Zed 1.0

Congrats to the Zed team for building the best modern editor I have ever used. I subscribe to the monthly plan just to give you guys the funding you need, even if my funding is a tiny drop in the bucket. I always wanted a feature rich alternative to Sublime Text that can run anywhere and do basically anything I need from it. I've use JetBrains IDEs for years (been subscribed annually since 2017), but since Zed I havent really opened any of those IDEs in a long time, other than maybe Rider but that's due to C# nuances I needed to work with.

What an abysmal series of top comments. These guys created a phenomenal product using novel technology, which will only continue to improve. Great work to the Zed team.

Congrats!

My daily driver is Zed developing on SSH remote servers on exe.dev.

It's crazy to think of all the dev tools I've churned through over the last 18 months but these two feel sticky.

Zed has everything I need in a unified pane. File editor, terminal, agents, SSH remotes. And it's fast and intuitive

exe.dev is the first "dev container" I've ever *loved*. The remote sandbox means `dangerously-skip-permissions` is safe. Being on the internet with good private / shared / public access saves so much time.

I also use https://conductor.build/ and GitHub but this is starting to feel clunky compared hacking directly against online live reloading apps.

I really want to like Zed because they've clearly put so much work into it, but so far I've been sticking with Sublime. I have several large PHP projects that were started in the 2010-2020 era, and Zed will highlight and complain about all sorts of minor things that were standard PHP fare at the time: functions without return types, for example. My code (which works fine) looks like an ocean of red when I view it with Zed, and turning all those warnings off is not trivial.

For each kind of warning, I wish there was a button that said "don't warn me again about issues like this one in this project." Then I could keep the interesting warnings (like undeclared variable) and ditch the ridiculous ones.

While it seems cool, I am still waiting for native Jupyter Notebook support for it to be useful to me. When that happens, I'll give it a spin, but it seems like they recently took it off the roadmap.

I was all for trying it until I saw this in the License Agreement:

"4.1. Zed's Use of Customer Data Customer hereby grants Zed a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable (except to service providers and Customer’s designees), non-transferable (except as set forth in Section 15.1) right to use, copy, store, disclose, transmit, transfer, display, modify, create derivative works from, collect, access, store, host, or otherwise process (“Process”) any materials that Customer inputs into or otherwise makes available to the Service (including prompts and other written content) (collectively, “Customer Data”) solely: (a) to perform its obligations set forth in the Terms, including its Support obligations as applicable; (b) to derive and generate Telemetry (see Section 4.4); and (c) as necessary to comply with applicable Laws. Except as required by applicable Laws, Zed will not provide Customer Data to any person or entity other than Customer’s designees (including pursuant to Section 7) or service providers."

Sorry, no I don't agree to make my source code and the product I am working to give you "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, non-sublicensable (except to service providers and Customer’s designees), non-transferable (except as set forth in Section 15.1) right to use, copy, store, disclose, transmit, transfer, display, modify, create derivative works from, collect, access, store, host, or otherwise process (“Process”) any materials that Customer inputs into or otherwise makes available to the Service (including prompts and other written content)"

Too bad they did not include better search UI into this release.

When you search, Zed opens a new tab, which I hate. Sometimes I just want to have a quick glance at some code and close the search using escape.

Telescope style search in vim, helix or JetBrains tools is so much better.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/46478

I tried Zed for a few days and loved it, but had to switch back to Cursor because I've become dependent on Cursor Tab.

The problem is that Cursor Tab seems kinda psychic, and I didn't realise how conditioned I'd become to just expressing a few keystrokes in the right place and have Tab pick up my intentions. If you're refactoring, you can move between files and it'll remember what you just did in a tab you just closed, and work out how to make the same changes here.

It's also really good at picking up patterns and the right imports from the whole repo. It seems to be working with a much larger, more persistent context.

I tried Zed AI, Copilot, and Mercury. All three seemed forgetful after a year of Cursor Tab. I wish there was a fix because literally everything else about Zed was an improvement.

I'd love to see the Alacritty terminal backend swapped out with libghostty (or more likely libghostty-rs). The work Mitchell is doing with Ghostty and the approach Zed has taken seem super aligned.

And Mitchell definitely seems to want to make Alacritty an easy target for conversion, he was just talking about being open to help support Warp with it: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2049159764261925005

I quite like Zed, I've consistently driven it for months at a time. But there are two things that add enough friction that over that month or so I end up bailing back to one of my other editors (vscode/neovim). The search experience being a new tab with no sidebar option and the diff viewer being a multibuffer view with no option to see the entire contents of a file you are diffing.

That being said, I love the software and will continue to check back on it with the hopes that it sticks one day. Congrats on the 1.0!!

The only thing that bothers me about Zed is the theme. It's so bland it actually gives me reading difficulties. I'd be surprised if some of the color combinations don't pose an accessibility issue. Grey text on grey background is quite the choice.

I've tried switching from JetBrains IDEs just a few days ago. The speed and memory footprint are very impressive. I ended up badly missing refactorings and some other features and configuring a debugging session looked like something that needs more time than I had on my hands. So went back for now. I hope they add more IDE features eventually. There's not much a pure text editor can offer over Emacs after all. But this announcement sounds like they are prioritizing agents integration - the same thing that seemingly made JetBrains drop the ball on their core advantages.

I really respect the people who have the sanity and patience to start the development of a new editor.

People are sooo picky when it comes to editors. Guaranteed they will not be satisfied. Too fast? Then it is not doing a lot. Too many features? Well now it is too heavy. Does it use sane key bindings? FU we want vim shortcuts.

Anyway, congrats on the launch folks. Hope you keep delivering excellent software despite the noisy feedback.

I want to try Zed, but it's just too much of a supply chain attack waiting to happen. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589

I did install it in a VM with virtio-gpu, but it was absurdly slow, so I wasn't able to try it.

I've been using the editor since the early days and have always been a fan of its visual look and feel, so I was pretty happy to see its UI library open sourced.

I wish GPUI could become the go-to Rust UI library and not just an editor backend.

