I love the spirit of Zed. From the principles to the low-level implementation details, it all screams "good taste". It's immensely interesting as an object of study (the code is great, from GPUI all the way up).
Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.
There was a time around ST2 when it felt like everyone was using it and it could've become The Editor, then something happened and it's been left in the dust. I wasn't even aware but apparently even fourth version of ST was released, and that was in 2021.
I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?
They didn’t “solve” it, otherwise it would be a thriving editor that everyone would be using.
In reality 70% of the people I see are using Cursor (Subscription), Vscode (Free) or some JetBrains products (Subscription). I only know of some people including myself that have ST for opening large files, where performance matters.
It does, or did, use dark patterns when showing upgrade notices -- prompting you to upgrade to a version that you don't own yet, without telling you you don't own it, leaving you with an unlicensed version. I was happy to use 3 but that felt really off.
They switched to a subscription model (3 year licenses are still subscriptions), and since the release of ST4 in 2021, there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025). All other releases have been bug fixes and "improvements".
I get that developers need to make a living, but 4 years of fixing bugs in your products is probably not what I want to be paying for, at least not when that is the only thing I'm getting. Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart.
I have used ST ever since the first version replaced TextMate for my use (TM2 spent something like a decade catching up to ST2), but I've since switched to Code and Zed (mostly Zed as of late, Code on windows until Zed is ready there).
ST was great back when it was still an actively maintained product, but in recent years (ever since ST2) it has felt like it was mostly on the back burner and other editors have passed it in functionality.
As for VC funding, it has done miracles for Code to have Microsoft sponsor it (and others). Code is currently the editor to beat for anything that doesn't involve opening large files.
The problem with accepting VC money is they will eventually demand a return on their investment, which means that the forces that drive enshitification will eventually come for Zed in some form. I suspect that we'll see more and more features locked behind a paid subscription and the open core of the editor will become neglected over time.
Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.
I might HAVE to learn EMacs (prefer over Vim) because I think eventually everything else will be tainted by mandatory AI features and/or subscriptions.
Sure, but given the existence of vim/nvim, emails, visual studio code, cursor, etc the price for editors has largely been driven to zero, or at least capped by what JetBrains charges. My concerns are more this is a big bet on a different thing, not the editor (which is quite nice, even if using typescript regularly makes it balloon to 15gb of ram), making them a giant pile of money. With the editor as a free complement.
Please, tell me what it's like living in your free-as-in-freedom house,
feeding your free-as-in-freedom offspring? Eventually demanding a
return on your investment? The audacity!
Counterpoint, apparently cursor's revenue is in the 300-400 million range. So it's not wildly inconceivable that you'd do 40m profit (although I too am doubtful).
I strongly doubt that Cursor makes anywhere near 40m profit. All they're revenue is spent on tokens with the LLM vendors. I'd be surprised if they are even running at positive margin and not just subsidizing usage with the VC money.
Unsure of what the end goal is, but I expect everything AI related to be a load-leader right now and then the goal being to figure out how to drive down costs or make even more money later.
If the world is moving towards open models which are "good enough" – the main winner will be the one controlling the distribution. So if you're controlling the web browser, the editor or the OS – you are the winner.
Obviously, the risk here is very high from this perspective, since nothing guarantees anything.
Zed isn’t just a text editor. It is the only working platform for code assistants.
Neither Google nor Claude nor anyone can’t at the moment get right basic operations like file edits. Zed is flawless in co-operating with most LLM models. And not just that - also switching models during conversation and more.
I am at Zed Pro at $20 but when Zed offers $200 Max plan I will sign up right away.
I switched off of Zed's agent system onto the Claude Code CLI because I was blown away by how much better CC was.
Even with "auto edit" turned on, Zed just kept asking me for confirmation. I'd be like "hey your code has this bug", and it'd be like "you're right, and this is why. here's how you can fix it" ??? just fix it man it's your code. Maybe this is fixed now, but Claude Code never has this issue and is very good at only stopping when truly stuck (and generally for good reason!)
Changing the topic a bit, Zed's collaboration features seem really good but it's quite hard to use when nobody uses it in the first place. With VSCode, I can use the LiveShare extension and everyone on the team can just join with no fuss at all. LiveShare is likely not nearly as technically great, but the simple fact that people can use it easily makes it win hard.
Honestly it would be cool if Zed can somehow become more popular thanks to this investment. As long as it can keep its speed and technical excellence. VSCode used to be super lean and cool, but now it's just another fat IDE with unlimited bells and whistles. It feels like how Eclipse felt back in the day.
