overly negative?
This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view
The thing with taking VC funding is that your intention usually is not to steadily grow a sustainable product.
You take the funding so that you can outgrow the competitors and get the market faster.
All you need is the small promise of innovation in an area which is somewhat new.
At the beginning, the product is good enough and you have money to keep marketing and developing slightly faster than others. This will get you the users.
In the end, is your product at that point truly the best among competitors? It matters less, since you already have the users.
I think Zed didn’t need this one since they had a great product. Many would have been ready to pay at least a little. They could have grown slowly and see what works. With VC money take can go to completely wrong direction with giant steps and they are not noticing that unless it is too late. And then investors want returns.
Another big point was they implemented their own parsers for everything which allowed them to make nifty things - the refactor features way back in the early 10s was miles ahead of everyone else - but then LSP happened and that advantage is diminishing and becoming a liability
>IntelliJ lost the plot at the inception of CLion etc.
I was a customer for so many years. "One IDE to rule them all" and then they started cashing on more.
What are you talking about?
ReSharper came out 21 years ago 3 years after Intellij.
RubyMine came out 15 years ago. 7 years before CLion.
The days of using a separate IDE for each language are kind of over.
These very paradigms are outdated these days. vscode got it, very early. vscode works for everything. Most projects use Python/Go and JS, and out of the box vscode just works for all these languages and their tools.
DeltaDB sounds of being a >git innovation for coding itself, and would fulfill Zed's promises in Nathan Sobo's debate/discussion with Steve Yegge recently.
Seems to solve a real problem which is growing rapidly, both in the old way and in the new way ... if it can overcome _slop_ in LLM chats, and the sheer enormity of code/data ahead. Trying to picture how coherence will survive.
With claims/hype/concern floating around that >90% of code will be LLM-generated within 3-6 months, with the insinuation/tone [1] that the same amount of code will be written by humans as now ( at least at first ) but LLM code will radically grow to dilute the space ( as is happening ) ... seems like DeltaDB being done right/well is going to be do-or-die on whether coherence remains possible!
For anyone not clicking through the link: it's from 5 months ago, predicting 90% of today's code will be from LLMs.
>I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code.
They're going to keep saying it because it's a juicy sound bite and they're sales people. That doesn't make it any more true than "9 out of 10 dentists recommend our socks" or how we surely have all had flying cars for decades now.
I had a week where I embraced and went deep on ai first coding (not vibe, that'd be crazy)
The thing wrote at least 80%, so we aren't far off in this anecdotal instance. There are citizen devs who are building fun things for themselves where the AI does 100%
It made me realize these things are more capable than I knew, though they still do dumb stuff reliably. But, it is easy to undo those changes, so the productivity boost remains
for those who just caught the headline, the real gem here isn't the investment, but what zed's doing different: rather than using git for version control, they're announcing deltadb which incrementally stores all changes as crdt [1] while being interopable with git.
this feels pretty important; git is definitely not the right primitive for version control with ai and that pain is obvious with existing solutions. zed seems to be going all in on collaboration with realtime, git, and now something in between and it'll be interesting to see where they end up-to me three solutions feels overcomplicated but that may be necessary given how teams work now.
Ehh Zed tried to push the collaborative editing before the AI hype was thing (that blog post is from 2022), and seemingly everyone outside of Zed developers promptly ignored the idea.
The Zed developers quickly refocused on milking the AI cow.
I'll argue git is plenty good, and there are a lot of people who don't understand it very well. The ones talking about Github PRs as if they were related to Git in any way most definitely don't.
It's funny how often people buy into the marketing and say "blazing fast" without actually questioning it. FWIW, I still prefer Zed because its LSP integration and vim mode are better than Sublime's.
I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code.
The modern Sublime Text is Sublime Text. There is way too much "extra" in Zed to compare it. If anything, it's a new IntelliJ.
This is accurate. I came over from Sublime Text because it had become laggy over >5 running instances, and native LLM integration. Even VS Code doesn't actually have that... where everything is an extension versus seamlessly/perfectly fitting
As mentioned in other comments, it actually outperforms window management in general in many/most cases. Radically flexible and almost never gets in the way
Just to clarify: I'm not saying I doubt they are the fastest, I don't know and I don't care. What I do care is that a company (a VC backed one specially) that markets their product like that follows the statement with proof, otherwise we should call it BS
I don't know what's DeltaDB, but if it will be able to show when a commit is simultaneously a refactoring and a change of code being refactored (moved into another module) – I would love to see that! At the moment if you refactor you punish the people reviewing the code, which reverses the motivation for cleaning things up.
Not sure what this guess is based on. Would that be a guess for git also, if mentioned by a company versus an individual?
My read was that they are pulling a Linus Torvalds with the Linux->Git move where both are innovations on their own, but work great together ( without dystopian universe instantiation )
zed is just on the hype train, obviously very talented people, they are thinking hard about LLMs but I'm not really sure where they are going, their pivot is probably going to be more interesting...
Sounds like a noble goal.. but I'm skeptical. I normally don't care about every single edit I've done, and don't want to store them and certainly don't want to see other people's character level edits.
Also how on earth do you handle conflicts?
This sounds most similar to IntelliJ's local history tracking, but that is local only which makes sense.
Still, more IDEs is always good so I wish them luck and will wait and see. (As with Zed - I keep trying it but it's still very alpha quality so I always end up back in VSCode.)
Nothing since then really recaptured what I personally liked about GWave or let me use their tool in similar ways to how I used it. YMMV, of course, more so than most of my comments.