For that, a couple of changes would be highly desirable: being able to switch the GPU backend from Metal to wgpu (so it could be mixed with vello, for instance), and the ability to integrate into an existing event loop like egui allows you to. If this were easy to do, I would switch from egui in a heartbeat.

Shortcuts still don't work on non-Latin keyboard layouts on Linux. For people who use languages with non-Latin writing systems, this is a show-stopper.

(there is, of course, a rich tradition of text editors with the same issue, including Vim and Emacs. They 1) have an excuse; 2) provide both workarounds and their own input method systems. Having this in a new program is nuts.)

Been following zed for at least a year now.

Tried switching multiple times from vscode but it's just not feature complete for my use cases. Off top:

- no expanding tabs to fill the window until another one is clicked

- file picker hides .gitignored files

- vertical terminal tabs would be nice

- restart doesn't automatically load the previous window (most recent project)

- while faster/more responsive than vscode on large codebases, still pretty heavy compared to its AI-averse fork, gram; thus I can't use it on the macbook neo

Until some/all of that is improved, it's just uncanny valley territory with no particular killer feature to migrate. Appreciate all the work they've put into it (especially remote ssh parity!) though and like what they're doing in broad strokes

Looks much better than when I last tried it! But I couldn't get it to work as well as Cursor for AI development, maybe I just need to get more used to it?

- I tried to use the Cursor Agent via ACP, it worked but it seemed markedly stupider than when I would use Cursor directly (saying that i18n strings were being used when they weren't, editing code differently than what I asked for, also when it is running terminal commands it seems to just say "Run Command: Terminal" and has no information on what's going on). Maybe I just need to not use Cursor Agent, but my company pays for it already so that's what I tried.

- Providing context is also cludgier - In cursor I often highlight specific chunks of code and add it to the AI context via Cmd+L, but I couldn't figure out any specific way of doing that with a keyboard in Zed besides clicking a tiny + button to add "Selection" to context, which got old fast.

- Maybe I just need to get used to it but reviewing code with the git integration is just hard for me to follow; one giant editor with every change in it is just harder for me to grok than showing each file one by one; so it was tiring to review the big changes produced by LLMs. Also, when you stage changes the file just stays where it is with a barely noticeable check in the checkbox in the sidebar - I prefer the behavior of Cursor where it actually moves the staged files to a separate section, but some kind of more obvious visual indication besides that perhaps would help. I did like the tree view, though!

- The tsgo and oxlint LSP servers kept crashing, which was frustrating. GraphQL LSP server also couldn't understand graphql.config.mjs, which is strange as that's supported out of box by graphql-config and works fine in Cursor/VSCode.

- I tried using a few of the different Edit Suggestion LLM options, but unfortunately Cursor is just way too good compared to any of them (slow, and just not very helpful in comparison).

- Just in general figuring out how to configure them is confusing, there's like 3-4 different places to configure agents and LLMs for different purposes, I found it very fragmented and confusing and the docs didn't make it particularly easy to set things up.

That all said, the performance was muuuuch better than Cursor. But the UX issues and general bugginess of ACP and these LSP plugins were impeding my workflow too much for me to tolerate it so back to Cursor for me. If anyone has tips on how I might make some of these better that would be cool, but if it's just inherent limitations then maybe I'll try again in 6 months or something.

Over the years I’ve tried plenty of fast, "snappy" code editors, but always found myself returning to Sublime.

Zed is the first one that got me to actually migrate. It does a great job of staying out of your way. Search and replace works seamlessly across multiple files with regex, and the extremely fast editing experience feels immediately familiar if you’re coming from Sublime. Being open source also gives confidence in its long-term viability.

Kudos to the team building Zed.

I am posting this because I want to like and use Zed because it's so fast and responsive (Especially on my tablet, which JB turns into a space heater), and has neat functionality like being able to switch to whatever set of hotkeys you use. And I greatly respect the small binary/download size and fast install. From experimenting in Python and rust:

  - Doesn't highlight typos in variable, functions, class/struct names etc. Doesn't highlight rust borrow-check, invalid method etc errors.
  - Doesn't seem to understand either language beyond superficial syntax
  - "Go to definition" (Ctrl + B) Doesn't do anything
  - Doesn't show which versions are valid in Cargo.toml and pyproject.toml
  - No ability to move functions/classes/structs etc to different modules
  - Doesn't seem to understand rust feature gates
  - Doesn't seem to understand what fields a struct has, or params a function has, let a lone what types are valid in them.
  - Rename seems naive

Overall: It is taking a superficial view of the code base, and treating it more as text than a cohesive structure.

edit: Thank you very much for those who have pointed out I needed to disable restricted mode. This has added some introspection and in-line error handling. Some of my concerns are partially-mitigated. It seems when introspection and in-line editing/complete/data appears is inconsistent (But working in many cases), and I do not yet know what rules define this. Refactoring tools like moving are still absent. I will continue to use Zed on my tablet with the LSPs enabled, and observe.

Just downloaded it and installed the C# language plugin because I need to use that for work. For some unknown reason the program grinds to an absolute halt. I cannot even close it properly anymore. If I type something it appends roughly one character per second.

Not sure if it is the plugin or something else, but unfortunately makes it very hard to try out for me.

Congratz to the team. I really like zed and started using it quite early, loved the text threads and was using them a lot as I don't think llms fit in a box of only agents, they were a nice way to manage conversations, work through them, edit responses to lead the agent better, copy-paste full text, sad to see them go (text threads).

I'm trying right now the ACP with my own agent and I'm of mixed opinions but that's maybe because I care how my agent works. I believe that for the agent view a plain buffer with small ui elements would be the best ui for an agent conversation but I may have been spoiled by their text threads. I may spin a personal fork but the thought of tens of mins of compile time isn't that attractive.

Edit: I realized I started moving to terminal based editors like helix due to agents: claude -> codex -> custom pi, with the open sourcing of warp I was considering making a native integration for warp + pi but now I'm thinking zed's text threads (~17k lines) + pi might be a better way, any thoughts or ideas?

I want to love Zed. I really do. I like how fast and performant it is. Few UI things are a nightmare, though:

1. Zed insists on opening files in the active panel AND Terminal opens in a panel -> I constantly open files over my terminal. Arghh.

