I interned at zed during the summer of 2022, when the editor was pre-alpha. Nathan, Max, Antonio are great guys and build software with care. I'm happy to see the editor receive the success it deserves, because the team has poured so much world-class engineering work into it.<p>I worked with Antonio on prototyping the extensions system[0]. In other words, Antonio got to stress test the pair programming collaboration tech while I ran around in a little corner of the zed codebase and asked a billion questions. While working on zed, Antonio taught me how to talk about code and make changes purposefully. I learned that the best solution is the one that shows the reader how it was derived. It was a great summer, as far as summers go!<p>I'm glad the editor is open source and that people are willing to pay for well-engineered AI integrations; I think originally, before AI had taken off, the business model for zed was something along the lines of a per-seat model for teams that used collaborative features. I still use zed daily and I hope the team can keep working on it for a long time.<p>[0]: Extensions were originally written in Lua, which didn't have the properties we wanted, so we moved to Wasm, which is fast + sandboxed + cross-language. After I left, it looks like Max and Marshall picked up the work and moved from the original serde+bincode ABI to Wasm interface types, which makes me happy: <a href="https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-extensions" rel="nofollow">https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-extensions</a>. I have a blog post draft about the early history of Zed and how extensions with direct access to GPUI and CRDTs could turn Zed from a collaborative code editor into a full-blown collaborative application platform. The post needs a lot of work (and I should probably reach out to the team) before I publish it. And I have finals next week. Sigh. Some day!
I really want to move off VS Code and start using Zed, but unfortunately the text is always extremely blurry. It's just unusable.<p>I check back on the GitHub issue every few months and it just has more votes and more supportive comments, but no acknowledgement.<p>Hopefully someone can rescue us from the sluggish VS Code.<p><a href="https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992">https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992</a><p>I have a 1440p monitor and seeing this issue.
I was using Zed up until a few months ago. I got fed up with the entire AI panel being an editable area, so sometimes I ended up clobbering it. I switched to Cursor, but now I don't "trust" the the editor and its undo stack, I've lost code as a result of it, particularly when you're in mid-review of an agentic edit, but decide to edit the edit. The undo/redo gets difficult to track, I wish there was some heirarchical tree view of history.<p>The restore checkpoint/redo is too linear for my lizard brain. Am I wrong to want a tree-based agentic IDE? Why has nobody built it?
Zed is exactly how software should be made. Granted, I don't agree with all of their UX decisions (i think the AI panel is really bad compared to Cursor's), but good lord is the thing fast. These guys are the real deal. They built a rendering system (GPUI) in Rust before building Zed on top of it, and so it is one of the fastest (if not the fastest) pieces of software that resides on my computer. I can't wait until GPUI becomes a bit more mature/stable so I can build on top of it, because the other Rust GUI libraries/frameworks aren't great.<p><i>edit</i>: they updated the AI panel! looking good!
Meanwhile I'm checking Helix editor every 6 month to see if authors became any less hostile to the idea of thinking about considering of starting thinking about potentially adding copilot support.<p><a href="https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037">https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/4037</a>
I’m developing in TS and Rust for the most part.<p>Went from Atom, to VSC, to Vim and finally to Zed. Never felt more at home. Highly recommend giving it a try.<p>AFAIK there is overlap between Atoms and Zeds developers. They built Electron to built Atom. For Zed they built gpui, which renders the UI on the GPU for better performance. In case you are looking for an interesting candidate for building multi platform GUIs in rust, you can try gpui yourself.
I'm not sure, it might have changed since, but my personal experience was different.<p>Tried using zed on Linux (pop os, Nvidia) several months ago, was terribly slow, ~1s to open right click context window.<p>I've spent some time debugging this, and turns out that my GPU drivers are not the best with my current pop os release, but I still don't understand how it might take so long and how GPU is related to right clicking.<p>Switched back to emacs, love every second. :)<p>I'm not sure if title referring to actual development speed or the editor performance.<p>p.s. I play top games on Linux, all is fine with my GPU & drivers.
