Zed is a code editor written from scratch in Rust, rendering its interface on the GPU. That combination is not a marketing detail: it is why keystrokes appear without perceptible delay and why scrolling a large file is smooth in a way most editors are not. The team includes people who built Atom, and Zed reads as a direct response to what they learned about the costs of building an editor on web technology.
Performance is the headline, but the collaboration model is the more unusual part. Multiple developers can edit the same buffer simultaneously, with cursors visible, plus an integrated voice channel and screen sharing. It is pair programming without a separate screen-sharing tool and without the latency that makes remote pairing tiring. Channels organise this by project, so joining a colleague's session is one click rather than a scheduling exercise.
The editing experience covers the expectations: language server support for diagnostics, completion and refactoring, tree-sitter syntax handling for accurate highlighting and structural selection, multiple cursors, an integrated terminal, Git blame and diff, and Vim mode that is good enough for people who are particular about Vim mode. Assistant features connect to language models, including running models locally, with an edit-prediction model of Zed's own.
The limitations reflect its youth. The extension ecosystem is a fraction of the size of the established editors, and if your workflow depends on a specific niche plugin it probably does not exist yet. Extensions are written in Rust compiled to WebAssembly rather than JavaScript, which raises the barrier to writing one. Remote development support has improved but is behind. Platform support has expanded from macOS to Linux and Windows, with the newer platforms less battle-tested.
Zed is open source under the GPL for the editor itself, with the collaboration service as the commercial component. That structure means the tool you edit in is free and stays free, which is a meaningfully different arrangement from a free tier that could be withdrawn.
Who it suits: developers who care about latency, remote pairs who have given up on screen sharing, and anyone curious about an editor not built on a browser engine. Who should be careful: anyone dependent on a large plugin ecosystem.