I go pretty heavy on Jetbrains products, but they have stirred up the dev community a few times chasing things seen as investor friendly. In particular when they shoved their AI plugin as a required plugin with carried an obnoxious upsell nag. In general they've also spread themselves out across a ridiculous number of products where I'd prefer if they just focused on making their current stuff work (and not discontinue useful things like AppCode). CLion was practically unusable with the Mac toolchain for refactoring for a long time until they released the Nova backend. Fleet has been in public preview forever as a direct contender to VSCode and they spent a lot of work on it, incomplete, and then just let it sit there with minor stuff like getting themes after three years.
They also pulled the plug on free support for their Rust plugin which really upset me. Jetbrains is intent on making you pay before you get IDE functionality; I'd rather use VS Code or Zed these days.
I liked the look of Zed when I first tried it out, but I read that it seems to have a strong cloud/AI focus which I don't want or need. I have started investing a bit of time in getting Vim working with all the bells and whistles and now it's a decent fallback when I can't use a JetBrains IDE for whatever reason.
I'll just be honest, I don't like Zed at all. I much preferred Atom when it was a thing, and I mostly use Zed begrudgingly because the other graphical editors tend to get sluggish.
My preferred IDE was what Jetbrains had before with IDEA - you could plug in basic support for the languages you want and edit as you go. I don't want to set up a superheavy environment with all the bells and whistles, I want Intellisense and tree-sitter in a relatively zippy interface. That was what Jetbrains offered before, and it's what I can't have anymore.
It's probably the most ridiculous nitpick in the history of ever, but I really hate the "sign in" button at the top right of Zed, particularly there's no way to hide it even through some configuration file. It's distracting to me and I want zero cloud connectivity associated with my text editor.
The Material redesign makes a lot more sense now. I still think it's a terrible decision and a huge waste of resources though.
Making Rider free to try is the correct strategy for them. Obviously they want to compete directly with VSCode, but they're burning a lot of good will in their existing customer base in the process.