No....there is value in having many developers use your tool for daily code development. You should think if it as a lot more than a text editor as well, just like Github is a lot more than just hosted Git (also VC backed at first).
I love working in Zed. It really is a delight to use, and I think the Agentic coding integration is really well done. I'm excited to see them investing in this space more.
I understand people's concerns about VC funding, but I think building quality products takes capital. The funding is still relatively small, especially when you compare it to players like Cursor, etc. And I think Zed is a much, much better product!
Zed being OSS is a gift to the community, and I suspect DeltaDB will be as well. And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human.
Maybe you can comment on this. I saw in the Zed demo that they're using "rewrite optimized version Claude". My first thought was wondering how big the bull is going to be.
> And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human.
Hate cancel culture as much as the next techbro, but since y'all point out they're "a delightful human", it'd be interesting to see how Nathan then responds to concerns raised in some quarters: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
With so many new AI editors popping up, it feels like the Zed team is in a tough “lose/lose” spot.
If they stick to their current path—focusing on craftsmanship and letting their world-class talent build the best editor—they risk falling behind giants like Cursor. Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there) in just two years. With that kind of momentum, Cursor can now buy their way into a superior product.
On the other hand, if Zed takes more VC money, it likely means doubling down on AI in ways they clearly don’t seem eager to—but at least it would give them a fighting chance.
I really feel for this team. It couldn’t have been an easy decision, and from the few interactions I’ve had, they strike me as incredibly talented, kind, and genuine folks. I truly wish them the best.
I hadn’t thought about it that way but it’s an interesting point. The cursor folks probably have 99% of the work already done for them, for free, funded by Microsoft, probably in perpetuity.
And on top of that, since it’s essentially just vscode, it costs users almost zero effort to make the switch. It’s the perfect crime!!
I hope zed does well though. I love their blog, and all of the cool open source stuff they’ve made. I recently heard they added a “helix mode” which might be enough to get me to switch from vscode…
this is where the advances in collaboration come in; it's a way out for them because existing editors are largely stuck with git and are patching ai on top of everything.
zed came at the incredibly (un?)fortunate timing where they were just able to build a solid base before the editor wars began. their only path now is to fully maximize the few advantages they do have:
* a fresh base that is far more flexible
* really good experience with performance, design, general craftmanship
* a buzzy community and fresh/boldness that attracts vcs
for zed to truly win (at least in sequioa's eyes) they will need to completely take over vscode as the new default, and that will require a big lead when it comes to collaboration and ai
> Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there
Revenue, not profit. I’d imagine cursor loses a dollar for every 50 cents of revenue and makes it up in volume. Meanwhile JetBrains is a profitable company not beholden to the whims of outside investors.
Tbh: I think git is not the century-tool that a lot of people think it is, and we're in an era now where its decreasingly serving the needs of its users. I'm ready for deeper ground-up innovation in the space of code collaboration.
Developers don't think in terms of commits; they think in terms of Tickets and PRs. Git doesn't have any native representation of either of these things. Getting tickets into the repository is something the community has talked about for years, and Linus himself has said he wants, but it hasn't happened yet. Branches work fine enough to start a PR, but then Github, again, has to take over for comments, CI execution, even the decision on how you want the commits on that branch represented on the main branch (squash? merge? rebase? why should I care?). LFS has been years in the making. Monorepos are still weird.
Idk, I think there's capacity in the industry to take the concept of a repository back to square one and think more holistically about how we all interface with the repository. The way they talk about DeltaDB gives me hope that they'll start thinking more about this with this funding; commits just aren't a useful primitive anymore, and a repository, locally-downloaded, open source, ultratight connection between diffs, merges, communication, and automated tooling is how I want to be coding in 2030.
Totally agree. git notes might help a bit with some of those points, but what most shops need / want is something like GitLab. git itself is usually too low level.
Is IntelliJ "bad"? Aren't the reactions here overly negative?
This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view
The thing with taking VC funding is that your intention usually is not to steadily grow a sustainable product.
You take the funding so that you can outgrow the competitors and get the market faster.
All you need is the small promise of innovation in an area which is somewhat new.
At the beginning, the product is good enough and you have money to keep marketing and developing slightly faster than others. This will get you the users.
In the end, is your product at that point truly the best among competitors? It matters less, since you already have the users.
I think Zed didn’t need this one since they had a great product. Many would have been ready to pay at least a little. They could have grown slowly and see what works. With VC money take can go to completely wrong direction with giant steps and they are not noticing that unless it is too late. And then investors want returns.
Another big point was they implemented their own parsers for everything which allowed them to make nifty things - the refactor features way back in the early 10s was miles ahead of everyone else - but then LSP happened and that advantage is diminishing and becoming a liability
>IntelliJ lost the plot at the inception of CLion etc.
