What exactly is phenomenal and novel about Zed? I've tried it a couple of times for a week or so, didn't see the point, and moved on every time.

And I'm not luddite swearing by vi or something, I use VSCode and Idea, and have used Sublime for many years, Xcode on/off for some Obj-C/Swift dev, Eclipse for 5-6 years in the 2000s, and vim for everything cli/lightweight since forever.

Is the GUI tech what's supposed to be novel? I couldn't care less about that backend in my everyday editor use as long as the editor is fast enough. Which on modern hardware, even Idea is.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good editor still.

Currently on this machine: using 900MB of RAM, including all language servers, with nine open projects - that is pretty phenomenal. VSCode could barely keep one open with the same memory.

The perception of 'fast' is very subjective. To me having a smooth, jitter-free UI, low input latency, and instant startup, all matter a lot.

It's amazing that a gig of ram is considered lightweight for having 8 project dirs open in an editor, which normally means 8 tree views and a few open file tabs per project :)

Even more amazing that 10GB for the same purpose is considered acceptable. ± 100MB for window, project files, LSP servers, ASTs etc is something very few editors can achieve - I'm pretty sure Zed beats both Emacs and Neovim in memory consumption.

My experience with Zed differed. On Linux I found it to be very memory hungry.

I heard that Zed has very impressive collaboration features. I tried them a little and they really look well (like discord, but directly in editor). But this was very superficial look