Published at
Table of Contents
A common habit of developers is searching for new tools on a regular basis. Visual Studio Code is such a tool which helped me over the years write some awesome code. But I always wanted to try something new. So I stumbled upon Zed.
So what is Zed?
Zed is a fairly new code editor written in Rust by the awesome folks which created tools like Atom. It got open sourced in the beginning of 2024. Zed aims to be a fast, collaborative and hackable editor. But have a look for yourself here.
I personally really like that it comes with a lot of extensions and “vim mode”.
Installation
You could build Zed either from source or download a pre-compiled binary (only macOS is currently supported).
I personally used brew to install Zed: brew install zed
Let’s open a project
The first thing you see is an empty window. I typically use ⌘ + P to open the file finder and navigate to my file of choice.
Here you see the file finder in action.
Working with Rust
Zed is “language aware” and detected that I opened a Rust file and applies the correct syntax highlighting. The Rust extension is shipped with Zed by default. The extension uses rust-analyzer for things like code completion, running tests and tree-sitter-rust for syntax highlighting. It also added indicators for Rust tests, so that I can run them directly from the editor. Let’s try it out :)
After clicking the “Run” button (the little “play” icon next to the test function), the test output is displayed in the built-in terminal at the bottom of the window.
Let’s do some refactoring. I open the editor: rename option (via Command Palette) by pressing ⌘ + Shift + P, change the name of the variable and see all changes in some kind of preview window.
Conclusion
Coming from Visual Studio Code, knowing its key bindings and what not, the transition to Zed was quite a smooth ride. I used it for 2 weeks to write some Rust and TypeScript and did not miss too much. I will definitely stick with Visual Studio Code for now, because some extensions e.g. zed-sql is still behind what the Visual Studio Code ecosystem offers.
Things I haven’t yet tried are the AI integration and the collaboration features, but I will definitely give them a try in the future.
I’m very happy with the overall experience so far and I’m looking forward to a bright future for Zed.