The vision sounds interesting but I think if they have two challenges they will need to overcome to compete in the IDE space
1) Their LLM integration needs to be at the quality of Cursor and VSCode to pull people away from those
2) Reduced friction to move over (keyboard shortcuts, common plugins, etc)
I think the Zed team is perfectly capable of winning. The bigger risk would be them trying to tackle fancy stuff before making sure the basics are good enough to get developers to switch.
They need to build up a deep understanding of why folks are sticking to Cursor/VSCode and not swapping over.
P.S. I would love for Zed to win in the market because I'm sick of slow software and it's refreshing to finally see an intense focus on performance.
I customized the hell out of my keybindings. I might be in the minority though! I was trying to give examples of (stupid) little points of friction that might prevent someone from taking the leap.
I think they're tackling a real problem that is revealing itself via agentic coding, and I think they've positioned themselves in an interesting spot.
I'd be interested to know how much data DeltaDB accumulates over time - because the level of granularity is so high - and are they going to want to use that data as training data?
Well done I suppose to the Zed founders as they're on the Sequoia gravy train now. But as others have noted this puts an inevitable clock on the enshittification no matter how hard the team crosses their heart and truly believes otherwise (or not, I mean maybe this IS the gameplan).
Hopefully Zedless [0] gets some community steam behind it.
I love Zed and I am glad they are getting funded. This allows them to truly polish both the remote collab and the AI features and compete with Cursor and friends.
The product has improved so much in the last year, it's been a pleasure to use and get excited about new features.
While i am sure this sounds insane i had to drop zed due to lack of the “last file dif” button gitlens vscode plugin provides.
It is a godsend on quickly debugging the why of things. If anyone knows how to replicate the same functionality with the same number of clicks in zed, id happily switch back to it.
I am not familiar with gitlens so not sure how close this gets you but you should be able to replicate the functionality you need from the git CLI and some light scripting. This can be a jumping off point maybe. If you want to view the diff using the zed diff viewer, you can do so using `zed --diff`, as demonstrated in this GitHub discussion: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/33503#disc...
VC backing apparently has the power to move the standard from "hodge-podge 800-line commit must have an issue key" to "track every damn interaction and back and forth".
That and the ever-trailing "especially now with AI".
Is anyone actually using the collaboration features? Zed is my daily editor and I love it, but I've never touched the collaboration features, which is their "USP" when raising cash.
Zed defaults don't seem to capture the full value of what it offers. For instance, edit predictions via tab completion are documented yet I've never experienced them. I need better settings, I guess.
On the bottom right, there is a button looks like magic emoji (). Click that and it will show general AI settings. You can choose _Eager-Completion_ rather than trigger-based one.
As a user, most IDEs/Editors currently show in _eager_ way. For example, VSCode by default shows ghost-text as well as Amazon Q extension too. Usually disabling those disables the AI completion completely.
Meanwhile I like Zed's approach that you can trigger completions with Alt+Space, not burning through your "tokens" in free-tiers. They also provide a free-tier completions, as well as _next-edit suggestions_.
*) Next-edit suggestions: When you edit some piece of code repeatedly, it suggest to do similar on the next few instances, with context awareness, quite nice feature saving several keystrokes every single time.
Not a good move. Evernote went that path and then turned an otherwise very useful app into a VC bet that forced the founders to pivot the app into something nobody wanted. Same happened to Soundcloud.
I wanted to try out Zed. It looked fine on my laptop screen but as soon as I tried it on a 1440p monitor, the font and icon rendering fall completely flat and are a blurry mess. If your product is a text editor focused on code, your font rendering better be *top of class*.
All of this data is valuable for the Zed team and
could easily be compiled into reports for management
about developer's individual progress and productivity.
I am certain the team will say that is not on the roadmap,
but for me, it still sounds like a possible leak in the
future.
Or maybe a semi draconian "mandatory" extension your
bosses will demand installed.
If you need a simple text editor without DeltaDB bloat, see CudaText. No so fast drawing speed because it does not use GPU. But drawing speed is not the decision factor for many tasks of text work.
Zed has better drawing speed. But DeltaDB bloat, AI bloat, telemetry, need of modern videocard.
From the description it seems my deveopment experience would
become a lot more crowded and furstraiting.
All the different actors sharing a live coding experience.
I feel my focus will become fragmented like someone poking
my shoulder frequently.
Hopefullly intended use is to schedule a time for it.
deltadb sounds interesting. AI editors should look into letting you operate on multiple git branches simultaneously, like isolated browser tabs where the AI gen doesn't contaminate the other.
One of the reasons I find LLMs don't increase productivity much is that I can't switch branches to multitask while it's processing. Context switching isn't always useful but there's still lots of opportunities for rapidly experimenting or ticking off a couple small bugs quickly while AI takes the first pass on something more complicated.
Each "branch tab" could have a sort of TODO list or plan.
I have been running multiple instances of the Codex CLI tool in several terminals to do different stuff. You can even checkout the repo several times, write the todo to a file (or ask the agent to do so), if you need.
I have trouble imagining a world where I will ever pay for this. Unless it becomes as feature rich and powerful as an IDE like PyCharm, it’s not compelling.
Exciting ideas! I'll take a look at this again in several years when they aren't trying to rebuild everything from the ground up from first principles.
I do like Zed very much. Fast, good UI, decent set of features.
Still missing some key features to get parity for python with PyCharm, and git features need more love, but pace of development has been blistering. Kudos to the team for building something really solid.
I don't use the agentic stuff though -- I have a ClaudeMax subscription and use CC or more recently opencode (the only non-CC that works with a ClaudeMax sub); I don't want to pay another sub for Zed and the free model use that comes with Zed runs out very quickly (understandably so, no complaints there). If I could connect my ClaudeMax sub to it then I'd maybe use it, though CC and opencode are pretty good.
