Zed is Good Software

Shoutout to Harrison Borges for introducing me to Zed

As a long time TextMate and Sublime Text user, switching to Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ for their much more powerful IDE features took a long time to finally commit to and was a difficult process of lowering standards for what a text editor should "feel like". Zed finally restores the sanity that the primary tool for creating software should itself be good software.

IntelliJ IDEA immediately after opening:

Zed, after running for days and with many windows open:

VS Code, with three bare windows open:

Each new window seems to consume about as much RAM as the entire Zed process. Also, the whole of Zed seems to run in a single process. When viewed hierarchically, all of its child processes are things like zsh shells and gopls LSP servers.

I've known Zed has been the right choice for a long time now, but I decided to be a late adopter to minimize the amount of change or adjustment that would be required to use it. Now that it has full debugger support and pretty much all of the other base features you would need in a modern IDE, it has been great to switch to it as my daily driver.

Inspired by: Software disenchantment @ tonsky.me