VSCode and Zed

These days I code JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, and CSS, and my coding environment is Visual Studio Code. I think that´s not a particular fancy choice and I do not get excited about it. When writing software in a team, in my experience it´s common developers are running VSCode. When everyone is on the same IDE you can share the settings and plugins, so that every developer has an identical environment and the code is formatted and linted by the same rules. Failure situations are more easy to track down because you only have to take care of a single IDE. VSCode doesn´t cost money, it runs on Mac and on Windows, and it has a huge plugin ecosystem.

Zed is a relatively new and fast editor. I´m using it currently for personal projects because it is something different and I like the speed of it. In the past there have been issues with how Zed collected telemetry data without users knowing, but it seems the team behind Zed fixed that. Now you can see what data is collected (go to Help → Telemetry). You can disable collecting the data in the settings.json file. Zed is currently available for Mac and Linux, but the team is preparing a Windows version.

An alternate choice could be JetBrains WebStorm, or JetBrains Fleet. I think the WebStorm folks are writing excellent IDE´s. When you are inside of their ecosystem and complement the IDE with their other tools, and when all your programmer colleagues are doing the same, I assume that would work pretty fine. I´m just not used to it. Every now and then I´ve seen colleagues using JetBrains and it looked like JetBrains is going one step further to support developers with a higher level of automation.