I’ve written setup posts for VSCodium, Void, and Zed, which makes me look either thorough or chronically unable to commit. It’s the second one. For a few years I changed primary editors the way some people rearrange furniture, chasing speed, or privacy, or whatever AI integration was supposed to change everything that quarter. What I want to write down is 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. Then Void, when local AI got interesting and I wanted a fork with a model wired into the editor and nothing leaving the machine — I learned a lot about where a local model actually helps by living in it for a while. Then Zed, for the cold-start speed and a Git panel that meant fewer extensions to babysit. Then Windsurf, when the AI-native editors started genuinely pulling ahead on the agentic work.
And then, a little sheepishly, back to VS Code. It’s the one with every extension I lean on, the integrations that just work, and no novelty left to wear off. Four detours, and I’m typing this in the editor I started from.
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. My actual speed barely moved with the editor. It moved with the things I carried between editors and never thought of as “the editor” at all.
Keybindings, once I learned them properly. I’d half-learn the shortcuts in each editor, then re-half-learn them in the next, which is the worst of all worlds. The afternoon I sat down and actually internalized the dozen motions I use a hundred times a day did more for my speed than any swap. The cruel part is that that afternoon would have paid off in any of them.
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 switch dropped from a week of fiddling to an afternoon. The discipline that made me able to hop cheaply is the same discipline that made hopping unnecessary: a setup that follows you 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 each editor left 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 showed me how little of VS Code’s extension pile I actually needed. Windsurf recalibrated what I expect AI in an editor to do. None of that was wasted, even though I landed back where I started.
What I’d tell someone mid-hop#
Try the new editor. They’re free and you’ll learn something. But put your real investment a layer down: learn your motions cold, and version your config so a switch costs an afternoon instead of a week. Do that and the editor stops being a decision with stakes. It becomes a paint color, and you can repaint as often as the mood takes you.
I’m back in VS Code as I write this, with Zed and Windsurf a keystroke away for when one of them is the right tool. The window keeps changing. The way I move around inside it doesn’t, and that was always the part that mattered.
