Regretfully enjoying Zed
I tried out Zed again a few weeks ago, and unfortunately I’ve been really enjoying it.
If you need an introduction on the topic of Zed, I have two blogs about it.
To summarize, I really don’t like the Zed CLA, and EULA. So much so that it turned me off from really trying the editor for a long time.
I only retried Zed because of a bad VSCode update that started causing crashes out of nowhere on my work computer. I decided I may need to try something new, and Zed 1.0 had recently come out…
So here I am now, writing this blog post on my 4th code editor now? (VSCode, then Helix, I wrote one blog post on Fresh, and now Zed).
Frankly I can sum up my enjoyment of Zed to just a few things (none of which are the horrid CLA and EULA, I hope they eventually get their comeuppance on that one).
The Performance (And the low resource usage)
The first thing I really enjoy about Zed is the performance and low resource usage. I’m running 2 zed windows right now and here’s what they are using:
I don’t think I need say much more on the topic, but I will. Zed is written in Rust, it rolls its own GUI framework called GPUI, and is at the very least marketed as a “high performance” editor. In my usage, I’ve felt it be very performant. Now, I won’t claim that it’s any more performant than VSCode, because I don’t think it is. VSCode has had over a decade to mature, and it’s fast; however, it’s not more efficient than Zed. Some of that might be due to extension bloat though (I do have a ton of extensions on my VSCode that I probably don’t need).
The Optional Integrations (Unfortunately I mean AI here)
Yes, Zed is one of the many editors that have prioritized AI. The editor itself is mostly stable, so I can’t say this is a bad thing, unless the quality of the editor degrades over time, which it very well could. I like that on Zed, the AI is completely optional, and nothing is forced on to you even if you have the AI settings enabled. This is much nicer than VSCode in comparison.
In my last blog post, I talked about learning how to use AI at home and at work. I like that instead of having to download VSCode extensions for Codex and OpenCode (OpenCode in particular didn’t seem to have a good extension for it), I can just use the ACP hooks Zed provides for Codex and OpenCode, which were much easier and integrated into the UI in a way that makes sense, instead of having a new panel with its own CSS and hardly working UI.
Tree Sitter
I really like Tree Sitter. It’s high performance, and IMO makes a lot more sense than TextMate Grammars which is what VSCode rolls with.
If you don’t know what tree sitter is, it’s what highlights your code on Zed, and many other editors, including Helix!
It just makes sense that I should mention it here, because it’s one of the things I liked about Helix too. It’s highly performant on large files, and it makes more sense when making color themes as opposed to the very weird way VSCode’s grammars work.
I think Zed is worth giving a try, despite what I’ve said in the past about the CLA and EULA. Those are still abhorrent, but it matters a bit less to me now that I’ve given up on contributing to any code editor. I tried to contribute to Lapce, but my PRs fell on deaf ears (and the project is basically dead anyways). I contributed a bit to Helix as well, but the development is more focused on the core contributors and most PRs gather dust over time there too. Zed appears to care about onboarding new contributors, but of course that’s with the caveat that they own your contributions. Make sure you understand that if you want to contribute there.
All this to say, no code editor seems to be perfect, and picking one’s poison is a personal decision, and I’ve picked mine for the time being.