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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • 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.


  • 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.