The code completion is decent and I especially like the "subtle" mode saves a lot of backspacing (no, dammit, that's not what I wanted!).
I understand Zed needs to make money, but VC backed, especially Sequoia, doesn't inspire any love, tbh. I don't care what platitudes VCs say about independence their love for the product etc., they need their 10x return and if it means enshittification, so be it, they don't really care.
I don't know why you are being downvoted. This is a real issue and a legitimate concern to have as a user of this software. I feel the same way (never used Zed in the first place because they are VC backed, but this would have been the final straw for me, too).
Because dragging politics into things is fucking obnoxious. It's off-topic, it gets people riled up so they are arguing about politics instead of having substantive discussion, and it degrades the community by threatening to destroy the focus on tech in favor of political slap fights. In short, going out of your way to bring up politics is being a jerk, and people don't appreciate that.
That brings them to 120x the amount of money I've invested in the same problem, and still they're only just announcing that they're intending to start trying to do something that I've already done better
It's apparently this but I can't really say that I get it: https://bablr.org
He seems to be saying he spent $350k making this. I guess it's some tooling for writing parsers.
He has this to say about Zed:
> Zed: Founded by Atom’s dev team, Zed was the rewrite that Atom always wanted to be able to do but couldn’t when Microsoft bought Github and made the executive decision to kill a product it might otherwise have had to compete with. Unfortunately Zed decided to do that rewrite in Rust. This has slowed their iteration speed, caused much of their dev effort to go to cross-platform support instead of innovation, cut them off from being able to offer their experience on the web, severely limited their hackability, and generally made theirs a niche tool for enthusiasts. What’s worse, their reliance on LSP — a product which believes that the presentation layer should be the primary abstraction layer — means their product is forever doomed to look like a VSCode knock-off. [1]
I love the spirit of Zed. From the principles to the low-level implementation details, it all screams "good taste". It's immensely interesting as an object of study (the code is great, from GPUI all the way up).
Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.
Sublime Text solved this 17 years ago with the 40-year-old shareware model.
It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.
There was a time around ST2 when it felt like everyone was using it and it could've become The Editor, then something happened and it's been left in the dust. I wasn't even aware but apparently even fourth version of ST was released, and that was in 2021.
I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?
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They didn’t “solve” it, otherwise it would be a thriving editor that everyone would be using.
In reality 70% of the people I see are using Cursor (Subscription), Vscode (Free) or some JetBrains products (Subscription). I only know of some people including myself that have ST for opening large files, where performance matters.
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It does, or did, use dark patterns when showing upgrade notices -- prompting you to upgrade to a version that you don't own yet, without telling you you don't own it, leaving you with an unlicensed version. I was happy to use 3 but that felt really off.
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How is Sublime faster?
ST is also all but dead.
They switched to a subscription model (3 year licenses are still subscriptions), and since the release of ST4 in 2021, there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025). All other releases have been bug fixes and "improvements".
I get that developers need to make a living, but 4 years of fixing bugs in your products is probably not what I want to be paying for, at least not when that is the only thing I'm getting. Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart.
I have used ST ever since the first version replaced TextMate for my use (TM2 spent something like a decade catching up to ST2), but I've since switched to Code and Zed (mostly Zed as of late, Code on windows until Zed is ready there).
ST was great back when it was still an actively maintained product, but in recent years (ever since ST2) it has felt like it was mostly on the back burner and other editors have passed it in functionality.
As for VC funding, it has done miracles for Code to have Microsoft sponsor it (and others). Code is currently the editor to beat for anything that doesn't involve opening large files.
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Zed works on Linux/Win/MacOS. I'm also frankly skeptical that ST feels that much faster, Zed is pretty darn fast, far faster than any Electron app.
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The problem with accepting VC money is they will eventually demand a return on their investment, which means that the forces that drive enshitification will eventually come for Zed in some form. I suspect that we'll see more and more features locked behind a paid subscription and the open core of the editor will become neglected over time.
Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.
I might HAVE to learn EMacs (prefer over Vim) because I think eventually everything else will be tainted by mandatory AI features and/or subscriptions.
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Sure, but given the existence of vim/nvim, emails, visual studio code, cursor, etc the price for editors has largely been driven to zero, or at least capped by what JetBrains charges. My concerns are more this is a big bet on a different thing, not the editor (which is quite nice, even if using typescript regularly makes it balloon to 15gb of ram), making them a giant pile of money. With the editor as a free complement.
Note to Zed: I prefer paid products to enshittened ones.
Please please please, get paid rather than holding on too tightly to making things free forcing future enshittening.
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I mean, eventually, sure. It took Uber around 15 years to get to profitability. ChatGPT came out in 2022, so get your predictions for 2037 in now.
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Please, tell me what it's like living in your free-as-in-freedom house, feeding your free-as-in-freedom offspring? Eventually demanding a return on your investment? The audacity!
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Yup, I was playing around with Zed and kind of liked it, and even debated switching over. But this kills it for me.
It was a cool idea while it lasted, I hope other editors embrace the learnings once zed is gone.
I doubt anyone will follow this.
1. Everyone else is building on Electron.
2. People still sleep on or dunk on Rust. There's a great deal of negativity here on HN for the language.
3. There's only so much Rust talent out there.
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Same. Especially not having been familiar with who Sequoia is. Altman, Huang, Musk, etc.
What do you mean by that list? They pretty much have every single big tech company in their portfolio.
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It does not support Monokai because of reasons. That does not scream good taste to me. It screams something different.
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> "I don't think an editor should be VC backed"
it's a software company. they sell software.
Then sell software, not equity
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I'm willing to accept this claim:
- You can make money when your product is a text editor.
I am very skeptical of these claims:
- When your product is a text editor, $42 million in capital can be effectively deployed to make meaningful improvements to your product.