2. On macOS, when I open another workspace (e.g. by drag and dropping to the app in the dock but also from CLI), it opens in one of the existing windows in a sort of workspace-level tab (?). I want a window per workspace. No way to configure that (or it is so unclear that I could never find it).

Bonus: I want code in a light scheme and terminal in a dark scheme. It is stupid, but my eyes just start hurting otherwise. I created a custom color scheme for that and it sort of works, BUT Zed seem to do some additional post-processing to colors based on the scheme-wide light/dark setting, so I cannot get the colors quite right. If I set scheme to "light" – terminal colors are a bit off. If I set to "dark" – code editor is off, cannot get it fixed with scheme level overrides.

I love Zed and have been using it for years. I’ve been especially excited about multi-agent support—it feels like it could be a genuinely powerful model.

That said, the current UX is pretty confusing.

There’s a mismatch in visual hierarchy: selecting an agent in the sidebar appears to change the entire editor’s worktree/branch, but the worktree/branch selector lives in the window titlebar, which strongly implies it controls the whole window. So it’s unclear which is the source of truth—the agent or the window.

That ambiguity shows up in the workflow too. If I want to create a new branch/worktree and then start an agent on it, I can’t do that directly. I have to:

1. create an agent 2. start a conversation (to instantiate it) 3. then switch the branch/worktree

That ordering feels backwards—I’d expect to define the context first, then start the agent.

Even basic navigation is unclear. If I switch the branch in the titlebar, does that affect the current agent, or the whole window? If I want to return to a previous worktree, is that tied to the agent or not? I still don’t have a solid mental model.

It feels like there are two competing concepts:

* agents as independent workspaces * the window as the workspace

Right now they overlap in a way that’s hard to reason about.

The feature has a lot of promise, but the current UX makes it difficult to predict what’s going to happen, which makes it hard to rely on.

Does a native UI experience have no value these days? I mean--amazing achievement building an alternate GPU-accelerated UI framework from scratch, and I do love the responsiveness, but this leaves you with a non-native app that doesn't follow OS conventions and will not get appearance and behavior updates going forward without a lot of additional effort.

So, the S and P in LSP stands for Server and Protocol. The Protocol is to exchange JSON-RPC messages with a server. So to add a new language to Zed, we should just be able to direct Zed to the server to talk to right? No. You have to write an extension in Rust. https://zed.dev/docs/extensions/languages#language-servers.

Or am I missing something?

Just tried it out and it works great and is really fast! It's a breath of fresh air compared to VS Code. Lots of other editors are fast, but this seems feature complete as well as fast.

Migrating from VS Code was also super simple and integrations with AI assistant seem to just work.

I can definitely appreciate the engineering work that went into it. Loving it so far! Thanks!

I'm rather happy with Zed.

I use it for Elixir and ansible stuff. I may eventually be open to using it instead of PyCharm for python and/or Nova for C.

If there's one area I still feel that Zed lets me down is in pane management. Maybe I need to just learn more key shortcuts. But I spend a bit of time "managing" the secondary panes and having to switch back and forth between outline, files, search. I'm not sure what the solution is. Just wish the secondary panes weren't a scarce resource that had to be mux'ed betwixt.

I really like(d) the agent integration, but we're currently experimenting with Claude Code Desktop, and I really miss not having the tight integration. My guess is that I'm going to switch back to using the Pro subsidized version. I was getting by with ~$40-$50 a month. Now the company is paying $125 for Claude Team premium seat, and it's a lesser experience.

Zed is a durable piece of software, rather than the current trend of cheap disposable software. Regardless of whether humans or agents use a tool like this, durability is a benefit for both.

Congrats to the team

Congrats on the 1.0 release to the team!

I tried Zed once, but unfortunately had to give up because of:

    - constant CPU usage when idle,
    - blurry fonts,
    - low-contrast light themes.

I tried Zed several times, and still VS Code + Sublime win.

1. In Zed, all my Rust files are reformatted on save. (I also code in Go, and don't like this approach at all.)

2. It takes ages to find out where to configure the language servers, and find those little options several layers deep, that I need to switch. (E.g. turn of rustfmt, or turn off some PEP8 checks.)

3. Zed is still missing the killer feature of Rust in VS Code -- underlining the mutable vars. (TBH, VS Code custom themes also lack this, and it's unclear how to turn that feature on, but at least the default ones have it.)

For comparison, I have bought all 4 Sublime editions. I tried Pycharm, and still preferred Sublime. VS Code came when I needed interactive debugger for Rust.

I downloaded it, tried opening one of my Java/Springboot projects. When I opened a Java file it had no text highlighting but offered to install a Java extension. Clicking it just made the prompt disappear and seemingly did nothing.

I found the Extensions screen, searched "Java" and tried installing the most popular extension. Clicking "Install" makes the button gray out for a second but does nothing before the button becomes clickable again. Not sure how to proceed from here. (On a work-managed MacBook)

Zed got me off of Emacs for the most part, which is about the highest praise I can offer. I've never used an editor that 1. closely mapped to how I think about code, and 2. is easily extensible enough that it's broadly supported with a gazillion third-party packets, and 3. is lightning fast. Emacs does 1 and 2. VSCode excels at 2. Sublime is good for 2 and 3, and Vim, and BBEdit 2 too. Zed's the only one I've ever tried that nailed all 3, plus excellent out of the box defaults.

I think it's fantastic. I still keep my Emacs chops up because it's 50 years old and I know it'll be here another 50 years from now, but Zed's open on my desktop more than any other app.

I was an early adopter of Zed (private alpha mid-2022) and it's crazy how far they have come in a relatively short space of time. Sadly I stopped using Zed when the push of AI features started to happen (same with Warp terminal) and have since used Gram more. I may have to give Zed another run as I believe you can turn all the AI features off now?

Congrats to the team on 1.0!

Zed seems to have many fans on HN.

But it is not for me. Multiple issues on Linux and high memory usage makes it a worse alternative to vscode and jetbrains.

Maybe it's better on OSX, but I dont use that anymore and why use an editor that treats your platform as a second class citizen?

