Ok, if this doesn't fit Zed, explain all the empty promises and stuff made all the way back in 2023?
If you're referring to specific statements, it would help to link them rather than making a broad accusation. In any case, roadmap mentions are never guarantees, especially in innovative open source projects...
They even mentioned Kethku, the creator of Neovide, being on the team and having animations on todo list.
"Animations" does not automatically imply a full Neovide-style distortion shader integrated into the rendering pipeline. Those are very different scopes of work.
Mr subidubi also made a comment early on pointing out potential flaws and issues, and the dev probably assumed that's a green light to proceed further and take care of those.
A single early comment in a PR thread is not a commitment to merge. Anyone who has followed open-source development for a while knows many PRs evolve or get closed once maintainers evaluate long-term cost.
Why not just instantly close this PR instead of wasting everyone's time and effort?
This is also explicitly covered in the contribution guidelines.
The maintainers state that they review PRs and only merge a subset:
"Although we will take a look, we tend to only merge about half the PRs that are submitted."
And the internal reviewer guidance says:
"If the fix/feature is not obviously great… Close the PR with a thank you and some explanation."
Which is, essentially, what happened here...
More importantly, the guidelines also recommend confirming features before implementing them:
"Make sure the change is desired… features should be confirmed with us first if you aim to avoid wasted effort."
The fact we're even debating if it was Neovide style animation or just cursor animation shows there was ambiguity in the scope. With hundreds of PRs active, I doubt this is intentional. It is probably rather a feedback collection/interpretation failure, which happens in every large project.
Lastly, they explicitly mention that features may be rejected when complexity outweighs benefit:
"Features where (in our subjective opinion) the extra complexity isn't worth it for the number of people who will benefit."
The maintainer comment on this PR follows that exact reasoning: the implementation touches a large part of the rendering stack and may not justify the maintenance cost.
Now, people are free to disagree with that judgement, but it's not some unexplained or arbitrary decision. It's consistent with how the project says contributions are evaluated.
This was extremely poorly handled in every way imaginable, so the backlash is very much deserved.
The reasoning was explained by the maintainer. Disagreeing with that decision is perfectly fair, but framing it as bad faith or incompetence doesn't really move the discussion forward.