I was a customer for so many years. "One IDE to rule them all" and then they started cashing on more.
What are you talking about?
ReSharper came out 21 years ago 3 years after Intellij.
RubyMine came out 15 years ago. 7 years before CLion.
The days of using a separate IDE for each language are kind of over.
These very paradigms are outdated these days. vscode got it, very early. vscode works for everything. Most projects use Python/Go and JS, and out of the box vscode just works for all these languages and their tools.
Readit News
Having said that, I don't think an editor should be VC backed. It's the obvious pragmatic choice to get a team together to support a thing, but I'm concerned by it.
It's also faster than Zed, works on Linux/Win/MacOS, and is decently customizable.
I lost track of what happened there (moved to Vim back then), was it VSCode that killed it?
In reality 70% of the people I see are using Cursor (Subscription), Vscode (Free) or some JetBrains products (Subscription). I only know of some people including myself that have ST for opening large files, where performance matters.
They switched to a subscription model (3 year licenses are still subscriptions), and since the release of ST4 in 2021, there has been exactly one release with new features (May 2025). All other releases have been bug fixes and "improvements".
I get that developers need to make a living, but 4 years of fixing bugs in your products is probably not what I want to be paying for, at least not when that is the only thing I'm getting. Speaking of releases, they're also usually 6-12 months apart.
I have used ST ever since the first version replaced TextMate for my use (TM2 spent something like a decade catching up to ST2), but I've since switched to Code and Zed (mostly Zed as of late, Code on windows until Zed is ready there).
ST was great back when it was still an actively maintained product, but in recent years (ever since ST2) it has felt like it was mostly on the back burner and other editors have passed it in functionality.
As for VC funding, it has done miracles for Code to have Microsoft sponsor it (and others). Code is currently the editor to beat for anything that doesn't involve opening large files.
Here I am on my free-as-in-freedom operating system, making commits with my free DVCS tool in my free programmable text editor, building it with my free language toolchain, using my free terminal emulator/multiplexer with my free UNIX shell. VC backed tools like Warp and Zed that seek to innovate in this space are of zero interest to me as a developer.
Please please please, get paid rather than holding on too tightly to making things free forcing future enshittening.
1. Everyone else is building on Electron.
2. People still sleep on or dunk on Rust. There's a great deal of negativity here on HN for the language.
3. There's only so much Rust talent out there.
Dead Comment
it's a software company. they sell software.
- You can make money when your product is a text editor.
I am very skeptical of these claims:
- When your product is a text editor, $42 million in capital can be effectively deployed to make meaningful improvements to your product.
- When your product is a text editor, your lifetime inflation-adjusted profit will eventually exceed $42 million.
Sequoia is apparently not so skeptical, and willing to put the money on the table. That must have been a truly extraordinary pitch deck...
They invested like $200 million in FTX and had a glowing article about SBF about mile long on their website.
The big VC firms are by no means immune from just doing plainly stupid things.
Right now all the hype around anything even at the periphery of "AI" is enabling a lot of similar stupidity.
Unsure of what the end goal is, but I expect everything AI related to be a load-leader right now and then the goal being to figure out how to drive down costs or make even more money later.
Maybe that's what Sequioa thinks too...
Obviously, the risk here is very high from this perspective, since nothing guarantees anything.
Neither Google nor Claude nor anyone can’t at the moment get right basic operations like file edits. Zed is flawless in co-operating with most LLM models. And not just that - also switching models during conversation and more.
I am at Zed Pro at $20 but when Zed offers $200 Max plan I will sign up right away.
Even with "auto edit" turned on, Zed just kept asking me for confirmation. I'd be like "hey your code has this bug", and it'd be like "you're right, and this is why. here's how you can fix it" ??? just fix it man it's your code. Maybe this is fixed now, but Claude Code never has this issue and is very good at only stopping when truly stuck (and generally for good reason!)
Changing the topic a bit, Zed's collaboration features seem really good but it's quite hard to use when nobody uses it in the first place. With VSCode, I can use the LiveShare extension and everyone on the team can just join with no fuss at all. LiveShare is likely not nearly as technically great, but the simple fact that people can use it easily makes it win hard.
Honestly it would be cool if Zed can somehow become more popular thanks to this investment. As long as it can keep its speed and technical excellence. VSCode used to be super lean and cool, but now it's just another fat IDE with unlimited bells and whistles. It feels like how Eclipse felt back in the day.
They are giving out the actual text editor for free.
I understand people's concerns about VC funding, but I think building quality products takes capital. The funding is still relatively small, especially when you compare it to players like Cursor, etc. And I think Zed is a much, much better product!
