Think about the customer base: the sorts of users who want a high-performance text editor are exactly the kind of people who will run Windows 7 until it's pried from their cold, dead fingers, and who will flood the support forums with complaints if you limit support to operating systems released in the last 15 years. Because of their target market, Zed probably has implicit support requirements which wouldn't apply to e.g. the last first-person shooter.

> Zed probably has implicit support requirements which wouldn't apply to e.g. the last first-person shooter.

This is incongruous given Zed uses modern frameworks (which is why they moved to D3D11 from Vulkan in the first place).

If Zed really wanted to target 'old Windows' then they might have used Win32 and GDI+, not D3D11. In fact they could've stuck to D2D (which was released with Windows 7 and back-ported to Vista), and not used their own rendering at all, since D2D is already a GPU-accelerated text-rendering API, and then used Win32 windowing primitives for everything else.

Similarly, the Mac version is for MacOS 10.15 (from 2019) or later, and has an x64 version.