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Sequoia backs Zed

zed.dev

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Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#251

Post by Jataman606 »

gleenn wrote: post #188
toastercat wrote: post #99

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.

Zed works on Linux/Win/MacOS. I'm also frankly skeptical that ST feels that much faster, Zed is pretty darn fast, far faster than any Electron app.

Zed only kinda works on Windows. As of today when you click to download windows version you can only sign up on beta program that I assume allows only select people to use that version.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#252

Post by grim_io »

markus_zhang wrote: post #86
spudlyo wrote: post #25

Earlier 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.

Eventually you will need a text editor with your emacs :)

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#253

Post by GuB-42 »

aranelsurion wrote: post #125
toastercat wrote: post #99

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.

There was a time around ST2 when it felt like everyone was using it and it could've become The Editor, then something happened and it's been left in the dust. I wasn't even aware but apparently even fourth version of ST was released, and that was in 2021. I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?

VSCode copied most of the good features of ST and it is free and open source. Just that is enough to overtake it.

I still use it, it is maintained and it is very good and fast, and that it didn't try to reinvent itself is a good thing for me. But it is not a full IDE (not Jetbrains), it didn't jump on the AI bandwagon (not Cursor), and it is not free (not VSCode), so it is not surprising that it lost some market share. But it is not dead.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#254

Post by resonious »

chewz wrote: post #231
csense wrote: 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,…

Zed isn’t just a text editor. It is the only working platform for code assistants. Neither Google nor Claude nor anyone can’t at the moment get right basic operations like file edits. Zed is flawless in co-operating with most LLM models. And not just that - also switching models during conversation and more. I am at Zed Pro at $20 but when Zed offers $200 Max plan I will sign up right away.

I switched off of Zed's agent system onto the Claude Code CLI because I was blown away by how much better CC was.

Even with "auto edit" turned on, Zed just kept asking me for confirmation. I'd be like "hey your code has this bug", and it'd be like "you're right, and this is why. here's how you can fix it" ??? just fix it man it's your code. Maybe this is fixed now, but Claude Code never has this issue and is very good at only stopping when truly stuck (and generally for good reason!)

Changing the topic a bit, Zed's collaboration features seem really good but it's quite hard to use when nobody uses it in the first place. With VSCode, I can use the LiveShare extension and everyone on the team can just join with no fuss at all. LiveShare is likely not nearly as technically great, but the simple fact that people can use it easily makes it win hard.

Honestly it would be cool if Zed can somehow become more popular thanks to this investment. As long as it can keep its speed and technical excellence. VSCode used to be super lean and cool, but now it's just another fat IDE with unlimited bells and whistles. It feels like how Eclipse felt back in the day.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#255

Post by ozgrakkurt »

kelnos wrote: post #215
efficax wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zed is fully open source. Fork it. The code is pretty nice, too, easy to understand.

I really dislike the dismissive "fork it" response. You do know how much time and work it takes to maintain your own fork of something, right? It's great that it's possible, but to expect most people to do something like that is absurd.

I would be willing to use a very old version of neovim or sublime text with only bugfixes.

Not sure how many people would use that though

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#256

Post by devoutsalsa »

zkoch wrote: post #98

I 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!…

Maybe you can comment on this. I saw in the Zed demo that they're using "rewrite optimized version Claude". My first thought was wondering how big the bull is going to be.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#257

Post by wuhhh »

reitanuki wrote: post #45
rtfeldman wrote: post #36

Earlier 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.

[dead]

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#258

Post by mkesper »

GuB-42 wrote: post #253
aranelsurion wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time around ST2 when it felt like everyone was using it and it could've become The Editor, then something happened and it's been left in the dust. I wasn't even aware but apparently even fourth version of ST was released, and that was in 2021. I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?

VSCode copied most of the good features of ST and it is free and open source. Just that is enough to overtake it. I still use it, it is maintained and it is very good and fast, and that it didn't try to reinvent itself is a good thing for me. But it is not a full IDE (not Jetbrains), it didn't jump on the AI bandwagon (not Cursor), and it is not free (not VSCode), so it is not surprising that it lost some market shar…

NB: Not all parts of VSCode are open source, especially not many popular extensions.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#259

Post by mkesper »

dkarl wrote: post #159
pantalaimon wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plugins were kind of it's selling point, yet it was pretty easy to mess it up with Plugins to the point of it being unusable - and not knowing what plug-in caused that.

The same curse emacs suffers from. What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date? I remember the extremes of the utter unconstrained chaos of Emacs and the rigid ultra-high-boilerplate approach of the Eclipse IDE. Emacs was fun to hack on, but impractical to use as an IDE, because if you installed enough plugins to make it useful as an IDE, it was broken half the time (my experience, many years ago.)…

An emacs "distribution" like e.g. doom-emacs has worked to be quite stable for me.
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