Zed being OSS is a gift to the community, and I suspect DeltaDB will be as well. And as others have said, Nathan (CEO) is a delightful human.
Congrats, Zed!
When VC funding comes in it stops being about building any products, because the company itself becomes a product.
Hate cancel culture as much as the next techbro, but since y'all point out they're "a delightful human", it'd be interesting to see how Nathan then responds to concerns raised in some quarters: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
If they stick to their current path—focusing on craftsmanship and letting their world-class talent build the best editor—they risk falling behind giants like Cursor. Cursor seemingly came out of nowhere and is already doing $300–400M annually, rivaling JetBrains (who took 20 years to get there) in just two years. With that kind of momentum, Cursor can now buy their way into a superior product.
On the other hand, if Zed takes more VC money, it likely means doubling down on AI in ways they clearly don’t seem eager to—but at least it would give them a fighting chance.
I really feel for this team. It couldn’t have been an easy decision, and from the few interactions I’ve had, they strike me as incredibly talented, kind, and genuine folks. I truly wish them the best.
And on top of that, since it’s essentially just vscode, it costs users almost zero effort to make the switch. It’s the perfect crime!!
I hope zed does well though. I love their blog, and all of the cool open source stuff they’ve made. I recently heard they added a “helix mode” which might be enough to get me to switch from vscode…
zed came at the incredibly (un?)fortunate timing where they were just able to build a solid base before the editor wars began. their only path now is to fully maximize the few advantages they do have:
* a fresh base that is far more flexible
* really good experience with performance, design, general craftmanship
* a buzzy community and fresh/boldness that attracts vcs
for zed to truly win (at least in sequioa's eyes) they will need to completely take over vscode as the new default, and that will require a big lead when it comes to collaboration and ai
Revenue, not profit. I’d imagine cursor loses a dollar for every 50 cents of revenue and makes it up in volume. Meanwhile JetBrains is a profitable company not beholden to the whims of outside investors.
I know which I’d rather work for…
Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964916
Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964366
Developers don't think in terms of commits; they think in terms of Tickets and PRs. Git doesn't have any native representation of either of these things. Getting tickets into the repository is something the community has talked about for years, and Linus himself has said he wants, but it hasn't happened yet. Branches work fine enough to start a PR, but then Github, again, has to take over for comments, CI execution, even the decision on how you want the commits on that branch represented on the main branch (squash? merge? rebase? why should I care?). LFS has been years in the making. Monorepos are still weird.
Idk, I think there's capacity in the industry to take the concept of a repository back to square one and think more holistically about how we all interface with the repository. The way they talk about DeltaDB gives me hope that they'll start thinking more about this with this funding; commits just aren't a useful primitive anymore, and a repository, locally-downloaded, open source, ultratight connection between diffs, merges, communication, and automated tooling is how I want to be coding in 2030.
Dead Comment
I wonder though what the play is here for Sequoia - like all VCs they’re looking for the possibility of a huge return.
I don’t see how “just” an editor (even with paying users) can generate a 10x return. So what is the larger vision here?
This means the company is funded, development will continue, zed will continue to improve. An IntelliJ style license (for example) is an acceptable trade-off from my point-of-view
So at some point Zed will likely need to pursue monetization more aggressively than IntelliJ does now.
You take the funding so that you can outgrow the competitors and get the market faster. All you need is the small promise of innovation in an area which is somewhat new. At the beginning, the product is good enough and you have money to keep marketing and developing slightly faster than others. This will get you the users.
In the end, is your product at that point truly the best among competitors? It matters less, since you already have the users.
I think Zed didn’t need this one since they had a great product. Many would have been ready to pay at least a little. They could have grown slowly and see what works. With VC money take can go to completely wrong direction with giant steps and they are not noticing that unless it is too late. And then investors want returns.
Deleted Comment
It’s refreshing to see an editor that’s built with performance as a priority.
I was a customer for so many years. "One IDE to rule them all" and then they started cashing on more.
Progress was down to a crawl, performance down the shitter and bug reports go unnoticed for 2+ years.
VSCode poops on IntelliJ these days for everything but the UX; but with enough modding, it can be very close.
What are you talking about?
ReSharper came out 21 years ago 3 years after Intellij. RubyMine came out 15 years ago. 7 years before CLion.
The days of using a separate IDE for each language are kind of over.
These very paradigms are outdated these days. vscode got it, very early. vscode works for everything. Most projects use Python/Go and JS, and out of the box vscode just works for all these languages and their tools.
IntelliJ did that before Atom even had ‘git init’ run on it.