The new default layout is exactly backwards of what I want.
It should go: project tree | text editor | agent view | threads
Not to mention on most laptops you'll only have room for about two panes at a time. So they should be focusing on pane management and making it easy to swap between views. Not highlighting 4 pane workflows. Unless you have an ultra-wide monitor, I'd rather have a separate Agents window.
I use Zed a lot and this is a minor (can be configured) but telling design decision that really bothers me. How long until they decide editing itself isn't worth it anymore? Stop supporting VI mode?
If they drop VI support, they lose me as a contributor and a user. It's the reason I started using Zed to begin with.
I don't think they'll drop it anytime, though.
Yeah, first thing I did was change all the locations back. I really dislike the automatic layout change they pushed.
Also, watching the change notes, most effort seems to be focused on agents this days, which is a bit worrying. I love Zed because it's great editor that also knows a bit about agents; I don't want it to continue pivoting towards pushing agent management deeper and deeper into the experience.
I don't have any problem with them investing heavily in this, I just think they need to be smart about the UX and not let the business VC drive the experience this much. Pivoting from text editor to agent manager is a bad choice IMO, when it can easily be both and help people onboard from editor to agentic workflows.
$VC disagrees w/ you on this.
Unfortunately.
Personally, I still pay Zed because I think they’re doing great foundational work. However I’ve now almost entirely migrated to helix for editing needs.
> I don't want it to continue pivoting towards pushing agent management deeper and deeper into the experience.
AI and agent tooling is the only way this VC-backed company is going to make any money. Nobody is going to pay for a text editor, so they've had no choice but to enshitify it by chasing AI features for the last year+.