Any benchmarks? Scrolling is using 16% of my GPU (vs 5% in Sublime). Also things like mouse-down to activate a tab (vs mouse-up in Zed) make Sublime feel faster.

If I saw this editor a year ago I would have jumped on it. In today's AI focused development it's not worth the hassle for me to learn new shortcuts and UI layout.

The demo video voice felt super AI generated. Which it many ways felt like it was going against the target audience, people that still code by using an editor and it's shortcuts.

Thank you, Zed team, for creating Zed. It’s clearly a labor of love, and I really want Zed to work for me. It seems like a quality project, it’s fast, and the base editor is easy to use.

I gave it weeks though, and the surrounding UI just never clicked for me. The various AI panels are confusing, the global search is awkward, and something about the type rendering just didn’t ever look right (maybe I’m hallucinating this?). I use VS Code only grudgingly, but I do think its ergonomics are actually pretty reasonable. I came from Sublime before that. I’ll keep trying Zed, and I hope you succeed.

Can you fix the CLI on Windows? You broke it a few versions ago. 'zed --version' and all the other flags don't work. Maybe broken command parser or something, im not sure. Zed with zero flags still launches it. I particularly want to be able to pass it filenames for quick opening and --new and --wait. Used to work. Thanks!

I'm loving it.

Just opened my current TS/TSX project and everything is working as expected.

Performance is fantastic. I used Sublime for a decade and always missed its native performance after switching to VSCode due to needing first class Svelte, Vue, or Astro support.

The only thing that bothered me is that it enabled the Tailwind LSP even though I'm not using TW and I couldn't stop it. Had to disable that LSP completely in the settings:

    "language_servers": [
      "...",
      "!tailwindcss-language-server"
    ]

Does anybody have experience running Claude Code or Codex in Zed?

Congratulations! I’ve been very happy with Zed for the past year or so.

I’m hoping the roadmap contains support for even more things that extensions can do, such as rendering images or Markdown in-editor.

Have they made a way to move those tiny icons in the lower left (aka "activity bar") to larger icons on the upper left like VsCode? As it stands, I can barely see them on my 4K screen and selecting them with a mouse cursor is like a pixel hunting contest. No go for me until they offer a way to change that. Beyond that it seems like a decent editor, but if I can't switch modes back and forth, that is a deal breaker.

UPDATE: Looks like they haven't yet, bummer, and doesn't seem to have much traction either. They redirect to discord, but AFAIK that doesn't have a way to make a feature request directly?

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/47593

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/48098

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/47626

I'm really thankful for Zed. I claim it's a better VI successor than vim/neovim. The fact that it comes with batteries included is a huge win. Multi buffer is super useful. I'd prefer if it was NOT written like a game engine, not depend on GPU, but I can't have everything.

Congrats to the team! Fantastic editor, it really brought me joy after years of VSCode/Cursor. I love how it's crafted, you can feel the soul behind each decision.

What I love:

- the speed, of course

- the high consistency between features, tabs, and panes, while Cursor looks like a crumbly assemblage of plugins. At first I was worried about the lack of plugins, but Zed made me realize you don't need many

- the visual elegance: the padding, the proportions... It reminds me of the best of JetBrains (though I haven't used their products in years). It feels closer to the IDEs I used in the past (for Java or C#), in the sense that it seems to encompass everything you need, without the heaviness.

- the numerous keyboard shortcuts, often displayed visibly, which makes them easier to remember

- the transparency of their roadmap and their velocity: now that we finally have the vertical git diff as promised, my doubts are gone!

Truly one of my favorite pieces of dev software in 15 years.

Zed's strongest argument has always been that editor performance still matters. It is easy to forget how much a fast, quiet tool changes the feel of a full workday.

I’ve tried it multiple times, but the performance issues on different Macs are too significant to ignore. I appreciate responsive UI, but I also prioritize sufficient battery life.

The best thing about Zed is GPUI

My biggest gripe with Zed right now (it seems they had changed the default force-formatting of source code) is that it is non-extensible.

I just wanted a custom action when I right click on a file (or multiple files) in the file tree - uh-oh, sorry, you can't have that.

Basically all text editors should be extensible. Emacs and vim, Notepad++ or Sublime - this is one of their core features. Do I need to explain this to the HN crowd?

GPU acceleration is nice, and in general, the whole basic editing experience is quite nice. But lack of extensibility is just a punch below the belt.

Maybe Zed 2.0 will be worth another look.

I would use zed, but I can't get over tabs for terminals and the file explorer doesn't refresh when new files are added from external sources, outside of that it's pretty good.

Could anyone tell me what’s the point of this when you have neovim?

This will never be an IDE like Jetbrains Rider if you use a language like C# where those guys excel at: sheer volume of refactorings, static and dynamic analysis, cpu and memory analysis, what have you.

And for a scratchpad: is this really better than neovim?

Well done on this milestone! Gave zed a decent chance last week and it wins on many fronts to replace my now scattered setup. 1. For me to use it I need to apply prettier formatting of the current project (maybe there is a way? i could not find it) 2. I need to run the claude cli, not an agent interface. or allow me to place the terminal on the left in the agent view or something.

for the everything else it was a win. will give it another chance in a month or three to see if it can do, excited to have a setup that easily navigates code diffs.

Congrats to the Zed team. I love that there's such a powerful and blazingly fast editor out there for us.

While it's been hard to use zed when the pull of claude/chatgpt desktop and terminal apps feel more full featured and take up more of the share of daily work, I continue to use Zed any time I do need to explore a codebase or review a markdown plan from an agent.

I hope that there can be improvements to the markdown preview because at least in my case, I'm using that feature a LOT these days.

Just wanted to mention they added amp jump to helix mode in preview 1.1.2!! Aka "gw" in helix. And it's AMAZING!!! Seems silly but this was the only thing keeping me from fully switching. It's such a snappy editor, and the helix mode is surprisingly faithful. Expand/shrink selection, multiple cursors from searching in a selection, amp jump... it's just amazing.

