It's very 'batteries-included', for one thing - when a novice wants to code, I recommend them Zed because it'll just handle and manage LSPs for them for a variety of languages. Meanwhile with VSCode step 1 of installing and using it for e.g. Rust is to go and install a random extension (and the VSCode store, whilst sorted by popularity, can be intimidating / confusing for a novice, who might install a random/scammy extension). The 'recommended extensions' thing helps, but it's still subpar.
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.
The biggest problem with VSC for me is that sometimes undo history is completely broken with VIM. If you don't commit frequently, it is very easy to mess up the with the project and lose all your work, if you undo anything.
Having everything be an extension is the double edged sword of VS Code. Zed is great for the ecosystem and I use it as an alternate editor for quick text editing but I dont foresee it replacing VS Code as my IDE. Once youve configured VS Code to your liking with devcontainers, and extensions declared by the config file, it becomes excellent.
It just feels smooth, like if you were in a modern vim. In most other editors that attempt implementing a vim mode, something constantly breaks the illusion. There are some some little annoyances in zed, but they are mostly behavior differences you can get used to. And they are still working on it, so I really see it as a new imagination of vim with many useful features built-in, like TS-based motions, or the way AI edit predictions work doesn't break the vim editing flow.
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.
[1]: https://zed.dev/features#multi-buffers