Ditching VSCode For Zed, Why, And For What?

I started using VSCode since its very early releases. I migrated to it from Sublime Text 2, and since then, VSCode has become my main code editor and then, my principal IDE.

One of the main reasons I adopted VSCode was its extensive extension’s ecosystem. The flexibility and extensibility of VSCode make it the first choice for any developer.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been looking for an alternative to VSCode for the same reason that initially drew me to it: its extensive extensions.

The VSCode extensions are a very clever way to add functionalities that are not built in, and it’s a very efficient way to help developers work with any kind of technology, no matter how old it is; probably there is already an extension for it.

This versatile extension ecosystem, unfortunately, made VSCode very slow to load projects, and for me, most of the time, I barely use 2 or 3 extensions at max.

For that, I started looking for a simple and efficient code editor that gives me the feel of speed, with some basic IDE features like a Git client, Debugger, etc.

I checked some code editors like Sublime Text 4, I gave it a good try, and it's still a good code editor, my only inconvenience with it was the price, a 100 USD for a code editor is kind of a high price for me. That’s one of the downsides of getting used to free and open-source projects 😅

Notepad++ wasn’t in my queue, just because it wasn’t my favorite code editor since my first steps in programming back in 2009.

Many of my friends recommended code editors like Cursor, Windsurf, but for me, they’re over-injected with some useless AI features, and their marketing strategy is all based on selling AI services.

I kept searching until I remembered Zed, the code editor that was built to be fast, installed it, and found it still really fast, memory use efficient, and has a growing extension library, but at the same time, a limited API to add functionalities.

The team behind Zed decided to build the main features and include them in the core of Zed, and allow the community to develop just some minor extensions that add, for example, support for language syntax highlighting, themes.

The Zed Era

After a few days of using Zed, I confirmed that it’s my new code editor from now on, and I’m not going back to VSCode to use it as my primary IDE.

Zed make you feel that it was made to make you code fast, be productive at what you’re doing, and not waiting for it to load your project so you can start working. Zed ecosystem is growing faster that I ever thought it will, and many extensions are getting published every day.

I was encouraged to publish my own extension to Zed repository. The extension adds the feature of syntax highlighting and autocompletion to EdgeJS, the templating engine of AdonisJS framework. You can check the extension from this link