Eclipse. Notepad++. Sublime. VS Code. Cursor. Antigravity. Zed.
That is my journey with editors. I think the journey has ended.
Not because Zed is the best one out there. Because the hours I spend inside an editor have collapsed.
Ideas used to be cheap. Development time was the expensive part, and the team’s time was sacred. You did not want to burn two weeks building something that was not scoped properly. So you argued about the scope first and wrote the code second.
Then we lived in the editor building those features. Eight hours a day, every day. Learning the shortcuts paid for itself. The time spent learning the shortcuts or keybinding - Ctrl+R to run a program, Ctrl+S (a lesson to save files frequently, which you learned the hard way) - was worth it.
Now it takes me an afternoon to build a working prototype.
I still have Eclipse keybindings in my fingers that I have not used in a decade. I will never build that muscle memory for Zed, and I have stopped trying. The last editor that I spent learning the keybidnings was Sublime Text. Not anymore.
The editor is no longer the place where the work happens for me. It is where I go to read the output of the agent or type in a few more instructions to guide the agent.
Now I’m learning to write proper instructions to guide the agent to the outcome I want - skills and prompts