What an abysmal series of top comments. These guys created a phenomenal product using novel technology, which will only continue to improve. Great work to the Zed team.
FWIW, the top comments at the time of my comment (one hour after yours, two hours after the article was posted) are all complimentary. You commented one hour after the article was posted; it's worth waiting a bit for the comment voting to shake out.
What exactly is phenomenal and novel about Zed? I've tried it a couple of times for a week or so, didn't see the point, and moved on every time.
And I'm not luddite swearing by vi or something, I use VSCode and Idea, and have used Sublime for many years, Xcode on/off for some Obj-C/Swift dev, Eclipse for 5-6 years in the 2000s, and vim for everything cli/lightweight since forever.
Is the GUI tech what's supposed to be novel? I couldn't care less about that backend in my everyday editor use as long as the editor is fast enough. Which on modern hardware, even Idea is.
Currently on this machine: using 900MB of RAM, including all language servers, with nine open projects - that is pretty phenomenal. VSCode could barely keep one open with the same memory.
The perception of 'fast' is very subjective. To me having a smooth, jitter-free UI, low input latency, and instant startup, all matter a lot.
It's amazing that a gig of ram is considered lightweight for having 8 project dirs open in an editor, which normally means 8 tree views and a few open file tabs per project :)
Even more amazing that 10GB for the same purpose is considered acceptable. ± 100MB for window, project files, LSP servers, ASTs etc is something very few editors can achieve - I'm pretty sure Zed beats both Emacs and Neovim in memory consumption.
I understand wanting your software to be well optimized, but at no point in my years of using VSCode have I ever actually had to care about how much RAM it's using. I have 32GB, I'm going to use it.
I, too, would like to use my RAM. And I would like to be able to use it on the things I deem important, not to subsidize the laziness of devs who reach for Electron.
I made the mistake of buying an 8 GB macbook air m3 a while ago, thinking it would be enough. I wasn't accounting for docker or vscode. It REALLY lags. The vim mode plugin will regularly lag on nearly every keystroke, until I kill everything and restart.
On the topic of vim, the built-in vim mode in zed is really good. The helix mode is great too!!
VS Code is also offering significant more ability than Zed at the moment. If you want to sell RAM-usage as a phenomenal benefit, then you should compare it with similar editors, like Sublime or (Neo)Vim.
A side effect of Electron crap, before Zed many editors and IDEs on Atari, Amiga, Windows, OS/2, BeOS, Mac OS, NeXTSTEP, were written in fully native code.
I heard that Zed has very impressive collaboration features. I tried them a little and they really look well (like discord, but directly in editor). But this was very superficial look
What?! Really?! Link? I'm not a Zed user. That comment was based off a few minutes of research, and I guess a small dose hopium of a VSCode user and understanding what a shit show the extensions setup is and wanting someone to do better.
Yep, it pulls stuff from at least npm, it’s not a secret - check the source code.
Actually it pulls latest versions (checking registry then installing that exact version, not sure why they sidestep normal resolution algorithms) no matter what .npmrc may say, so min-release-age breaks almost everywhere it integrates with JS/TS ecosystem (most visibly, Copilot). I probably should’ve filed an issue.
It also installs Go packages but I haven’t looked into that.
Recent example I looked at: https://github.com/nilskch/zed-jj-lsp, which downloads jj-lsp if not found in the system. I have seen other extensions doing similar for convenience, but can't remember names to give concrete links.
> TL;DR: Mix of language tooling, unsigned proprietary blobs, corrupted and/or GLIBC-dependent files, redundant copies of already-installed executables. The Node packages especially are able to run scripts on install. Personal preference aside, might also create issues with security laws, certifications. All without user consent.
> Issues opened in January and June 2024. They've been rejected, closed, and opened a couple times since then. No changes directly improving this yet as of April 2026.
So... If you want broad language support via LSP servers, then you're going to have to bring in other ecosystems, and Node/Typescript is a big one that doesn't always have alternatives. [0] That's not a Zed-specific problem.
IMO the real issue with Zed is the "runs them by default without asking" part. Plus the questionable practices with binary blobs and the cavalier attitude in the discussions, when I can just use an editor that... Doesn't do any of that.
From what I can see, one of the top comments (at the time of this comment) is worried about legalese claiming to have "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable" access to your source code. I think it is very fair criticism to not want to give away your source code.
There is this big recurrent misunderstanding with zed's ToS that produces some extreme, misinformed reactions. Zed (the ide) is open source ("GPL v3 with Apache 2.0 for certain components"). The ToS are only applicable for the services they provide when you subscribe for an account and use them [0]. Some people read the ToS, think they apply just for the editor, and think that zed is stealing your source code and whatnot, because it would indeed be weird to have these ToS for just editing stuff locally, without any of the additional services provided. However, if one actually reads the ToS instead of nitpicking a paragraph, it is very clear what it is about.
Any ToS for a company that you send data to process includes similar terms that just allow it to process the data as you are expecting them to in order to provide these services. Eg for the AI tab-completion, they process part of your source code on their servers and provide a tab-completion suggestion ("derivative data"). Some people are evidently either unfamiliar about how these things work or about the data-related legalese terms used (barring any bad intentions assumed). If anything, paragraph 4.2 [1] makes it clear that any data output is owned by the user (and not by zed). This whole discussion made me read the terms and (apart from the arbitration thing imo, though not uncommon), I couldn't see any kind of dark pattern or issue.
I like zed a lot, it works great, I am definitely cautious about the fact that they have received VC money which holds me from getting "all-in", but criticism that is based on misunderstandings or on obviously factually wrong arguments is not very useful.
yeah, all forms of criticism, all feature suggestions, any comparisons to other products/solutions, etc. should be outright banned by HN. if you aren't praising the thing, get out!
(do you comment this same type of thing on github, microsoft, apple, etc. posts? all of these comments seem absolutely tame compared to the vitriol in those threads. most top comments here are supportive. most of the negative ones are constructive.)
Maybe this wasn't true an hour ago, but all the top 3 comments right now look supportive (if I am to count yours), and the next few are just mildly critical.
I agree, the toxic trolls focusing on minor nitpicks like a license agreement that allows your text editor to steal all your source codes really harshes the vibes.
I hope HN can appreciate what a game changer (and paradigm shift) Zed can be.
To the Zed developers: CONGRATULATIONS! I have been following your project with great interest since your speed demo years ago. And since it’s AI-first, I’m interested to see how we can integrate it with https://safebots.ai (Safebots, Safebox, and Safecloud).
I would love to see how we might be able to increase the safety of agents in Zed, use local models like Qwen/Deepseek and we also have Grokers which can turn any codebase into a graph with tree-sitter and help your agents far more than RAG and similarity search (https://grokers.ai/deck.pdf)
What’s the best way of getting in touch? (If you want, my profile has a way of emailing me).
I haven't read them because they're now buried, but whatever those top comments said can't be bad enough to warrant your vitriol. Abysmal means bad, not pessimistic. It's inappropriate for the (currently) top comment to be casting such judgment in its preface.
I don't think overly-opinionated meta-comments are inherently bad, but I don't come to this site for them. I don't even think your comment is bad; I'm mad that this is what the people of HN have decided is the most important remark on the matter. It tells me something unfortunate.