It’s built by the team that built atom which was way better than vscode but was mothballed when Microsoft bought GitHub.
They built it from scratch and not on electron bloat so it is a much better foundation. It will take a long time to reach parity with vscode but when it does it will smoke it.
I think you do not understand the value proposition of Zed.
It is an editor made for people who are used to double-clicking individual files rather than opening a folder in VS Code, so they close and open their editor dozens or even hundreds of times per day.
Let's say VS Code takes 5 seconds to boot.
Some programmers may argue: "yes, I spend 3 hours on a project or just leave it open overnight, so 5 seconds per week is nothing"
But here is not the case, it is for programmers who come from Notepad/Sublime/Notepad++/emacs/vi, and who opens a single file and closes the editor right after.
If you work 2 hours, maybe 4 files per minute, this means 120 * 4 openings = 480 openings.
It means you would have wasted 2400 seconds (40 minutes per day!) waiting for VS Code to open (about 33% of the 2-hour work session spent waiting)
Yes, like with Notepad or Zed, you lose some features like Colors or Syntax checking, but still, time is the most precious thing in life.
If you think "build by atom team" and "not electron" are any kind of serious advantage for any peace of software than your are the one who lacks knowledge about software development.
It would be relevant that they were the team behind Atom if they seemed to understand the lessons of Atom...
Instead of learning from what worked and fixing what didn't, they just threw everything away and wandered off in some totally different direction. They did the reactionary kind of learning instead of the theory-building kind: https://xkcd.com/242/
They built it from scratch and not on electron bloat so it is a much better foundation. It will take a long time to reach parity with vscode but when it does it will smoke it.