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I love the spirit of Zed. From the principles to the low-level implementation details, it all screams "good taste". It's immensely interesting as an object of s
by mccoyb 1y ago
I love the spirit of Zed. From the principles to the low-level implementation details, it all screams "good taste". It's immensely interesting as an object of study (the code is great, from GPUI all the way up).
Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.
- spudlyo 1y agoThe problem with accepting VC money is they will eventually demand a return on their investment, which means that the forces that drive enshitification will eventually come for Zed in some form. I suspect that we'll see more and more features locked behind a paid subscription and the open core of the editor will become neglected over time. Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.
- parentheses 1y agoNote to Zed: I prefer paid products to enshittened ones. Please please please, get paid rather than holding on too tightly to making things free forcing future enshittening.
- rtfeldman 1y agoWe're working on it! :) You can pay for Zed today if you'd like - https://zed.dev/pricing https://zed.dev/pricing - and also the editor itself is open-source under the GPLv3 license. So if at any point in the future Zed changes direction in a way you don't like, you are perpetually free to build the version you liked from source (or make a community fork and take it in a different direction).
- reitanuki 1y agoThis will sound a bit odd, but I don't necessarily want to pay in a way that makes it look like I'm paying for the AI rather than the editor.
- codr7 1y agoYeah, same here, the least interesting aspect for me.
- vunderba 1y agoNo, it's not odd, I like this take a lot. They almost need a dropdown menu indicating where you'd like your money to go to (editor, LSP, etc). I'd also much rather have a means of paying a single flat fee to indicate my support than yet another subscription which is misleading because I have zero interest in the AI components of Zed.
- wuhhh 1y ago[dead]
- runako 1y agoBig fan of Zed. I want to echo a sibling comment that I don't see that as paying for Zed, I see it as paying for LLM usage. And since I already have my own LLM keys, I just use those instead.
- koito17 1y agoI already pay for Zed Pro, but my fear (and likely GP's as well) is that this doesn't provide enough revenue for the team. Since switching from Emacs last year, I have absolutely loved how this editor has evolved, and I am looking for any way to directly support the effort. I have been a Zed Pro subscriber for quite a while now, and I have started trying to contribute to the codebase, but I really wish there were monetization options beyond making a spread on Anthropic API pricing.
- ethanwillis 1y agoI would also pay for Zed (the editor) and not the AI. But I also don't want to pay just make Zed more attractive for VC acquisition. You don't have to give me any more features than what's in the free editor. I would gladly pay up to $300 just to have a "license".
- jchw 1y agoUnless they have very unusual terms on their funding, it isn't really entirely in their control in the long term. Hopefully they find a way to make their investors whole that doesn't suck for everyone else, but if not, well, I at least appreciate that the editor is truly open source, since at least it offers a contingency plan in the worst cases. If I'm wrong I'd love to know, but I think that we need to start talking about what funding really implies more honestly. It's traditionally met with unabashed enthusiasm and congratulations, which I totally understand, but it's a mutual exchange, not an award or a grant. I absolutely believe that everyone wants to make good on their promises, but promises made to users are not legally binding, and the track record for upholding those has not been great. Plus, as a user, I want to pay for software, but nothing feels worse than paying, then watching enshittification unfold anyways... When this happens, the investors should send you a nice postcard thanking you for paying back some of their money. Can $20/mo sustain a text editor company with a massive multimillion dollar valuation? Well, we'll see. Good luck Zed Industries, we're all counting on you.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoyou don't have to choose. paid things get enshittified just as easily as free things
- fragmede 1y agoI mean, eventually, sure. It took Uber around 15 years to get to profitability. ChatGPT came out in 2022, so get your predictions for 2037 in now.
- Temporary_31337 1y agoFor 2038 I predict Epochalypse and since there will only be vibe coders by then, good luck to y'all.
- markus_zhang 1y agoI might HAVE to learn EMacs (prefer over Vim) because I think eventually everything else will be tainted by mandatory AI features and/or subscriptions.
- myaccountonhn 1y agoAnd Zeds multiplayer features might make it so your workplace mandates Zed if you're unlucky and Zed succeeds with their plan.
- ksherlock 1y agoI hate to break it to you, but emacs was a product of the MIT AI lab.(prep.ai.mit.edu anyone?).
- cultofmetatron 1y agoclassical AI and modern generative AI are VERY different beasts. also, there isn't any AI in emacs itself. It was a tool built to make a job easier.
