I’ve been using Sublime Text for more than a decade and I gave Zed a try recently. I don’t have good reasons like the author, but I kinda wanted to see what the hype was about.

I really liked everything about it including the much better LSP support and the base key map for Sublime Text was very close so I felt at home quickly.

Then I tried actually writing code in my usual workflow and this is where things started to fall apart. I’ve been writing in Ruby for almost 10 years now and when I type things like `def<tab>` I’m used to Sublime filling in the snippet and allowing me to quickly enter and tab through the components. Same for a bunch of really common Ruby concepts like blocks. I found this to be very limited and even though I created custom snippets they never would render with the correct indentation. I think the Ruby language extension just needs some additional work and probably doesn’t get much attention. For me I didn’t have time to figure it out and contribute so I went back to Sublime Text.

I will definitely continue to play with Zed and see if it gets better because of the native AI integration. I’m not an AI fanboi and I usually avoid it, but being able to supply the open and existing files as context when asking the assistant to generate things like tests performed much better with context than without and were much closer to how we write and format tests.