Zed: Show & Tell

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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.

Zed - empty window

Here you see the file finder in action.

Zed - file finder

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 :)

Zed - rust file

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.

Zed - rust test

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.

Zed - refactoring

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.