3 min read

Why I Left Cursor for Zed

zed
cursor
editor
developer-experience
opinion

So recently I switched my daily editor from Cursor to Zed, and honestly — I should've done this months ago. Quick rundown of why I left, what Zed gives me, and one bonus thing about Zed's batteries-included story 😤.

Why I left Cursor 🤔

  1. Auto-formatting randomly stops working. Save a file, Prettier runs. Save the next one, nothing. No error, no notification. When the thing you use every minute silently breaks, you stop trusting it.
  2. Too much AI slop. I'm not anti-AI — I use it daily. But Cursor isn't an editor with AI features anymore, it's an AI product with a code window strapped to the side.
  3. They ship too fast. Every couple of weeks a keybinding moves, a panel reorganizes, a setting hides behind a new menu. My editor should be the stable surface I work on top of, not the thing that keeps changing.
  4. It's genuinely slow. Cold start, big files, command palette — all heavy. Once you've used something snappy, going back hurts.
  5. The agent chat panel keeps shoving itself in my face. Every launch — there it is. I closed it, dug through settings, edited config. Next launch, back again 🤭.
  6. The settings UI is a maze. Half in Cursor's panel, half inherited from VS Code, some in "Models", some in "Features". You end up editing settings.json directly just to be sure.

What Zed gave me instead 🎁

  1. It's fast. Rust, GPU rendering, zero perceptible input lag. Going back to anything else feels like wading through water.
  2. It doesn't throw AI in your face. The assistant exists — as a panel I open when I want it, not one that opens me.
  3. Highly customizable. Keymaps, themes, LSPs, formatters — all in a JSON file you edit directly. One source of truth.
  4. Settings done right. Cleanly organized, especially the panels section. Each panel gets its own clearly-named section instead of a flat list of editor.something.something.something.
  5. A better, more mature community. Thoughtful GitHub discussions, issues get triaged, changes respect the existing experience. Closer to early Sublime / early VS Code energy than a startup chasing the next AI fad.

Bonus: Zed ships with what you'd normally install ⚡

Coming from VS Code (and Cursor, which is a fork of it), you're trained to think of formatters and language servers as marketplace extensions you bolt on. Zed's model is different — the common stuff is just there.

Native, no install needed:

  • Prettier — HTML, CSS, JSON, Markdown, YAML, JS/TS and more
  • LSP support — TypeScript, Rust, Python, Go, etc. auto-managed
  • ESLint — via LSP, no separate extension
  • Tree-sitter — syntax highlighting across every language

And extensions like html, yaml, toml, dockerfile, markdown auto-install on demand the first time you open a relevant file. You don't go shopping for them.

The key difference: in VS Code, Prettier and ESLint are marketplace extensions. In Zed they just are the editor.

Conclusion 🎉

Cursor isn't bad. It's just not the editor I want to be using every day. If you're tired of fighting your editor, give Zed a Saturday — worst case you go back, best case you stop thinking about your editor at all.

If you've moved between these two yourself, drop your take in the comments.

Bye for now .....