I also landed with Zed on Fedora, and experience is good. But I stopped using its agent in favor of external agent, because models I use cannot understand tools available to them. They spend a lot of tokens trying to write to file, eventually giving up and rewriting whole files. There is not such a problem with different agent using same model.
Neovim, Emacs, Sublime (paid but has an eternal trial period that pops up to remind you to pay now and again) and VSCodium (an open source version of VSCode that removes a lot of bloat and telemetry from VSCode) are the usual suspects that I see mentioned. Helix is a newer one that I appreciate.
Honestly though, I don’t do much coding these days, so I scrape by with micro editor in my terminal. I think I’d probably either learn Helix better or settle on some configuration of Neovim and use that if I ever got the notion to do something more robust than tinker with custom tools and scripts for my own personal use.
Be aware that with VSCodium that any of the Microsoft extensions will not work. It took me a few minutes to realize that they were gatekeeping the C/C++ extensions.
I tried out kickstart.nvim and stuck with it for a long time with no customizations. The first time you run nvim after switching your init.lua, it will take a few minutes to set up libraries and language servers, but after that it feels just as quick as normal nvim without the effort of setting everything up yourself.
Nowadays with the amount of server work I do, I just use regular vim and netrw commands.
I'm mostly (hobby) programming in Zig, and also recently decided to move away from VsCode. I'm still checking stuff out, but currently I'm using Kitty as terminal with Flow Control as editor, nnd as debugger, and I just started to checkout lazygit, which looks good, but I'm not sure I'll need it for my very simple git use.
I made the switch to Helix after VSCode started pushing way too much Copilot/AI on me.
I was looking at various (neo)vim distributions but they all seemed a bit too janky and painful to use to me. Helix has slightly different motions that actually work for me better, and has sane enough defaults, all I needed to do was to set up some language servers.
If you don't want a terminal based editor, I hear mostly good things about Sublime Text, there's also an attempt to revive and continue Atom, called Pulsar which could be interesting.
I find VS Code's AI internal implementation quite interesting even if the UI push it in your face.
The Copilot UI is actually not that coupled with GitHub Copilot (although parts of it still is - they often said in the docs that they will work on remove that). Internally, VSCode has a "Language Model Chat Provider API" which Copilot is one of them. Many other providers do provide alternative provider implementation (and Copilot allow for custom API key as well), so you can switch to your chosen provider.
There is also a Language Model API, which allow extensions to submit request to the provider, so that any extension you install in VSCode can utilize your LLM provider without providing API keys to every extensions. Of course, there are people who built an OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible API server in VSCode so that you can use in any LLM tools. I tried and it seems that you do get the Copilot billing for it (eg. GPT 4o is unlimited even when using the emulated API outside of VSCode).
Happy user of Nvim here, but if I wasnt so used to the keybinds (been using vi/vim/nvim for well over a decade now), Id probably start with helix. Im so used to the terminal that I would never personally consider a GUI editor at this point.
Sublime Text has been super performant and rock solid for me for over a decade now. I use vim and emacs sometimes, but Sublime might just be my daily driver for life.
IntelliJ really cannot be beaten for Java development. Sure, it’s a big hulking beast that takes up too many resources but it has a lot of features that are easy to discover if you’re interested, such as database connectivity and even UML diagramming.
I really like Panic’s Nova on MacOS. It’s ultra snappy and very Mac-like, but last I checked it doesn’t really play well with a lot of things I tend to need or want. I bought it a while back because I was dicking around with the Playdate SDK and it was great for that, but when I did another lua project using LÖVE, it didn’t have the means to debug it - kind of important for gamedev! But to be fair I haven’t payed for an upgrade in years at this point so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it vastly improved.
If you’re just looking for a fast “code-like” experience, then Zed is pretty good. I’m not personally, but in its credit I still have it installed and it’s pretty good for what it is. I probably would have switched over if not for needing some VS Code exclusive extensions.
I've never worked with Java, so that probably is a factor in why I dislike it. An internal tool at my last workplace was written as an IntelliJ plugin and it was always a pain to get working and the slowness of starting PyCharm did not help with my first impressions.
I've downloaded Zed and it feels snappy so far, but I need to probably actually work on a new project to get a sense for if I like it yet.
I believe intelliJ was created for Java, it is written in Java. I've never used anything that even comes close for it specifically with Java.