Helix lovers who are dying waiting for helix plugins, please try this out

I just upgraded to the latest to try it out. It's like Visual Studio Code and I like that. But both are VERY LLM focused and I am not using that at all. If it bothers me with LLM stuf I will switch to https://gram.liten.app/

Congrats to the Zed team! I've been using a combination of Zed + Gram [1] (which I predict may lag behind this 1.0 release in features/fixes). They are both nice, fast editors. However, I switched to Sublime Text 4 again recently and... I'm surprised to see how much clunkier Zed feels than Sublime. I can't put my finger on it, but Sublime, although lacking in features, feels considerably more polished and performant.

[1] https://gram.liten.app/

Bravo! I've enjoyed using Zed and seeing its progress. Still waiting on python notebook support.

I actually downloaded and tried Zed first time about a week ago, because I needed a text editor that looks and behaves almost identically with Windows/macOS/Linux, so there is minimal switching hassle between developing for all these three OSs. And vims/emacs are no-choice for me, because if I don't use them for a while, I have to google how to exit/save etc. Not a choice for CEO.

I have now one week experience, and I like it very much. Some settings take a bit time to get right for my taste, and themes doesn't look polished, but otherwise it is excellent choice (even when thinking Sublime, which I considered the best of all). AI-things can be disabled for now, so let's hope it stays that way.

I also tried VSCode, and omg, I can't understand who want to use that... It is almost Visual Studio grade bad. At least by default settings. It couldn't even open 900 kb text file without freezing (Zed/Sublime had no problem, like 2026 computers/software shouldn't have with 1 mb file).

I tried zed a couple of times, it's something I'd like to play more because the feeling is fantastic ... but for python development pycharm is still superior.

PS: One thing I'm really missing is the ctrl+shift+f equivalent

1.0 and Zed still won't appear until I touch my mouse or press a key after it's been started...

I love Zed. I was a fan of Sublime Text, and could never get used to VSCode. I thought I'd try Zed a try when it was still extremely raw, before the AI integration, and I loved the simplicity and speed almost immediately. When they added better python linting features, I switched, and haven't used anything else. I know that there are many anti-AI folks here, but I feel lucky that we they added the Zed Agent, and all the integration. It's been great not having to switch back to VSCode for copilot.

Seems like a de-webbed fork of this is a no brainer. its crazy what they think people will just take lying down from a open source project.

Congrats! I have been using Zed for many years now, arguably the best piece of software I have ever used, and the main reason I switched to macOS.

The editor is so good it has been defining how I work - at first I would quickly copy relevant files into multiple AI chat apps using Text Threads (was quite annoyed when it was replaced by the Agent Panel which at the time made it very awkward to add relevant context and copy text), and now I really can't imagine living without the new Threads Sidebar.

It's not perfect, but whenever something is broken then I know it's just a matter of time before it gets fixed or improved.

Zed is a great editor. I think they have done an excellent job and hope they are successful. That said, I do not feel compelled to switch to it. For a pure text editing experience, I've always felt most comfortable with Geany. When I want to extend the editor, I reach for Emacs. AFAICT, extending Zed means using Rust, and that's never going to happen.

I used the fastest editor I've ever used, and the UI design was also very good, but the Git interface didn't show the commit history, which was a bit like JetBrains' Git interface.

I like Zed but as a user of Scala it is not open-enough of a platform to be useful beyond small projects.

e.g. its "run" gutter icons rely on context free grammar queries, but of course Scala allows to define main methods via inheritance from a class. Zed's extension api should let the extension report entry points via whatever internal mechanism it needs.

This also goes for the various testing libraries in Scala that because only tree-sitter queries are supported therefore need a custom pattern match for each library as they have their own mechanisms, rather than letting the extension provide its own test harness (easily handled by build tools automatically) - Zed should provide something similar to VS Code's Test Explorer and Testing API interface.

Also extensions can't add new UI, so you are stuck fitting to the recipe Zed team provides for you to plug into, and often enough this is not satisfactory.

I really want to use Zed, their technical approach and product design seem great. However, I had to stop using it after a few months because the Typescript LSP was just unbearably slow. An order of magnitude slower than VSCode, often more than 10 seconds to typecheck a change. More worrying is that this has been a known issue for more than two years

Still, congrats to the team. Hopefully this launch means more money to fix issues so I can start using it again.

Congratulations! I recall there used to be difficulties handling non-ASCII characters in the built-in terminal, but now I can use it without any problems regarding Japanese input. Providing a stable, real-time, stateful application like an editor is incredibly difficult.I appreciate the efforts of the team and contributors.

i've been a zed user for almost 6 months. i've encountered maaany bugs which i reported, or that were already reported. they're still there. meanwhile, every single update shipped a feature or bugfix for "ai agents".

not sure how 1.0 ships with that massive pile of bugs. but ai agents are the first-class citizen in this editor, and developer experience is not a priority.

funny thing is i uninstalled zed right before the 1.0 release. kinda relieved i didn't miss anything.

i have been a zed junkie since it came out. i feel very happy for the team. and they seem to be very focused and disciplined about what they are building. it makes me feel like i am making the right bet!

I love zed. What CLI agent and model do you use with it? I am looking for something on par with CC+Opus4.6, possibly subscription-based

Nice! I might try it, it seems genuinely innovative.

I don't need much from an editor. Instant cold start, sane colors, sane folding in origami style , like "kent folding" allows to do on vim ( https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=416 ).

Not much, but it seems all modern editors fail to do good origami folding.

Does Zed do this?

Still absolutely no support for screen readers?

Despite promising it for years and every comparable product having it.

Well, just fired it up on Windows, and already dislike it. And I went in with a positive attitude, because I would welcome a better tool than VS Code.

Main problem: No menu. Where are the settings? The first thing I wanted to do was move the file treeview to the left side; I don't know what country the authors live in, but in Western countries we read from left to right. But nope, there's no View menu or anything of the sort.

Then I examined every other little button around the UI, to no avail. I want to get stuff done; not play with an Advent calendar, hunting for goodies.

I like Zed for the same reason I liked Atom: it's very light. These past few months my workflow has basically consisted of me running Codex + Gemini CLI in the terminal panel and hopping through files in another. Easy-peasy.

It's a nice departure from the visual overstimulation I get while in VS Code (for which I have to take some blame as I need to remove some installed plugins).