- When your product is a text editor, your lifetime inflation-adjusted profit will eventually exceed $42 million.
Sequoia is apparently not so skeptical, and willing to put the money on the table. That must have been a truly extraordinary pitch deck...
> Sequoia is apparently not so skeptical, and willing to put the money on the table. That must have been a truly extraordinary pitch deck...
They invested like $200 million in FTX and had a glowing article about SBF about mile long on their website.
The big VC firms are by no means immune from just doing plainly stupid things.
Right now all the hype around anything even at the periphery of "AI" is enabling a lot of similar stupidity.
Counterpoint, apparently cursor's revenue is in the 300-400 million range. So it's not wildly inconceivable that you'd do 40m profit (although I too am doubtful).
I strongly doubt that Cursor makes anywhere near 40m profit. All they're revenue is spent on tokens with the LLM vendors. I'd be surprised if they are even running at positive margin and not just subsidizing usage with the VC money.
Unsure of what the end goal is, but I expect everything AI related to be a load-leader right now and then the goal being to figure out how to drive down costs or make even more money later.
Maybe that's what Sequioa thinks too...
how much profit does Cursor generate on that revenue?
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If the world is moving towards open models which are "good enough" – the main winner will be the one controlling the distribution. So if you're controlling the web browser, the editor or the OS – you are the winner.
Obviously, the risk here is very high from this perspective, since nothing guarantees anything.
Zed isn’t just a text editor. It is the only working platform for code assistants.
Neither Google nor Claude nor anyone can’t at the moment get right basic operations like file edits. Zed is flawless in co-operating with most LLM models. And not just that - also switching models during conversation and more.
I am at Zed Pro at $20 but when Zed offers $200 Max plan I will sign up right away.
I switched off of Zed's agent system onto the Claude Code CLI because I was blown away by how much better CC was.
Even with "auto edit" turned on, Zed just kept asking me for confirmation. I'd be like "hey your code has this bug", and it'd be like "you're right, and this is why. here's how you can fix it" ??? just fix it man it's your code. Maybe this is fixed now, but Claude Code never has this issue and is very good at only stopping when truly stuck (and generally for good reason!)
Changing the topic a bit, Zed's collaboration features seem really good but it's quite hard to use when nobody uses it in the first place. With VSCode, I can use the LiveShare extension and everyone on the team can just join with no fuss at all. LiveShare is likely not nearly as technically great, but the simple fact that people can use it easily makes it win hard.
Honestly it would be cool if Zed can somehow become more popular thanks to this investment. As long as it can keep its speed and technical excellence. VSCode used to be super lean and cool, but now it's just another fat IDE with unlimited bells and whistles. It feels like how Eclipse felt back in the day.
How does this compare to the rust rover with Junie? it is definitely well integrated for code edits and iterations with the IDE
No....there is value in having many developers use your tool for daily code development. You should think if it as a lot more than a text editor as well, just like Github is a lot more than just hosted Git (also VC backed at first).
They don’t sell an editor, they sell editing.
What they are really selling is an AI service subscription.
They are giving out the actual text editor for free.
AI text editor
I love working in Zed. It really is a delight to use, and I think the Agentic coding integration is really well done. I'm excited to see them investing in this space more.
I understand people's concerns about VC funding, but I think building quality products takes capital. The funding is still relatively small, especially when you compare it to players like Cursor, etc. And I think Zed is a much, much better product!
Zed being OSS is a gift to the community, and I suspect DeltaDB will be as well. And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human.
Congrats, Zed!
> I understand people's concerns about VC funding, but I think building quality products takes capital.
When VC funding comes in it stops being about building any products, because the company itself becomes a product.
Maybe you can comment on this. I saw in the Zed demo that they're using "rewrite optimized version Claude". My first thought was wondering how big the bull is going to be.
> And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human.
Hate cancel culture as much as the next techbro, but since y'all point out they're "a delightful human", it'd be interesting to see how Nathan then responds to concerns raised in some quarters: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
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I think a lot of people are missing the sarcasm here. that said, I agree that its absolutely horrific. yesterday I saw a video where a girl who couldn't have been more than 9 or 10 years old carrying water was hit by an idf strike. Poor kid was basically rendered into chum. The fact taht this stuff is going on right in front of our eyes and our government is complicit in is horrific.
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With so many new AI editors popping up, it feels like the Zed team is in a tough “lose/lose” spot.
If they stick to their current path—focusing on craftsmanship and letting their world-class talent build the best editor—they risk falling behind giants like Cursor. Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there) in just two years. With that kind of momentum, Cursor can now buy their way into a superior product.
On the other hand, if Zed takes more VC money, it likely means doubling down on AI in ways they clearly don’t seem eager to—but at least it would give them a fighting chance.
I really feel for this team. It couldn’t have been an easy decision, and from the few interactions I’ve had, they strike me as incredibly talented, kind, and genuine folks. I truly wish them the best.
I hadn’t thought about it that way but it’s an interesting point. The cursor folks probably have 99% of the work already done for them, for free, funded by Microsoft, probably in perpetuity.
And on top of that, since it’s essentially just vscode, it costs users almost zero effort to make the switch. It’s the perfect crime!!
I hope zed does well though. I love their blog, and all of the cool open source stuff they’ve made. I recently heard they added a “helix mode” which might be enough to get me to switch from vscode…
this is where the advances in collaboration come in; it's a way out for them because existing editors are largely stuck with git and are patching ai on top of everything.
zed came at the incredibly (un?)fortunate timing where they were just able to build a solid base before the editor wars began. their only path now is to fully maximize the few advantages they do have:
* a fresh base that is far more flexible
* really good experience with performance, design, general craftmanship
* a buzzy community and fresh/boldness that attracts vcs
for zed to truly win (at least in sequioa's eyes) they will need to completely take over vscode as the new default, and that will require a big lead when it comes to collaboration and ai
> Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there
Revenue, not profit. I’d imagine cursor loses a dollar for every 50 cents of revenue and makes it up in volume. Meanwhile JetBrains is a profitable company not beholden to the whims of outside investors.
