Zed is a cutting-edge, open-source code editor designed for high performance and collaboration. Developed by the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter, Zed is written in Rust and incorporates innovative features that cater to modern development needs.
Key Features
- High Performance: Zed leverages a GPU-based User Interface (GPUI) framework for rendering, ensuring smooth scrolling and fast updates even with large files.
- This approach outperforms traditional CPU-based rendering, making Zed one of the fastest editors available.
- Collaboration: Zed excels in real-time collaborative coding, enabling multiple developers to work on the same project seamlessly. This feature is particularly valuable in remote-first work environments.
- AI Integration: Zed includes advanced AI-assisted coding tools through its assistant panel and inline transformations.
- These tools provide transparency and control over AI interactions, allowing developers to refine prompts and improve productivity.
- Vim Mode: For developers accustomed to Vim, Zed offers a dedicated mode with familiar keybindings while introducing unique functionalities to enhance the experience.
- Extensibility: Zed supports a growing ecosystem of extensions for additional language support, themes, and customizations, making it highly adaptable to diverse workflows.
- Multi-threading: By distributing tasks across CPU cores, Zed ensures that features like code suggestions and auto-saving do not interfere with each other, maintaining a fluid user experience.
Currently, Zed is available for macOS and Linux, with plans to expand support to Windows and web platforms in the future. Installation can be done via direct download or package managers for supported systems.
Zed integrates essential tools such as an advanced terminal, task runner, syntax-aware selections, inlay hints, and project-wide diagnostics. These features streamline coding processes and enhance developer efficiency.
Zed uses cargo-about for license compliance and welcomes contributions from the developer community. Detailed guidelines are available in its CONTRIBUTING.md file.
In summary, Zed redefines code editing with its high-speed performance, robust collaboration tools, AI capabilities, and extensibility.
It stands as a strong alternative to established editors like VS Code and Sublime Text while offering unique innovations tailored for modern development practices.