- markus_zhang 1y agoThat’s fine as long as they don’t force AI prompts to me. To clarify, I use AI agents, but I absolutely hate them submitting code in my editor. Chatting is fair enough and useful, but I need to turn off the auto-generating code part.
- efficax 1y agoZed is fully open source. Fork it. The code is pretty nice, too, easy to understand.
- jlarocco 1y agoVSCode is open source, too, but it's been pretty easy for them to keep forks from taking off by having proprietary extensions, a "markeplace", and other lock-in. All they have to do is only permit official builds to talk to official builds (for security, of course ;-), and forking Zed becomes a lot harder.
- x0x0 1y agoSure, but given the existence of vim/nvim, emails, visual studio code, cursor, etc the price for editors has largely been driven to zero, or at least capped by what JetBrains charges. My concerns are more this is a big bet on a different thing, not the editor (which is quite nice, even if using typescript regularly makes it balloon to 15gb of ram), making them a giant pile of money. With the editor as a free complement.
- sexyman48 1y agoPlease, tell me what it's like living in your free-as-in-freedom house, feeding your free-as-in-freedom offspring? Eventually demanding a return on your investment? The audacity!
- danr4 1y ago> "I don't think an editor should be VC backed" it's a software company. they sell software.
- pbiggar 1y ago[flagged]
- tjc2210 1y agoSame. Especially not having been familiar with who Sequoia is. Altman, Huang, Musk, etc.
- eldenring 1y agoWhat do you mean by that list? They pretty much have every single big tech company in their portfolio.
- hashbig 1y agoThey have some house cleaning to do in their leadership before I am willing to use a product they back. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
- toastercat 1y agoSublime Text solved this 17 years ago with the 40-year-old shareware model. It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.
- dpkirchner 1y agoIt does, or did, use dark patterns when showing upgrade notices -- prompting you to upgrade to a version that you don't own yet, without telling you you don't own it, leaving you with an unlicensed version. I was happy to use 3 but that felt really off.
- toastercat 1y agoYeah, I wasn't happy about that. Nor was I happy about the new 3-year-of-updates license model that ST4 adopted. Although at least to me, Sublime Text 4 feels like a "finished" product.
- ben-schaaf 1y agoST developer here. We aren't happy that happened either, it was a big oversight in the ST4 release that made people like yourself lose trust in us. I'm sorry and will do my best to not have something like that happen again. > Nor was I happy about the new 3-year-of-updates license model that ST4 adopted. I'm curious what you don't like about this model? The most common complaint with regards to updates was the long waiting period between major versions, which we've now eliminated, and without changing the perpetual nature of our licenses.
- agos 1y agonot OP but I am not thrilled by "x months/years of updates" because you pay upfront for updates that you're not really sure that will happen. Will I get bug fixes? Will I get new features or at least significant improvements? Will the two person team work on the other project? I have had experience with quite a few projects switching to recurring billing, occasionally justifying it with "to support development of great new stuff" and then... just keeping the same rate of updates as before, resulting in a de facto steep upgrade. That said, three years of upgrades for 99$ is reasonable, even if there were only bugfixes
- recroad 1y agoYup, I was playing around with Zed and kind of liked it, and even debated switching over. But this kills it for me.
- ActionHank 1y agoIt was a cool idea while it lasted, I hope other editors embrace the learnings once zed is gone.
- echelon 1y agoI doubt anyone will follow this. 1. Everyone else is building on Electron. 2. People still sleep on or dunk on Rust. There's a great deal of negativity here on HN for the language. 3. There's only so much Rust talent out there.
- ActionHank 1y agoWhilst rust is a big part of this it is not the core of their innovation. Pushing everything to the GPU is. Stating that everyone else is building on Electron belies your lack of exposure to any editors other than vscode \ atom spin offs. Realistically all the editors including those based on Electron could easily shift to leveraging the GPU more and that would be big leap forward for performance.
- echelon 1y ago> Stating that everyone else is building on Electron belies your lack of exposure to any editors other than vscode \ atom spin offs. Enlighten me.
- ActionHank 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_integrated_development_environments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_integrated_devel... It's not hard to look, I would wager a small percentage of these editors are Electron based.
- Bolwin 1y agoI haven't seen any negativity only push back. Rust became too hyped. I don't think Rust has a visibility problem right now. Everyone who cares enough already knows about it. Also, it doesn't have to be rust, it could be C# or Zig or Lua or whatever
- irlib 1y agoIt does not support Monokai because of reasons. That does not scream good taste to me. It screams something different.