I know which I’d rather work for…
Related ongoing threads:
Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964366
Tbh: I think git is not the century-tool that a lot of people think it is, and we're in an era now where its decreasingly serving the needs of its users. I'm ready for deeper ground-up innovation in the space of code collaboration.
Developers don't think in terms of commits; they think in terms of Tickets and PRs. Git doesn't have any native representation of either of these things. Getting tickets into the repository is something the community has talked about for years, and Linus himself has said he wants, but it hasn't happened yet. Branches work fine enough to start a PR, but then Github, again, has to take over for comments, CI execution, even the decision on how you want the commits on that branch represented on the main branch (squash? merge? rebase? why should I care?). LFS has been years in the making. Monorepos are still weird.
Idk, I think there's capacity in the industry to take the concept of a repository back to square one and think more holistically about how we all interface with the repository. The way they talk about DeltaDB gives me hope that they'll start thinking more about this with this funding; commits just aren't a useful primitive anymore, and a repository, locally-downloaded, open source, ultratight connection between diffs, merges, communication, and automated tooling is how I want to be coding in 2030.
Totally agree. git notes might help a bit with some of those points, but what most shops need / want is something like GitLab. git itself is usually too low level.
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Whether this is good or bad for Zed remains to be seen.
I wonder though what the play is here for Sequoia - like all VCs they’re looking for the possibility of a huge return.
I don’t see how “just” an editor (even with paying users) can generate a 10x return. So what is the larger vision here?
JetBrains would be a good case study. They also arguably have a lot more IP.
Is IntelliJ "bad"? Aren't the reactions here overly negative?
This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view
Not many people are willing to pay ~$300/year for an IDE. And Intellij didn't take any VC funding.
So at some point Zed will likely need to pursue monetization more aggressively than IntelliJ does now.
The thing with taking VC funding is that your intention usually is not to steadily grow a sustainable product.
You take the funding so that you can outgrow the competitors and get the market faster. All you need is the small promise of innovation in an area which is somewhat new. At the beginning, the product is good enough and you have money to keep marketing and developing slightly faster than others. This will get you the users.
In the end, is your product at that point truly the best among competitors? It matters less, since you already have the users.
I think Zed didn’t need this one since they had a great product. Many would have been ready to pay at least a little. They could have grown slowly and see what works. With VC money take can go to completely wrong direction with giant steps and they are not noticing that unless it is too late. And then investors want returns.
Cursor costs $240 per year and loads of people are paying for it
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IntelliJ has always been extremely slow for me, even on my beefed up mobile workstation for work.
It’s refreshing to see an editor that’s built with performance as a priority.
IntelliJ lost the plot at the inception of CLion etc.
I was a customer for so many years. "One IDE to rule them all" and then they started cashing on more.
Progress was down to a crawl, performance down the shitter and bug reports go unnoticed for 2+ years.
VSCode poops on IntelliJ these days for everything but the UX; but with enough modding, it can be very close.
Another big point was they implemented their own parsers for everything which allowed them to make nifty things - the refactor features way back in the early 10s was miles ahead of everyone else - but then LSP happened and that advantage is diminishing and becoming a liability
>IntelliJ lost the plot at the inception of CLion etc. I was a customer for so many years. "One IDE to rule them all" and then they started cashing on more.
What are you talking about?
ReSharper came out 21 years ago 3 years after Intellij. RubyMine came out 15 years ago. 7 years before CLion.
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>>Is IntelliJ "bad"?
The days of using a separate IDE for each language are kind of over.
These very paradigms are outdated these days. vscode got it, very early. vscode works for everything. Most projects use Python/Go and JS, and out of the box vscode just works for all these languages and their tools.
> vscode works for everything.
IntelliJ did that before Atom even had ‘git init’ run on it.
VC funding and self funded are totally different beast. Self funded are organic and they can follow their own vision , not VC's vision.
Ever since the UI redesign they've lost the plot a bit.
Counterpoint: the updated UI looks and works great, and their software has never felt higher quality.
DeltaDB sounds of being a >git innovation for coding itself, and would fulfill Zed's promises in Nathan Sobo's debate/discussion with Steve Yegge recently.
Seems to solve a real problem which is growing rapidly, both in the old way and in the new way ... if it can overcome _slop_ in LLM chats, and the sheer enormity of code/data ahead. Trying to picture how coherence will survive.
With claims/hype/concern floating around that >90% of code will be LLM-generated within 3-6 months, with the insinuation/tone [1] that the same amount of code will be written by humans as now ( at least at first ) but LLM code will radically grow to dilute the space ( as is happening ) ... seems like DeltaDB being done right/well is going to be do-or-die on whether coherence remains possible!
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...
For anyone not clicking through the link: it's from 5 months ago, predicting 90% of today's code will be from LLMs.
>I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code.
They're going to keep saying it because it's a juicy sound bite and they're sales people. That doesn't make it any more true than "9 out of 10 dentists recommend our socks" or how we surely have all had flying cars for decades now.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...
https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...
By sheer volume, that 90% number might be right.
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I had a week where I embraced and went deep on ai first coding (not vibe, that'd be crazy)
The thing wrote at least 80%, so we aren't far off in this anecdotal instance. There are citizen devs who are building fun things for themselves where the AI does 100%
It made me realize these things are more capable than I knew, though they still do dumb stuff reliably. But, it is easy to undo those changes, so the productivity boost remains
Could you link to the Sobo/Yegge debate? Is it this? https://youtu.be/j2goZBL156Q?si=S1A2XO_HxL7fpeVU
The problem I see is the VC involvement...
