I love the spirit of Zed. From the principles to the low-level implementation details, it all screams "good taste". It's immensely interesting as an object of study (the code is great, from GPUI all the way up).
Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.
There was a time around ST2 when it felt like everyone was using it and it could've become The Editor, then something happened and it's been left in the dust. I wasn't even aware but apparently even fourth version of ST was released, and that was in 2021.
I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?
I've been a registered user of ST for long long time, and I thought if anything hurt them in the marketplace, it was taking several years off from the end of 2013 until late 2017 with hardly anything being released that opened the door to Atom and other editors to catch up.
Yeah, as others already mentioned, I think they sat on their laurels for a bit too long and let VSCode overtake it.
For what it's worth, I went from ST3 -> VSCode -> ST4, and have been happy since. I've found that I prefer my text editor with minimal extensions, and with Sublime Text's LSP Plugin, I'm pretty content. The performance and customizable UI make it more worth it to me than VSCode.
It's the LSP plugin that finally drove me to leave ST4 for Zed. Language integration is table stakes for an editor now. The fact that ST support is behind a volunteer plugin instead of integrated directly in the editor just means it's never going to be as good as a editor that does have first class support. The ST devs need to actually improve the editor, but I haven't seen any material updates in years.
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.
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.
Maybe they just wanted to do something else. Sometimes people just don't want to grind on endlessly for theoretically more money when what they've got already is enough for them.
I don't get this Sublime is dead nonsense. It's still being updated and works great. It's been my editor of choice for years and I happily pay for my license. I'd probably pay more if they asked me, it's tremendous value for money in my opinion.
I dislike "$x is dead" as much if not more as you do, and I'm sure it works fine as something doesn't need to be the most popular choice to be working.
With that being said, just a quick look at, for example Stack Overflow 2025 survey tells me it doesn't have the same mindshare it once had.
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
I don't run that many plugins to be fair, but the ones I do run (of which at least a couple are no longer maintained) works fine.
The key plugins I use are some LSP servers, and they work wonders. The few languages I mainly use (yaml, json, TS/JS, python and Go) I get great language support for via the LSP servers and the editor is blissfully fast always.
I could live without even the LSP stuff, but the one feature I can't live without is Sublime's excellent recovery support. Every once in a while my system will crash, and even though I've had multiple unsaved buffers Sublime recovers them every single time. Saved my butt more times than I want to know!
Yeah Atom and then VSCode killed it. Turns out being able to use JS to extend your editor is quite valuable. Essentially every JS devs have their own Emacs without having to learn Emacs and Lisp
Plugins were kind of it's selling point, yet it was pretty easy to mess it up with Plugins to the point of it being unusable - and not knowing what plug-in caused that.
The same curse emacs suffers from. What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date?
I remember the extremes of the utter unconstrained chaos of Emacs and the rigid ultra-high-boilerplate approach of the Eclipse IDE. Emacs was fun to hack on, but impractical to use as an IDE, because if you installed enough plugins to make it useful as an IDE, it was broken half the time (my experience, many years ago.) Eclipse had a robust architecture, but writing plugins for it was a dispiriting slog, even when I got paid for it (again, my experience, many years ago.)
> What is the best sweet spot an editor/IDE has achieved to date?
Unironically, maybe VS Code.
Everything simple you can do with it, either comes built-in, or within Github/Microsoft ecosystem, or has an official plugin that gets recommended and featured by the editor itself. Plugins from individual hobbyist developers I have, I can almost count in one hand. (VSCodeVim being the most important one)
Now I compare this to my Neovim setup, and that one is basically running on charity from OSS developers.
What about writing a quick ad-hoc command? Something I would have found useful today, which I would have done in emacs fifteen years ago, was writing a command to parse a file in a log, generate a curl command from it, and copy the command to the clipboard. Could I do that in VSCode without creating an entire project?
I can't even start listing the issues with your hasty generalization here - I see outdated anecdotal evidence, survivorship bias, vague metrics, false correlation, goalposts moving. While your personal experience likely genuine, presenting it as evidence that Emacs is inherently impractical as an IDE only adds to the fallacy of generalizing from a single data point to universal truth.
