How Zed Ensures a Great Vim-Mode Experience

This post by Conrad Irwin on the Zed blog is about the roadmap for Vim features in Zed in 2025, but this section caught my eye:

People who switch to Zed from Vim are attracted by the “just works by default” aspect of Zed: language servers just work, and the advanced features (AI, collaboration). But, nothing is more frustrating than a Vim mode that doesn’t work exactly like Vim. We get a lot of VS Code Vim extension refugees, and the number one complaint is that “it just didn’t feel right”.

Zed is already much closer to Vim. We have extensive “side-by-side” testing where we run headless Neovim to ensure our keyboard shortcuts do exactly the same thing. That said, there’s always more to do, both to add the remaining minor motions zL/ zH come to mind, and fix edge cases in things like d]}.

I have been impressed by Zed’s mode, it did in fact just work™ for the most part when I started using the first Linux version of Zed¹. They clearly consider it a core part of the Zed experience and are dedicated to making it feel correct with that side-by-side testing. In many other editors the vim mode feels like an afterthought, tacked on to appease those vim weirdos. I’m glad that’s not the case here.