I generally use Neovim, but Zed was the first code editor that made me go, "Wow, I can see myself actually using this." My only gripe is the "Sign In" button at the top that I can't seem to remove.<p>But apropos TFA, it's nice to see that telemetry is opt-in, not opt-out.
It’s funny that they lead with AI tools. I love zed because it’s fast, customizable, has a clean interface and it’s easy to pair program. The LLM bit is just an annoying thing I shut off because imo I’m too junior at the moment to use LLMs
Tried Zed and Cursor, but they always felt too magical to me. I ended up building a minimal agent framework that only uses seven tools (even for code edits):
read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, and think.<p>These simple, composable tools can be utilized well enough by increasingly powerful LLM(s), especially Gemini 2.5 pro to achieve most tasks in a consistent, understandable way.<p>More importantly - I can just switch off the 'ask' tool for the agent to go full turbo mode without frequent manual confirmation.<p>I just released it yesterday, have a look at <a href="https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami">https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami</a> for the implementation if you think it is useful for you!
I tried the agent mode with sonnet 3.7 (not the thinking one). When it started trying to create a file, it kept getting a "Failed to connect to API: 400 Bad Request" error. After a few attempts to create files, it "touch"ed a file and tried to edit this, which also failed. It checked permissions with "ls -la", then it tried to "cat" the code into it but failed because of syntax errors (to do with quoting). Then it tried nano(?!?!) and failed, and then it started "echo"ing the code into the file chunk by chunk, which started working. After 4 chunks it got an error and then it made the following chunks smaller. It took it a dozen "echo"s or so.<p>While the initial 400 error is a bummer, I am actually surprised and admire its persistence in trying to create the file and in the end finding a way to do so. It forgot to define a couple of stuff in the code, which was trivial to fix, after that the code was working.
I am amazed how well it works. Yesterday I have spent a full day with a new macOS project with idea in my head. Spend half a day writing basic features, and after that opened the project in Zed to add features. Not very well documented things like AppKit + SwiftUI integration - no issues, and I mean I was getting about 500 new lines from my questions and was getting compilable code (and working). A few times after review I modified a few things to make it compilable/or better. But still.
And I had one interesting problem with objc/swift and javascript integration - and Zed AI delivered some masterpiece in JavaScript, that is definitely outside my knowledge.
This technology is definitely going to change how we program now.
For people who have tried the new agent panel in Zed, how does it compare to something like Cursor or Windsurf?<p>(I've yet to dive deep into AI coding tools and currently use Zed as an 'open source Sublime Text alternative' because I like the low latency editing.)
I've used zed both for work and personal projects. I'm not a fan of the direction they're going. I don't want "agentic" tools, I just want to back and forth with an LLM to get a better idea. I've specified in my markdown to not write actual code to files. Would be nice if this was togglable in settings.<p>Apart from that, it's a hell of a lot better than alternatives, and my god is it fast. When I think about the perfect IDE (for my taste), this is getting pretty close.
From my experience Zed agents oftn just goes and edits your files without your asking it to. Even if you ask questions about codebase, it assumes you want it to be changed. For it to be useful it must be better at understanding prompts; I would also like it to generate diffs like it does but prompt me if I want to apply them first
A bit off topic: For work I mostly develop on Python and Typescript.<p>I’ve been using PyCharm Professional for over a decade (after an even longer time with emacs).<p>I keep trying to switch to vscode, Cursor, etc. as they seem to be well liked by their users.<p>Recently I’ve also tried Zed.<p>But the Jetbrains suite of tools for refactoring, debugging, and general “intelligence” keep me going back. I know I’m not the only one.<p>For those of you that love these vscode-like editors that have previously used more integrated IDEs, what does your setup look like?
I wanted Zed to work as a high performance dev-enabled Markdown editor as I was looking to replace Obsidian that doesn't scale well (memory use and cursor latency degrades with document size, and generally what I suspect is a weak foundation).
My use case is active note taking(PKM) and reviewing including a few large (1-2+ MB) markdown files.
