That doesn't guarantee it will have paid contributors indefinitely, but the same is true of the other editors you listed. It does, however, guarantee that if Zed (the company) were to disappear, community members would be free to continue using the Zed editor (and developing it) in perpetuity!
“We believe that open source should be sustainable and open source maintainers should get paid!”
Maintainer: introduces commercial features
“Not like that”
Maintainer: works for a large tech co
“Not like that”
Maintainer: takes investment
“Not like that”
It might sound silly but it helps me to have one use per app (even better if each is clearly identifiable by their theme).
It has some other niceties – I love how if you Cmd+Shift+F to search across the project, that you get a multi-buffer [1] - I often use that for larger manual refactors for a ton of places in my codebase.
But honestly... as others have said, speed is just _such_ a strong feature for my taste - it makes a world of difference compared to VSCode, because in VSC I'll be typing vim commands, the editor will fail to keep up and it'll do the wrong thing - whereas in Zed it's fast enough that I never really run into stalls.
I think I agree with the implicit judgment from the Zed team that it's too early to try to lock people in and capture value, and the best way to build long-term user loyalty is to just be the best editor and let people work however they want to work. On top of that, it is not a great use of their dev time to iterate on the details of an agentic coding tool when there are 10 other ones doing the same thing, and any prompting secret sauce a) is trivial to copy, and b) gets eaten by the next model generation anyway.
I don't really understand what Cursor's business model is supposed to be long term -- at least Zed is trying to come up with new things that an editor can be (see their chat ideas and now source control). On the other hand, I also don't buy the argument some have made that Cursor and friends were banking on the marginal cost of inference going to zero, keeping prices at $20 a month, and pocketing the difference. It seems obvious (even a year ago, but moreso now) that in that situation, the IDEs also compete down to zero. If anything, higher total inference spend has to be better for them: more to skim off of. If you're already spending $50 a month on LLM tooling, Cursor doesn't have to be that big of a value-add to get you to pay them $52 instead.
[0]: https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed#introducing-deltadb-o...
Can i make my own Modes trees like Helix/etc offers? I'm aware of https://zed.dev/docs/helix, just not sure what the UX is to customize this behavior yourself as a user.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/38e5c8fb66ac19f58... allows custom keybinds to actions
Modes look to be hardcoded (at the moment) https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/crates/vim/s...
I purchased Panic's Nova editor when it was first released. I'd be willing to pay Zed an equivalent ~79 per year for a perpetual license (with updates after the first year requiring further payment).
My issue with it is when I use it on my codebase, it doesn't like my (probably old style) eslintrc. So it decides to go ahead and reformat my file on save :(.
But it’s a text editor first. And what I want, and it’s non negotiable, in a text editor is good text editing. Except font rendering is atrocious and broken on Linux ( what I use ) and on Windows ( what my employer force me to use ).
I understand it’s an alpha / beta. But still
{"agent_servers": { "Container Gemini": { "command": "ssh", "arguments": ["hostname", "gemini", "--experimental-acp"] } }
could work?
jasonjmcghee•5mo ago
https://github.com/zed-industries/agent-client-protocol
not to be confused with the other ACP from IBM, Agent Communication Protocol... Which is about "communication between agents, humans, and applications".
https://github.com/i-am-bee/ACP
Which is now part of A2A
https://github.com/a2aproject/A2A
I'm curious if there was an attempt to extend this to add first class support for interaction with IDEs rather than creating a new protocol.
jauntywundrkind•5mo ago
Implemented by langchain, https://github.com/langchain-ai/agent-protocol
Threads for ongoing work, runs for stateless one-shots, long term memory. And a discovery system. No affiliation, just fun to see what folks have in their APIs.