Goodbye Sublime Text, Hello Zed
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) pretty much ended the user-friendly text editor wars. It’s very customizable, and has what appears to be an endless number of extensions.
With that being said, it’s based on Electron. While Microsoft has done wonders to make it as performant as possible, it still feels sluggish to me, and lacks that native user interface feel.
For years now, Sublime Text has been my go-to text editor. It’s blazing fast, has a relatively mature extensions ecosystem (nowhere near VS Code), and most importantly, it has a native user interface feel.
There are a few noticeable downsides, such as the lack of official extensions from vendors like Tailwind (i.e. there are no official extensions for Tailwind), it lacks built-in collaboration, and the biggest of them all: it’s closed-source and costs $99 USD for a perpetual license that includes three years of updates.
Now, that is more than fair, and it’s something that I normally would have gladly paid for—until I discovered Zed.
Zed is still in its early stages, but it’s just as fast (if not faster) than Sublime. It also features a native user interface feel, and has built-in collaboration. Most importantly, it’s free and open-source. Personally, I feel that it is a healthy blend between Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code.
I have been using it for a few days and I find myself really liking it. Enough for me to sunset Sublime as my go-to text editor. I think that