However, to my surprise, the performance for Markdown was much worse - it's practically unusable.<p>This is clearly a Markdown backend problem, but not really relevant in the editor arena, except maybe to realize that the editor "shell" latency is just a part of the overall latency problem.<p>I still keep it around as I do with other editors that I like, and sometimes use it for minor things, while waiting to get something good.<p>On this note, I think there's room for an open source pluggable PKM as an alternative to Obsidian and think Zed is a great candidate. Unfortunately I don't have time to build it myself just yet.
I get the high performance component, but it seems most of their speed is from underlying models supporting a "diff style" edits and that a small percentage of it is from code-level text-editing optimizations and improvements.<p>vscode running a typescript extension (cline, gemini, cursor, etc) to achieve LLM-enhanced coding is probably the least efficient way to do it in terms of cpu usage, but the features they bring are what actually speeds up your development tasks - not the "responsiveness" of it all. It seems that we're making text editing and html rendering out to be a giant lift on the system when it's really not a huge part of the equation for most people using LLM tooling in their coding workflows.<p>Maybe I'm wrong but when I looked at zed last (about 2 months ago) the AI workflow was surprisingly clunky and while the editor was fast, the lack of tooling support and model selection/customization left me heading back to vscode/cline which has been getting nearly two updates per week since that time - each adding excellent new functionality.<p>Does responsiveness trump features and function?
Wow that's one awkwardly pompous introduction. Nevertheless Zed never fails to impress. Aside from all the AI fireworks it really goes to show how building software "from scratch" pays off in the long run.
The pricing page: <a href="https://zed.dev/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://zed.dev/pricing</a><p>The pricing page was not linked on the homepage. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't but it surely was not obvious to me.<p>Regardless of how good of a software it is or pretends to be I just do not care about landing pages anymore. Pricing page essentially tells me what I am actually dealing with. I knew about Zed when it was being advertised as "written in rust because it makes us better than everyone" trend everyone was doing. Now, it is LLM based.<p>Absolutely not complaining about them. Zed did position themselves well to take the crown of the multi billion dollar industry AI code editors has become. I had to write this wall of text of because I just want to just drop the pricing page link and help make people make their own decision, but I have to reply to "whats your point" comments and this should demonstrate I have no point aside from dropping a link.
I'm sure it's fast, but is it accessible? Am I as a screen reader user going to get fired if the company I work at decides one day to have all of their devs use this? And if not, any plans to make it so?
Might sound a little brusque but this really is the stakes we're playing with these days.
The demo video looks great<p>The free pricing is a bit confusing, it says 50 prompts/month, but also BYO API keys<p>So even if I use my own API keys, the prompts will stop at 50 per month?<p>Also, since it’s open source, couldn’t just someone remove the limit? (I guess that wouldn’t work if the limit is of some service provided by Zed)
we recorded a podcast with them talking about their AI work! <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZmJInhzIKo&pp=0gcJCYUJAYcqIYzv" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZmJInhzIKo&pp=0gcJCYUJAYcqI...</a>
Regardless of the AI stuff, Zed is the best editor since Sublime Text and it’s only getting better. Congrats to the team.<p>I also laughed at the dig on VSCode at the start. For the unaware, the team behind Zed was originally working on Atom.
I've had aot of issues with AI hallucinating the API surface for libraries, to the point where I kinda gave up using it for a lot of purposes.<p>But I got back on the horse & broke out Zed this weekend, deciding that I'd give it another shot, and this time be more deliberate about providing context.<p>My first thought was that I'd just use Zed's /fetch and slam some crates.io docs into context. But there were dozens and dozens of pages to cover the API surface, and I decided that while this might work, it wasn't a process I would ever be happy repeating.<p>So, I went looking for some kind of Crates.io or Rust MCP. Pretty early looking effort, but I found cratedocs-mcp. It can search crates, lookup docs for crates,lookup specific members in crates; that seems like maybe it might be sufficient, maybe it might help. Pulled it down, built it...
