It's honestly frustrating to see such a promising product make _so many_ sub-par product decisions. It's probably one of the only products that I have genuinely tried using > 5 times and gave up right after. I would grant this if they were new in the block, but it's been a while now.
If they had focused on
1. Feature-parity with the top 10 VSCode extensions (for the most common beaten path — vim keybindings, popular LSPs, etc) and
2. Implemented Cursor's Tab
3. Simple chat interface that I can easily add context from the currently loaded repo
I would switch in a beat.
I _really_ want something better than VSCode and nvim. But this ain't it. While "agentic coding" is a nice feature, and specially so for "vibe coding projects", I (and most of my peers) don't rely on it that much for daily driving their work. It's nice for having less critical things going on at once, but as long as I'm expected to produce code, both of the features highlighted are what _effectively_ makes me more productive.
1. Zed has been working great for me for ~1.5 years while I ignored its AI features (I only started using Zed's AI features in the past 2 weeks). Vim keybindings are better IMHO than every other non-vim editor and the LSP's I've used (typescript, clangd, gleam) have worked perfectly.
2. The edit prediction feature is almost there. I do still prefer Cursor for this, but its not so far ahead that I feel like I want to use Cursor and personally I find Zed to be a much more pleasant editor to use than vscode.
3. When you switch the agent panel from "write" to "ask" mode, its basically that, no?
I'm not into vide coding at all, I think AI code is still 90% trash, but I do find it useful for certain tasks, repetitive edits, and boilerplate, or just for generating a first pass at a React UI while I do the logic. For this, Zed's agent feature has worked very well and I quite like the "follow mode" as a way to see what the AI is changing so I can build a better mental model of the changes I'm about to review.
I do wish there was a bit more focus on some core editor features: ligatures still don't fully work on Linux; why can't I pop the agent panel (or any other panel for that matter) into the center editor region, or have more than one panel docked side by side on one of the screen sides? But overall, I largely have the opposite opinion and experience from you. Most of my complaints from last year have been solved (various vim compatibility things), or are in progress (debugger support is on the way).
If they had focused on
1. Feature-parity with the top 10 VSCode extensions (for the most common beaten path — vim keybindings, popular LSPs, etc) and
2. Implemented Cursor's Tab
3. Simple chat interface that I can easily add context from the currently loaded repo
I would switch in a beat.
I _really_ want something better than VSCode and nvim. But this ain't it. While "agentic coding" is a nice feature, and specially so for "vibe coding projects", I (and most of my peers) don't rely on it that much for daily driving their work. It's nice for having less critical things going on at once, but as long as I'm expected to produce code, both of the features highlighted are what _effectively_ makes me more productive.