[xpe]

Here is a top-level comment for people who want to post the things they wish Zed had.

Request: please be sincere if you claim "the one thing that keeps me from using Zed is X" ... because let's face it, there is probably more than one thing. Editor ecosystems are complex beasts, and it is ok if people are slow to switch, but the "one thing" claims are rarely credible to me. Anyhow, such comments are rarely consistent with how human nature works. People find rationalizations, and that's fine. It would just be nice if people were a little more self-aware. Changing editors is harder for some people more than others.

My suggestion: if you want to make Zed better for your use case, please smart by explaining who you are as a developer, what you've used, what your expectations are. And be intellectually honest about the last time you've made a big change to your development workflow. End soapbox.

[xpe]

I wish Zed had built-in APIs for extension developers to allow for more customizable text transformations. In particular, I want to write tools that have more control over what a buffer displays. Imagine a Markdown extension that gives Zed something close to the WYSIWG experience of Obsidian. To make this happen, I think something like a customizable presentation layer to transform the buffer's contents and adjust cursor movement would be a great start. Vim has a 'conceal' feature that could serve as an inspiration or reference point. [1]

I have no affiliation with Zed, though I have applied to work there, so I'm hardly neutral. I've been an enthusiastic user for probably two years. I don't expect perfect alignment with what I want, and sometimes the team doesn't respond how I would like with particular issues. But man, in a pretty suboptimal world right now, Zed is an amazing thing to have: open source, regular updates, extensions, nice settings. In the past I've used BBEdit, Eclipse, TextEdit, Sublime, Emacs, VS Code, Jetbrains, Helix. Zed is my favorite by far, probably because of the latency. It is an intangible feeling that just clicked immediately for me.

Personally, as a mostly independent developer/researcher, I go through bursts of re-evaluating my tools. To give some context about my newer tools over the last few years: Ghostty, Nushell, Podman, Nix, Mochi, Monodraw, Swish (window manager for macOS), Base (macOS SQLite editor by Menial), LM Studio, (probably obviously) Claude Code. So for a "seasoned" developer, I'm probably more open to new tools than most? Oh, totally off-topic but I think some of the lesser appreciated new open source tools / formats / conventions are: KDL (https://kdl.dev), Typst, and (evaluating) Djot, Cocogitto (Conventional Commits, took me long enough).

[1] https://alok.github.io/2018/04/26/using-vim-s-conceal-to-mak...

[light_cone]

I use two text manipulation plugins in sublime text all the time. I did not manage to have the functionality in zed, which made be renounce to use it:

- Evaluate, a plugin that evaluates the selections as python expressions and replaces them by their respective results. I added "iota" as a variable in the evaluation context, that gives me the current selection index (like iota in go). With that, so many math or text manipulations can be done in bulk.

- Alignment, to align all my cursor into a vertical column by adding spaces.

[8note]

alternatively:

what do i actually need from a text editor that i dont already have? Sublime's killer feature was column editing, and vscode's was kinda typescript and kinda language servers.

... and why do i want an actual text editor as the primary view, vs a side view to agent TUI? from what Ive experienced, the editor is now a secondary interface to the text, rather than the primary one

if i am picking up a new editor, i think i want it to be focused on how to better understand llm outputs, and how to give really structured feedback without having to write a ton of imprecise text.

how does zed make it easy to have agents build several proposals for a solution, and help me choose which one is actually the best?