<a href="https://github.com/d6e/cratedocs-mcp">https://github.com/d6e/cratedocs-mcp</a><p>Then check the Zed docs for how to use this MCP server. Oh man, I need to create my own Zed extension to use an MCP service? Copy paste this postgres-context-extension? Doesn't seem horrendous, but I was pretty deflated at this side-quest continuing to tack on new objectives & gave up on the MCP idea. It feels like there should be some kind of builtin glue that lets Zed add MCP servers via configuration, instead of via creating a whole new extension!!<p>On the plus side, I did give DeepSeek a try and it kicked out pretty good code on the first try. Definitely some bits to fix, but pretty manageable I think, seems structurally reasonably good?<p>I don't know really know how MCP tool integration works in the rest of the AI ecosystem, but this felt sub ideal.
Here’s what I want, a keyboard only code editor, (ideally with all the vim keybindings and features) that also has in built lsp for popular languages like C, C++, Go and just works out of the box (even better if it has good code completion with copilot or something similar). I can’t seem to get this anywhere. I’m still sticking with neovim for now but it’s code complete doesn’t work well that I’ve turned it off and I have to maintain its config every few months.
Jose Valim just gave a demo of Tidewave integration with Zed. Really interesting stuff: <a href="https://x.com/josevalim/status/1920062725394243640" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/josevalim/status/1920062725394243640</a><p>I'm catching up on Zed architecture using deepwiki: <a href="https://deepwiki.com/zed-industries/zed" rel="nofollow">https://deepwiki.com/zed-industries/zed</a>
I hate chat and panels in my ide, they are distracting and have worst ux, I'm using Cursor because of cursor prediction, but lately the trend has been the opposite even in the development of Cursor, apparently people are more interested about chatting instead of doing super powered editing supported by the AI that let you lead the game and makes you feel much more productive. I'd like to see something like that in Zed and I'd pay for it, agent mode and chats never worked for me, always been the worse experience
I have been using Zed as my main editor for the past ~5 months and I have been very happy with it. It's actually fast and snappy. I hope they become sustainable.<p>VS Code forks (Cursor and Windsurf) were extremely slow and buggy for me (much more so than VS Code, despite using only the most vanilla extensions).
I want to love Zed. The UX is absolutely amazing - it just feels like you're on turbo mode all the time. And the AI is excellent too. I don't know how far it can go, though, without the VSCode ecosystem.
In my personal experience I couldn't use Zed for editing python.<p>Firstly, when navigating in a large python repository, looking up references was extremely slow (sometimes on the order of minutes).<p>Secondly, searching for a string in the repo would sometimes be incorrect (e.g. I know the string exists but Zed says there aren't any results, as if a search index hasn't been updated). These two issues made it unusable.<p>I've been using PyCharm recently and found it to be far superior to anything else for Python. JetBrains builds really solid software.
I tried Zed out and successfully got Claude chat working with my API key.<p>But I'm not sure how to get predictions working.<p>When the predictions on-ramp window popped up asking if I wanted to enable it, I clicked yes and then it prompted me to sign in to Github. Upon approving the request on Github, an error popover over the prediction menubar item at the bottom said "entity not found" or something.<p>Not sure if that's related (Zed shows that I'm signed in despite that) but I can't seem to get prediction working. e.g. "Predict edit at cursor" seems to no-op.<p>Anyways, the onboarding was pretty sweet aside from that. The
"Enable Vim mode" on the launch screen was a nice touch.
I've been recently using Zed, and I'm in love. It's the best editor experience I've ever had. Everything's snappy like notepad.exe, but it's also quite featureful, and quickly becoming even better.
The way context management in Zed works is really well-done imo. I haven't found a different place which does it this way.<p>Basically, by default:<p>- You have the chat<p>- Inline edits you do use the chat as context<p>And that is extremely powerful. You can easily dump stuff into the chat, and talk about the design, and then implement it via surgical inline edits (quickly).<p>That said, I wasn't able to switch to Zed fully from Goland, so I was switching between the two, and recently used Claude Code to generate a plugin for Goland that does chat and inline edits similarly to how the old Zed AI assistant did it (not this newly launched one) - with a raw markdown editable chat, and inline edits using that as context.
