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.
It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.
I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?
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.
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.
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.
Please please please, get paid rather than holding on too tightly to making things free forcing future enshittening.
1. Everyone else is building on Electron.
2. People still sleep on or dunk on Rust. There's a great deal of negativity here on HN for the language.
3. There's only so much Rust talent out there.
it's a software company. they sell software.
- You can make money when your product is a text editor.
I am very skeptical of these claims:
- When your product is a text editor, $42 million in capital can be effectively deployed to make meaningful improvements to your product.
- When your product is a text editor, your lifetime inflation-adjusted profit will eventually exceed $42 million.
Sequoia is apparently not so skeptical, and willing to put the money on the table. That must have been a truly extraordinary pitch deck...
They invested like $200 million in FTX and had a glowing article about SBF about mile long on their website.
The big VC firms are by no means immune from just doing plainly stupid things.
Right now all the hype around anything even at the periphery of "AI" is enabling a lot of similar stupidity.
Unsure of what the end goal is, but I expect everything AI related to be a load-leader right now and then the goal being to figure out how to drive down costs or make even more money later.
Maybe that's what Sequioa thinks too...
Obviously, the risk here is very high from this perspective, since nothing guarantees anything.
Neither Google nor Claude nor anyone can’t at the moment get right basic operations like file edits. Zed is flawless in co-operating with most LLM models. And not just that - also switching models during conversation and more.
I am at Zed Pro at $20 but when Zed offers $200 Max plan I will sign up right away.
Even with "auto edit" turned on, Zed just kept asking me for confirmation. I'd be like "hey your code has this bug", and it'd be like "you're right, and this is why. here's how you can fix it" ??? just fix it man it's your code. Maybe this is fixed now, but Claude Code never has this issue and is very good at only stopping when truly stuck (and generally for good reason!)
Changing the topic a bit, Zed's collaboration features seem really good but it's quite hard to use when nobody uses it in the first place. With VSCode, I can use the LiveShare extension and everyone on the team can just join with no fuss at all. LiveShare is likely not nearly as technically great, but the simple fact that people can use it easily makes it win hard.
Honestly it would be cool if Zed can somehow become more popular thanks to this investment. As long as it can keep its speed and technical excellence. VSCode used to be super lean and cool, but now it's just another fat IDE with unlimited bells and whistles. It feels like how Eclipse felt back in the day.
They are giving out the actual text editor for free.
I understand people's concerns about VC funding, but I think building quality products takes capital. The funding is still relatively small, especially when you compare it to players like Cursor, etc. And I think Zed is a much, much better product!
Zed being OSS is a gift to the community, and I suspect DeltaDB will be as well. And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human.
Congrats, Zed!
When VC funding comes in it stops being about building any products, because the company itself becomes a product.
Hate cancel culture as much as the next techbro, but since y'all point out they're "a delightful human", it'd be interesting to see how Nathan then responds to concerns raised in some quarters: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
If they stick to their current path—focusing on craftsmanship and letting their world-class talent build the best editor—they risk falling behind giants like Cursor. Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there) in just two years. With that kind of momentum, Cursor can now buy their way into a superior product.
On the other hand, if Zed takes more VC money, it likely means doubling down on AI in ways they clearly don’t seem eager to—but at least it would give them a fighting chance.
I really feel for this team. It couldn’t have been an easy decision, and from the few interactions I’ve had, they strike me as incredibly talented, kind, and genuine folks. I truly wish them the best.
And on top of that, since it’s essentially just vscode, it costs users almost zero effort to make the switch. It’s the perfect crime!!
