Comment by spudlyo
4 days ago
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.
And Zeds multiplayer features might make it so your workplace mandates Zed if you're unlucky and Zed succeeds with their plan.
Zed is fully open source. Fork it. The code is pretty nice, too, easy to understand.
VSCode is open source, too, but it's been pretty easy for them to keep forks from taking off by having proprietary extensions, a "markeplace", and other lock-in.
All they have to do is only permit official builds to talk to official builds (for security, of course ;-), and forking Zed becomes a lot harder.
I really dislike the dismissive "fork it" response. You do know how much time and work it takes to maintain your own fork of something, right? It's great that it's possible, but to expect most people to do something like that is absurd.
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if you haven't checked neovim out, the Lua based config is really nice and easy to grok these days. 10x better than classic vimscript!
A year or two ago I moved away from one of the neovim distros when they randomly changed all the keybinds on an upgrade (such things really anger me) and set up my own config. Funnily enough, I preferred vimscript. I still do use lua of course for various things, but those just go in lua EOF blocks in the vimscript. Vimscript is really terse and convenient for many things, I love it.
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You can try Helix editor, it is super underrated editor. I always wanted to go down the vim/nvim path but just couldn't stick to it, especially with nvim. Helix configuration is straightforward have some pretty nice built-ins and it is the fastest/snappiest editor I have used so far.
Nothing against emacs, but check out NeoVIM. If you like Emacs, you might like NeoVIM and its powerful extensibility features.
What makes NeoVIM emacs-like?
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Eventually you will need a text editor with your emacs :)
I hate to break it to you, but emacs was a product of the MIT AI lab.(prep.ai.mit.edu anyone?).
classical AI and modern generative AI are VERY different beasts. also, there isn't any AI in emacs itself. It was a tool built to make a job easier.
That’s fine as long as they don’t force AI prompts to me.
To clarify, I use AI agents, but I absolutely hate them submitting code in my editor. Chatting is fair enough and useful, but I need to turn off the auto-generating code part.
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.
We're working on it! :)
You can pay for Zed today if you'd like - https://zed.dev/pricing - and also the editor itself is open-source under the GPLv3 license. So if at any point in the future Zed changes direction in a way you don't like, you are perpetually free to build the version you liked from source (or make a community fork and take it in a different direction).
This will sound a bit odd, but I don't necessarily want to pay in a way that makes it look like I'm paying for the AI rather than the editor.
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I'm enjoying using Zed, and I do pay for tools I use regularly. It's now approaching a month of daily use for me and I don't see that changing. But to echo the other replies, I'm uninterested in the LLM tools. I don't use those normally and paying for that as a way to support Zed would send the wrong signal. You have to be careful when you restrict what people can pay for, because that will become what you optimize for which may not be what your users actually care about.
Zed is fast, easy to configure (so far, maybe some hard parts I haven't run into yet), works well with the languages I care about via LSPs, and the collaboration features are compelling. I want to pay to support that, I don't want to pay for an LLM feature I don't care about that ends up distracting from the progress on the things I want to see maintained or improved.
I already pay for Zed Pro, but my fear (and likely GP's as well) is that this doesn't provide enough revenue for the team.
Since switching from Emacs last year, I have absolutely loved how this editor has evolved, and I am looking for any way to directly support the effort. I have been a Zed Pro subscriber for quite a while now, and I have started trying to contribute to the codebase, but I really wish there were monetization options beyond making a spread on Anthropic API pricing.
I would also pay for Zed (the editor) and not the AI. But I also don't want to pay just make Zed more attractive for VC acquisition.
You don't have to give me any more features than what's in the free editor. I would gladly pay up to $300 just to have a "license".
Big fan of Zed. I want to echo a sibling comment that I don't see that as paying for Zed, I see it as paying for LLM usage. And since I already have my own LLM keys, I just use those instead.
I can't pay for Zed Pro using my work funds because it's an unapproved AI service. Can you provide another way to pay? E.g. cross device settings sync or professional support.
I'm a big fan of Zed and having met much of the team I think it's some great people building a great product. But I do echo concerns that while the intentions are all honorable the incentives of the pricing structure, business environment, and now a funding round are concerning in the long term. I don't think anyone at Zed has a single ill intent or a secret master plan but these days anything I'm not paying for I just assume is going to be enshittified eventually. Especially for an app where the only paid features are AI-centric and there's a VC expecting to make multiples on a $60m investment.
So here's my ask: let me pay for it without paying for AI! None of my use cases will stress your servers; I have `"disable_ai": true` in my settings.json. Give me a $5/mo "support the devs tier" or a $10/mo tier with some random app quality-of-life features and I'm there. I specifically want to pay for good software without paying for AI to signify the value proposition that still exists there cause I don't think a VC would believe me otherwise.
With Shaun Maguire's recent behavior associating with Sequoia is gross
Unless they have very unusual terms on their funding, it isn't really entirely in their control in the long term. Hopefully they find a way to make their investors whole that doesn't suck for everyone else, but if not, well, I at least appreciate that the editor is truly open source, since at least it offers a contingency plan in the worst cases.
If I'm wrong I'd love to know, but I think that we need to start talking about what funding really implies more honestly. It's traditionally met with unabashed enthusiasm and congratulations, which I totally understand, but it's a mutual exchange, not an award or a grant. I absolutely believe that everyone wants to make good on their promises, but promises made to users are not legally binding, and the track record for upholding those has not been great. Plus, as a user, I want to pay for software, but nothing feels worse than paying, then watching enshittification unfold anyways... When this happens, the investors should send you a nice postcard thanking you for paying back some of their money.
Can $20/mo sustain a text editor company with a massive multimillion dollar valuation? Well, we'll see. Good luck Zed Industries, we're all counting on you.
you don't have to choose. paid things get enshittified just as easily as free things
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.
For 2038 I predict Epochalypse and since there will only be vibe coders by then, good luck to y'all.
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!
Sure but does it mean that every business needs to be unicorn?
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