Comment by spudlyo

Comment by spudlyo 5 days ago

39 replies

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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.

markus_zhang 5 days ago

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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  • myaccountonhn 5 days ago

    And Zeds multiplayer features might make it so your workplace mandates Zed if you're unlucky and Zed succeeds with their plan.

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  • efficax 5 days ago

    Zed is fully open source. Fork it. The code is pretty nice, too, easy to understand.

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    • jlarocco 5 days ago

      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.

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    • kelnos 5 days ago

      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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      • ozgrakkurt 5 days ago

        I would be willing to use a very old version of neovim or sublime text with only bugfixes.

        Not sure how many people would use that though

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      • efficax 3 days ago

        i do know how hard it is, that doesn’t change anything. nobody is forced to use something like zed and if you think it’s important enough to stress about the product decisions they make, the open source license gives you freedom to decide what to do about it. anyway you don’t even have to maintain it. you can take gpl software you like today, build it for linux and with a docker container you’ll be able run that same binary for the foreseeable future. then you can choose to extend it or not

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  • dbalatero 5 days ago

    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!

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    • porridgeraisin 5 days ago

      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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      • smohare 5 days ago

        I’ve always maintained my own configs for (neo)vim. The only area where I prefer vimscript is with certain incantations for which there are no lua-based alternatives. And those are increasingly rare.

        Authoring plugins is a lot more attractive in lua, imho.

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  • zx10rse 5 days ago

    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.

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  • martin1975 5 days ago

    Nothing against emacs, but check out NeoVIM. If you like Emacs, you might like NeoVIM and its powerful extensibility features.

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    • greymalik 5 days ago

      What makes NeoVIM emacs-like?

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      • skydhash 5 days ago

        It's not emacs-like. But a lot of plugins wants to adopt the emacs philosophy of having it open for the duration of your login session. Instead of the quick edit and be done of standard Vim.

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  • grim_io 5 days ago

    Eventually you will need a text editor with your emacs :)

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  • ksherlock 5 days ago

    I hate to break it to you, but emacs was a product of the MIT AI lab.(prep.ai.mit.edu anyone?).

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    • cultofmetatron 5 days ago

      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.

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    • markus_zhang 5 days ago

      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.

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x0x0 5 days ago

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.

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parentheses 5 days ago

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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  • rtfeldman 5 days ago

    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).

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    • reitanuki 5 days ago

      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.

      Reply View 3 replies
      • vunderba 5 days ago

        No, it's not odd, I like this take a lot. They almost need a dropdown menu indicating where you'd like your money to go to (editor, LSP, etc).

        I'd also much rather have a means of paying a single flat fee to indicate my support than yet another subscription which is misleading because I have zero interest in the AI components of Zed.

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      • codr7 5 days ago

        Yeah, same here, the least interesting aspect for me.

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    • Jtsummers 5 days ago

      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.

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    • koito17 5 days ago

      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.

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    • ethanwillis 5 days ago

      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".

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    • runako 5 days ago

      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.

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    • trenchpilgrim 5 days ago

      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.

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    • MerrimanInd 5 days ago

      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.

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    • blactuary 5 days ago

      With Shaun Maguire's recent behavior associating with Sequoia is gross

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  • jchw 5 days ago

    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.

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  • ants_everywhere 5 days ago

    you don't have to choose. paid things get enshittified just as easily as free things

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fragmede 5 days ago

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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  • Temporary_31337 4 days ago

    For 2038 I predict Epochalypse and since there will only be vibe coders by then, good luck to y'all.

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sexyman48 5 days ago

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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