Comment by jemiluv8 4 days ago
I always have mixed feelings about forks. Especially the hard ones. Zed recently rolled out a feature that lets you disable all AI features. I also know telemetry can be opted out. So I don’t see the need for this fork. Especially given the list of features stated. Feels like something that can be upstreamed. Hope that happens
I remember the Redis fork and how it fragmented that ecosystem to a large extent.
Well there's features within Zed that are part of the account / sign-in process, so it might be a bit more effort to just "simply comment out login" for an editor that is as fast and smooth as Zed, I dont care that its there as long as they dont force it on me, which they don't.
I have this take, too. I tried to show how valuable this is to me via github issue, but the lack of an answer is pretty clearly a "don't care."
Even opt-in telemetry makes me feel uncomfortable. I am always aware that the software is capable of reporting the size of my underwear and what I had for breakfast this morning at any moment, held back only by a single checkbox. As for the other features, opt-out stuff just feels like a nuisance, having to say "No, I don't want this" over and over again. In some cases it's a matter of balance, but generally I want to lean towards minimalism.
I'm not particularly attached to this position. I just don't believe in a world where interests don't collide and often the person doing more should probably have a better say in things. If we built the product, we get to dictate some of these privacy features by default.
But giving users an escape hatch is something that people take for granted. I'd understand all these furor if there was no such thing.
Besides, I reckon Zed took a lot of resources to build and maintain. Help them recoup their investment
I'm one of the people interested in Zed for the editor tech but disheartened with all the AI by default stuff.
opt-out is not enough, specially in a program where opt-out happens via text-only config files.
I can never know if I've correctly opted out of all the things I don't want.
For me, it's always interesting to try out new editors, and I've been a little frustrated with Sublime lately.
Upsides of Zed (for me, I think):
* Built-in AI vibecodery, which I think is going to be an unavoidable part of the job very soon.
* More IDE features while still being primarily an Editor.
* Extensions in Rust (if I'm gonna suffer, might as well learn some Rust).
* Open source.
Downsides vs Sublime:
* Missing some languages I use.
* Business model, arguably, because $42M in VC "is what it is."
I particularly agree with you.
Sublime is not open source and it has a very devout paying client base.
To me the dirty thing is to make something “open source” because developers absolutely love that, to then take an arguably “not open source” path of $42 mil in VC funding.
There’s something dissonant there.
I think it makes sense business wise.
Open source allows it to gain adoption in the dev community. Devs are notoriously hard to convince to adopt a new tool. Open source is one way to do it.
The path is usually to have an open community edition and then a cloud/enterprise edition. Over time, there will be greater and greater separation between the open source one and the paid ones. Eventually, the company will forget that the open source part even exists and slowly phase it out.
It's nice to have additional assurance that the software won't upload behind your back on first startup. Though I also run opensnitch, belt and suspenders style.
Not to mention Zed is already open source. I guess the best thing Zed can do is make it all opt-in by default, then this fork is rendered useless.
I'd see less need for this fork if Zed's creators weren't already doing nefarious things like refusing to allow the Zed account / sign-in features to be disabled.
I don't see a reason to be afraid of "fragmented ecosystems", rather, let's embrace a long tail of tools and the freedom from lock-in and groupthink they bring.