I wanted to like Zed but tying buffers to tabs is a deal breaker for me. They have really good vim motion support but don't let you view any buffer in any pane.
Tried for a long while to use Zed. It was great and I loved it - and maybe I could have switched to a GUI editor for real though for the first time in my life.
But man. File trees and tabs are the worst DX I can possibly imagine. Try as I might, I just could not get used to the tab and tree workflow. Creating new files killed me. Hiding the tab didn’t really help because the editor assumes you’re using tabs and at that point it doesn’t feel like buffers, it feels like tabs with the tab bar hidden (go figure).
I’m not even a buffer power users, but I think the default assumption of buffers over tabs, and explore over a file tree, led to 1000 other great decisions that make vim vim.
I think unless the zed core team really tried to move away from tabs and trees (and I don’t think they would nor should) they’ll fail to capture a meaningful share of vim users
As another neovim/vim expat using VSCode these days (because I got tired of fixing configuration), this is also my number one complaint. I want to be able to view any file in any split. Honestly, I wish my whole window manager worked this way (stacking WMs get close). And my browser - why can't I display any "tab" in any window with a couple of key strokes? It drives me batty how inflexible the split/buffer/pane/window model is outside of vim and emacs land. I don't want tab groups; I don't want independent windows; I don't want VSCode editor groups that are pita to close. For the love pixels, I want to make the content I care about appear in the window I have in front of me, where those windows are arranged to consume my monitor's space without overlap. /soapbox-dismount.
Not that guy but how about viewing two parts of the same file side by side, organizing them vertically or horizontally as needed, opening like a hundred files and cycling through them in a sane fashion, probably dealing with macros. Tabs get very annoying if you have too many of them, and buffers are a good solution to that problem.
