Sequoia backs Zed
(zed.dev)445 points by vquemener 5 days ago
445 points by vquemener 5 days ago
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?
I've been a registered user of ST for long long time, and I thought if anything hurt them in the marketplace, it was taking several years off from the end of 2013 until late 2017 with hardly anything being released that opened the door to Atom and other editors to catch up.
Yeah, as others already mentioned, I think they sat on their laurels for a bit too long and let VSCode overtake it.
For what it's worth, I went from ST3 -> VSCode -> ST4, and have been happy since. I've found that I prefer my text editor with minimal extensions, and with Sublime Text's LSP Plugin, I'm pretty content. The performance and customizable UI make it more worth it to me than VSCode.
Plugins were kind of it's selling point, yet it was pretty easy to mess it up with Plugins to the point of it being unusable - and not knowing what plug-in caused that.
VSCode copied most of the good features of ST and it is free and open source. Just that is enough to overtake it.
I still use it, it is maintained and it is very good and fast, and that it didn't try to reinvent itself is a good thing for me. But it is not a full IDE (not Jetbrains), it didn't jump on the AI bandwagon (not Cursor), and it is not free (not VSCode), so it is not surprising that it lost some market share. But it is not dead.
For me, it was that the maintainer of a language plugin I used was, um, challenging to work with. I wanted to contribute to add some much-requested functionality and he talked to me like I was a toddler and warned me not to waste his time.
Well, OK then. Back to Emacs I went.
Yes, VSCode killed it, because VSCode was free. Which is kind of sad because ST2 is actually noticeably faster than VSCode. Someone mentioned Atom, but that was never really a contender, not many people used it.
Personally at that time (circa 2013 I think) I wasn't using it because it lacked integrated features like debugger or good autocomplete. I was using a specific editor, but one editor per language (java = eclipse, C++ = QTCreator, C = geany). I feel like there wasn't a true "one size fits all" editor (except maybe Vim, but it felt so... unfriendly?). Also, I'm not sure it was available on Linux (don't quote me on that)
I love ST and don't get why it stopped taking off. VSCode is way too heavyweight for just editing text and TextEdit is more like WordPad on Windows than Notepad.
Anecdotally a lot of people I know went from Sublime to Atom to VSCode. I think it mostly was about scale of community and momentum of updates.
vscode came along with a thriving extension ecosystem. That made up for any pitfalls really.
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.
I'm using Sublime Text. I feel that most people using ST are happy with it and been happy with it for a long time, you don't see many posts about it cause most of the userbase does not make using Sublime Text into part of their digital persona like many users of other editors (not speaking as if doing this is a bad thing, but you'll see fans of other editors being a lot more vocal).
That makes sense. The rest of us left ST a long while ago, and the rest remain because they're happy with it and have been for a long time.
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.
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.
> They switched to a subscription model (3 year licenses are still subscriptions)
Licenses are perpetual. It is not a subscription. Don't like the work we've done? You can continue to use that version of Sublime Text until the end of time.
> there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025)
August 2024 we added kinetic scroll and xdg-activation support for Wayland; we also added the ability to configure image extensions and allow dynamically switching between the hex-editor and image view.
November 2023 we added native font dialog support for switching fonts.
August 2023 we added webp and proper support for running as administrator on all platforms.
November 2022 we added syntax-based code folding and operating system recent file integration
December 2021 we added GB18030 support.
I'll stop there. Those are just the largest, most user facing new features, not any of the new settings, new APIs or improvements that I'd argue are new features.
You can read the full changelogs here: https://www.sublimetext.com/download
> Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart.
We do stable releases infrequently, because they're stable. If you want more frequent releases you can switch to the development releases. You can see from the build number how many builds we've done of ST4 since the release: it's around 150.
> You can continue to use that version of Sublime Text until the end of time.
Or until some change in the underlying OS makes it no longer able to run. Not saying that happens frequently, but it does happen.
> I'll stop there. Those are just the largest, most user facing new features, not any of the new settings, new APIs or improvements that I'd argue are new features.
New font pickers, settings dialogues and other "polish" is hardly what i'd call new features. I listed those as "improvements".
I'm not trying to start a fight, and i respect the work that has been done, but VS Code releases more features in a month that ST has released in the entire ST4 lifecycle, as does Zed. I understand the team is (a lot) smaller. My frustration is that when a new release comes out, it's mostly polish, and not fixing the real problems, such as lack of integration and plugins.