I have completely opposite experience with [modern] Emacs. Of course, it wasn't smooth from the day one, but neither was my ride with different IDEs. Somehow, I keep coming back to Emacs because no IDE ever provided all the machinery I need to be productive. For me (and I suppose for many other people), Emacs is far more sweeter spot of an IDE than any other alternative.
VSCode copied most of the good features of ST and it is free and open source. Just that is enough to overtake it.
I still use it, it is maintained and it is very good and fast, and that it didn't try to reinvent itself is a good thing for me. But it is not a full IDE (not Jetbrains), it didn't jump on the AI bandwagon (not Cursor), and it is not free (not VSCode), so it is not surprising that it lost some market share. But it is not dead.
good question. I think the community fell off and many plugins were left unmaintained. I was using it for over a decade up until recently. ST4 had so many plugin issues and it stopped being worth manually fixing.
For me, it was that the maintainer of a language plugin I used was, um, challenging to work with. I wanted to contribute to add some much-requested functionality and he talked to me like I was a toddler and warned me not to waste his time.
Yes, VSCode killed it, because VSCode was free. Which is kind of sad because ST2 is actually noticeably faster than VSCode. Someone mentioned Atom, but that was never really a contender, not many people used it.
Personally at that time (circa 2013 I think) I wasn't using it because it lacked integrated features like debugger or good autocomplete. I was using a specific editor, but one editor per language (java = eclipse, C++ = QTCreator, C = geany). I feel like there wasn't a true "one size fits all" editor (except maybe Vim, but it felt so... unfriendly?). Also, I'm not sure it was available on Linux (don't quote me on that)
I love ST and don't get why it stopped taking off. VSCode is way too heavyweight for just editing text and TextEdit is more like WordPad on Windows than Notepad.
People refer to it as VSCode, but do people really use VSCode or VSCodium? I personally use VSCodium. I think that is the most de-telemetry'd version of it, I think?
Not sure if VSCodium and others can use all the extensions, especially Microsoft ones like Copilot. I remember setting up something like that once and had to do a lot of fiddling to be able to use all the extensions I wanted. Gave up on it at some point.
As for people in general, safe bet in almost any topic is that most people won’t care. :) So yes most people use VSCode.
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).
I don't have any insights into how the company is doing, I'm just going by the sample set of people around me or things I read.
I'm a fan of indie software and native apps but I know zero people in the past 10 years that switched to ST. I know plenty of people of people who switched to Vscode and all the other free or paid competitors. It's probably enough to sustain a small company, and not everyone has to strive for a monopoly. But I wouldn't call that thriving.
I don't know anyone that still uses Sublime. I haven't seen a company recommend its engineers use it either. I used to be an avid user until VSCode came out.
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.
It does, or did, use dark patterns when showing upgrade notices -- prompting you to upgrade to a version that you don't own yet, without telling you you don't own it, leaving you with an unlicensed version. I was happy to use 3 but that felt really off.
ST developer here. We aren't happy that happened either, it was a big oversight in the ST4 release that made people like yourself lose trust in us. I'm sorry and will do my best to not have something like that happen again.
> Nor was I happy about the new 3-year-of-updates license model that ST4 adopted.
I'm curious what you don't like about this model? The most common complaint with regards to updates was the long waiting period between major versions, which we've now eliminated, and without changing the perpetual nature of our licenses.
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 great new stuff" and then... just keeping the same rate of updates as before, resulting in a de facto steep upgrade. That said, three years of upgrades for 99$ is reasonable, even if there were only bugfixes
> 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 what improvements would be made to ST3.
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. :)
> 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. :)
the difference is subtle, and comes mainly from the fact that at the time the concept of Major Release still existed.
You got everything in the current Major Release and every minor and patch update to it. If it took more than three years to release a new Major it was not a big problem, because you were still covered.
The new model might leave you without bugfixes before a new major version is out.
I think you might be misunderstanding the new licensing model. There are no major versions anymore; features & bugfixes just get released when they're ready.
