What Zed lacks in code generation quality it makes up for in not-being-an-Electron-app
With the advent of coding agents, I really hope we see devs move away - back to the traditional approach of using native frameworks/languages as now, you can write for 1 platform and easily task AI to handle other platforms.
This is literally their whole distinguishing feature and people are switching because of it and just it.
Zed seems to have been hugely succesful recently and their only real distinguishing feature is "fast from the ground up". It has less features than vscode. Worse AI features than Cursor. but people seem to love it nonetheless.
Turns out there is a market for people fed up with VScode-derivatives.
> My experience in Atom always felt like bending over backwards to try to achieve something that in principle should have been simple. Lay out some lines and read the position of the cursor at this spot in between these two characters. That seems fundamentally doable and yet it always felt like the tools were not at our disposal. They were very far away from what we wanted to do.
> Nathan: It was a nightmare. I mean, the ironic thing is that we created Electron to create Atom, but I can't imagine a worse application for Electron than a code editor, I don't know. For something simpler, it's probably fine, the memory footprint sucks, but it's fine. But for a code editor you just don't have the level of control I think you need to do these things in a straightforward way at the very least. It's always some... backflip.
Electron has been a powerful tool for quickly iterating UIs and plugin architectures in VSCode, Brackets, Atom, etc, now the window is open for a modern editor to deliver that experience without the massive memory footprint and UI stalls.
then it's basically just a proxy for node/npm afaik.
https://zed.dev/blog/videogame https://zed.dev/blog/we-have-to-start-over