I have yet to find anything else that refactors as well as intelliJ, though it used to be pretty useless for JavaScript. Language does matter, I had an easier time with Go in Doom Emacs.
I use nvim with NVChad. I also have VSCodium and Zed installed to look at and play around with. There's no good way (I have found) to do step-debugging in nvim for PHP applications so having Zed or VSCodium set up to do that is helpful.
I did used to use Notepad++ back in the day when I was on windows lol! Ngl though, hate its aesthetic enough that I wouldn't really go for it even without the compromise thing
When I got tired of Visual Studio Code I switched to Emacs. So I guess that's my recommendation. See some of my previous comments on Emacs if interested:
Emacs is the most extensible text editor and provides great interfaces for just about every text-based work you can imagine, not just writing code.
However, it does have a very low "introduction velocity". If you switch to Emacs, you will spend a lot of time extending (configuring) Emacs. That's a very rewarding experience, but it might not be what you want to spend time on. You don't have to abandon VSCode immediately for Emacs. You could ease yourself into Emacs/wane yourself off VSCode, that's what I did, but the process of switching to Emacs is still... well, a process.
Beyond Emacs, it's hard to make a confident recommendation for anything else, because my other recommendation would have been Neovim. Without knowing why you don't want to use Vim, it's hard to make other recommendations. Do you not want a terminal text editor? Do you not want a modal text editor? Do you just not like Vim specifically?
So I will cautiously recommend Helix and Kakoune as other terminal-based, modal text editors that are like-not-like Neovim. I don't know as much about Kakoune, and it seems less popular than Helix these days, but both editors use their own modal editing "languages" that are supposedly easier and better than Neovim's. At least for Helix, it also has more/better default features baked into the editor, but it is not as extensible as Neovim. I would say Helix has a high "introduction velocity" compared to Neovim or Emacs.
Other than those:
Lem is an interesting take on what Emacs could be like if it was written today
Helix, although I default to code due to QoL stuff often and because F# support is lacking. I like the idea of it, but I also need to get used to using a terminal editor more, and it seems to be a mixed bag on too little vs too much intellisense.
Well it's 2026 and I'm a fullerest stack developer, so I'm not using any sort of tui type applications on a machine with more than 8gb of ram. I use vscodium. If it's a really really small one line change I might use nano or even just notepad.
I still find myself going to ssms for most sql and tsql tasks but at work they want us to start using vscode for that also at some point. The plan is to set up repos/pipelines for the db objects and have the pipeline compile the script and execute it on the server instead of a developer in ssms. vscode has gotten way better, but it's not to ssms level yet.
Pulsar looks pretty cool, I might check that out but I dont have high hopes, atom ran like shit for me before vscode ran away from the pack. Hell it was pretty much the entire reason I switched.
At work I'm pretty much stuck on vscode since we use ms everything (azure, windows, entra, etc)
I spend most of my life in non-optional platform-tied IDEs (Xcode, Android Studio) so my opinion might not be worth a lot, but for non-IDE editors I've stuck with Sublime Text.
It does its job well, it's fast and light, and spiritually it's closest to TextMate which was my first "seriously" used programming text editor. Never felt the need to pursue anything else. VS Code does too much for my taste and has more doodads scattered about its windows than I like and having only started writing "real" code in the late 2000s CLI-based editors like vim feel too alien outside of the odd config file edit.
bln | 10 hours ago
There’s Zed which sounds like what you’re looking for.
In the terminal there are other options than Vim/Neovim, such as Helix or Ki, but it sounds like you’re looking for something more graphical.
tlhunter | 5 hours ago
My only Linux gripe is that Zed doesn't have momentum scrolling.
AaronNight | 4 hours ago
I also landed with Zed on Fedora, and experience is good. But I stopped using its agent in favor of external agent, because models I use cannot understand tools available to them. They spend a lot of tokens trying to write to file, eventually giving up and rewriting whole files. There is not such a problem with different agent using same model.
teaearlgraycold | 24 minutes ago
Switch to Zed. Don’t get left behind.
Narry | 10 hours ago
Neovim, Emacs, Sublime (paid but has an eternal trial period that pops up to remind you to pay now and again) and VSCodium (an open source version of VSCode that removes a lot of bloat and telemetry from VSCode) are the usual suspects that I see mentioned. Helix is a newer one that I appreciate.
