It's very 'batteries-included', for one thing - when a novice wants to code, I recommend them Zed because it'll just handle and manage LSPs for them for a variety of languages. Meanwhile with VSCode step 1 of installing and using it for e.g. Rust is to go and install a random extension (and the VSCode store, whilst sorted by popularity, can be intimidating / confusing for a novice, who might install a random/scammy extension). The 'recommended extensions' thing helps, but it's still subpar.

It has some other niceties – I love how if you Cmd+Shift+F to search across the project, that you get a multi-buffer [1] - I often use that for larger manual refactors for a ton of places in my codebase.

But honestly... as others have said, speed is just _such_ a strong feature for my taste - it makes a world of difference compared to VSCode, because in VSC I'll be typing vim commands, the editor will fail to keep up and it'll do the wrong thing - whereas in Zed it's fast enough that I never really run into stalls.

[1]: https://zed.dev/features#multi-buffers

It's not Microsoft, which is kind of a big deal because they own so much of developer tool ecosystem right now

The vim emulation is very good.

IME, it's not as polished as VSCode, too many rough little details here and there. But then, VSCode has been around for longer.

I use it as a notepad mostly, just because vscode is for the actual repo and sublime would nag me with the trial/purchase thing.

It might sound silly but it helps me to have one use per app (even better if each is clearly identifiable by their theme).

Also very active development, which is pretty notable when every other IDE-lite but Nova and JetBrains seems to have just given up.

vscode has gotten way to bloated in recent years in my opinion. zed is just a really fresh Beath of air.