There are a couple of features shown in the v1.0 video that I was unaware of and am keen to check out.

Feature-wise, Zed is still far from VS Code, but for me, the change has been worth it for the performance increase alone. I'm really happy with Zed, and I think it has a bright future ahead. Congratulations on the 1.0 release!

Good for them, but I wish they'd hurry up and catch up on some of the big missing features. Really hoping they'll accept my PR to add the missing call hierarchy feature before the GitHub issue turns 2 years old :)

I switched to Zed for the first time over the weekend on a somewhat complex mixed C/rust project. I was able to set the whole thing up in about an hour to my liking and it is a really nice IDE, coming from bloated VS Code. I think they have a really nice AI-assisted coding setup, I think that the "file review pane, in line with IDE" UX is correct for AI tools. I'm skeptical that terminal or "agent" based AI programming is viable long-term.

I'm trying it out, looks pretty decent.

For better or worse, my current workflow is to do most things through WSL on Windows 11. VSCode supports running the editor natively on Windows, but then having an agent or something inside WSL that lets me remote control what's going on there. Does Zed do anything similar?

Currently I'm just access the workspace in Zed via Windows Explorer, but I wonder if that's going to kneecap some of the integrations.

EDIT: nm, Zed supports exactly the same kind of remote editor session, via hamburger -> File -> Open Remote

Congtats for reaching 1.0

Gotta say farewell to Sublime. Now Zed is my general purposed text editor. For doing most of my coding work, still use VSCode and nvim.

Congratulations to the team, big milestone. Aside from an occasional drop to Positron for dataframe visualization, I haven't had a need to open any other IDEs like PyCharm/IDEA or VSCode in a long time, and I've been using them for over five years at this point. Zed's internals is software engineering at its finest, and I hope GPUI will eventually become the go-to Rust GUI library.

Can anyone comment on the inline AI tab completion performance of Zed compared to Cursor? Hoping to move away from Cursor as it seems like they break my settings every time they push an update and Vim motions stop working at random.

The only thing stopping me from leaving Cursor is their tab completion, which is honestly just incredible.

Zed is a really good editor in an age that every other editor has forgotten to be about *editing* and wants to be a wrapper around coding agents.

On the agent side, I really like their ACP approach but for now it seems buggy and limited in functionality (previous message editing, occasionally never-ending work, ...)

I have been following zed for quite some time and I use it daily alongside nvim (haven’t yet tried zed vim mode, planning to). I really like the performance and control zed provides, as well as the reduced UI clutter compared to alternatives. The collaborator functionality is not talked enough by the community but I believe it’s an ambitious idea worth pursuing. Wishing the team all the best.

Congrats on shipping !

I love that most of my (small but important) set of keyboard shortcuts from VSCode jsut works.

- Terminal - Ctrl + P (and siblings).

Suggestion (minor):

To me, font size is as import these days as dark/light mode. Would be cool if basic font-size (ui panel etc, were part of default/first-run config)

Also like that AI is a "first class citizen" it seems on Zed.

Well done guys :)

Nobody in the post or the comment talked about how it is built on top of / similarly to Godot Engine. Congrats to the Zed team!

Zed is my daily driver for the last couple of month. I tried it a few times before but had to switch to various other editors for different projects. But my plan was to finally ditch VSCode as my normal file editor. I really love how fast the editor fires up. I also love the fact that it has great vim binding not just in the editor pane.

Ever since agents came out I had been lost trying to figure out what I should replace my heavy IntelliJ with. I switched fully over to Zed once they shipped the git graph in stable [0] and couldn't be happier. Congrats on 1.0!

[0] https://zed.dev/releases/stable/0.231.1

Best editor ever.

Unrelated to the actual editor but this is one of the best looking and most responsive websites I've ever used

Congrats to the Zed! I've been using zed since their first launch on HN. They did not even have a search + replace function at that time! I now use zed all_the_time.

What an awesome journey!

I want to use Zed but last time I tried it was spawning node processes, i guess for lsp. (I develop in Go)

This is a solid release and first time, I feel like it is pretty good for the use case of decent sized Typescript mono repos. I can jump around codebase quicker.

PS: Pretty daring move to think of building an editor when there's already sublime, textmate, Jetbrains and VSCode.

I want to like and use Zed, but in my mind there was some odd commerce, or 3rd party share decision that was made which had me avoid it for security reasons. Like... Zed was endorsed as the only editor for something... can anyone remember or elaborate? I cannot!

I would really love to see an iOS remote control app for zed. I am using it on throw away microvms via ssh. Would love to have the zed server running there, control agents via phone and occasionally use my Mac to connect to the server and use the desktop app as normal for review and hand coding

Does it work on Ubuntu yet?

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14237

Just downloaded, installed, turns out it doesn't have pdf preview capability

Congrats on the launch. I have been using zed since 2026 exclusively. I moved from JetBrains and am genuinely happy. Missing the compare with clipboard though.

Congrats on 1.0!

Though it's a pretty big bummer to see that extension improvements were removed from the roadmap.

Congrats! I just started playing with Zed last week. Changelog notes, for the curious: https://zed.dev/releases/stable/1.0.0.

Congrats on reaching your first major

Zed is the only editor I use on a daily basis and VIM. It is fast and renders nicely. I do not need to configure it much, few extra plugins but most of the things are working out of the box.

Massive congratulations to the team and the community. Thanks for the solid product. It's fast and native on Linux with Wayland. I don't use any of the AI stuff, though, so I'm glad there is a switch to disable it.

This editor sounds awesome, but it's sad they didn't make the UI accessible.

"Instead of building Zed like a web page, we built it like a video game, --", uh, what.

and then the whole telemetry bit.

bye.

Congrats to the Zed team! I really like your editor and it works surprisingly well, althought there are a few rough edges still with the python experience.

The debugger in Python FastAPI and mainly Django is not working as expected. Hopefully soon will be fixed.

It has replaced VS Code for my for my work and side projects.

I don't use AI tools in 90% of the projects.

It's snappy, fast, everything just works. I have the vim mode turned on while editing.

Why does signing up through Github require the "act on behalf" permission?

That seems risky.