I hope zed does well though. I love their blog, and all of the cool open source stuff they’ve made. I recently heard they added a “helix mode” which might be enough to get me to switch from vscode…
zed came at the incredibly (un?)fortunate timing where they were just able to build a solid base before the editor wars began. their only path now is to fully maximize the few advantages they do have:
* a fresh base that is far more flexible
* really good experience with performance, design, general craftmanship
* a buzzy community and fresh/boldness that attracts vcs
for zed to truly win (at least in sequioa's eyes) they will need to completely take over vscode as the new default, and that will require a big lead when it comes to collaboration and ai
Revenue, not profit. I’d imagine cursor loses a dollar for every 50 cents of revenue and makes it up in volume. Meanwhile JetBrains is a profitable company not beholden to the whims of outside investors.
I know which I’d rather work for…
Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964916
Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964366
Developers don't think in terms of commits; they think in terms of Tickets and PRs. Git doesn't have any native representation of either of these things. Getting tickets into the repository is something the community has talked about for years, and Linus himself has said he wants, but it hasn't happened yet. Branches work fine enough to start a PR, but then Github, again, has to take over for comments, CI execution, even the decision on how you want the commits on that branch represented on the main branch (squash? merge? rebase? why should I care?). LFS has been years in the making. Monorepos are still weird.
Idk, I think there's capacity in the industry to take the concept of a repository back to square one and think more holistically about how we all interface with the repository. The way they talk about DeltaDB gives me hope that they'll start thinking more about this with this funding; commits just aren't a useful primitive anymore, and a repository, locally-downloaded, open source, ultratight connection between diffs, merges, communication, and automated tooling is how I want to be coding in 2030.
I wonder though what the play is here for Sequoia - like all VCs they’re looking for the possibility of a huge return.
I don’t see how “just” an editor (even with paying users) can generate a 10x return. So what is the larger vision here?
This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view
So at some point Zed will likely need to pursue monetization more aggressively than IntelliJ does now.
You take the funding so that you can outgrow the competitors and get the market faster. All you need is the small promise of innovation in an area which is somewhat new. At the beginning, the product is good enough and you have money to keep marketing and developing slightly faster than others. This will get you the users.
In the end, is your product at that point truly the best among competitors? It matters less, since you already have the users.
I think Zed didn’t need this one since they had a great product. Many would have been ready to pay at least a little. They could have grown slowly and see what works. With VC money take can go to completely wrong direction with giant steps and they are not noticing that unless it is too late. And then investors want returns.
It’s refreshing to see an editor that’s built with performance as a priority.
I was a customer for so many years. "One IDE to rule them all" and then they started cashing on more.
Progress was down to a crawl, performance down the shitter and bug reports go unnoticed for 2+ years.
VSCode poops on IntelliJ these days for everything but the UX; but with enough modding, it can be very close.
What are you talking about?
ReSharper came out 21 years ago 3 years after Intellij. RubyMine came out 15 years ago. 7 years before CLion.
The days of using a separate IDE for each language are kind of over.
These very paradigms are outdated these days. vscode got it, very early. vscode works for everything. Most projects use Python/Go and JS, and out of the box vscode just works for all these languages and their tools.
IntelliJ did that before Atom even had ‘git init’ run on it.
Seems to solve a real problem which is growing rapidly, both in the old way and in the new way ... if it can overcome _slop_ in LLM chats, and the sheer enormity of code/data ahead. Trying to picture how coherence will survive.
With claims/hype/concern floating around that >90% of code will be LLM-generated within 3-6 months, with the insinuation/tone [1] that the same amount of code will be written by humans as now ( at least at first ) but LLM code will radically grow to dilute the space ( as is happening ) ... seems like DeltaDB being done right/well is going to be do-or-die on whether coherence remains possible!
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...
>I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code.
They're going to keep saying it because it's a juicy sound bite and they're sales people. That doesn't make it any more true than "9 out of 10 dentists recommend our socks" or how we surely have all had flying cars for decades now.
The thing wrote at least 80%, so we aren't far off in this anecdotal instance. There are citizen devs who are building fun things for themselves where the AI does 100%
It made me realize these things are more capable than I knew, though they still do dumb stuff reliably. But, it is easy to undo those changes, so the productivity boost remains
VCs operate from the goal of xtreme high user market share as the problem..
