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The New Code Editor Zed has a Strong Start, and is now Open Source
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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Programming
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This is a nice editor. I don’t like the comparisons to Atom since some of us remember that as “the really bloated and slow predecessor to VS Code”. Whereas Zed is quite small and fast. Opening a shell panel is instant and makes VS Code feel slow.
Its strength is multi-user (their term: multiplayer) shared editing spaces. It also has quite good AI integration and supports Github Copilot too.
I am a little concerned that they started off commercial and then went open source. Open source is great! But this path sometimes means that the original developers no longer have the time/money/interest to keep developing it. I hope that’s not the case here because they’ve got the start of something good.
For the last point, they mentionned from the very start they wanted to go open source
Developing a proprietary code editor is a blunder. The big players in the space are Vim, Emacs and VSCode, all of which are open source, so you can't outcompete those unless you go open source yourself. Being customisable and source-hackable is the key in making your product being liked by developers, obviously.
My bet is they simply realised the mistake and decided to fix it.
Is it a blunder? Tell that to Apple, Jetbrains, or Microsoft, each of whom have proprietary code editors that net billions of dollars of revenue.
It’s true, VS Code is open source, but it is developed almost entirely by Microsoft, by a large team of paid full-time programmers, designers, and PMs. It may be the most-used text editor in the world, but it isn’t developed by a team of volunteers who materialized around it because it was open source.
Instead, consider that making something open source is often just a marketing strategy — or a soft way to sunset a project.
I expected you to say that! The only mentioned company that has a proprietary code editor is Jetbrains with their Fleet. Visual Studio, XCode, most jetbrains products are IDEs.
IDEs are big, bloated products that don't need hackability because they already come prepackaged with everything. Code editors are different. Developers also like stuff being open source so they can put their trust into it — if everything goes to hell, somebody could fork it, which would save you from the need to find another properietary editor and change your workflow.
Ultimately, who develops OSS doesn't matter anymore. Even the Linux kernel, the thing that comes to mind to most people when they think of "open source", is developed by a lot of people working for corporations, on paid positions specifically to develop the kernel.
I can't disagree with that, but my point is that if being an open source code editor is so important, then there is a bigger probability that the team behind Zed are fixing the mistake, rather then sunsetting the software.