1.0 and still has the wrong colours when ran in Wayland and lacks bitmap font support.

I really like Zed but it's most recent big changes to Git integration and Parallel Agents has forced me to disable both of those features as the way they work just didn't suit me and my workflow

Congratulations to the Zed team! What a great project.

The newer layout that came along with the parallel agents feature is very nice; even without using parallel agents regularly, this is a breath of fresh air.

Just installed it and used it for a bit, Great Editor. It sometimes lags and slows down but overall good experience, all these things can be fixed in later patches.

I switched to Zed about three months ago, and honestly, I’m loving it. It just works, it doesn’t lag, and it doesn’t eat all my RAM. Thanks, and congrats!

does this support plugins? How does it integrate with cmake projects?

After hearing Zed has vim mode, I might give it a try. Currently my workflow is just opencode + nvim/opencode

I hate to dismiss Zed for such a stupid reason, but I have tried to use Zed seriously many times and every time I stop because I can't get over the theme. I've tried basically every single theme I can find that is reasonably popular and they are all equally poor. VSCode and Cursor have vastly better default themes.

Does anyone have any suggestions here? I would love to use Zed more.

I like Zed, I had only a few issues switching from VSCode. And I love the responsiveness of the crew in the repo! Keep it up, you're my default!

Congrats to the Zed team for abandoning zero-based versioning!

https://0ver.org/

Congratulations to the team, I've been on Zed exclusively for a couple of years and it has been nothing but great on macOS and Linux.

Been loving Zed for the last few months. The Dev Containers were the last thing I needed to switch over and been steady ever since.

I use zed as a quick editor for stuff using usaved files.

I don't like how it loses the session when I reopen it randomly (and not randomly every upgrade).

Congrats Zed! GPUI has been a huge inspiration.

Whenever I think to myself “yikes that sounds too hard”, my next thought is “well, Zed team could probably do it”.

I feel like the last time I looked at Zed it didn't support windows, looks like it does now but it sure scared windows defender.

I love how snappy Zed is. Well done, folks. You should be proud of your work.

I switched to Zed as my main editor about a year ago, and I’m not going back! What a great product!

I seriously hate this “choose your adventure” way with new IDEs. Just install the language plugin, then spend hours making it work, and then it has crazy bugs anyway. Maybe just ptsd from the Java language server, but I’ve also somehow made editing json files laggy and unresponsive by installing the json language server.

Jetbrains “just worked”, but work isn’t paying for the license anymore because AI so I’ll just bang my head against these plugins.

daily driver has been zed ever since they introduced helix more. still super excited to see how far it can go. congrats to them

Great product! Would love to see some search (tree view) and git (staged vs unstaged diffs) improvements in the future!

I haven’t booted up an editor in a long time but I’ve written lots of software recently (mostly with codex).

Interesting times…

Congrats to the Zed team! Great to see people continuing to work on important tooling like editors these days.

Would not recommend getting attached to an editor that's VC funded by Sequoia.

Once there was Vim, and then there is Zed. In between I just found useless UI bloats.

Simply love it!

I've been using Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA as my main IDE for Go, Rust, TypeScript, etc. for the last 3 years, and this Christmas I switched to Zed, and I'm not looking back.

I was admittedly skeptical of Zed in the beginning, because they started out with so few features, and it seemed impossible to really switch permanently to it and still be as productive. The Jetbrains platform has got such an amazingly rich set of features and an uncanny ability to just nail the editor experience. It seems almost unthinkable that anyone would be able to compete, and for a long time Zed was very far behind, but this year I feel they're finally a viable alternative.

What ultimately pushed me towards Zed was performance and the sheer amount of work-stopping bugs. I would have days where Jetbrains would get unresponsive or extremely sluggish. Suddenly "undo" would stop working (!). Major and minor upgrades often introduced perplexing performance degradation. In short, I've wasted insane amounts of time on bugs and on filing detailed bug reports that are never looked at. That undo bug has been open for maybe a year now.

For all the bells and whistles, I think Jetbrains faces an intractable problem. It's just utterly unrealistic that they'll be able to solve everything unless they stopped all development to focus on just stability. The product is too big, too complex, too unwieldy, and too bloated. I was always allocating 16GB RAM to Jetbrains, and often had it sit there consuming 1000% (!) CPU. Zed chews up a couple of gigs at most, and rarely uses much CPU. There's a tendency for editors to get bloated as they evolve. This certainly happens with Atom. I'm really hoping Zed will stay lean.

the best modern editor ever

Serious question, is there any advantage to Zed if one does not use LLM assisted coding?

VSCode is draining my battery, looking forward to trying this

Tried using Zed but for some reason the AI can't open the browser?

Tried it yesterday. HUGE fan of how the agents work and how the editor feels.

I'd love to try Zed out but I'm locked out unless they deliver a build without any AI integration, or deliver the build tools so that I can build my own editor on their foundation.

Either is fine by me, but I have zero interest until one of those things happen.

Congratulations from me too — it quickly became my go-to editor (sorry, VSCode)

Congrats to the entire team!

Why do I get a warning when trying to run this on Windows 11?

Can I replace Vim with Zed? Is there a vim mode?

Zed is one of my fav. piece of software of the last years :)

2.3k issues says enough. License as mentioned by others here equally belongs in the trash. Shameful

zeds dead baby

Love zed, prepared to love it moreee

As a heavy (n)vim user for the last decade, what does zed give me i wont get with vim?

Is it targeted for IDE people or vscode users, or is there something else i can benefit from coming from vim?

Wow! So much yes!!!

Huge congratulations to the Zed team!

Such a pity remote dev containers are critical for me. I guess some SSH tunneling could help with it...

How is their emacs keymap support? I tried VSCode for a while but switched back to emacs because it was so slow and the keymap was not very good. I've been intending to try Zed but emacs is working well enough so the motivation isn't really there yet..

Congrats guys! I've been using zed since a few months ago, I would consider myself a "light" user but I do enjoy the experience. My only sour point would be the not so smooth integration with claude code. But I've learmt to live with it for now

An editor that sends all your input to the U.S. and consumes 50% of your CPU while idle, and still gets praised to high heaven. We truly live in the age of enshittification.

