Nothing wrong with bland, but a well-designed IDE does a good job using the UI to allow you to parse information as fast as possible. For instance, compare the autocomplete popover in Zed to VSCode. The VSCode popover:

- Has icons. These are so useful for parsing information quickly!!

- Shows the type information in a different color than the field name. There is spacing between the type name, and the type is smaller.

The Zed autocomplete popover is a solid wall of (almost entirely) monochrome text, all the same size. It is significantly harder to parse. I use the autocomplete popover probably thousands of times a day. These subtle things make a big difference.

Is the Zed popover bland? Yes. Is the VSCode popover flashy? Not really, it's just utilitarian - clearly designed by someone who understood how important every detail is.

In 2007 I had the best actionscript IDE that looked awesome and made the whole actionscript development magical. FlashDevelop iirc. It made a huge difference and inspired me every time.

I program mostly in Rust, so in theory Zed should be the perfect IDE for me. But I couldn't get past the design. It just put me in the wrong mind space.

As a data point for the Zed folks: JetBrains' RustRover with vim key bindings is still my go-to. It just "looks and feels" right to me.

I'm sure that they'll get there in time. They're playing the slow, careful, methodical game. Writing it in Rust was the right choice and it'll pay dividends.