This seems like a really great demo of the agent panel:<p><a href="https://zed.dev/blog/fastest-ai-code-editor" rel="nofollow">https://zed.dev/blog/fastest-ai-code-editor</a><p>It's fast paced, yet it doesn't blush over anything I'd find important. It shows clearly how to use it, shows a realistic use case, e.g. the model adding some nonsense, but catching something the author might have missed, etc. I don't think I've seen a better AI demo anywhere.<p>Maybe the bar is really low that I get excited about someone who demos an LLM integration for programmers to actually understand programming, but hey.
I'm using it without any AI stuff, just turned everything off. I like it. But in day-to-day usage I don't really see any difference with VSCode. And I'm using it out of pure curiosity and interest to try something new.
This doesn't seem ready for real use. Testing it right now, is miles slower than Cursor for simple edits in the AI panel, and behaves in what seems to be a broken way. I gave up after it started to type out my entire file from scratch for every edit and presenting a diff for the entire file, rather than the few lines that were changed.<p>Does it not do incremental edits like Cursor? It seems like the LLM is typing out the whole file internally for every edit instead of diffs, and then re-generates the whole file again when it types it out into the editor.
Like iy way more than the old one. (really didnt like how i couldnt just copy code blocks in one click) The new one seems interresting but useless without the agentic toolcalling, witch seems to be unsupported by most (even tool capable models like o4-mini or gemini2.5-pro. I would like to be able to supply debug info like before, as well as importing regular text threads into the context.
I'm curious what others' experiences have been with this. I haven't tried it out yet. Is it comparable to Cursor's capabilities? More on par with VS Code Copilot? Something else entirely?
I have launched Zed probably once a week for the past few months to try it out (each time running updates to see what's improved). I so badly want a native editor like this one to succeed. But the UX just seems very difficult to use. For a while, there were no settings UIs, and you had to edit everything in JSON. I think that's still true. But fine.<p>Now I'm excited that they actually have a Cursor-like agentic mode.<p>But the suggestions are still just nowhere near as "smart" as the ones from Cursor. I don't know if that's model selection or what. I can't even tell which model is being used for the suggestions.<p>Today I'm trying to use the Agentic stuff, I added an MCP server, and I keep getting non-stop errors even though I started the Pro trial.<p>First error: It keeps trying to connect to Copilot even though I cancelled my Copilot subscription. So I had to manually kill the Copilot connection.<p>Second Error: Added the JIRA MCP (it's working since Zed lists all the available tools in the MCP) and then asked a basic question (give me the 5 most recent tickets). Nope. Error interacting with the model, some OAuth error.<p>Third Weirdness (not error): Even though I'm on a Pro trial, the "Zed" agent configuration says "You have basic access to models from Anthropic through the Zed Free AI Plan" – aren't I on a Pro trial? I want to give you money guys, please, let me do that. I want to encourage a high performance editor to grow.<p>I'm not even trying to do anything fancy. I just am on a pro trial. Shouldn't this be the happiest of happy paths? Zed should use whatever the Pro stuff gives you, without any OAuth errors, etc. How can I help the Zed team debug this stuff? Not even sure where to start.
> Privacy and Security by Default [...] you can also run custom models on your own hardware via Ollama.<p>That's nice for the chat panel, but the tab completion engine surprisingly <i>still</i> doesn't officially support a local, private option.[0]<p>Especially with Zed's Zeta model being open[1], it seems like there should be a way to use that open model locally, or what's the point?<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/15968">https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/15968</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://zed.dev/blog/edit-prediction" rel="nofollow">https://zed.dev/blog/edit-prediction</a>
Slightly OT: Why aren't AI coding assistants implemented as plugins (like through an LSP), rather than being a standalone AI-first editor (like Cursor)?<p>I might be missing the obvious, and I get no standard exists, but why aren't AI coding assistants just plugins?