Sorry, I am not going to use and get attached to a code editor that is VC funded. You know the enshittification will happen sooner or later.

Strange, I'm on 2.4.1 already. Oh wait...this isn't about ZFS.

Sorry, can't help it, every time I see Zed i think of the ZFS Event Daemon

Now that Zed supports remote development, I really hope they can release it for tablets (iOS/Android) so that we can use it as a client for a remote development machine. That would be delightful!

> We're also launching Zed for Business. Companies have been asking us for a way to roll out Zed to their engineering teams, and very soon they can, with centralized billing, role-based access controls, and team management.

Regardless of everything else being said, does anyone actually still do it? I thought this practice more or less died with Eclipse, where proprietary editors often shipped as Eclipse plugin and then the ops of a company that bought the plugin would have to configure it for every developer, set up with home-made automation etc.

I haven't seen anything like this in the last ten years at least and assumed the practice was dead, and, instead, developers were allowed to use whatever editor they want, while committing editor-specific (configuration) files, for example, would be considered a noobie mistake.

Or was I just happily living in the world where the long arm of the corporate was unable to reach me?

I'm using it and i fail to see what is the difference between this and VSCode

I try Zed every few months. I does not yet have everything I need yet, but at some point I think it's going to be the best code editor out there.

Well done. I've been using Zed pretty much full-time for about 6 months now, and am happy with the experience.

There are still a few things PyCharm does better (debugging, for one), but overall Zed is very good and I haven't used PyCharm in months.

I still use CC in the terminal instead of inside Zed, and lazygit for reviewing git changes and other git actions (though Zed now does a decent job of the basics).

Here is a top-level comment for people who want to post the things they wish Zed had.

Request: please be sincere if you claim "the one thing that keeps me from using Zed is X" ... because let's face it, there is probably more than one thing. Editor ecosystems are complex beasts, and it is ok if people are slow to switch, but the "one thing" claims are rarely credible to me. Anyhow, such comments are rarely consistent with how human nature works. People find rationalizations, and that's fine. It would just be nice if people were a little more self-aware. Changing editors is harder for some people more than others.

My suggestion: if you want to make Zed better for your use case, please smart by explaining who you are as a developer, what you've used, what your expectations are. And be intellectually honest about the last time you've made a big change to your development workflow. End soapbox.

Zed is a very polished and nice product. I tried hard to use it, especially when I decided to migrate away from Emacs. But NeoVim gives me everything I was looking for in Zed: Speed, a polished UI, quick startup, not overloaded. So between Zed and NeoVim I decided for the latter. I use Neovide in GUI and neovim in terminal. I don’t use AI alongside nvim, but claude code helps me configure my config file in lua. So my neovim has a 10k lines config spread of several files. It is my simple text editor with super fast movements, and it can become a full blown programmable interface for my Obsidian, for my journal writing, for coding, writing documentation. It can be as complex as I need it to be. And it’s super fast.

bro why build a new IDE, just use IntelliJ or any other flavor of these for your favorite language. You would have saved years and 37.000 commits

I've installed it from flatpak and it has improved somewhat but won't use it because it doesn't remember the window size and position. Resizing the window is a pain in the ass, the arrows don't show up until you match the border pixels and it doesn't even try to mimic the native UI stuff, uses round corners. Vertical resize doesn't work, it just moves the window up and down so you have to use the corner resize. Good luck doing that with round corners. If the editor doesn't start up as I've left it, then I'll keep using my pinned (because M$ like to randomly add annoying shit that breaks my workflow) VSCodium. Also, the "Sign in" drop down on the title bar. Sign in where? I don't want to sign in anywhere, let me remove that. Maybe keep the dropdown for the settings and other stuff a small icon in front of it and about "Sign in". That should be an entry in the dropdown menu, the last one on the list. In fact let me remove the widgets that I deem useless from the main UI just like the browsers do. I haven't even got to check if it has syntax highlighting for Perl, Ruby and Racket yet because these things annoyed me so much that I uninstalled it. Good stuff: one can disable AI and Git integration, athough I'd appreciate if the further options would just go away when you switched the whole thing off. Atom, Sublime and VSCode keymaps are also nice because I don't have to remap. Will check again at 1.5, I guess. At least it has improved somewhat since that last time I've tried it, I think 0.13 or so.

their website kick my fan up, what gives? CPU sweating just to display this??

Can't run it. Vulkan as a dependency for a text editor is beyond retarded.

Testing it now ... it is absurdly efficient with tokens. Probably order of magnitude better than opencode for a couple of tasks.

Looking at Zed (and Brave in another thread) I'm really firming up this idea that the "big funded private company model" for essential tech software is just most often idea. They don't know how to add features without also adding bloat and BS.

This is why I say Docker is the only real "success" story here. And note, I mean a success story for the users; Docker tries real hard to enshittify and fails, and that's good.

> Zed is also an AI-native editor.

My editor is dumb. No AI anywhere.

The only unusual thing is that I use ruby as primary glue language to everything, so in a way that editor (no longer maintained, similar to Linus' editor) is just a wrapper over ruby as such, and functionality in these scripts.

I have also found that it is not the editor that slows me down, but the need to have to think. This is also one reason why I try to make the specification as useful as possible. For instance, in one project that I use to compile everything from source, I use a ton of simple, mostly smallish .yml files that describe everything - allowed keys, allowed values, settings that are mostly just a pointer to where to fetch the source, how, how to compile it then and so forth. The ruby code then is mostly just a glue over that data. And that approach, while very simple, works quite well. Users can also modify settings, by modifying the .yml file or via commandline flags. And if need be, I could also use and populate a SQL database with that data (but for the most part, yaml actually suffices; I don't understand why people are so upset about yaml, and then only point at use cases where folks use mega-nested yaml files. These guys don't understand why simplicity is a benefit; admittedly yaml is not a perfect format either, I notice this when I have a long .yml file and then some forgotten ":" or "," due to manual copy/paste error, then it takes me a few seconds to notice what's wrong).

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Is what?

I tried zed sometime ago, and the limiting factor was devcontainer support. It looks like they’ve made some progress there https://zed.dev/docs/dev-containers