Thoughts
Apparently Zed has been publishing releases for months. Very cool editor. Definitely more competitive than something like Lapce
which is having to re-invent keyboard control and UI elements from scratch. It's funny how I can open up an editor and click around and form an opinion within about a minute. I've spent so much time in text editors that my system-1 can pick up on thousands of details about the responsiveness, layout, design, color palette, (false positive) linter errors, keyboard shortcut support, etc. Speaking of responsiveness, Zed already has more key-press-latency than Sublime or a native text-entry field. (Maybe. Always hard to tell when it comes down to milliseconds.)
It's definitely usable. Like.
Startup time is very good, it handled every keyboard shortcut I could throw at it.
I'm sure there would be surprises and missing features as its still 0.111, but since Atom's death if you wanted a GUI text editor on mac that supported command+shift+right arrow selecting to the end of the line, your options were kind of Sublime or VS Code (or XCode, or smaller ones like Xi, or custom configs for vim or emacs, or BBEdit, Pulsar, Textmate, Brackets, others that no one uses) but like that was it. It's very cool to see another big player emerging.
I think I glazed over Zed originally because the collaboration features are a sham. We had Teletype, we have the JetBrains one. I get it. But I don't. It's cool and useful but it's not a 0-to-1 innovation.
They need to not use monospace fonts for their UI elements, it looks like fricking Lunar in here.