Lapce being cross-platform is a major difference for now, Zed plans to be eventually but it's currently only on Mac.

Now that Zed is open source they're actually quite similar in capability (even sharing a number of underling libraries). The biggest difference is probably that Zed is backed by a commercial company (and I believe they have plans to sell collaborative functionality on top of the core editor) whereas Lapce is more of a community open source project.

Lapce is also cross-platform whereas Zed is currently macOS only. But they seem to be making rapid progress on linux support so this may not be relevant soon.

This is my question too. I think I’m going to have to try both. AFAICT so far, Lapce is ‘just’ someone’s open source project that has got popular, while Zed is made by a funded-looking startup with several employees that announced they were switching to open source just a couple of weeks ago. Zed also has Copilot built in. Both look like great editors at a glance. Zed has more easily findable information about their goals - there’s a blog and a roadmap on their site. (I guess with Lapce it might be possible to get a sense of goals/vision by sifting through GitHub issues and comments, which I haven’t done yet.)

One thing I know of is that zed'a scope is a bit wider and includes some collaborative tools and enhancements. Don't know the exact details though.

it seemes closer ti what I actually need than zed. love zed's speed but remote development is mandatory in thus day and age

What makes you say that remote development is mandatory? I think it has less to do with "this day and age" and more to do with your current employment.

For me and a lot of people it is. But not because of employment. one big use of remote is to remote into docker containers. why docker containers? I can have a different set of dependencies for each project and yet have my different systems communicate with each other over a network.

but for me, the big issue is I run phoenix framework and the older version I'm running my project on can't run the tests on the arm version of docker os I had to create a x86 machine on hetzner.

From a developer perspective, Zed's licensing prevents it from being used/inspected outside of the context of other GPL projects. For example, Helix can't use nor read any of the code in Zed because it would pollute the licensing.