Is the new #zed editor mostly hype rn?
I can believe it’s good and cool ( built in graphics and collab seem to me like good ideas).
But as someone who happily stayed with sublime (with LSPs a likely game changer) …
takes like “it’s fast!”, “LSP!”, “it now has snippets!” … along with people telling me it has a plug-in system, but doesn’t (cf python/lua runtimes of sublime/nvim) give me massive hype vibes and honestly just feels very “2020s-tech”.
I tried it briefly. I like the idea of an alternative to VS code, that’s not some inefficient javascript electron app. But the focus of zed seems to be on collaboration in cloud and also pushing LLM tools. That’s not what I’m looking for. I disliked that it was impossible to hide the “log in to github” button (I don’t want to log into an editor). Irked me the wrong way.
It drives me nuts that there’s no way to close a folder once you opened it. There’s no way to just edit a file without making it a “project”. In my mind that’s a weird design decision (which is probably rooted in weird fundamental ideas) and gives me no warm & fuzzy feeling about what direction it will take in the future.
That’s not too weird, until IntelliJ added its lite editor, it was the same way for many years.
IntelliJ is an all-out full IDE in the tradition of the old Visual Studio or Borland IDE:s, so it makes sense there. Zed is ostensibly a text editor in the same niche as VS Code, vim and Sublime, where I expect to be able to just open a single file and edit it without any bigger investment.
I typically have both an IDE and a text editor installed, for different use cases. But Zed can never replace IntelliJ and because of this design choice it can’t replace VS Code/vim/Notepad++ either.