Zed is a recently open sourced ultra fast code editor written in Rust. It is created by developers from the Atom Editor (sadly killed off by Microsoft) which was also the origin of the Electron JavaScript run-time, which is used most famously by Visual Studio Code (and Discord, Teams, Figma and many other applications). This editor aims to be much more performant than Visual Studio Code and in this it succeeds.
The development of Zed is structured around the following assumptions:
Mission-critical tools should be hyper-responsive.
When you move the cursor or type a character, you should see pixels on the next refresh of your display—every time. Even sub-perceptual pauses add up over the course of a day to create unnecessary stress.
Real-time collaboration produces better software.
Pull requests have their place, but sometimes you just want to code together. It’s more fun than code review, builds trust between colleagues, and it’s one of the best ways to distribute knowledge through a team. But it has to be easy.
If you want someone’s perspective on a piece of code, it should be as easy as sending a message to pull them into your working copy and start coding.
Conversations should happen close to code.
If you want to talk about code on GitHub you have to commit and push it first, and pasting code into a chat application sucks. By treating keystrokes as the fundamental unit of change and integrating chat into the editor, we can make it easy to have a conversation about any line of code in any working copy–whether it was committed last year or just typed ten seconds ago.
Your editor should disappear.
If you’re living in a tool for hours every day, every pixel must carry its weight. The software you’re creating should always be the focus. So we constantly ask ourselves how we can maximize signal and minimize noise. Our goal is to find the most efficient way to accomplish each coding task and make it accessible. Joyful coding starts with an editor that stays out of your way.
Sadly for now, Zed is MacOS only, but there are projects underway to bring it to Linux and Windows.
Key Links
You can check out Zed in action on MacOS in the video below. Does this program have the ability to be a Visual Studio Code killer for programmers looking for a faster and lighter code editor?