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Sequoia backs Zed
111–120 of 346 posts
Re: Sequoia backs Zed
#112I love working in Zed. It really is a delight to use, and I think the Agentic coding integration is really well done. I'm excited to see them investing in this space more. I understand people's concerns about VC funding, but I think building quality products takes capital. The funding is still relatively small, especially when you compare it to players like Cursor, etc. And I think Zed is a much, much better product!…
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Re: Sequoia backs Zed
#113I 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.
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.
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.
Re: Sequoia backs Zed
#114[flagged]
The mods deleted another comment that brought this up, and probably will delete this one too.
Re: Sequoia backs Zed
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
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.
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.
Re: Sequoia backs Zed
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fr…
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.
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!
Re: Sequoia backs Zed
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fr…
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.
Nothing against emacs, but check out NeoVIM. If you like Emacs, you might like NeoVIM and its powerful extensibility features.
Re: Sequoia backs Zed
#118deltadb sounds interesting. AI editors should look into letting you operate on multiple git branches simultaneously, like isolated browser tabs where the AI gen doesn't contaminate the other.
One of the reasons I find LLMs don't increase productivity much is that I can't switch branches to multitask while it's processing. Context switching isn't always useful but there's still lots of opportunities for rapidly experimenting or ticking off a couple small bugs quickly while AI takes the first pass on something more complicated.
Each "branch tab" could have a sort of TODO list or plan.
Re: Sequoia backs Zed
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why you are being downvoted. This is a real issue and a legitimate concern to have as a user of this software. I feel the same way (never used Zed in the first place because they are VC backed, but this would have been the final straw for me, too).
Because Paul consistently violates HN guidelines: > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not possible in today's world and not be political. People who say they are apolitical are also political. Silence is also communication.
Pointing out that Zed has taken money from a company that openly supports one of the biggest genocides in recent history is not a "political battle".
Re: Sequoia backs Zed
#120Have they fixed the big/feature where it insists on downloading entire distributions of Node.js for running it's language server functionality?
This is basically my main gripe with Zed atm — it's very keen to autodownload and execute binaries. I have a light fork that tries to nullify this, but I don't think I've managed to catch all the instances. Other than that, it's a very nice editor in my opinion.
> it's very keen to autodownload and execute binaries.
I hate this pattern in software so much.