Zed really is delightful to use. I haven't had any need to open VSCode in over a year. Extending it has been relatively simple, even as someone who doesn't know Rust well.
The Zed team seem to have really learned their lesson on performance from the Atom days, because it's very performant. @nathansobo, @maxbrunsfeld, @as-cii and the team, congrats!
There's a general tide moving towards ES6 in the Atom community, and away from CoffeeScript. See https://github.com/atom-community/environment for an example package. That doesn't mean all existing packages will be rewritten overnight, but it does mean you'll see a shift, even in core packages.
The killer feature of Atom to me is the ease with which it can be extended (via packages) and the openness to community contribution on core features. That's not a knock against any other editor (some of which share similar characteristics in this regard) – it's just what draws me to Atom.
A huge thanks to the Atom team (https://github.com/benogle in particular) for embracing a community package and bringing it back into the core of Atom.
This is the killer feature of Atom in my mind: the community around it, and the rate with which contributions can be made and then absorbed into the core.
The Zed team seem to have really learned their lesson on performance from the Atom days, because it's very performant. @nathansobo, @maxbrunsfeld, @as-cii and the team, congrats!