Honestly though, I don’t do much coding these days, so I scrape by with micro editor in my terminal. I think I’d probably either learn Helix better or settle on some configuration of Neovim and use that if I ever got the notion to do something more robust than tinker with custom tools and scripts for my own personal use.
DeaconBlue | 10 hours ago
Be aware that with VSCodium that any of the Microsoft extensions will not work. It took me a few minutes to realize that they were gatekeeping the C/C++ extensions.
d32 | 9 hours ago
Yes, they are in the "extend" phase with their "open source" project.
adutchman | 5 hours ago
Same with TS if I'm not mistaken
Banazir | 5 hours ago
I tried out kickstart.nvim and stuck with it for a long time with no customizations. The first time you run nvim after switching your init.lua, it will take a few minutes to set up libraries and language servers, but after that it feels just as quick as normal nvim without the effort of setting everything up yourself.
Nowadays with the amount of server work I do, I just use regular vim and netrw commands.
lynxy | 10 hours ago
Previous discussion can be found here.
For what it's worth, I settled on Zed. It fits my needs, runs native, and is only a little unstable. I hope the stability improves as it matures.
[OP] sparksbet | 7 hours ago
I had an inkling someone would've asked this here before, thanks for the link!
shu | 10 hours ago
I'm mostly (hobby) programming in Zig, and also recently decided to move away from VsCode. I'm still checking stuff out, but currently I'm using Kitty as terminal with Flow Control as editor, nnd as debugger, and I just started to checkout lazygit, which looks good, but I'm not sure I'll need it for my very simple git use.
ogre | 8 hours ago
Very happy with flow as my daily driver (outside of work), especially since the 0.7 release.
vildravn | 10 hours ago
I made the switch to Helix after VSCode started pushing way too much Copilot/AI on me.
I was looking at various (neo)vim distributions but they all seemed a bit too janky and painful to use to me. Helix has slightly different motions that actually work for me better, and has sane enough defaults, all I needed to do was to set up some language servers.
If you don't want a terminal based editor, I hear mostly good things about Sublime Text, there's also an attempt to revive and continue Atom, called Pulsar which could be interesting.
whs | 8 hours ago
I find VS Code's AI internal implementation quite interesting even if the UI push it in your face.
The Copilot UI is actually not that coupled with GitHub Copilot (although parts of it still is - they often said in the docs that they will work on remove that). Internally, VSCode has a "Language Model Chat Provider API" which Copilot is one of them. Many other providers do provide alternative provider implementation (and Copilot allow for custom API key as well), so you can switch to your chosen provider.
There is also a Language Model API, which allow extensions to submit request to the provider, so that any extension you install in VSCode can utilize your LLM provider without providing API keys to every extensions. Of course, there are people who built an OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible API server in VSCode so that you can use in any LLM tools. I tried and it seems that you do get the Copilot billing for it (eg. GPT 4o is unlimited even when using the emulated API outside of VSCode).
vildravn | 4 hours ago
Oh, I don’t really appreciate AI and LLMs in my life at all but thanks for the indepth explanation, maybe someone will find it useful :)
Toric | 8 hours ago
Happy user of Nvim here, but if I wasnt so used to the keybinds (been using vi/vim/nvim for well over a decade now), Id probably start with helix. Im so used to the terminal that I would never personally consider a GUI editor at this point.
DynamoSunshirt | 3 hours ago
Sublime Text has been super performant and rock solid for me for over a decade now. I use vim and emacs sometimes, but Sublime might just be my daily driver for life.
Akir | 4 hours ago
IntelliJ really cannot be beaten for Java development. Sure, it’s a big hulking beast that takes up too many resources but it has a lot of features that are easy to discover if you’re interested, such as database connectivity and even UML diagramming.
I really like Panic’s Nova on MacOS. It’s ultra snappy and very Mac-like, but last I checked it doesn’t really play well with a lot of things I tend to need or want. I bought it a while back because I was dicking around with the Playdate SDK and it was great for that, but when I did another lua project using LÖVE, it didn’t have the means to debug it - kind of important for gamedev! But to be fair I haven’t payed for an upgrade in years at this point so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it vastly improved.
If you’re just looking for a fast “code-like” experience, then Zed is pretty good. I’m not personally, but in its credit I still have it installed and it’s pretty good for what it is. I probably would have switched over if not for needing some VS Code exclusive extensions.