VCs operate from the goal of xtreme high user market share as the problem..
As frameworks get better, the audience using the IDE changes...
Both are misaligned before even meeting and it will get worse once VC money control is added.
My bias, I am a flutter framework user and MS VSCode user.
for those who just caught the headline, the real gem here isn't the investment, but what zed's doing different: rather than using git for version control, they're announcing deltadb which incrementally stores all changes as crdt [1] while being interopable with git.
this feels pretty important; git is definitely not the right primitive for version control with ai and that pain is obvious with existing solutions. zed seems to be going all in on collaboration with realtime, git, and now something in between and it'll be interesting to see where they end up-to me three solutions feels overcomplicated but that may be necessary given how teams work now.
- [1]: https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
Ehh Zed tried to push the collaborative editing before the AI hype was thing (that blog post is from 2022), and seemingly everyone outside of Zed developers promptly ignored the idea.
The Zed developers quickly refocused on milking the AI cow.
I'll argue git is plenty good, and there are a lot of people who don't understand it very well. The ones talking about Github PRs as if they were related to Git in any way most definitely don't.
Have they fixed the big/feature where it insists on downloading entire distributions of Node.js for running it's language server functionality?
This is basically my main gripe with Zed atm — it's very keen to autodownload and execute binaries.
I have a light fork that tries to nullify this, but I don't think I've managed to catch all the instances.
Other than that, it's a very nice editor in my opinion.
Easy fix:
{ "server_url": "", }
I comment out that JSONC line periodically when I feel like cherry-picking updates
> it's very keen to autodownload and execute binaries.
I hate this pattern in software so much.
That is the great thing about Zed. Stuff just works.
That's not great at all. It's not acceptable to "just work" by downloading and running third party software without asking the user.
> we've been building the world's fastest IDE
Any data to backup this?
Well, last year, Nikita Tonsky measured it and it did worse than Sublime: https://mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/112146684329230663
It's funny how often people buy into the marketing and say "blazing fast" without actually questioning it. FWIW, I still prefer Zed because its LSP integration and vim mode are better than Sublime's.
It's commendable to try and challenge Sublime, the undisputed performance champion in GUI text editing, but making false claims is a massive red flag.
I know it probably didn't, but I wonder if part of Sequoia's decision to invest had anything to do with these false claims?
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Yes if a software markets itself like this without backing up I smell BS.
Like any company now is "global leader in X market".
You can try it out. I would say it’s aiming to be a more modern Sublime Text, which is a win to be considered in the same category imo.
I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code.
The modern Sublime Text is Sublime Text. There is way too much "extra" in Zed to compare it. If anything, it's a new IntelliJ.
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This is accurate. I came over from Sublime Text because it had become laggy over >5 running instances, and native LLM integration. Even VS Code doesn't actually have that... where everything is an extension versus seamlessly/perfectly fitting
As mentioned in other comments, it actually outperforms window management in general in many/most cases. Radically flexible and almost never gets in the way
Just to clarify: I'm not saying I doubt they are the fastest, I don't know and I don't care. What I do care is that a company (a VC backed one specially) that markets their product like that follows the statement with proof, otherwise we should call it BS
Oh well, back to Sublime Text.
RIP Zed, you had a good run.
Met the CEO of Zed. Very humble and deeply technical. Glad to see they're doing well!
I don't know what's DeltaDB, but if it will be able to show when a commit is simultaneously a refactoring and a change of code being refactored (moved into another module) – I would love to see that! At the moment if you refactor you punish the people reviewing the code, which reverses the motivation for cleaning things up.
> To make this possible, we're building DeltaDB: a new kind of version control that tracks every operation, not just commits.
Let me guess: DeltaDB is free to use as long as we host your data and have free range on training AI based on your editor interactions.
Not sure what this guess is based on. Would that be a guess for git also, if mentioned by a company versus an individual?
My read was that they are pulling a Linus Torvalds with the Linux->Git move where both are innovations on their own, but work great together ( without dystopian universe instantiation )
CRDTs mentioned: https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
Definitely sounds very eerie. Luckily there are open source solutions that do just this with no AI integration:
https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin
how is atuin doing what deltaDB does?
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this doesn't seem related to the above post
that said atuin is excellent
zed is just on the hype train, obviously very talented people, they are thinking hard about LLMs but I'm not really sure where they are going, their pivot is probably going to be more interesting...
Data harvesting and non-ownership.
The beginning of the end.
You know where this goes.
Sounds like a noble goal.. but I'm skeptical. I normally don't care about every single edit I've done, and don't want to store them and certainly don't want to see other people's character level edits.
Also how on earth do you handle conflicts?
This sounds most similar to IntelliJ's local history tracking, but that is local only which makes sense.
Still, more IDEs is always good so I wish them luck and will wait and see. (As with Zed - I keep trying it but it's still very alpha quality so I always end up back in VSCode.)
What on earth do they need this kind of money for?
feels like we are giving up privacy for productivity.
wouldn’t be the first time a massive investment from someone like sequoia sparks the death of a previously great tool/service
Yea, this announcement makes it less likely I will try Zed
I don't want chat with coworkers in my IDE, nor do I feel the pains they describe with conversations spread between tools. It's not a top 5 problem
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That's true. Sequoia is often a death sentence for power users. And a huge gamble for the founders
If you're using it at work, the company might decide the risks are outweighed by the increased productivity.
It’s sounds very similar to Google wave, if anyone remembers that, but for code.
