How do other editors handle this in your experience? I’m pretty sure VSCode behaves exactly the same, with the addition of a manual “merge” editor when you try to save, but never shows changes live for a modified file.
Changes to open files without any modifications in the buffer are always shown. Are you using any kind of containers or virtual fs that might be interfering?
Other editors, at least, display a pop-up indicating that the file has changed on disk in the meantime and ask me if I want to reload the file or overwrite it with my current buffer, or do nothing (geany editor does that, for example). And it happens immediately as soon as I hover over the editor's window.
Interestingly, Zed displays the change right away for the first time, but any other edits are not picked up. I'm using Zed's installer, Zed updated to the latest version, no containers or virtual fs, my partitions are ext4.
Changes to open files without any modifications in the buffer are always shown. Are you using any kind of containers or virtual fs that might be interfering?