I'd love to be able to configure it to use OpenAI API but with a custom hostname. I found some comments in a forum about how to configure that, but they were pretty old and didn't seem to work anymore.
My favorite part of Zed is the problems/errors view. It's great seeing everything in one place and being able to edit multiple files with context at the same time.<p>That feature + native Git support has fully replaced VSCode for me.
Been using Zed as my daily driver (without AI) since sometime in late 2023 when I decided I wanted to ditch vscode for mention leaner and faster. Love it.<p>I switched to cursor earlier this year to try out LLM assisted development and realised how much I now despise vscode. It’s slow, memory hungry, and just doesn’t work as well (and in a keyboard centric way) as Zed.<p>Then a couple of weeks ago, I switched back to Zed, using the agents beta. AI in Zed doesn’t feel quite as polished as cursor (at least, edit predictions don’t feel as good or fast), but the agent mode works pretty well now. I still use cursor a little because anything that isn’t vscode or pycharm has imho a pretty bad Python LSP experience (those two do better because they use proprietary LSP’s), but I’m slowly migrating to full stack typescript (and some Gleam), so hope to fully ditch cursor in favour of Zed soon.
As a longtime Sublime user, Sublime really needs to step it up. Presumably their silence is because they're (hopefully) releasing something big soon.
> ...So far, these futuristic tools have been accessible to programmers in one of three ways:<p>> ... 3. Baked into a closed-source fork of an open-source fork of a web browser<p>I laughed out loud at this one.
Honestly, being able to just turn off all the AI junk and have a fast editor is the main thing I want. You think AI features or speed actually matter more for most devs day to day?
It's honestly frustrating to see such a promising product make _so many_ sub-par product decisions. It's probably one of the only products that I have genuinely tried using > 5 times and gave up right after. I would grant this if they were new in the block, but it's been a while now.<p>If they had focused on<p>1. Feature-parity with the top 10 VSCode extensions (for the most common beaten path — vim keybindings, popular LSPs, etc) and<p>2. Implemented Cursor's Tab<p>3. Simple chat interface that I can easily add context from the currently loaded repo<p>I would switch in a beat.<p>I _really_ want something better than VSCode and nvim. But this ain't it. While "agentic coding" is a nice feature, and specially so for "vibe coding projects", I (and most of my peers) don't rely on it that much for daily driving their work. It's nice for having less critical things going on at once, but as long as I'm expected to produce code, both of the features highlighted are what _effectively_ makes me more productive.
Tried using it, but I’ve found it to be unreliable on my Linux laptop. Maybe it’s a sway thing or an amdgpu thing but last time I tried it was just too prone to crashing.
Been trying out Zed here and there for a few months. There's lots to like about it. Nice clean UI. Extremely fast. No endless indexing (looking at you, PyCharm). It doesn't include a python debugger UI, and the type inspection is far behind PyCharm, so it doesn't take me away from PyCharm yet for serious work, but it might once it's competitive on those features.<p>I have run into some problems with it on both Linux and Mac where zed hangs if the computer goes to sleep (meaning when the computer wakes back up, zed is hung and has to be forcibly quit.<p>Haven't tried the AI agent much yet though. Was using CoPilot, now mostly Claude Code, and the Jetbrains AI agent (with Claude 3.7).
I hate the direction they're going to be honest with this giga focus on AI bullshit. Only good part added was zeta (their own predictive editing model that jumps across the file where it predicts you want to edit your typo etc AND have a "subtle" mode), but they price it at 20/month, which is absurd.
an editor that made by mac-only developers and put macOS support at is highest priority will be always shit on other OS.<p>sorry, but to me it is just pure garbage.
>scratch-built in Rust _all the way down to handcrafted GPU shaders and OS graphics API calls_<p>Is this what happens to people who choose to learn Rust?<p>Joking aside, this is interesting, but I'm not sure what the selling point is versus most other AI IDEs out there? While it's great that you support ollama, practically speaking, approximately nobody is getting much mileage out of local models for complex coding tasks, and the privacy issues for most come from the LLM provider rather than the IDE provider.