Comment by mccoyb 5 days ago
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?
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.
It's the LSP plugin that finally drove me to leave ST4 for Zed. Language integration is table stakes for an editor now. The fact that ST support is behind a volunteer plugin instead of integrated directly in the editor just means it's never going to be as good as a editor that does have first class support. The ST devs need to actually improve the editor, but I haven't seen any material updates in years.
I dislike "$x is dead" as much if not more as you do, and I'm sure it works fine as something doesn't need to be the most popular choice to be working.
With that being said, just a quick look at, for example Stack Overflow 2025 survey tells me it doesn't have the same mindshare it once had.
Eh.. I gave ST4 a go earlier this year and moved away from it due to plugins I wanted not being updated for years, and no longer working. That really feels on the cusp of being dead to me
There needs to be a critical mass of people using it for things that aren't core to stay updated
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.
The same curse emacs suffers from. What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date?
I remember the extremes of the utter unconstrained chaos of Emacs and the rigid ultra-high-boilerplate approach of the Eclipse IDE. Emacs was fun to hack on, but impractical to use as an IDE, because if you installed enough plugins to make it useful as an IDE, it was broken half the time (my experience, many years ago.) Eclipse had a robust architecture, but writing plugins for it was a dispiriting slog, even when I got paid for it (again, my experience, many years ago.)
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.
People refer to it as VSCode, but do people really use VSCode or VSCodium? I personally use VSCodium. I think that is the most de-telemetry'd version of it, I think?
Not sure if VSCodium and others can use all the extensions, especially Microsoft ones like Copilot. I remember setting up something like that once and had to do a lot of fiddling to be able to use all the extensions I wanted. Gave up on it at some point.
As for people in general, safe bet in almost any topic is that most people won’t care. :) So yes most people use VSCode.
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.
I don't have any insights into how the company is doing, I'm just going by the sample set of people around me or things I read.
I'm a fan of indie software and native apps but I know zero people in the past 10 years that switched to ST. I know plenty of people of people who switched to Vscode and all the other free or paid competitors. It's probably enough to sustain a small company, and not everyone has to strive for a monopoly. But I wouldn't call that thriving.
It has users but the number of users is dwarfed by the big dogs like VS Code, Visual Studio and IntelliJ Idea - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular... (using 2024 because 2025 onwards is AI slop).
People are 7x more likely to be using VS Code, which means that a niche tool is far more likely to have a VA Code plugin than an ST plugin.
Other than that, if the 11% of people using it are happy then there’s no issue.
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 developer here. We aren't happy that happened either, it was a big oversight in the ST4 release that made people like yourself lose trust in us. I'm sorry and will do my best to not have something like that happen again.
> Nor was I happy about the new 3-year-of-updates license model that ST4 adopted.
I'm curious what you don't like about this model? The most common complaint with regards to updates was the long waiting period between major versions, which we've now eliminated, and without changing the perpetual nature of our licenses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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".
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.
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.
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.