---
title: 'Am I Switching From Nova To Zed?'
pubDate: '4/14/24, 9:20 AM'
tags: ['Apps', 'Programming', 'Web Dev']
---

For the past several days I've been using the [Zed](https://zed.dev/) editor at work, and on my personal web projects. It started out as just curiosity, but I wasn't immediately sold. I even went so far as to [toot](https://mastodon.social/@ghalldev/112243389407945338) that I'd be going back to Nova as my daily driver.

But then something weird happened. The next day, I signed into my day job, opened up Nova, and then worked for maybe an hour before Zed started calling to me. After using Zed for 8 hours the previous day, Nova suddenly felt overwhelming and clunky in the same way VSCode felt when I first started using Nova.

Nova is, on paper, everything I want from a Mac app; it's slick, it's fast, and it feels right at home on macOS. Zed on the other hand, while fast (perhaps more so than Nova), is not all that pretty, and does not feel like a native Mac app.

But it has one huge advantage over Nova; it's a code editor first and foremost. And once you figure out the [various JSON incantations](https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed) to disable the extraneous AI and collaboration features, it's a pretty barebones app that puts your code front-and-center. Even something like git integration, which is a big deal in both VSCode and Nova, is pretty limited, necessitating the use of the command line tool, or an app like Fork, to perform any action besides seeing which lines and files have been changed.

This isn't to say I don't have any concerns about Zed, and the team behind it. Their business model doesn't seem all that clear to me, and their AI focus as outlined on their [roadmap](https://zed.dev/roadmap) doesn't exactly indicate to me that this is a product I want to use long term – I'd rather they focus those resources on just trying to build a good editor.

On an emotional level I'd rather give my business to a company like Panic, who have a clear business model with Nova, and who are very good at targeting the niche I happen to fall into - namely, the discerning, if not extremely nit-picky, Mac user. But Zed makes me _feel_ more productive (the science is still out on if it _actually_ makes me more productive), and the extension ecosystem, while still much smaller than the one around Nova, seems a lot healthier[^1].

Of course, this whole post could be totally premature, and, once the honeymoon period is over, I'll find myself crawling back from the cold utilitarianism of Zed to the warm friendliness of Nova. After all, I am known, among those who know my computing habits, to be extremely finicky about the software I choose to use...

[^1]: Example: Nova's TypeScript extension hasn't been updated in about a year, and the developer archived the project on GitHub in late December. 🙁
