> I love Sublime, but I don't want to pay to upgrade from 3 to whatever version it is now

I don't know what your financial situation is, but given that the upgrade is an $80 one off payment (a new license is $99), that it's a per-user license (not per-machine), and that there were 8 years between Sublime Text 3 (2013) and Sublime Text 4 (2021) (only major versions require a new license), I personally think it's very reasonably priced.

I tried Zed last month but found that it uses high CPU usage even when idle (up to 50% of 1 core of my i7-7500U).

This is even higher CPU usage than my vscode causes.

Sublime does not do that; in fact it has 0% CPU usage when idle:

    sudo strace -fyp "$(pidof sublime_text)"

shows that Sublime issues no syscalls when idle, as it should be.

(Note, you need to either unfocus it so that the caret stops flashing, or switch from fading caret to fixed / non-fading caret, otherwise it necessarily has to do syscalls to draw itself.)

Zed spams syscalls even when its screen is entirely still:

    strace -fyp "$(pidof zed-editor)"

In fact Zed makes 800 syscalls per second when completely idle and unfocused.

I finally moved off Sublime a few months ago because I wanted something open source and stumbled on KDE/kate. It's been a perfect substitute.

https://github.com/kde/kate

I've tried a lot of editors, including Zed, and always come back to Sublime Text.

I use it every day. The #1 reason is because it never loses unsaved files (though I'm still working on breaking the habit of typing a few characters and pressing Ctrl-S). Column editing! Macros! Record/Playback! Configuration! Plugins! Responsiveness! Low resource utilization! Etc!

Why wouldn't I pay for it? I've bought all four versions. The author deserves to be paid.

I guess the question is: why don't you want to pay for it? Assuming here that you're a professional coder being paid a reasonable, US-equivalent salary. I understand not everyone fits that situation; plenty of us pirated software as starving college students / interns, folks in other countries don't get the same pay for the same work, etc.

We should all want to pay the authors of great software. We're on HN, which is a celebration of creating great code and awesome businesses.

"Pay him. Pay that man his money" - Teddy KGB

The AI stuff was a lot more prominent in an earlier version, but they tweaked it a bit. It's the same with Warp forcing a login at first.

Jetbrains is a heavyweight IDE, but I'm not sure if the weight is worth the features it offers anymore, at least for the things I work on.

VS Code is also an IDE, but it's a bit easier on resources depending on what plugins you use and what you allow them to do. I've had combinations of plugins that caused my whole system to freeze up with too much memory usage because it spawned several Node processes each taking up multiple GBs of memory :/.

With Zed touting itself as an AI first editor, is it possible to completely disable all AI features so that you never have to look at the equivalent of a copilot icon ever again? I don't want to have to spend energy to actively ignore these things.

Given the price and the fact it’s a WinRAR-style model, I really don’t mind ST being paid.

I also loved / want to love ST but it seems its ecosystem has collapsed, a lot of plugins haven't had an update in over 5 years.

Eventually Zed devs will need to get money that isn't coming out of VCs...

How much did you pay for doordash last month?