I’ve travelled all across the editor-lands from vim to emacs to vscode and then intellij. Now I think I’ve settled for Zed (My screen time says I’ve used Zed an average of approx. 3 hours over the past work week plus I wrote this post in Zed).

You intuitively get a sense for good software. Over the last few years I’ve had the pleasure of using some good software. Some notable entries in this list are uv (yes, the package manager), Tailscale & Zed. All of these software share some characteristics. 1) They work fast and effortlessly for me and never hog CPU and memory (No random resource spikes either) - in other words great performance. 2) They have a clean interface and API that hides complexity. What they do seems easy, but isn’t just going by the fact that they stand out like diamonds in a coal mine. They inspire me to make good software and are a gold standard we should aspire to.

So talking about zed more specifically, the above points hold extra true in comparison to the other alternatives. Coming from intellij which took more than 10 seconds to start and consumed like 10 GB RAM at times on an beefy office macbook, Zed is so much faster and lighter on resource use, you almost feel it in every keystroke while typing.

Another point is the clean interface and APIs. One example is the remote development experience which I’ve really enjoyed using the. You add a host ip, select the folder and you can edit code on another machine just as you would on your own machine. It just works. Just incredibly well implemented solid quality of life stuff that I use all the time - a quick and useful command pallete, editing code directly in the multi buffer.

Their AI features have been a blast to use as well. See AI_UI_UX.

There are two more aspects with respect to Zed that stand out to me.

First, it is a completely from-scratch new editor. Not a vscode clones like some of these new age AI editors. I’ve been burned before very badly with big-bang rewrite, but when the most dominant editor (vscode) in the industry is clearly not very good, I think someone needs to create a new editor and I’m glad the Zed team did it. Rewriting software when done properly and tastefully (not a blind rewrite) gives engineers foresight to avoid bad choices and design/evolve the software correctly. I’m a huge fan of please-rewrite-certain-tools-in-rust bandwagon and it always baffles me when I remember that vscode is written in typescript on electron.

Small things matter (ie. attention to details, craftmanship). You see this sprinkled all through Zed. I’m glad that I can open a pdf file in the default application from the project panel with a keyboard shortcut and certain combination of characters like -> or |> or != are rendered a single character.

Here’s to Zed - for being a great tool for many more days to come.