This happened to me and I tried to recover the last licensed version I had used but mixed up my shortcuts or something and, after the 100th time I saw the nagware screen, I gave up and uninstalled and went with something simple and free: Notepad++.
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 that is the only thing I'm getting. Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart.
I have used ST ever since the first version replaced TextMate for my use (TM2 spent something like a decade catching up to ST2), but I've since switched to Code and Zed (mostly Zed as of late, Code on windows until Zed is ready there).
ST was great back when it was still an actively maintained product, but in recent years (ever since ST2) it has felt like it was mostly on the back burner and other editors have passed it in functionality.
As for VC funding, it has done miracles for Code to have Microsoft sponsor it (and others). Code is currently the editor to beat for anything that doesn't involve opening large files.
> 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.
> 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.
> You can continue to use that version of Sublime Text until the end of time.
Or until some change in the underlying OS makes it no longer able to run. Not saying that happens frequently, but it does happen.
> 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.
New font pickers, settings dialogues and other "polish" is hardly what i'd call new features. I listed those as "improvements".
I'm not trying to start a fight, and i respect the work that has been done, but VS Code releases more features in a month that ST has released in the entire ST4 lifecycle, as does Zed.
I understand the team is (a lot) smaller. My frustration is that when a new release comes out, it's mostly polish, and not fixing the real problems, such as lack of integration and plugins.
You may choose to brush it off as just an old fart rambling on the internet, but i'm not alone with this opinion, and i have ST licenses dating back to the original version, and i have chosen not to renew my ST4 license. When you start losing the "religious" users, maybe it's time to reevaluate ?
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.
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.
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?
Have you even ever watched someone experienced using Emacs or you're making assumptions on your (I suppose limited experience)?
The "distraction" framing assumes everyone has the same preferences and working style, I for one find VSCode (and IDEs in general) massively distracting from productively solving many tasks. No, it's not "a skill" issue - I have used InteliJ every single day for almost a decade, diving into some profoundly advanced and non-documented features, and I do open VSCode from time to time.
I feel your argument conflates initial learning curve with ongoing productivity, and assumes VSCode's approach is universally optimal rather than just different.
>>Have you even ever watched someone experienced using Emacs or you're making assumptions on your (I suppose limited experience)?
I am one of those experienced Emacs users myself. Wrote more stuff in Emacs and even vim than most devs today will even write code over their careers.
Its just vscode now does simply too many things out of the box, you obviously can recreate that in Emacs, but its a pointless exercise. Time consuming, and distracts your from your real job. My job is to write code, not build emacs to write code.
I totally stopped using Org-mode, because Google docs do it way better.
At some point you have to move on. For some people like that point arrived a little early.
Can you name Emacs packages you've authored, maintained or contributed to?
> vscode now does simply too many things out of the box
Oh yeah? Can you edit your filesystem in VSCode like a wiki? Changing directories and filenames as if you're editing plain text? Can any of thousand of its extensions provide "indirect buffer" experience? Can you bind a double tap of the comma to navigate to the last error and automatically fix it? Can you at all bind to double/tripple comma or just about any arbitrary key based on context in VSCode? Keyboard macros with counters - e.g. to transform lists into numbered lists? True buffer based (not file oriented) workflows? Occur-mode style search and replace? Comint style process interaction? Are there any extensions that allow you to move the cursor to the piece of a plain text like "rfc-3540" or "myproj#4044", intelligently recognize it and allow you to browse the RFC document or review a Pull-Request - Emacs does. Can you run a shell command and pipe it into a buffer, or pipe the content of a buffer through series of shell commands and into another buffer?
> I totally stopped using Org-mode, because Google docs do it way better.
Don't be ridiculous. They are completely different classes of products. If you are even having to compare Org-mode with GDocs, perhaps you don't know well either or both. GDocs can't manage my dotfiles. I can't use it to annotate books or academic papers. I can't have inline LaTeX formulas in GDocs. It can't let me control a videoplayer and type my notes at the same time. I can't use it to manage my flashcards or keep the log of my LLM interactions there. I can't have executable blocks of code - in org-mode I can explore APIs or send SQL queries while passing them into data transforming code blocks. There are no TODO states/keywords in GDocs, no agenda views, no scheduling/deadlines, no time tracking/clocking, no habit tracking, no pomodoro timers, no dynamic time tables, no tag-based filtering, no capture/refile system.
