Zed Creator Quits His Job, Will Attempt to Make the Open Source Editor His Day Job

We recently discussed the sustainability of Indie Open Source on Bad Voltage, and this story relates:

When I started the Zed project about a year ago I intended to build an editor just for me: something minimal, simple and stable. Writing something for myself seemed a natural thing to do after spending about a year and a half having a job building an IDE: once you’ve built your own tools, there’s no going back. Also, having built this sort of thing before (although not from “scratch”), it was fairly quick to get something working. Over the past year, Zed has been the ultimate piece of dogfood-ware for me — my own personal playground that allowed me to iterate on lingering ideas I had on improving code editing. Since people asked why I created yet another editor, over time I distilled some principles behind the design of Zed. The past half a year I’ve been using Zed full-time and I’ve been very happy with it. And I’m not the only one. The Google Chrome Web Store (Zed currently runs as a Chrome app) tells me there are well over 4000 “weekly users”, and the reviews are generally very positive. Now I take the 4k number with a grain of salt, but clearly, this is no longer a 1-person audience editor. The number of community contributions has also increased lately and there appears to be a growing number of users that don’t just like Zed as a cool “look what web tech can do” demo, but really love Zed as an editor, and see it as a modern-day Emacs or Vim: minimalist, powerful and extensible. However, with a full-time day job at work, and full-time night job as a parent, there isn’t always much time to spend on Zed. At least not as much as I’d like. And I have so many cool ideas I still want to implement. It’s time to fix that. I’m making Zed my day job

Official Announcement...

--jeremy