[giancarlostoro]

I love Sublime, but I don't want to pay to upgrade from 3 to whatever version it is now, Zed is everything I wanted Sublime to be. Honestly, I wanted VS Code but fully native, and I feel like that's what I'm getting from Zed.

I feel like some people will be put off by all the "AI" mentioned by Zed, but you're sleeping on a top tier editor where you can just ignore the AI stuff if you don't want it. It's very high quality, and probably the reason I wont be renewing next year for JetBrains, unless JetBrains does something impressive, I thought by now they'd have a more native feeling IDE that handles most / any language instead of so many separate ones.

VS Code has gotten so bloated over the years. The gold standard of ST has spoiled me with simpler editors. Zed is the first time I felt like someone finally built an editor that is modern and has a rich set of features.

[nicoburns]

> I love Sublime, but I don't want to pay to upgrade from 3 to whatever version it is now

I don't know what your financial situation is, but given that the upgrade is an $80 one off payment (a new license is $99), that it's a per-user license (not per-machine), and that there were 8 years between Sublime Text 3 (2013) and Sublime Text 4 (2021) (only major versions require a new license), I personally think it's very reasonably priced.

[Meekro]

Agreed-- Sublime is asking $99 right now, which is quite reasonable for something that you're going to use for hours a day in your professional work. Somebody gave many years of their life to make that tool the best it could be, and as a well-paid professional, I feel it's more than fair. In other high-end professions (like the legal field), I've heard of law firms paying a lot more than $99 for certain software licenses.

That said, there are a lot of reasons why someone might be struggling with money. If I was the creator, I wouldn't object to someone using an unlicensed copy forever in that case.

[GuB-42]

It is "one time" in the sense that it will never stop working, unlike a subscription model.

You are however limited to 3 years of updates, so if you want to keep up to date, it is $80 for 3 years. Which if fine for me, it is the one piece of software I used the most except for the browser and OS, I even use it to make money, $80 / 3 years is not much.

It is also the kind of software I like to support. It is... respectful in that it isn't a resource hog, runs fast, launches fast, and it doesn't try to be anything but a text editor. No ads, no subscription, no cloud, no AI, no slop, no dark patterns, no enshittification. Just an executable that does what it say it will do, and does it well. I wish it was open source, but it works well enough out of the box to not need it.

[nicoburns]

Ah, you are correct. I thought a renewal was only required for a new major version after 3 years. But it's actually any update after 3 years. Which is still pretty reasonable (but not quite such a good deal)!

[albedoa]

I also thought that it was perpetual. Maybe they changed it. Either way, the three-year subscription is news to me.

[nicoburns]

It's perpetual for the version you buy. 3 years of updates.

And tbh, Sublime Text is pretty stable and the kind of program you could probably get away without updating for some time if you wanted to. Things like LSP support are in 3rd party packages (that are open source, not subject to the license), so you'd get updates for those anyway.

[gozzoo]

I'm using the latest free/unregistered version (4200) and I haven't experienced any limitiation so far

[ziml77]

There isn't any other than the occasional message when you save that tells you to buy the product. It's about as close to freeware as a paid product can get.

I do suggest people pay though, it's cheap for a one-time purchase. The only reason I've ever seen the message at all is because I spent months being too lazy to dig up the license key to send to my work email. (That should also say something about how little I was being bothered by the message too)

[8note]

on paid 3, i get a popup every time i try to do anything telling me i must upgrade and pay again, so i've steadily just stopped using sublime. Didn't install it on the new computer

[pverheggen]

I don't like that it upgrades to ST4 without telling you, but there's a simple workaround if you want to continue using your ST3 license. Download the latest stable build of ST3 from their website:

https://www.sublimetext.com/3

And then add

  “update_check”: false

to your user settings.

[giancarlostoro]

I can't justify upgrading Sublime if I don't even find myself using ST3 I just don't see what 4 offers that would entice me, and compared to Zed, I get way more out of it.

[nh2]

I tried Zed last month but found that it uses high CPU usage even when idle (up to 50% of 1 core of my i7-7500U).

This is even higher CPU usage than my vscode causes.

Sublime does not do that; in fact it has 0% CPU usage when idle:

    sudo strace -fyp "$(pidof sublime_text)"

shows that Sublime issues no syscalls when idle, as it should be.

(Note, you need to either unfocus it so that the caret stops flashing, or switch from fading caret to fixed / non-fading caret, otherwise it necessarily has to do syscalls to draw itself.)

Zed spams syscalls even when its screen is entirely still:

    strace -fyp "$(pidof zed-editor)"

In fact Zed makes 800 syscalls per second when completely idle and unfocused.

[nh2]

Syscall spamming is one of the main reasons why computers get slow when many apps are running.

Good software does not do that; when idle, it should only consume RAM, not CPU.

Aside: Browsers, and Electron, seem to always syscall-spam no matter what, which is probably a key reason why people feel that all Electron apps bog down their computers. When your computer gets faster, the software just does more syscall loops per second, for unchanged misery.

[conartist6]

From what I recall they generally avoid caching anything and just try to repaint the whole UI really, really fast on every frame so I think that's the design.

It's like how a video game renders, which is their stated goal from the beginning.

I always thought their stated design goals were a bit... wonky.

[lstodd]

If you look into strace of something like IMGUI demo on say sdl2+opengl backend, you'll see about same syscall/sec number at 60 fps, but it'll all be sequences of writev, recvmsg, poll, clock_gettime and DRM_IOCTL_SYNCOBJ_ ioctls. Which is basically just polling for input and submitting gpu command buffers, nothing expensive, and nothing a cache can help with.