As frameworks get better, the audience using the IDE changes...
Both are misaligned before even meeting and it will get worse once VC money control is added.
My bias, I am a flutter framework user and MS VSCode user.
this feels pretty important; git is definitely not the right primitive for version control with ai and that pain is obvious with existing solutions. zed seems to be going all in on collaboration with realtime, git, and now something in between and it'll be interesting to see where they end up-to me three solutions feels overcomplicated but that may be necessary given how teams work now.
- [1]: https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
The Zed developers quickly refocused on milking the AI cow.
I'll argue git is plenty good, and there are a lot of people who don't understand it very well. The ones talking about Github PRs as if they were related to Git in any way most definitely don't.
I have a light fork that tries to nullify this, but I don't think I've managed to catch all the instances.
Other than that, it's a very nice editor in my opinion.
{ "server_url": "", }
I comment out that JSONC line periodically when I feel like cherry-picking updates
I hate this pattern in software so much.
Any data to backup this?
It's funny how often people buy into the marketing and say "blazing fast" without actually questioning it. FWIW, I still prefer Zed because its LSP integration and vim mode are better than Sublime's.
I know it probably didn't, but I wonder if part of Sequoia's decision to invest had anything to do with these false claims?
Like any company now is "global leader in X market".
The modern Sublime Text is Sublime Text. There is way too much "extra" in Zed to compare it. If anything, it's a new IntelliJ.
As mentioned in other comments, it actually outperforms window management in general in many/most cases. Radically flexible and almost never gets in the way
RIP Zed, you had a good run.
Let me guess: DeltaDB is free to use as long as we host your data and have free range on training AI based on your editor interactions.
My read was that they are pulling a Linus Torvalds with the Linux->Git move where both are innovations on their own, but work great together ( without dystopian universe instantiation )
CRDTs mentioned: https://zed.dev/blog/crdts
that said atuin is excellent
You know where this goes.
Also how on earth do you handle conflicts?
This sounds most similar to IntelliJ's local history tracking, but that is local only which makes sense.
Still, more IDEs is always good so I wish them luck and will wait and see. (As with Zed - I keep trying it but it's still very alpha quality so I always end up back in VSCode.)
I don't want chat with coworkers in my IDE, nor do I feel the pains they describe with conversations spread between tools. It's not a top 5 problem
I'd be interested to know how much data DeltaDB accumulates over time - because the level of granularity is so high - and are they going to want to use that data as training data?
Well done I suppose to the Zed founders as they're on the Sequoia gravy train now. But as others have noted this puts an inevitable clock on the enshittification no matter how hard the team crosses their heart and truly believes otherwise (or not, I mean maybe this IS the gameplan).
Hopefully Zedless [0] gets some community steam behind it.
It is a godsend on quickly debugging the why of things. If anyone knows how to replicate the same functionality with the same number of clicks in zed, id happily switch back to it.
// ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/zed/tasks.json
[
{
"command": "git --paginate log --follow -p -m -1 ${ZED_FILE}",
"label": "last-file-diff:${ZED_FILE}",
"shell": { "program": "sh" }
}
]
// ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/zed/keymap.json
[
{
"context": "Editor && mode == full",
"bindings": {
"ctrl-shift-g d": [
"task::Spawn",
{ "task_name": "last-file-diff:${ZED_FILE}" }
]
}
}
]
there is also inline-blame, both are native (ie. no plugins required)
It seems such a silly thing but it made me not use zed at least until vscode eats all my ram again.
The product has improved so much in the last year, it's been a pleasure to use and get excited about new features.
1) Their LLM integration needs to be at the quality of Cursor and VSCode to pull people away from those
2) Reduced friction to move over (keyboard shortcuts, common plugins, etc)
I think the Zed team is perfectly capable of winning. The bigger risk would be them trying to tackle fancy stuff before making sure the basics are good enough to get developers to switch.
