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Sequoia backs Zed

zed.dev

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Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#301

Post by jen20 »

tiffanyh wrote: post #191

With so many new AI editors popping up, it feels like the Zed team is in a tough “lose/lose” spot. If they stick to their current path—focusing on craftsmanship and letting their world-class talent build the best editor—they risk falling behind giants like Cursor. Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there) in just two years. With t…

> Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there

Revenue, not profit. I’d imagine cursor loses a dollar for every 50 cents of revenue and makes it up in volume. Meanwhile JetBrains is a profitable company not beholden to the whims of outside investors.

I know which I’d rather work for…

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#302

Post by handsclean »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #285
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.

ST is also all but dead. They switched to a subscription model (3 year licenses are still subscriptions), and since the release of ST4 in 2021, there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025). All other releases have been bug fixes and "improvements". I get that developers need to make a living, but 4 years of fixing bugs in your products is probably not what I want to be paying for, at least not when…

Please don’t conflate limited updates with subscriptions. The problems with subscriptions are that the company can take away your own files, the company can take away your software, the lifetime cost is extremely high, and the company can unilaterally change the deal or stop offering one. None of this applies to limited updates offers like Sublime Text’s. You pay once and keep it forever. The three year limit is on the time into the future for which the company continues to add to what you’re keeping forever. Of course this isn’t unlimited, it’s pay once for the program, not pay once for the lifetime servitude of everybody who works on it.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#303

Post by jen20 »

kamaal wrote: post #300
airesQ wrote: 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

>>Is IntelliJ "bad"? The days of using a separate IDE for each language are kind of over. These very paradigms are outdated these days. vscode got it, very early. vscode works for everything. Most projects use Python/Go and JS, and out of the box vscode just works for all these languages and their tools.

> vscode works for everything.

IntelliJ did that before Atom even had ‘git init’ run on it.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#304

Post by jen20 »

krackers wrote: post #202
airesQ wrote: 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.

Counterpoint: the updated UI looks and works great, and their software has never felt higher quality.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#305

Post by jen20 »

duped wrote: post #70
yurishimo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can try it out. I would say it’s aiming to be a more modern Sublime Text, which is a win to be considered in the same category imo.

I have tried it out and by default it was so slow as to be unusable. After discovering it required some customization in /etc (because it's the only GUI application that fails to recognize my GPU on a very popular distro with next to zero customization, because I game a lot on Linux - weird how that's a me problem and not a Zed problem) it got better, but still noticeably slower than VS Code. The modern Sublime Text…

> If anything, it's a new IntelliJ.

I do not understand how one says this with a straight face unless you’ve never used either product. Do you also believe Neovim to be a “new IntelliJ”? That’s the level of functionality out the box, though fortunately Zed does not require lots of screwing with config files to get basic things working.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#306

Post by kamaal »

skydhash wrote: post #297
kamaal wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That no major AI players even bother to announce a ST plugin/package is proof enough, its now just a tool to manage random text copy/paste snippets. vscode seems to have totally taken over dev mindshare these days.

They also don’t bother to announce a Vim or Emacs one either. VS Code provides good default and most people don’t care about editor fluency. Which is why they keep using it.

>>They also don’t bother to announce a Vim or Emacs one either.

vim has a universal and in many ways a eternal use case. You have to edit a file at some point on a server, be it a self hosted or even on ec2. Thats kind of the only real use case for vim.

In these days of AI assisted coding, no one really 'edits' code. A lot of editor short cuts and fluency related concepts kind of in many ways are not relevant in this paradigm.

The thing is vscode just works, like just works, for nearly all the usecases. In case of emacs, learning it and mastering it takes lots of time in ones career. In case of vscode you don't have to do this, you can straight away work on the project that you want to get done.

emacs is some what like a massive distraction from the actual task you want to achieve. Instead of writing code to build a project, you have to first write code to make emacs work, then use emacs to write the project code. In vscode you just write project code.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#307

Post by Winsaucerer »

soapdog wrote: post #281
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.

I'm using Sublime Text. I feel that most people using ST are happy with it and been happy with it for a long time, you don't see many posts about it cause most of the userbase does not make using Sublime Text into part of their digital persona like many users of other editors (not speaking as if doing this is a bad thing, but you'll see fans of other editors being a lot more vocal).

That makes sense. The rest of us left ST a long while ago, and the rest remain because they're happy with it and have been for a long time.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#308

Post by vendiddy »

weakfish wrote: post #298
vendiddy wrote: post #292

The vision sounds interesting but I think if they have two challenges they will need to overcome to compete in the IDE space 1) Their LLM integration needs to be at the quality of Cursor and VSCode to pull people away from those 2) Reduced friction to move over (keyboard shortcuts, common plugins, etc) I think the Zed team is perfectly capable of winning. The bigger risk would be them trying to tackle fancy stuff bef…

FWIW their default keybinds mirror VS Code nearly 1:1 with some (IMO) improvements

I customized the hell out of my keybindings. I might be in the minority though! I was trying to give examples of (stupid) little points of friction that might prevent someone from taking the leap.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#309

Post by arcatech »

lionkor wrote: post #280
hashbig wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Wow, some people really don't know what to give a shit about, do they? It must be endlessly exhausting to go around looking for any reason to boycott everything, instead of using these fantastic tools to make things that make the world a better place.

You’re complaining that the people giving enough of a shit to boycott a thing don’t know what to give a shit about?

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#310

Post by toastercat »

dewey wrote: post #237
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.

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.

I mean that they solved the funding model that pays the bills of their employees, not that they solved becoming the most widely used text editor in the world.
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