Zed 1.0

I've been using Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA as my main IDE for Go, Rust, TypeScript, etc. for the last 3 years, and this Christmas I switched to Zed, and I'm not looking back.

I was admittedly skeptical of Zed in the beginning, because they started out with so few features, and it seemed impossible to really switch permanently to it and still be as productive. The Jetbrains platform has got such an amazingly rich set of features and an uncanny ability to just nail the editor experience. It seems almost unthinkable that anyone would be able to compete, and for a long time Zed was very far behind, but this year I feel they're finally a viable alternative.

What ultimately pushed me towards Zed was performance and the sheer amount of work-stopping bugs. I would have days where Jetbrains would get unresponsive or extremely sluggish. Suddenly "undo" would stop working (!). Major and minor upgrades often introduced perplexing performance degradation. In short, I've wasted insane amounts of time on bugs and on filing detailed bug reports that are never looked at. That undo bug has been open for maybe a year now.

For all the bells and whistles, I think Jetbrains faces an intractable problem. It's just utterly unrealistic that they'll be able to solve everything unless they stopped all development to focus on just stability. The product is too big, too complex, too unwieldy, and too bloated. I was always allocating 16GB RAM to Jetbrains, and often had it sit there consuming 1000% (!) CPU. Zed chews up a couple of gigs at most, and rarely uses much CPU. There's a tendency for editors to get bloated as they evolve. This certainly happens with Atom. I'm really hoping Zed will stay lean.

Going forward there will be one version of Jetbrains IDE and clion, webstorm, etc will be all just plugins.

It is a fact that some useful things in the software world are a pain in the ass to learn, and that they could be better on that front.

LSP is one of those things, or at least it has been, for a while.

LSP is also something that's not necessary to writing quality code; it's absolutely a major quality-of-life boost, but before rewriting my configs after switching to Rust, my LSP usage was limited to being a slightly faster autocomplete engine more than anything. I didn't have keybinds set up for going to definitions, implementations, or references of symbols. I still put out what I think was decent code. I'm also better off now that I've adopted a more useful config.

IMO it's an important part of this industry (among others) to let developers have whatever workflow they want, within reason. If someone decides they want to invest the time into setting up LSP with their editor, that's their prerogative. If not, that's fine too. I don't know who among my present or past coworkers use LSP outside of occasionally chatting about editor configs with one or two of them, because they've usually figured out a workflow that lets them produce respectable code, and I've never had to question their tooling before questioning their methodology.

Well done on this milestone! Gave zed a decent chance last week and it wins on many fronts to replace my now scattered setup. 1. For me to use it I need to apply prettier formatting of the current project (maybe there is a way? i could not find it) 2. I need to run the claude cli, not an agent interface. or allow me to place the terminal on the left in the agent view or something.

for the everything else it was a win. will give it another chance in a month or three to see if it can do, excited to have a setup that easily navigates code diffs.

You can do that, from their repo it seems it's licensed as GPL3. I'd expect someone to do a fork in the same vein of vscodium or ungoogled-chromium. Maybe call it unzedium.