They need to build up a deep understanding of why folks are sticking to Cursor/VSCode and not swapping over.
P.S. I would love for Zed to win in the market because I'm sick of slow software and it's refreshing to finally see an intense focus on performance.
That and the ever-trailing "especially now with AI".
As a user, most IDEs/Editors currently show in _eager_ way. For example, VSCode by default shows ghost-text as well as Amazon Q extension too. Usually disabling those disables the AI completion completely.
Meanwhile I like Zed's approach that you can trigger completions with Alt+Space, not burning through your "tokens" in free-tiers. They also provide a free-tier completions, as well as _next-edit suggestions_.
*) Next-edit suggestions: When you edit some piece of code repeatedly, it suggest to do similar on the next few instances, with context awareness, quite nice feature saving several keystrokes every single time.
For example, I don't like that I am forced to look at its "Sign In" UI, and that they have refused attempts to remove it. [0]
Zed has some much more annoying bugs, and I am not excited to help fix them given the position of the code owners.
I am certain the team will say that is not on the roadmap, but for me, it still sounds like a possible leak in the future.
Or maybe a semi draconian "mandatory" extension your bosses will demand installed.
Zed has better drawing speed. But DeltaDB bloat, AI bloat, telemetry, need of modern videocard.
Hopefullly intended use is to schedule a time for it.
One of the reasons I find LLMs don't increase productivity much is that I can't switch branches to multitask while it's processing. Context switching isn't always useful but there's still lots of opportunities for rapidly experimenting or ticking off a couple small bugs quickly while AI takes the first pass on something more complicated.
Each "branch tab" could have a sort of TODO list or plan.
Git worktrees are great for this. I built a little tool to make them more ergonomic: https://steveasleep.com/autowt/
You really don't need every LLM vendor to build their own version of worktrees.
It just means that we will now see AI crapola being stuffed into this editor in the next few days.
"total funding to over $42M"
the enshittification it'll take to extract $400m of value out of a text editor will be dismal
"Fast" is what got me interested. All this other stuff sounds like "we want more money"
Still missing some key features to get parity for python with PyCharm, and git features need more love, but pace of development has been blistering. Kudos to the team for building something really solid.
I don't use the agentic stuff though -- I have a ClaudeMax subscription and use CC or more recently opencode (the only non-CC that works with a ClaudeMax sub); I don't want to pay another sub for Zed and the free model use that comes with Zed runs out very quickly (understandably so, no complaints there). If I could connect my ClaudeMax sub to it then I'd maybe use it, though CC and opencode are pretty good.
The code completion is decent and I especially like the "subtle" mode saves a lot of backspacing (no, dammit, that's not what I wanted!).
I understand Zed needs to make money, but VC backed, especially Sequoia, doesn't inspire any love, tbh. I don't care what platitudes VCs say about independence their love for the product etc., they need their 10x return and if it means enshittification, so be it, they don't really care.
I think thinking in solitude is still better than that
Getting developers to switch is going to be hard.
Personally I don't think they can do it.
I am a 10 out of 10
YES!!!
I miss some of his old posts that he took down from his website, in particular the one on learning statistics, that was a great one.
He seems to be saying he spent $350k making this. I guess it's some tooling for writing parsers.
He has this to say about Zed:
> Zed: Founded by Atom’s dev team, Zed was the rewrite that Atom always wanted to be able to do but couldn’t when Microsoft bought Github and made the executive decision to kill a product it might otherwise have had to compete with. Unfortunately Zed decided to do that rewrite in Rust. This has slowed their iteration speed, caused much of their dev effort to go to cross-platform support instead of innovation, cut them off from being able to offer their experience on the web, severely limited their hackability, and generally made theirs a niche tool for enthusiasts. What’s worse, their reliance on LSP — a product which believes that the presentation layer should be the primary abstraction layer — means their product is forever doomed to look like a VSCode knock-off. [1]