I'm very happy with zed if I have to compare it to any intellij product

If you're using Windows (+ WSL) then yes, there's a hunch of memory issues currently. Apart from Windows I've never issues though, especially seeing as how intellij indexing takes >1 min and hogs my memory during that period.

The only reason I'm not switching is because Zed's vim bindings are aaalmost perfect. I did not like Vim Mode in VSC or intellij IDE's since it's another keymap I have to learn next to my nvim setup

No, I had issues on native Linux. At one point it used 4x available memory and brought down the entire system.

Maybe this is a vim thing? What do emacs and vscode users feel about zed?

Same experience, I heard about them in some podcasts, it all sounded good, performance, from the ground up, rust, collaboration, whatever.

Tried it, it was the worse experience I had with an editor since I started my career… then I tried it again because maybe they figured it out… it’s still bad.

I initially loved Zed because it was so much snappier than VSCode/Cursor, but running several Zed instances made my Ryzen/32gb machine unusable together with Claude because Zed seems such a memory hog. Not using it currently anymore. (Win11)

I've been using it as a replacement for VSCode/Cursor for the past few months and really like it.

There have been recent changes to the font rendering, it now looks good on my 1440p monitor - when I first tried, it was blurry and instantly gave me a headache. It does seem strange to me that *font rendering* of all things is what a text editor has trouble with. Precise font rendering should be table stakes here.

As for performance/memory usage, it's been top-notch for me on both Linux and macOS.

I had originally switched to try and get away from Microsoft's "only focus on AI features" trend in VSCode, but it seems like Zed has fallen into the same trap.

I have done the same multiple times. But for the last 3 months or so. I haven’t touched anything else (well nvim for quick code browsing, but not as editor). I think that might be around the time they fixed the font rendering on Linux.

It’s good. Launches from anywhere from cli with just ‘zed .’ (No logs and artifacts that hold up the terminal). Multiple instances without worry (unlike PyCharm I used before).

It’s good to the point I keep checking to see if there is a “pro” plan, but there isn’t. They just have AI subscriptions.

I've been using it daily for about a year now. I love it. Using most other IDEs feels like a major regression. Multi-buffers are beautifully implemented. I typically use Claude Code if I use an LLM, but their Claude integration is excellent.

Debugging is good. I'd love to see integrated test runners.

I also wish the collaboration was more relevant and fleshed out, but no one I know uses it anyway.

I tried Zed. It's alright. Unfortunately the devs think it's ok to download and run extra software without asking me (specifically node.js but it would be bad no matter what the software was). I am not willing to use software where the developers have such a cavalier approach to the user's PC, so I went back to Sublime.

Went to Zed from Sublime and never looked back (I'm on Mac). Never touched VSCode apart of small tests to see that the project setting (format on save, etc) will work for my colleagues. Can't stand it.

I have opened at all times at least 3-4 medium sized front-end projects and at least one large python project and never had memory issues.

if you would say you are writing about zed, I'd think you were writing about vscode.

I can't believe the latency of browser based editor is acceptable to people

*wouldn't have said

I’m on a mac - I’ve been poking at zed a bit and it’s… fine? I was a die hard Textmate user, but that’s not just dead but decayed at this point, and I’ve yet to find anything as good.

I've been trying it out on MacOS for the past couple of weeks and I'm happy with it. I have a fairly vanilla use of my code editors and I find Zed snappier than VSCode. I have not experienced the issues you describe.

It used to be the best. Straight to the point, simple, great settings.

Same. MacOS. Tried it. Was okay-ish for several days. But eventually I realised it's worse than WebStorm in basically every aspect, subjectively speaking.

It is slow, it's missing features and it is buggy.

the only time it's using high memory usage if the project runs like 3-4 LSP's. then it's pretty slow, yes.

Because it's the only good free IDE for rust.

neovim works just as good... as long as you ask AI to set it up for you.

I find it okay on macOS. Font rendering isn't the best but palatable.

Personally I love it. It just feels fast and minimal. I'm on Mac.

I haven't had this experience (on macOS, it is quite fast), but I have read this exact same complaint about rendering/slowness from other Linux users a handful of times. So I think those might be more platform-specific issues. I do see high memory usage, though. So I enjoy using Zed when I want to use AI, and prefer Sublime when I want to fly solo.

To me it's just a Sublime with AI. Except Sublime doesn't eat my RAM.

Very fast but not enough features to use on a daily basis.

And they lack some extensions I love in VSCode such as Markdown All In One and GitLens. They have a big battle against the large ecosystem of VSCode extensions.

And then there's JetBrains which is on another level of refactoring/features.

I agree there are really noticeable issues on Linux. For example, closing file windows is shockingly slow. I'm talking like 500ms+ to close on a high end Ubuntu machine.

The macOS version is where they've invested the most optimizations for sure. None of the issues you've described occur on there. Fwiw, I've been daily driving the editor on my mac for about a year with almost no complaints.