I’ve written setup posts for VSCodium, for Void, and for Zed, which makes me look either thorough or deeply unable to commit. It’s the second one. For about three years I switched primary editors roughly every season, chasing speed, or privacy, or the AI integration that was going to change everything. I want to write down what actually stuck, because it turned out not to be any of the editors.
The tour, briefly#
VSCodium came first, when I got tired of shipping telemetry to Microsoft and wanted VS Code with the tracking stripped out. It’s still the most sensible “I want VS Code, minus the parts I don’t trust” answer, and if that’s your only complaint it’s the smallest possible move.
Void came next, when local AI got good enough to be interesting and I wanted a fork built around an in-editor model wired to Ollama, with nothing leaving the machine. Genuinely cool. I learned a lot about where a local model actually helps by living in it for a while.
Zed is where I mostly landed, because the cold-start speed won me over and the Git panel meant fewer extensions to babysit. “Mostly” is doing work in that sentence. VS Code is still open for the few extensions I refuse to live without, and I stopped pretending that was a failure of discipline.
So: four editors in rotation across three years. Here’s the part I didn’t expect.
The editor was never the leverage#
Every switch felt like a productivity upgrade for about a week, and then the gain evaporated and I was just typing in a different-colored window. The honeymoon was real and the honeymoon was the whole effect. The actual speed of my work barely moved with the editor. It moved with the things I carried between editors and didn’t think of as the editor at all.
My keybindings, once I committed to learning them properly. I’d half-learned shortcuts in each editor and then re-half-learned them in the next, which is the worst of every option. The session I sat down and actually internalized the dozen motions I use a hundred times a day did more for my speed than any editor swap. The cruel part: that session would have worked in any of the four.
Vim mode. Turning it on in editor one and keeping it on through all four meant the one interface I never had to relearn was the one I used most: moving the cursor and changing text. The chrome around it changed every season; the core motions didn’t. That’s the only reason the hopping didn’t cost me more than it did.
Versioned config. The first hop was miserable because I rebuilt my settings from memory. After that I kept editor config in my dotfiles, and every subsequent switch was an afternoon instead of a week. Worth saying plainly: the thing that made me able to hop cheaply was the discipline that also made hopping unnecessary, because a well-versioned setup follows you and stops feeling like a reason to start over.
What hopping was actually for#
I used to feel guilty about the churn, like it was procrastination dressed up as tooling. Some of it was. But not all. Each editor taught me something I kept: VSCodium taught me to care what my tools phone home. Void taught me concretely what a local model is and isn’t good for, which became a whole post. Zed taught me how little of VS Code’s extension pile I actually needed once the basics were in-box.
The mistake wasn’t trying them. It was believing each one would be the thing that made me faster, when the editor is maybe the least important variable in how fast I write code. The most important ones are the boring portable skills, and I’d have been better off investing in those on day one and treating the editors as interchangeable.
What I’d tell someone mid-hop#
Try the new editor. They’re cheap to install and you’ll learn something. But put your real investment into the layer underneath: learn your motions cold, turn on a modal mode and keep it on everywhere, and version your config so a switch costs an afternoon. Do that and the editor stops being a decision with stakes. It becomes a paint color.
I still have all four installed. I open Zed first now, the way I used to open VS Code first, and I’ve made my peace with the fact that next year it might be something else. The window will change. The way I move around inside it won’t, and that was always the part that mattered.
