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Sequoia backs Zed

zed.dev

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Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#261

Post by agos »

toastercat wrote: post #139
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?

Yeah, as others already mentioned, I think they sat on their laurels for a bit too long and let VSCode overtake it. For what it's worth, I went from ST3 -> VSCode -> ST4, and have been happy since. I've found that I prefer my text editor with minimal extensions, and with Sublime Text's LSP Plugin, I'm pretty content. The performance and customizable UI make it more worth it to me than VSCode.

even before VSCode Atom had started to eat their lunch

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#262

Post by testdelacc1 »

timeon wrote: post #240
dewey wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn’t “solve” it, otherwise it would be a thriving editor that everyone would be using. In reality 70% of the people I see are using Cursor (Subscription), Vscode (Free) or some JetBrains products (Subscription). I only know of some people including myself that have ST for opening large files, where performance matters.

Why do you think that it is not thriving? Is the company struggling? Not everyone needs to use the thing to be thriving.

It has users but the number of users is dwarfed by the big dogs like VS Code, Visual Studio and IntelliJ Idea - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular... (using 2024 because 2025 onwards is AI slop).

People are 7x more likely to be using VS Code, which means that a niche tool is far more likely to have a VA Code plugin than an ST plugin.

Other than that, if the 11% of people using it are happy then there’s no issue.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#263

Post by keyle »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #225
keyle wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. What are you talking about? ReSharper came out 21 years ago 3 years after Intellij. RubyMine came out 15 years ago. 7 years before CLion.

I don't write Ruby, but I write Go and C, and C++ and I was left facing a new license. For no reason at all. It's the same debugger and the same code base, you just need to hook into gdb or lldb instead of all the other ones.

Like I said it's only one of the problems, read the rest.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#264

Post by agos »

alexchantavy wrote: post #227
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?

I love ST and don't get why it stopped taking off. VSCode is way too heavyweight for just editing text and TextEdit is more like WordPad on Windows than Notepad.

I think it stopped taking off when they stopped developing on it for something like four years

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#265

Post by jama211 »

timeon wrote: post #240
dewey wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn’t “solve” it, otherwise it would be a thriving editor that everyone would be using. In reality 70% of the people I see are using Cursor (Subscription), Vscode (Free) or some JetBrains products (Subscription). I only know of some people including myself that have ST for opening large files, where performance matters.

Why do you think that it is not thriving? Is the company struggling? Not everyone needs to use the thing to be thriving.

That’s true. It’s all relative.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#266

Post by danhau »

827a wrote: post #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 repositor…

Totally agree. git notes might help a bit with some of those points, but what most shops need / want is something like GitLab. git itself is usually too low level.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#267

Post by zx10rse »

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.

You can try Helix editor, it is super underrated editor. I always wanted to go down the vim/nvim path but just couldn't stick to it, especially with nvim. Helix configuration is straightforward have some pretty nice built-ins and it is the fastest/snappiest editor I have used so far.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#268

Post by Hendrikto »

hashbig wrote: post #183
eldenring wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by that list? They pretty much have every single big tech company in their portfolio.

They have some house cleaning to do in their leadership before I am willing to use a product they back. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604

I have never seen so much virtue signaling and moral superiority in a GitHub issue. What a joke.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#269

Post by ThinkBeat »

From the description it seems my deveopment experience would become a lot more crowded and furstraiting. All the different actors sharing a live coding experience. I feel my focus will become fragmented like someone poking my shoulder frequently.

Hopefullly intended use is to schedule a time for it.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#270

Post by ThinkBeat »

All of this data is valuable for the Zed team and could easily be compiled into reports for management about developer's individual progress and productivity.

I am certain the team will say that is not on the roadmap, but for me, it still sounds like a possible leak in the future.

Or maybe a semi draconian "mandatory" extension your bosses will demand installed.

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