Why hackers moved from VS Code to Zed
5 hackers described this switch in public comments. Their words, with links to the originals.
What hackers said about the move
“Recently ditched VSCODE completely and switched from development on local machine to remote "vps" cloud.”throwaway888abc, 2026-06-05original comment ↗
“I switched from VSCode to Zed, which has a helix mode built-in and it works very well.”16bitvoid, 2026-05-13original comment ↗
“I switched from vscode to zed as a way to keep things interesting at work and now I mostly use zed”mathcartney, 2026-05-02original comment ↗
“recently thought "Why do I even use that slow bloated thing of VS?" and switched to Zed.”KingOfCoders, 2026-02-13original comment ↗
“I also switched from VSCode to Zed”avanwyk, 2026-01-06original comment ↗
Use VS Code? Get alerted when hackers criticize it.
Tell us the tools in your stack. When hackers start criticizing one of them, or moving to an alternative, you will hear about it first.
VS Code vs Zed
| VS Code | Zed | |
|---|---|---|
| Hackers who recommend | 8 | 12 |
| Hackers who criticize | 14 | 2 |
| Moved away from it | 15 | 1 |
| Moved to it | 6 | 10 |
Counts are distinct hackers in the sampled comments, not market share.
Criticism of VS Code
“personally switched from VS Code to herdr (with some custom plugins), and couldn't be happier.”falcor84, 2026-10-29original comment ↗
“This is the reason why I switched from VSCode to nvim (AstroNvim to be specific).”Ronsenshi, 2026-06-28original comment ↗
“using vscodium instead of vscode is again justified.”RandyOrion, 2026-05-03original comment ↗
“Multi-cursor was the first plugin I installed when I moved from VSCode to Vim”worksonmine, 2026-03-07original comment ↗
“The "new Notepad" is some dumbass executives pet project that overlaps with Visual Studio Code and is a shitty alternative to WordPad”jiggawatts, 2026-02-11original comment ↗
Praise for Zed
“I've also customized Zed's UI to optimize for reading and reviewing code”throw2ih020, 2026-07-10original comment ↗
“We started using LLMs heavily at work this year and I switched from Vim to Zed to help with that.”vinc, 2026-05-26original comment ↗
“I've been very happy with Zed, and that was before it had as many features as it does now.”insane_dreamer, 2026-05-19original comment ↗
“I have been using zed since 2026 exclusively. I moved from JetBrains and am genuinely happy.”_badmike, 2026-04-29original comment ↗
“Congrats to the Zed team for building the best modern editor I have ever used.”giancarlostoro, 2026-04-29original comment ↗
Other moves from VS Code
Other moves to Zed
- Vim → Zed (2)
- JetBrains → Zed (1)
- JetBrains IDEs → Zed (1)
- PyCharm → Zed (1)