[nh2]

That does not really matter though: Even immediate-mode approach programs should just not be drawing new frames when the program logic says that there are no new inputs that can result in different pixels (e.g. no user inputs, animations, notifications, text content changes, etc.). One does not need to "poll" for input.

[lstodd]

> Even immediate-mode approach programs should just not be drawing new frames

They can't not. When the backend asks for a frame you give it a frame, or the result is not defined (a black rectangle instead of window content usually).

Even if you don't redraw anything at all it's still a 2d blit from gpu memory which is two triangles, a texture and sync object. Or you need to tell the window manager what's the window content this frame by any other way which also inevitably crossess process boundaries and thus is a bunch of syscalls. Plus you need to poll for input anyway.

edit: by "poll for input" I mean the literal poll() syscall. Which is ofc the basis of async and all. How else do you get to know there was any input?

[conartist6]

But a video game does!

You see why I think their logic that an IDE should work exactly like a video game does is not as strong as it sounds at first.

They claim browser engines just lack the raw speed to build an experience like Zed, but I know of no reason that it should be true.

[chromadon]

I've found that some of the language servers can really grind up a storm but Zed itself is usually pretty lightweight.

[nh2]

Can you repro my finding?

I'm running on a Zed with only 1 empty text file in it. So language servers should not be in use.

How do you measure "pretty lightweight"?

[frio]

I've always thought of it as lightweight, but checking it now, wow.

[vunderba]

I finally moved off Sublime a few months ago because I wanted something open source and stumbled on KDE/kate. It's been a perfect substitute.

https://github.com/kde/kate

[giancarlostoro]

Actually, I do like Kate, but Zed seems to give me the best of everything I want. It's like they know exactly what I want out of an editor, they provide way more than I need, but that is okay too.

[vunderba]

I think I need to give Zed another look. A while back, it seemed like they’d shifted gears toward prioritizing AI, and I lost interest because I was looking for a more pure IDE with solid LSP support, good debugging tools, and so on.

[kstrauser]

They've prioritized supporting AI for people who want to use it, but it's highly respectful of devs who don't want to.

[sieve]

Kate is REALLY underrated. The UI is a bit meh, but it makes up for it in terms of features. It is actually a fantastic document editor. Don't really use it for coding.

[netcoyote]

I've tried a lot of editors, including Zed, and always come back to Sublime Text.

I use it every day. The #1 reason is because it never loses unsaved files (though I'm still working on breaking the habit of typing a few characters and pressing Ctrl-S). Column editing! Macros! Record/Playback! Configuration! Plugins! Responsiveness! Low resource utilization! Etc!

Why wouldn't I pay for it? I've bought all four versions. The author deserves to be paid.

I guess the question is: why don't you want to pay for it? Assuming here that you're a professional coder being paid a reasonable, US-equivalent salary. I understand not everyone fits that situation; plenty of us pirated software as starving college students / interns, folks in other countries don't get the same pay for the same work, etc.

We should all want to pay the authors of great software. We're on HN, which is a celebration of creating great code and awesome businesses.

"Pay him. Pay that man his money" - Teddy KGB

[hackermanai]

> never loses unsaved files

This is a big one indeed. I keep many unsaved tmp notes and pastes open all the time. Sublime Text also have it's super smooth pane and window management, so easy to select many tabs, drag and drop tabs to windows etc. Never mind what is unsaved and not. Everything always there on open anyway.

I think this is a highly requested feature in Zed as well, but not sure if they are actually working on this or not.

[Cthulhu_]

The AI stuff was a lot more prominent in an earlier version, but they tweaked it a bit. It's the same with Warp forcing a login at first.

Jetbrains is a heavyweight IDE, but I'm not sure if the weight is worth the features it offers anymore, at least for the things I work on.

VS Code is also an IDE, but it's a bit easier on resources depending on what plugins you use and what you allow them to do. I've had combinations of plugins that caused my whole system to freeze up with too much memory usage because it spawned several Node processes each taking up multiple GBs of memory :/.

[giancarlostoro]

> VS Code is also an IDE

I always called it a Lightweight IDE. ;)

[daemin]

With Zed touting itself as an AI first editor, is it possible to completely disable all AI features so that you never have to look at the equivalent of a copilot icon ever again? I don't want to have to spend energy to actively ignore these things.

[nacs]

I only installed it today for the first time but yes it does have a very prominent button to completely disable all AI.

[daemin]

Thanks, I might give it a spin on the weekend then and see how well it performs compared to Sublime Text. If what other people say here are true - as in it uses considerable CPU and GPU resources being idle - then I'll know it's not a usable piece of software.

[nacs]

Just checked since you made me curious. With 1 PHP and 1 nodejs project in 2 windows, here's the usage (on Ubuntu Linux):

   Zed is using:
   - CPU: 4.7%
   - RSS: ~2.1 GB

The bulk of it is language servers (TypeScript/tsserver is adding ~600MB). Zed by itself is ~790MB RAM.

[daemin]

Is it constantly using that 4.7% CPU? (which could be one or two CPU cores depending on the processor).

For (what should be) an event driven application using any amount of CPU just sitting there idle is a big no-no. Anyone on a laptop should pay attention.

[frizlab]

Given the price and the fact it’s a WinRAR-style model, I really don’t mind ST being paid.

[Cthulhu_]

I also loved / want to love ST but it seems its ecosystem has collapsed, a lot of plugins haven't had an update in over 5 years.

[pjmlp]

Eventually Zed devs will need to get money that isn't coming out of VCs...

[rolymath]

How much did you pay for doordash last month?