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.
What interests you about Zed that is not already covered by Sublime?