When did you last try Zed? If it was recently then that hasn’t quite matched my experience, for me vim keybindings work quite well. But I did think the same when I first used Zed over a year ago.

I tried it a couple days ago. Lost me right off with the poor `:e` experience; popup box with no completion, fuzzy-matching, sub-directory support. Vim is a file oriented editor, not a project oriented one, so good file operations are table stakes.

I don’t quite get what Zed’s emulation of :e has to do with being a modal editor. It’s a completely different editor so of course the interface to interact with files is going to be different, but in my experience Zed’s implementation of modality when it comes to its Vim mode is extremely good. Even better than the already excellent NeoVintageous for Sublime Text.

Fair point. I guess the problem is with their (Neo)Vim keybindings, not so much with the modal-editing part. I included it as vim is the most popular modal editor and its keybindings are what are lacking.

Are there any modal editors that are not file-based? Maybe it would be better to say this is a problem with its file-based editor emulation?

Is it now possible to import .vimrc, or otherwise configure e.g. the sequence j k to execute Escape?

You can easily configure jk for escape. I don't know about importing .vimrc

Can you explain how?

From the documentation at https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/docs/src/vim...

  {
    "context": "Editor && vim_mode == insert",
    "bindings": {
      "j k": "vim::NormalBefore"
    }
  }

No .vimrc importing, but remapping capability is quite comprehensive.

I at least really like that ctrl-w allows switching between panels as well as editors, something VS code doesn’t do (or at least, you can switch to the explorer but not back?) and is a major papercut IMO

Huh? Zed's vim emulator is one of the best I've used in an IDE. Saying it's an afterthought feels disingenuous. I'm pretty sure some of the core zed devs are big vim enthusiasts.