> At some point you have to move on
Like I told you already, you're assuming too broadly. Both VSCode and Google Docs are excellent products - no denying that, but they are not universally better. If you came to the opposite conclusion, it is yours, and yours only.
Zed only kinda works on Windows. As of today when you click to download windows version you can only sign up on beta program that I assume allows only select people to use that version.
The problem with accepting VC money is they will eventually demand a return on their investment, which means that the forces that drive enshitification will eventually come for Zed in some form. I suspect that we'll see more and more features locked behind a paid subscription and the open core of the editor will become neglected over time.
Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.
I might HAVE to learn EMacs (prefer over Vim) because I think eventually everything else will be tainted by mandatory AI features and/or subscriptions.
VSCode is open source, too, but it's been pretty easy for them to keep forks from taking off by having proprietary extensions, a "markeplace", and other lock-in.
All they have to do is only permit official builds to talk to official builds (for security, of course ;-), and forking Zed becomes a lot harder.
I really dislike the dismissive "fork it" response. You do know how much time and work it takes to maintain your own fork of something, right? It's great that it's possible, but to expect most people to do something like that is absurd.
i do know how hard it is, that doesn’t change anything. nobody is forced to use something like zed and if you think it’s important enough to stress about the product decisions they make, the open source license gives you freedom to decide what to do about it. anyway you don’t even have to maintain it. you can take gpl software you like today, build it for linux and with a docker container you’ll be able run that same binary for the foreseeable future. then you can choose to extend it or not
A year or two ago I moved away from one of the neovim distros when they randomly changed all the keybinds on an upgrade (such things really anger me) and set up my own config. Funnily enough, I preferred vimscript. I still do use lua of course for various things, but those just go in lua EOF blocks in the vimscript. Vimscript is really terse and convenient for many things, I love it.
I’ve always maintained my own configs for (neo)vim. The only area where I prefer vimscript is with certain incantations for which there are no lua-based alternatives. And those are increasingly rare.
Authoring plugins is a lot more attractive in lua, imho.
You can try Helix editor, it is super underrated editor. I always wanted to go down the vim/nvim path but just couldn't stick to it, especially with nvim. Helix configuration is straightforward have some pretty nice built-ins and it is the fastest/snappiest editor I have used so far.
It's not emacs-like. But a lot of plugins wants to adopt the emacs philosophy of having it open for the duration of your login session. Instead of the quick edit and be done of standard Vim.
That’s fine as long as they don’t force AI prompts to me.
To clarify, I use AI agents, but I absolutely hate them submitting code in my editor. Chatting is fair enough and useful, but I need to turn off the auto-generating code part.
Sure, but given the existence of vim/nvim, emails, visual studio code, cursor, etc the price for editors has largely been driven to zero, or at least capped by what JetBrains charges. My concerns are more this is a big bet on a different thing, not the editor (which is quite nice, even if using typescript regularly makes it balloon to 15gb of ram), making them a giant pile of money. With the editor as a free complement.
You can pay for Zed today if you'd like - https://zed.dev/pricing - and also the editor itself is open-source under the GPLv3 license. So if at any point in the future Zed changes direction in a way you don't like, you are perpetually free to build the version you liked from source (or make a community fork and take it in a different direction).
No, it's not odd, I like this take a lot. They almost need a dropdown menu indicating where you'd like your money to go to (editor, LSP, etc).
I'd also much rather have a means of paying a single flat fee to indicate my support than yet another subscription which is misleading because I have zero interest in the AI components of Zed.
I'm enjoying using Zed, and I do pay for tools I use regularly. It's now approaching a month of daily use for me and I don't see that changing. But to echo the other replies, I'm uninterested in the LLM tools. I don't use those normally and paying for that as a way to support Zed would send the wrong signal. You have to be careful when you restrict what people can pay for, because that will become what you optimize for which may not be what your users actually care about.