You may choose to brush it off as just an old fart rambling on the internet, but i'm not alone with this opinion, and i have ST licenses dating back to the original version, and i have chosen not to renew my ST4 license. When you start losing the "religious" users, maybe it's time to reevaluate ?
Please don’t conflate limited updates with subscriptions. The problems with subscriptions are that the company can take away your own files, the company can take away your software, the lifetime cost is extremely high, and the company can unilaterally change the deal or stop offering one. None of this applies to limited updates offers like Sublime Text’s. You pay once and keep it forever. The three year limit is on the time into the future for which the company continues to add to what you’re keeping forever. Of course this isn’t unlimited, it’s pay once for the program, not pay once for the lifetime servitude of everybody who works on it.
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.
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.
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).
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
For 2038 I predict Epochalypse and since there will only be vibe coders by then, good luck to y'all.
It was a cool idea while it lasted, I hope other editors embrace the learnings once zed is gone.
Whilst rust is a big part of this it is not the core of their innovation. Pushing everything to the GPU is.
Stating that everyone else is building on Electron belies your lack of exposure to any editors other than vscode \ atom spin offs.
Realistically all the editors including those based on Electron could easily shift to leveraging the GPU more and that would be big leap forward for performance.
Same. Especially not having been familiar with who Sequoia is. Altman, Huang, Musk, etc.
They have some house cleaning to do in their leadership before I am willing to use a product they back.
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.
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...
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.
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
> being "islamophobic" is actually the right thing to do from a humanitarian perspective
Every perpetrator of terrorism sees himself as a victim. Such is the case not only with individual terrorists, who often compete with their enemies over who is more victimized, but also with terrorist groups and nation states.
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.
I have heard of worse. Check out recent podcast with Tony Aguilar or the Theo Von podcast with a doctor. Boys shot in the testicles. Children shot longitudinally (bullet went through head and lodged in the abdomen)- raising concern if they were shot from choppers or drones. The aid distribution sites are basically hunger games- people only go there if they have death wish, and it is run by private military- you know, the infamous ones from Iraq, Afghanistan or Abu Gharib.
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=44964916
Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long? - 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.
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?
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.
I doubt there is much overlap between people happily paying for cursor and people upset Zed took VC funding.
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.
I don't write Ruby, but I write Go and C, and C++ and I was left facing a new license. For no reason at all. It's the same debugger and the same code base, you just need to hook into gdb or lldb instead of all the other ones.
Like I said it's only one of the problems, read the rest.
>>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.
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.
I agree. The level of dilution is becoming obvious and a big problem... code is becoming predominantly disposable
Despite the article being salesmanship hype ( at WEF no less ) we are now in the time mentioned, and can feel this
The idea that the code is GOOD or even being used is not necessary to be saying that it exists, strewn everywhere
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.
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.
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?
I really love Sublime. If it had a solid "remote-ssh" type integration and a more straightforward way to manage plugins/extensions that isn't a rats nest of random directories with similar names - I would return to using it. I purchased every upgrade from like 2012 to 2022 or so.
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.
> If anything, it's a new IntelliJ.
I do not understand how one says this with a straight face unless you’ve never used either product. Do you also believe Neovim to be a “new IntelliJ”? That’s the level of functionality out the box, though fortunately Zed does not require lots of screwing with config files to get basic things working.
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
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:
this doesn't seem related to the above post
that said atuin is excellent
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.)
wouldn’t be the first time a massive investment from someone like sequoia sparks the death of a previously great tool/service
although I tried the collaborative features I unfortunately cannot say that I used these extensively for now. Although I found them quite nice, well integrated, seamless, and straightforward!
The issue is again people, they don't wanna change their _archaic_ workflow, stuck with inefficient -copy/paste- loop to the chat (ie. Slack) and back.
The story in the article went a bit too far that I agree, but I guess that is their north-star vision. Current implementation allows you to "join" a workspace session shared by someone, edit the same or different file, follow/watch a certain person, as well as have a chat (without requiring copy-paste) about certain piece of code. (both written or via voice)
If something, large enterprises generally don't support smaller and ambiguous licenses. Therefore, if Zed will allow enterprise licensing (ie. via on-prem license server or volume ordering, SSO, whatever) that would increase their adoption quite well...
