Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sequoia backs Zed

zed.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 346 posts

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#311

Post by toastercat »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #284
agos wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not OP but I am not thrilled by "x months/years of updates" because you pay upfront for updates that you're not really sure that will happen. Will I get bug fixes? Will I get new features or at least significant improvements? Will the two person team work on the other project? I have had experience with quite a few projects switching to recurring billing, occasionally justifying it with "to support development of gre…

> not OP but I am not thrilled by "x months/years of updates" because you pay upfront for updates that you're not really sure that will happen. Will I get bug fixes? Will I get new features or at least significant improvements? Will the two person team work on the other project? Thanks. I guess I'm just not really seeing how that is any different to what we did before? You'd buy a ST3 license with no knowledge of wha…

It's been a while since I used my ST3 license, but I remember my license affording me all updates for ST3. Maybe that model was unrealistic for ST4, but as others have echoed in this thread, major feature updates for ST4 are not common, so if you bought a license in May of 2022, your access to new features would have expired right before the new updates of the May 2025 release.

Personally, I'm OK with using an old build so I don't mind that much about the limitation. Although if my 3 years elapses right before ST4 introduces first-class LSP support and an official Debugger, I may be very peeved. :)

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#313

Post by AstroBen »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #246
AstroBen wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh.. I gave ST4 a go earlier this year and moved away from it due to plugins I wanted not being updated for years, and no longer working. That really feels on the cusp of being dead to me There needs to be a critical mass of people using it for things that aren't core to stay updated

Out of curiosity which plugins didn't work for you?

wish I could remember, this was a good 6 months ago

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#314

Post by ben-schaaf »

toastercat wrote: post #311
ben-schaaf wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not OP but I am not thrilled by "x months/years of updates" because you pay upfront for updates that you're not really sure that will happen. Will I get bug fixes? Will I get new features or at least significant improvements? Will the two person team work on the other project? Thanks. I guess I'm just not really seeing how that is any different to what we did before? You'd buy a ST3 license with no knowledge of wha…

It's been a while since I used my ST3 license, but I remember my license affording me all updates for ST3. Maybe that model was unrealistic for ST4, but as others have echoed in this thread, major feature updates for ST4 are not common, so if you bought a license in May of 2022, your access to new features would have expired right before the new updates of the May 2025 release. Personally, I'm OK with using an old bu…

> It's been a while since I used my ST3 license, but I remember my license affording me all updates for ST3

That's correct, but it could be the day after you buy the license is when ST3 stops receiving any updates and we dedicate all work to ST4. With a ST4 license you're always getting 3 years of updates, ST3 it was anywhere from 3 to zero (not counting the beta period, ST3 only got 3 years of updates).

> Although if my 3 years elapses right before ST4 introduces first-class LSP support and an official Debugger, I may be very peeved. :)

I think we can all sympathize with some buyer's remorse. Unfortunately the line needs to be drawn somewhere. Maybe you can take solace in that we probably can't put multiple huge features in a single update, at least not a dev release. :)

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#315

Post by ben-schaaf »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #230
jonas21 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less that they sat on their laurels and more that a team of 2 had trouble keeping up with the dozens of well-paid folks working on VSCode. Which suggests that perhaps a shareware model did not work out so well for them.

They literally stopped developing for about 5 years, it wasn't just about the team not keeping up

I don't think development actually stopped. ST3 was in a quiet public beta for a long time, but you can see builds of ST3 from 2013 to 2019: https://www.sublimetext.com/3.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#316

Post by tjc2210 »

eldenring wrote: post #166
tjc2210 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Especially not having been familiar with who Sequoia is. Altman, Huang, Musk, etc.

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

Point was they didn't have Zed in their portfolio until this announcement.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#317

Post by skydhash »

kamaal wrote: post #306
skydhash wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know if you're trolling or not, but there's one thing that VSCode and nearly all other "normal" editors don't have and I want: Non-tied Windows (pane) and buffers (opened files). One of my most used layout is one main window and two smaller ones. Layout like this are my mental frame, but what I actually want to look at may vary at any moment. It may be a test result, a git diff, or going down a reference link. It's like a moodboard instead of a stack of paper you can only look at one at a times.

Emacs and Vim has this built-in. Other editors kinda have that, but it's clunky. I can suffer IDE because they provide a lot more than editing.

> 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

That's only done once. It's like adjusting the mirrors and seats of a car. Once it's comfortable, you don't have to touch it. Using VS Code feels like borrowing a car with a very limited range of adjustments. Why is the explorer on the left and the terminal at the bottom? Why are they always there?

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#318

Post by ben-schaaf »

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…

> They switched to a subscription model (3 year licenses are still subscriptions)

Licenses are perpetual. It is not a subscription. Don't like the work we've done? You can continue to use that version of Sublime Text until the end of time.

> there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025)

August 2024 we added kinetic scroll and xdg-activation support for Wayland; we also added the ability to configure image extensions and allow dynamically switching between the hex-editor and image view.

November 2023 we added native font dialog support for switching fonts.

August 2023 we added webp and proper support for running as administrator on all platforms.

November 2022 we added syntax-based code folding and operating system recent file integration

December 2021 we added GB18030 support.

I'll stop there. Those are just the largest, most user facing new features, not any of the new settings, new APIs or improvements that I'd argue are new features.

You can read the full changelogs here: https://www.sublimetext.com/download

> Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart.

We do stable releases infrequently, because they're stable. If you want more frequent releases you can switch to the development releases. You can see from the build number how many builds we've done of ST4 since the release: it's around 150.

Re: Sequoia backs Zed

#319

Post by pprnm »

If you need a simple text editor without DeltaDB bloat, see CudaText. No so fast drawing speed because it does not use GPU. But drawing speed is not the decision factor for many tasks of text work.

Zed has better drawing speed. But DeltaDB bloat, AI bloat, telemetry, need of modern videocard.

Post reply on HN