Zed is fast, easy to configure (so far, maybe some hard parts I haven't run into yet), works well with the languages I care about via LSPs, and the collaboration features are compelling. I want to pay to support that, I don't want to pay for an LLM feature I don't care about that ends up distracting from the progress on the things I want to see maintained or improved.
I already pay for Zed Pro, but my fear (and likely GP's as well) is that this doesn't provide enough revenue for the team.
Since switching from Emacs last year, I have absolutely loved how this editor has evolved, and I am looking for any way to directly support the effort. I have been a Zed Pro subscriber for quite a while now, and I have started trying to contribute to the codebase, but I really wish there were monetization options beyond making a spread on Anthropic API pricing.
Big fan of Zed. I want to echo a sibling comment that I don't see that as paying for Zed, I see it as paying for LLM usage. And since I already have my own LLM keys, I just use those instead.
I can't pay for Zed Pro using my work funds because it's an unapproved AI service. Can you provide another way to pay? E.g. cross device settings sync or professional support.
I'm a big fan of Zed and having met much of the team I think it's some great people building a great product. But I do echo concerns that while the intentions are all honorable the incentives of the pricing structure, business environment, and now a funding round are concerning in the long term. I don't think anyone at Zed has a single ill intent or a secret master plan but these days anything I'm not paying for I just assume is going to be enshittified eventually. Especially for an app where the only paid features are AI-centric and there's a VC expecting to make multiples on a $60m investment.
So here's my ask: let me pay for it without paying for AI! None of my use cases will stress your servers; I have `"disable_ai": true` in my settings.json. Give me a $5/mo "support the devs tier" or a $10/mo tier with some random app quality-of-life features and I'm there. I specifically want to pay for good software without paying for AI to signify the value proposition that still exists there cause I don't think a VC would believe me otherwise.
Unless they have very unusual terms on their funding, it isn't really entirely in their control in the long term. Hopefully they find a way to make their investors whole that doesn't suck for everyone else, but if not, well, I at least appreciate that the editor is truly open source, since at least it offers a contingency plan in the worst cases.
If I'm wrong I'd love to know, but I think that we need to start talking about what funding really implies more honestly. It's traditionally met with unabashed enthusiasm and congratulations, which I totally understand, but it's a mutual exchange, not an award or a grant. I absolutely believe that everyone wants to make good on their promises, but promises made to users are not legally binding, and the track record for upholding those has not been great. Plus, as a user, I want to pay for software, but nothing feels worse than paying, then watching enshittification unfold anyways... When this happens, the investors should send you a nice postcard thanking you for paying back some of their money.
Can $20/mo sustain a text editor company with a massive multimillion dollar valuation? Well, we'll see. Good luck Zed Industries, we're all counting on you.
Please, tell me what it's like living in your free-as-in-freedom house,
feeding your free-as-in-freedom offspring? Eventually demanding a
return on your investment? The audacity!
Whilst rust is a big part of this it is not the core of their innovation. Pushing everything to the GPU is.
Stating that everyone else is building on Electron belies your lack of exposure to any editors other than vscode \ atom spin offs.
Realistically all the editors including those based on Electron could easily shift to leveraging the GPU more and that would be big leap forward for performance.
I haven't seen any negativity only push back. Rust became too hyped. I don't think Rust has a visibility problem right now. Everyone who cares enough already knows about it.
Also, it doesn't have to be rust, it could be C# or Zig or Lua or whatever
I don't see anyone boycotting github, cisco, dropbox, figma and many other companies that where/are founded by sequoia and to this day do fishy stuff and have questionable people on their seats. But sure, let's boycott the open source startup that wants to pay their devs for writing code but let's keep hosting our code on github owned by microsoft which provides Israel with compute power for mass surveillance, that makes total sense.
Regardless of your political stance, how is taking money from a VC company that has a single person that said a single thing you disagree with “supporting genocide”? And how is uninstalling a text editor going to help literally anyone?
This is 100% pure virtue signaling. This brigading is not helping a single Palestinian. These people just want to feel and show the world that they are “the good guys”, while not actually doing anything or helping anyone. To me, that is absolutely a joke.
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.
Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.