For the record: I have never used the collaboration aspects of Zed
What I also have not used is vim emulation, though I have a vim background
As mentioned elsewhere, Zed is still very configuration-dependent to get the full power of it, and a lot of its functionality is never discovered for that reason
What pushed me to try it was Ollama integration which is not an afterthought, then I realized I loved it _way_ more than SublimeText, especially on performance, at first, then everything else once that won me over
I have ~10 running instances at any given moment, and >99% of the time never feel any lag, whatsoever
Another unexpected benefit is that terminals, code editor panels, and assistant chats, get to be sized and fit wherever you want, so it is also kind of a window manager... I often have more terminals open in Zed than in the Window Manager of the OS itself
That's true. Sequoia is often a death sentence for power users. And a huge gamble for the founders
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 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.
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.
// ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/zed/tasks.json
[
{
"command": "git --paginate log --follow -p -m -1 ${ZED_FILE}",
"label": "last-file-diff:${ZED_FILE}",
"shell": { "program": "sh" }
}
]
// ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/zed/keymap.json
[
{
"context": "Editor && mode == full",
"bindings": {
"ctrl-shift-g d": [
"task::Spawn",
{ "task_name": "last-file-diff:${ZED_FILE}" }
]
}
}
]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)! ;)
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.
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.
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 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 Paul consistently violates HN guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
This flagging is pretty obviously the actual violation of the guideline.
It's not possible in today's world and not be political. People who say they are apolitical are also political. Silence is also communication.
Pointing out that Zed has taken money from a company that openly supports one of the biggest genocides in recent history is not a "political battle".
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.
Hard to take their Code of Conduct seriously anymore https://zed.dev/code-of-conduct
A sibling comment claims that making a comment like this constitutes waging a 'political'/'ideological' battle that 'tramples curiosity', because raising a legitimate concern is inherently ideological, but silencing any and all scrutiny of a VC is not.
Yeah, pretty ridiculous... maybe we can move off of hackernews too.
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
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]
IMO in the 12 months or so I've been aware of the BABLR work and observed the author's comment contributions, they've never really substantiated why BABLR would be preferable to tree-sitter, or how a JS-based implementation of parser tech can fulfill any of the same niches. Most consumers of tree-sitter leverage it via FFI or native code, not an embedded or external JS runtime.
It's not clear to me how you could substantially replace the capabilities/benefits of what LSP provides with BABLR either.
We have some meaningful advantages that help us gain a practical edge on Tree-sitter:
- Our core and grammars are relatively tiny and can easily be loaded into any web page as a syntax highlighter, except actually a bit more: more like being able to embed ASTExplorer directly into your docs page or blog post to help people understand code examples.
- We support runtime extensibility of languages, e.g. TS can extend from JS at runtime. Tree-sitter only supports static linking, so every shipped language extended from their JS grammar contains a complete copy of the JS grammar.
- Our grammars are much easier to debug. They're written as plain scripts, and they can be run and debugged in exactly the form they're written in.
- We can parse inputs with embedding gaps. An example of such an input would be the content of a template tag before interpolations have been applied. Parsing after interpolation opens the door to injection attacks, but parsing before interpolation allow safe composition of code fragments using template tags.
- We emit streaming parse results on the fly, and can parse infinitely long data streams with ease or syntax highlight. within large single-line files without freezing up
- Tree-sitter is half an IDE's state solution: "just add text buffer". Our solution is the whole thing. One stop shop. IDE in a box.
- CSTML lets us do round trip serialization of any tree and also gives our trees stable hashes. Tree-sitter could trivially represent its parse results as CSTML if it cared to, giving it competitive compatibility with BABLR. A rising tide lifts all boats.
- While they're setting out to make version control for the first time now, we're already basically as powerful as git thanks to the combination of hashed trees, immutable data, and btree amortization within nodes for maximum structural reuse of data.
- Did I mention you don't have to deal with this? https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-typescript/blob/m...
- We can probably literally just run the Javascript source code for Tree-sitter grammars on our runtime. The only problem is the C lexers, but C lexers are one of the great annoyances of tree-sitter anyway since any context in the grammar requires you to hand-write the lexer
I don't think they are doomed to be a VSCode knock-off due to their technical decisions. I think they decided to be a VSCode knock-off by design. I mean they follow the same project oriented GUI design that VSCode and Sublime helped make popular. There is nothing inherent to their tech that required that.
Haha yes I wrote that, thank you for sharing.
We're approaching the problem by drawing from browser design. We want to see an editor with a DOM API for code documents. BABLR is a parser framework meant as a direct answer to Tree-sitter.
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.