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Sequoia backs Zed

zed.dev

201–210 of 346 posts

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#201
post #106

Is IntelliJ "bad"? Aren't the reactions here overly negative? This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view

IntelliJ lost the plot at the inception of CLion etc.

I was a customer for so many years. "One IDE to rule them all" and then they started cashing on more.

Progress was down to a crawl, performance down the shitter and bug reports go unnoticed for 2+ years.

VSCode poops on IntelliJ these days for everything but the UX; but with enough modding, it can be very close.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#202
post #106

Is IntelliJ "bad"? Aren't the reactions here overly negative? This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view

Ever since the UI redesign they've lost the plot a bit.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This happened to me and I tried to recover the last licensed version I had used but mixed up my shortcuts or something and, after the 100th time I saw the nagware screen, I gave up and uninstalled and went with something simple and free: Notepad++.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#204
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Myself and most people I know that switch to Zed (many from Sublime) did it because we DON'T want a DOM in our text editor. Webtech makes for crappy text editors.

Sorry, I didn't make that very clear. I'm not talking about the HTML DOM, which exists as an API to control the 2D pixel rendering layer. A standardized DOM for code would provide a universal way of changing code documents using scripts and would allow many different code-oriented tools to interoperate naturally where they never could before.

I think I know what you're saying, and it sounds like an interesting thing to attempt. Some sort of universal API that feels really good to make structural edits to code documents would be excellent.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#205
I love Zed and I am glad they are getting funded. This allows them to truly polish both the remote collab and the AI features and compete with Cursor and friends.

The product has improved so much in the last year, it's been a pleasure to use and get excited about new features.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#206
post #200
post #194

I'm willing to accept this claim: - You can make money when your product is a text editor. I am very skeptical of these claims: - When your product is a text editor, $42 million in capital can be effectively deployed to make meaningful improvements to your product. - When your product is a text editor, your lifetime inflation-adjusted profit will eventually exceed $42 million. Sequoia is apparently not so skeptical,…

Counterpoint, apparently cursor's revenue is in the 300-400 million range. So it's not wildly inconceivable that you'd do 40m profit (although I too am doubtful).

how much profit does Cursor generate on that revenue?

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#207
post #194

I'm willing to accept this claim: - You can make money when your product is a text editor. I am very skeptical of these claims: - When your product is a text editor, $42 million in capital can be effectively deployed to make meaningful improvements to your product. - When your product is a text editor, your lifetime inflation-adjusted profit will eventually exceed $42 million. Sequoia is apparently not so skeptical,…

They don’t sell an editor, they sell editing.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#208
post #200
post #194

I'm willing to accept this claim: - You can make money when your product is a text editor. I am very skeptical of these claims: - When your product is a text editor, $42 million in capital can be effectively deployed to make meaningful improvements to your product. - When your product is a text editor, your lifetime inflation-adjusted profit will eventually exceed $42 million. Sequoia is apparently not so skeptical,…

Counterpoint, apparently cursor's revenue is in the 300-400 million range. So it's not wildly inconceivable that you'd do 40m profit (although I too am doubtful).

I strongly doubt that Cursor makes anywhere near 40m profit. All they're revenue is spent on tokens with the LLM vendors. I'd be surprised if they are even running at positive margin and not just subsidizing usage with the VC money.

Unsure of what the end goal is, but I expect everything AI related to be a load-leader right now and then the goal being to figure out how to drive down costs or make even more money later.

Maybe that's what Sequioa thinks too...

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#209
Tbh: I think git is not the century-tool that a lot of people think it is, and we're in an era now where its decreasingly serving the needs of its users. I'm ready for deeper ground-up innovation in the space of code collaboration.

Developers don't think in terms of commits; they think in terms of Tickets and PRs. Git doesn't have any native representation of either of these things. Getting tickets into the repository is something the community has talked about for years, and Linus himself has said he wants, but it hasn't happened yet. Branches work fine enough to start a PR, but then Github, again, has to take over for comments, CI execution, even the decision on how you want the commits on that branch represented on the main branch (squash? merge? rebase? why should I care?). LFS has been years in the making. Monorepos are still weird.

Idk, I think there's capacity in the industry to take the concept of a repository back to square one and think more holistically about how we all interface with the repository. The way they talk about DeltaDB gives me hope that they'll start thinking more about this with this funding; commits just aren't a useful primitive anymore, and a repository, locally-downloaded, open source, ultratight connection between diffs, merges, communication, and automated tooling is how I want to be coding in 2030.

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