Switched to Zed from VS Code. It’s really quite cool, mainly in terms of RAM usage and startup time. For my projects, a single VS Code window consumes around 2 GB of RAM, while the same project in Zed consumes around 90 MB. It really is quite insane. And Zed’s cold-start bootup latency is around 3 seconds (for me), compared to around 10-12 seconds in VS Code (before it’s ready to use). I don’t use a lot of extensions in VS Code.
I spent an entire day working on a real project in Zed, and felt quite at home. Zed’s very customizable, so I’ve made it look and feel a lot like a de-bloated VS Code, with the same theme and key bindings.
This is one of the nicer side-effects of GitHub Copilot’s crazy 40x pricing increase. That event led me to switch away from both Copilot and VS Code. Not out of moral outrage, but simply because there are better alternatives (to both), and I needed something like this to get out of my comfort zone. Without Copilot, I see no reason to continue using VS Code because Zed is a better alternative.