That came back as Slack and other similar products
Nothing since then really recaptured what I personally liked about GWave or let me use their tool in similar ways to how I used it. YMMV, of course, more so than most of my comments.
This sounds interesting. Which aspects?
“ never-ending stream of conversations”
VC backed? Zed's dead.
The vision sounds interesting but I think if they have two challenges they will need to overcome to compete in the IDE space
1) Their LLM integration needs to be at the quality of Cursor and VSCode to pull people away from those
2) Reduced friction to move over (keyboard shortcuts, common plugins, etc)
I think the Zed team is perfectly capable of winning. The bigger risk would be them trying to tackle fancy stuff before making sure the basics are good enough to get developers to switch.
They need to build up a deep understanding of why folks are sticking to Cursor/VSCode and not swapping over.
P.S. I would love for Zed to win in the market because I'm sick of slow software and it's refreshing to finally see an intense focus on performance.
FWIW their default keybinds mirror VS Code nearly 1:1 with some (IMO) improvements
I customized the hell out of my keybindings. I might be in the minority though! I was trying to give examples of (stupid) little points of friction that might prevent someone from taking the leap.
I think they're tackling a real problem that is revealing itself via agentic coding, and I think they've positioned themselves in an interesting spot.
I'd be interested to know how much data DeltaDB accumulates over time - because the level of granularity is so high - and are they going to want to use that data as training data?
Aw man :( I too loved the promise of Zed.
Well done I suppose to the Zed founders as they're on the Sequoia gravy train now. But as others have noted this puts an inevitable clock on the enshittification no matter how hard the team crosses their heart and truly believes otherwise (or not, I mean maybe this IS the gameplan).
Hopefully Zedless [0] gets some community steam behind it.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964916
I love Zed and I am glad they are getting funded. This allows them to truly polish both the remote collab and the AI features and compete with Cursor and friends.
The product has improved so much in the last year, it's been a pleasure to use and get excited about new features.
While i am sure this sounds insane i had to drop zed due to lack of the “last file dif” button gitlens vscode plugin provides.
It is a godsend on quickly debugging the why of things. If anyone knows how to replicate the same functionality with the same number of clicks in zed, id happily switch back to it.
Seems like a minor thing to change IDEs over. Would a Zed task that runs the relevant git command work for you? e.g.
You can even throw a keybind on it if you'd like:
I am not familiar with gitlens so not sure how close this gets you but you should be able to replicate the functionality you need from the git CLI and some light scripting. This can be a jumping off point maybe. If you want to view the diff using the zed diff viewer, you can do so using `zed --diff`, as demonstrated in this GitHub discussion: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/33503#disc...
i use the gutter markers, where a click shows the chunk-diff.
there is also inline-blame, both are native (ie. no plugins required)
Nice. I dont like the gutters taking up space. I like the ux of click, see dif of last change, click see the next last change.
It seems such a silly thing but it made me not use zed at least until vscode eats all my ram again.
VC backing apparently has the power to move the standard from "hodge-podge 800-line commit must have an issue key" to "track every damn interaction and back and forth".
That and the ever-trailing "especially now with AI".
Is anyone actually using the collaboration features? Zed is my daily editor and I love it, but I've never touched the collaboration features, which is their "USP" when raising cash.
I enjoy the responsiveness of the Zed editor compared to VSCode, but I am concerned that it is a VC backed enterprise.
For example, I don't like that I am forced to look at its "Sign In" UI, and that they have refused attempts to remove it. [0]
Zed has some much more annoying bugs, and I am not excited to help fix them given the position of the code owners.
[0] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12325
Zed defaults don't seem to capture the full value of what it offers. For instance, edit predictions via tab completion are documented yet I've never experienced them. I need better settings, I guess.
On the bottom right, there is a button looks like magic emoji (). Click that and it will show general AI settings. You can choose _Eager-Completion_ rather than trigger-based one.
As a user, most IDEs/Editors currently show in _eager_ way. For example, VSCode by default shows ghost-text as well as Amazon Q extension too. Usually disabling those disables the AI completion completely.
Meanwhile I like Zed's approach that you can trigger completions with Alt+Space, not burning through your "tokens" in free-tiers. They also provide a free-tier completions, as well as _next-edit suggestions_.
*) Next-edit suggestions: When you edit some piece of code repeatedly, it suggest to do similar on the next few instances, with context awareness, quite nice feature saving several keystrokes every single time.
Not a good move. Evernote went that path and then turned an otherwise very useful app into a VC bet that forced the founders to pivot the app into something nobody wanted. Same happened to Soundcloud.
I wanted to try out Zed. It looked fine on my laptop screen but as soon as I tried it on a 1440p monitor, the font and icon rendering fall completely flat and are a blurry mess. If your product is a text editor focused on code, your font rendering better be *top of class*.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
All of this data is valuable for the Zed team and could easily be compiled into reports for management about developer's individual progress and productivity.
I am certain the team will say that is not on the roadmap, but for me, it still sounds like a possible leak in the future.
Or maybe a semi draconian "mandatory" extension your bosses will demand installed.
If you need a simple text editor without DeltaDB bloat, see CudaText. No so fast drawing speed because it does not use GPU. But drawing speed is not the decision factor for many tasks of text work.
Zed has better drawing speed. But DeltaDB bloat, AI bloat, telemetry, need of modern videocard.
From the description it seems my deveopment experience would become a lot more crowded and furstraiting. All the different actors sharing a live coding experience. I feel my focus will become fragmented like someone poking my shoulder frequently.
Hopefullly intended use is to schedule a time for it.
Cool, I basically get the same effect with "code snapshots" with using jj so I wonder if this will be different.
As an aside, I really like the Zed website. Easy to read and pleasant to look at.
