Why did hackers move from Vim to Zed?

“I switched from using Vim as my primary editor to using Zed's Vim Mode.” (throw2ih020) “We started using LLMs heavily at work this year and I switched from Vim to Zed to help with that.” (vinc)

How many hackers moved from Vim to Zed?

2 hackers said so in public Hacker News comments.

X → Y moves / Vim to Zed

Why hackers moved from Vim to Zed

2 hackers described this switch in public comments. Their words, with links to the originals.

Vim 2 hackers criticize it

→

Zed 12 hackers recommend it

What hackers said about the move

“I switched from using Vim as my primary editor to using Zed's Vim Mode.”

throw2ih020, 2026-07-10original comment ↗

“We started using LLMs heavily at work this year and I switched from Vim to Zed to help with that.”

vinc, 2026-05-26original comment ↗

Vim vs Zed

	Vim	Zed
Hackers who recommend	4	12
Hackers who criticize	2	2
Moved away from it	6	1
Moved to it	3	10

Counts are distinct hackers in the sampled comments, not market share.

Criticism of Vim

“I switched from vim to neovim at the time when the former didn't support true color themes”

shmerl, 2026-03-29original comment ↗

“I personally also moved from vim to neovim mainly because of better LSP support.”

embedding-shape, 2026-01-13original comment ↗

Praise for Zed

“Zed + Terminal threads (love this!) + Remote machine”

throwaway888abc, 2026-06-05original comment ↗

“I've been very happy with Zed, and that was before it had as many features as it does now.”

insane_dreamer, 2026-05-19original comment ↗

“I switched from VSCode to Zed, which has a helix mode built-in and it works very well.”

16bitvoid, 2026-05-13original comment ↗

“it is faster for larger codebases and also have a interesting design”

mathcartney, 2026-05-02original comment ↗

“I have been using zed since 2026 exclusively. I moved from JetBrains and am genuinely happy.”

_badmike, 2026-04-29original comment ↗

Other moves from Vim

Vim → Neovim (3)
Vim → VS Code (1)