Hands-on with Zed: The IDE built for AI

Text editors and IDEs tend to inspire devotion from their users. Vim and Emacs have long-standing power-user bases. Visual Studio Code, despite being far newer, has exploded in popularity thanks to its cross-platform support and overall flexibility. Any new editor, like any new programming language, faces a lot of incumbent competition.

Zed, a new editor built using Rust, is being pitched by its creators as “a next-generation code editor designed for high-performance collaboration with humans and AI.” Originally only available for Mac and Linux systems, it’s recently been released for Microsoft Windows, allowing a much broader base of users to try it out.

Zed should still be considered a pre-release offering; the release I looked at for this review was version 0.212.4. But enough features are in place to give a sense of what working with Zed is like, and how its approach differs from VS Code and other editors in the same class.

Setup and configuration

If you’re an existing VS Code user, when you run Zed for the first time, you can elect to import your VS Code or Cursor settings into Zed. This covers things like the projects you’ve recently worked on, but it doesn’t extend to Zed-specific settings like extensions, which are handled differently (more on this later).

Multiple themes are available out of the box, each with light and dark modes, and you can set Zed to use a base keymap derived from other popular editors—not just VS Code, but JetBrains products like IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm, as well as Sublime Text, Atom, Emacs, and Cursor. Vim users can also activate a “Vim mode” and use modal command-based editing. It’s a nice touch that you can go back to this setup pane anytime and re-apply the settings.

Look and feel

A widely touted advantage of Zed is that it’s a platform-native application. Unlike VS Code, Zed doesn’t use Electron or another web-view wrapper; instead, it uses native GPU-accelerated code to render the UI. Everything resizes and reformats without jank, including multi-megabyte text files.

The Zed text editor, open to a page in a Python project. Syntax highlighting is automatically provided by Zed’s built-in Python support.
Foundry

Zed’s layout echoes most other modern editors. Files open in tabbed panes with panels on the sides, and the panels can be toggled on and off. By default, panels include a file browser for the directory currently in context as a project, real-time collaboration, outlining, version control, terminals, debugging/breakpoints, editor-wide notifications, and an interface for Zed’s agent. All can be redocked at the sides, although only some (such as the terminal panel) can be docked at bottom.

The top border of the editor doesn’t have an application context menu visible by default; instead, it shows the current project’s info. Click it and you get a neat quick-switch menu to bring any other instances of Zed into focus. To expose the menus, you click a hamburger icon at top left or hit F10.

If you’ve imported settings from another editor, you may find some of them don’t map directly to Zed. For instance, toggling word wrap in a file in VS Code is done with Alt-Z. In Zed, even with VS Code settings migrated, it’s Ctrl-K, Z.

AI integration

Zed has its own large language model for making edit predictions with code, called Zeta. It’s on by default, so I let it prompt me with suggestions while writing a sample Python application in Zed (a simple wiki that renders Markdown to HTML with templates).

Like most such tools currently, Zeta’s predictions are hit-or-miss. When writing the more boilerplate parts of the program, it offered some surprisingly accurate and useful code snippets. But anything outside of that only got in the way, so I toggled it off after writing the most predictable parts of the program. The model also tended to mangle the levels of indentation in inserted code, which is a big problem in Python.

Edit predictions in Zed are provided, by default, by the editor’s built-in LLM. Use of this LLM is free for the first 2,000 predictions, but requires a subscription afterwards.
Foundry

Zeta will collect training data from your codebase, but only if it identifies a compatible open source license file. Otherwise, collection is off by default. You can also toggle which kinds of files get edit predictions, or how aggressive they are—for example, you can instruct Zeta to only offer hints if the LSP for the language you are writing in doesn’t offer anything.

Also see: How AI is transforming IDEs into intelligent development assistants.

Two thousand predictions can be served on the free tier, with use-billed predictions available on the $10-a-month Pro plan. You can also connect Zed to most any other external agent (e.g., Claude Code) and use that. A handy kick-out panel lists all the major agents and services you can connect with.

Finally, you can disable all of Zed’s AI features by throwing a single switch.

Collaboration

Zed’s collaborative features are also baked into the product, not added by way of a plugin. Sign in with your GitHub credentials, and you can create or join a hierarchical set of “channels,” or virtual workspaces.

Channels have a default document, which can be edited in a shared manner by anyone with channel permissions. Projects you’re working on can be shared through a channel, which becomes shared-editable with people you choose. Channels also function as group voice-chat systems like what you might use on Discord or Slack.

Zed’s creators have noted that “Collaboration as it stands today is considered alpha, and for the time being, is free for all to use!” That, of course, leaves open the possibility that collaboration will become a paid feature in the future. It may also be possible in the future to self-host collaboration, but there is currently no officially supported path to doing so.

Extensions

Zed resembles VS Code, and many other modern editors, in that the user can expand its functionality with third-party extensions. Even at this early stage of its development, Zed has a surprising number of extensions available, even for relatively niche uses. For instance, there’s an extension for syntax highlighting for code used by Python’s Cython package.

Some functionality one might expect by way of extensions is baked directly into Zed, such as Python support. One downside of this setup is that any upgrades are tied to updates to Zed itself. But even in this early version, Zed is updated quite frequently.

Another possible issue with the way Zed handles extensions is, there’s no mechanism for toggling them on or off on a per-project basis. To disable an extension, you have to uninstall it completely. (There is an open feature request to change this.)

Conclusion

There’s no question Zed provides a comfortable and performant experience for the developer, delivered in a more economical, platform-native package than web-UI projects like VS Code. It’s also clear the core of Zed—the editor itself, and most of its extensions—will remain free.

What’s still up in the air is how much of the rest of Zed’s feature set will eventually become a paid option (the language model and collaborative editing in particular), and how that will in time compete with the existing ecosystem of similar tools, both free and for-pay. For now, though, Zed is well worth taking for a test drive.