I love Zed, but this makes me worry for its future. VCs are not the end user, and thus don't understand the perils of enshittification.
deltadb sounds interesting. AI editors should look into letting you operate on multiple git branches simultaneously, like isolated browser tabs where the AI gen doesn't contaminate the other.
One of the reasons I find LLMs don't increase productivity much is that I can't switch branches to multitask while it's processing. Context switching isn't always useful but there's still lots of opportunities for rapidly experimenting or ticking off a couple small bugs quickly while AI takes the first pass on something more complicated.
Each "branch tab" could have a sort of TODO list or plan.
I have been running multiple instances of the Codex CLI tool in several terminals to do different stuff. You can even checkout the repo several times, write the todo to a file (or ask the agent to do so), if you need.
> AI editors should look into letting you operate on multiple git branches simultaneously
Git worktrees are great for this. I built a little tool to make them more ergonomic: https://steveasleep.com/autowt/
You really don't need every LLM vendor to build their own version of worktrees.
I have trouble imagining a world where I will ever pay for this. Unless it becomes as feature rich and powerful as an IDE like PyCharm, it’s not compelling.
> Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed.
It just means that we will now see AI crapola being stuffed into this editor in the next few days.
Have you heard of Zed before just now?
Exciting ideas! I'll take a look at this again in several years when they aren't trying to rebuild everything from the ground up from first principles.
OK they touched Unity and now Zed. I’m sure it’s going to be good.
Great, maybe they can finally make Zed start maximized instead of this small window and add a picker for recent files (not projects)! ;)
bad news
"total funding to over $42M"
the enshittification it'll take to extract $400m of value out of a text editor will be dismal
Yeesh. With every announcement, I get less and less interested in Zed. I've yet to use it because Windows has been on the "soon" list forever.
"Fast" is what got me interested. All this other stuff sounds like "we want more money"
Should bring some interesting new features to Zed quickly. Glad to see it.
I do like Zed very much. Fast, good UI, decent set of features.
Still missing some key features to get parity for python with PyCharm, and git features need more love, but pace of development has been blistering. Kudos to the team for building something really solid.
I don't use the agentic stuff though -- I have a ClaudeMax subscription and use CC or more recently opencode (the only non-CC that works with a ClaudeMax sub); I don't want to pay another sub for Zed and the free model use that comes with Zed runs out very quickly (understandably so, no complaints there). If I could connect my ClaudeMax sub to it then I'd maybe use it, though CC and opencode are pretty good.
The code completion is decent and I especially like the "subtle" mode saves a lot of backspacing (no, dammit, that's not what I wanted!).
I understand Zed needs to make money, but VC backed, especially Sequoia, doesn't inspire any love, tbh. I don't care what platitudes VCs say about independence their love for the product etc., they need their 10x return and if it means enshittification, so be it, they don't really care.
Ugh, ok. I just want an editor.
Is DeltaDB not open-source yet?
Butch: Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead.
How is this any better than VSCode?
Getting developers to switch is going to be hard.
Personally I don't think they can do it.
Latency, responsiveness...
Never had any issues with those.
Congratulations!!
I miss Atom.
Enshitenfication gonna follow.I like the idea that Opensource software should be funed like public infrastructure - not by loanshark VCs.
I LOVE THIS FOUNDER
I am a 10 out of 10
YES!!!
Let the enshitification begin.
Am I the only one that associates "Zed" and "development" with Zed Shaw? I don't think he has anything to do with zed.dev, unfortunately.
I really appreciate Zed Shaw for walking his own path and sticking to his guns.
I miss some of his old posts that he took down from his website, in particular the one on learning statistics, that was a great one.
You’re not. Everytime I see him on Twitch I have to do a double take.
Did not know he was a streamer now, thanks!
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Glad I didn't start evaluating it earlier, just a few hours down the drain.
I don't know why you are being downvoted. This is a real issue and a legitimate concern to have as a user of this software. I feel the same way (never used Zed in the first place because they are VC backed, but this would have been the final straw for me, too).
Because dragging politics into things is fucking obnoxious. It's off-topic, it gets people riled up so they are arguing about politics instead of having substantive discussion, and it degrades the community by threatening to destroy the focus on tech in favor of political slap fights. In short, going out of your way to bring up politics is being a jerk, and people don't appreciate that.
Because Paul consistently violates HN guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Hard to take their Code of Conduct seriously anymore https://zed.dev/code-of-conduct
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The mods deleted another comment that brought this up, and probably will delete this one too.
HN mods don't do that. What comment are you referring to?
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Does an anti-palestinian fund investing in the company really count as harassment of the community?
That brings them to 120x the amount of money I've invested in the same problem, and still they're only just announcing that they're intending to start trying to do something that I've already done better
Can we see?
It's apparently this but I can't really say that I get it: https://bablr.org
He seems to be saying he spent $350k making this. I guess it's some tooling for writing parsers.
He has this to say about Zed:
> Zed: Founded by Atom’s dev team, Zed was the rewrite that Atom always wanted to be able to do but couldn’t when Microsoft bought Github and made the executive decision to kill a product it might otherwise have had to compete with. Unfortunately Zed decided to do that rewrite in Rust. This has slowed their iteration speed, caused much of their dev effort to go to cross-platform support instead of innovation, cut them off from being able to offer their experience on the web, severely limited their hackability, and generally made theirs a niche tool for enthusiasts. What’s worse, their reliance on LSP — a product which believes that the presentation layer should be the primary abstraction layer — means their product is forever doomed to look like a VSCode knock-off. [1]
1. https://docs.bablr.org/architecture/prior-art/#ides
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won’t be using the Zed IDF anymore… whoops i mean IDE