I've been using the Zed editor for... checks previous blog ...about 3 months now. I've used it exclusively for projects, I don't even have VS Code on my taskbar anymore. The 1 feature I missed most from VS Code was the ability to drag and drop text in the editor. Fortunately, I realized just today that it was added, so I can't even complain about that. In my defense, it was a recent addition. Honestly, that was it, that was the 1 con I had.

So, what do I like about it? It is a more complete editor out of the box. VS Code has a lot of great extensions, but I like a very clean workspace. I don't set up a lot of things to be always on. Zed does a lot of things on its own, like checking imports and even sorting them in alphabetical order or removing unused ones. I don't need to dig into extensions for those things, they are just simple settings. If you want something different, there's probably an extension and you just change the setting, but out of the box prettier and eslint have just worked for me. I love the import sorting and cleaning, that is one of my pet peeves and it just fixes it for me.

It runs very smoothly. I have a kinda middle of the road PC, by today's standards. It's not weak, but it's not anything crazy. Zed doesn't seem to use as many resources as VS Code or any modern editor. I do think the way it works can cause resource usage to go up or down, depending on what you are doing. It's not like VS Code though; if I leave VS Code running all day or over multiple days, it will continuously consume resources at about the same amount. Zed has a smaller footprint and, unless I'm actively working in Zed, it maintains that smaller footprint, even with multiple windows open.

Finally, the 1 thing that peaked my interest in Zed in the first place, it uses Claude for it's edit predictions. I've used several in VS Code and it was nearly always just a starting point if it recommended something or it would replace a huge chunk of code that didn't need to be replaced, even breaking it most of the time. The Github suggestions were a bit better than others, but still not consistent. With Zed the prediction is nearly always right or at least enough to save some typing. I've been very happy with predictions in Zed, because most of the time I don't need them anyway, but sometimes it's a time saver and that's really what it should be all about.

I definitely recommend trying Zed editor, if you aren't too resist to some change. It's been really great for me and the simplicity of it all makes it a perfect editor.