It's easy to say that Visual Studio Code is quite popular these days, so popular that almost every software developer knows about it or even uses it every day, and for good reasons. However, nothing is perfect, and VS Code sometimes shows its flaws in performance compared to native editors like Sublime Text, etc. That's why there are always new tools in the market trying to replace it, and one of them is Zed.
To be honest, I was not a fan of Zed initially, but now there are good reasons for me to make the switch, so let's dig into why.
What is Zed?
Have you ever heard of Atom or Tree-sitter? Atom is a code editor developed by GitHub, which they ceased development a few years ago. Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library. To keep things short, Zed is a "successor" of Atom, developed by the same folks who created these two tools.
Being the "successor" of Atom, Zed does not use the Electron framework; it uses Rust. So you know things will be fast 👀
Why now?
Did I mention that I was not a fan initially? That's because when it was first released to the public as a beta last year, it was a closed-source, Mac-only tool, which made the adoption not very tempting to me since I use Windows at work. But things have slowly changed:
- They open-sourced Zed at the beginning of this year, making it easy for others to contribute to the project.
- They added Linux support to the roadmap a few months ago. Though Windows is still not officially on the roadmap at the moment, you can build the app from source and use it if you want.
Making the switch
With that settled, I'm slowly switching to Zed now. There are still many things that I might miss, but I'm trying to figure it all out. I will definitely share more in the next post. In the meantime, happy coding!