Backstory
Since starting my career in IT, I've used a wide variety of code editors and IDEs. My first ever line of code was actually written in an IDE called "Roblox Studio" which is used to create games on the Roblox platform. Now this is a very unknown IDE and at the time, even today, it lacks many basic features that are considered standard in modern editors. So I quickly moved onto other, more capable editors such as JetBrains' PHPStorm and WebStorm.
Visual Studio Code, the best of both worlds?
But here's the thing, I don't like slow, bloated software. When I'm writing code, I want to work quickly and efficiently. 5 minutes of indexing and loading is, atleast for me, unacceptable.
This is where Visual Studio Code comes in. It's fast, lightweight, open source and free. There's a huge community creating extensions for it and it's available on all major platforms. For me, it simply ticks all the right boxes.
I feel like it's the perfect balance between a full blown IDE and a simple text editor.
The switch to Zed
As of a couple of weeks ago, I've been a happy user of VSCode. But recently I started looking for something new, something that's even faster, even more lightweight and powerful.
And that's when learned about Zed. Written entirely in Rust using a custom UI framework makes it extremely fast, probably the fastest editor on the market right now.
That sounds almost too good to be true, where's the catch?
Well, there are a few. First of all, Zed is still in beta (v110.2). Half a year ago, a lot of core features where missing. Since then, the editor has matured a lot but many functionalities, languages and other things are still on the roadmap. It's currently only available for macOS. Windows and Linux support is planned but there's no ETA yet.
Why am I using it then?
To put it simply, Zed has everything I need for my day to day work. It supports all the languages I regularly use, it works seamlessly with GitHub Copilot and most importantly, it has Vim emulation.
Would I recommend Zed?
If you're on MacOS and are looking for a fast, lightweight editor then yes, absolutely. Zed is available for free on their website, so I recommend you give it a try. Especially if you're using Rust or TypeScript on a daily basis.
If a language or feature you need is missing, you can always open an issue on Zed's GitHub or upvote an existing one to help the developers prioritize.