Zed

What is Zed?

Zed is a code editor built from scratch in Rust by Zed Industries, a company founded by Nathan Sobo and other engineers who previously worked on Atom at GitHub and on design tools at Adobe. The founding bet was that developers deserve an editor as fast as the hardware it runs on, so Zed was designed from day one for native performance, instant startup and buttery scrolling even in huge files.

Performance is only half the story. Zed bakes collaboration into the editor itself: channels, shared workspaces, and even voice and video calls, so a distributed team can work in the same editor session as easily as chatting. The company calls this multiplayer editing, and it is one of the reasons Zed stands apart from editors that treat sharing as an afterthought.

Zed is open source and free. The editor source is on GitHub, most components are permissively licensed, and the business model sits on top: Zed AI, a subscription that brings models like Claude and GPT into the editor with full codebase context. The project started in 2022, reached public beta on macOS in early 2024, and later added Linux and Windows support.

Key Features

• Native Rust performance with near-instant startup
• Built-in collaboration: shared workspaces, voice and video calls
• Zed AI with model access and codebase-aware assistance
• Vim mode and VS Code keybinding compatibility
• Powerful multi-cursor editing and a fast fuzzy finder
• Integrated terminal and task runner
• Open source with a permissive license for most components

How to get started

Download Zed for your platform from the official site, or install it with a package manager like Homebrew. On first launch you can pick between VS Code and Vim keybindings, which makes the transition easy. Open a project and feel the difference in speed, then try the collaboration features by creating a channel and sharing the workspace with a teammate.

• Download Zed or install it with your package manager
• Choose your keybinding preset on first launch
• Open a project and try the fuzzy finder
• Install themes and extensions from the marketplace
• Create a channel to try collaborative editing

Use cases

• Working in very large codebases where other editors feel slow
• Pair programming with remote teammates in the same editor
• Teaching or presenting code with live shared sessions
• Everyday coding with Vim or VS Code-style bindings
• AI-assisted development with model access in the editor

Pricing and licensing

Zed the editor is free and open source. The core is licensed under the GPL, while many shared components use the more permissive Apache 2.0 license, and the source is public on GitHub. There is no paid tier for the editor itself.

The company funds development through Zed AI, an optional subscription that gives you a monthly allowance of AI requests inside the editor, with model choices including Claude and GPT. The free editor plus paid AI add-on model is similar to how other modern editors structure their business.

Pros and cons

Zed's strengths are speed and collaboration. The native Rust core makes even giant files feel responsive, and the built-in multiplayer features replace the awkward screen-sharing sessions many teams use. Open source and free pricing also remove most barriers to trying it.

The trade-offs are maturity and ecosystem size. The editor is younger than VS Code, so some extensions and niche workflows are still missing, and the AI features, which are a core part of the pitch, require the paid subscription. Teams heavily invested in VS Code extensions may find the catalog thin by comparison.

Alternatives

• VS Code: the most popular editor, with a vast extension ecosystem
• Sublime Text: fast, lightweight and customizable
• Cursor: AI-first editor with agentic features
• Neovim: terminal editor for maximal customization
• JetBrains IDEs: deep language-aware tooling