[OP] sparksbet | 3 hours ago
I've never worked with Java, so that probably is a factor in why I dislike it. An internal tool at my last workplace was written as an IntelliJ plugin and it was always a pain to get working and the slowness of starting PyCharm did not help with my first impressions.
I've downloaded Zed and it feels snappy so far, but I need to probably actually work on a new project to get a sense for if I like it yet.
tanglisha | 2 hours ago
I believe intelliJ was created for Java, it is written in Java. I've never used anything that even comes close for it specifically with Java.
I have yet to find anything else that refactors as well as intelliJ, though it used to be pretty useless for JavaScript. Language does matter, I had an easier time with Go in Doom Emacs.
dsh | 5 hours ago
I use nvim with NVChad. I also have VSCodium and Zed installed to look at and play around with. There's no good way (I have found) to do step-debugging in nvim for PHP applications so having Zed or VSCodium set up to do that is helpful.
jcd | 5 hours ago
I personally use geany + a terminal. Id use sublime if I wanted something less spartan
Bullmaestro | 4 hours ago
I would have said Notepad++ for a lightweight code editor, but their update servers got compromised by a state actor, likely from China.
But also oof, it's Windows only.
[OP] sparksbet | 3 hours ago
I did used to use Notepad++ back in the day when I was on windows lol! Ngl though, hate its aesthetic enough that I wouldn't really go for it even without the compromise thing
hungariantoast | 2 hours ago
When I got tired of Visual Studio Code I switched to Emacs. So I guess that's my recommendation. See some of my previous comments on Emacs if interested:
Emacs is the most extensible text editor and provides great interfaces for just about every text-based work you can imagine, not just writing code.
However, it does have a very low "introduction velocity". If you switch to Emacs, you will spend a lot of time extending (configuring) Emacs. That's a very rewarding experience, but it might not be what you want to spend time on. You don't have to abandon VSCode immediately for Emacs. You could ease yourself into Emacs/wane yourself off VSCode, that's what I did, but the process of switching to Emacs is still... well, a process.
Beyond Emacs, it's hard to make a confident recommendation for anything else, because my other recommendation would have been Neovim. Without knowing why you don't want to use Vim, it's hard to make other recommendations. Do you not want a terminal text editor? Do you not want a modal text editor? Do you just not like Vim specifically?
So I will cautiously recommend Helix and Kakoune as other terminal-based, modal text editors that are like-not-like Neovim. I don't know as much about Kakoune, and it seems less popular than Helix these days, but both editors use their own modal editing "languages" that are supposedly easier and better than Neovim's. At least for Helix, it also has more/better default features baked into the editor, but it is not as extensible as Neovim. I would say Helix has a high "introduction velocity" compared to Neovim or Emacs.
Other than those:
C-cto copy,C-xto cut,C-vto paste,C-sto save, etc), but it's pretty barebones.Eji1700 | 2 hours ago
Helix, although I default to code due to QoL stuff often and because F# support is lacking. I like the idea of it, but I also need to get used to using a terminal editor more, and it seems to be a mixed bag on too little vs too much intellisense.
SpunkWorks_Scientist | 43 minutes ago
Well it's 2026 and I'm a fullerest stack developer, so I'm not using any sort of tui type applications on a machine with more than 8gb of ram. I use vscodium. If it's a really really small one line change I might use nano or even just notepad.
I still find myself going to ssms for most sql and tsql tasks but at work they want us to start using vscode for that also at some point. The plan is to set up repos/pipelines for the db objects and have the pipeline compile the script and execute it on the server instead of a developer in ssms. vscode has gotten way better, but it's not to ssms level yet.
Pulsar looks pretty cool, I might check that out but I dont have high hopes, atom ran like shit for me before vscode ran away from the pack. Hell it was pretty much the entire reason I switched.
At work I'm pretty much stuck on vscode since we use ms everything (azure, windows, entra, etc)
ButteredToast | 37 minutes ago
I spend most of my life in non-optional platform-tied IDEs (Xcode, Android Studio) so my opinion might not be worth a lot, but for non-IDE editors I've stuck with Sublime Text.
It does its job well, it's fast and light, and spiritually it's closest to TextMate which was my first "seriously" used programming text editor. Never felt the need to pursue anything else. VS Code does too much for my taste and has more doodads scattered about its windows than I like and having only started writing "real" code in the late 2000s CLI-based editors like vim feel too alien outside of the odd config file edit.