Zed Editor

3/20/2025

A few days ago I tried Zed (https://zed.dev/) — a code editor written in Rust.

Here are some things that immediately stood out right out of the box.

Built-in features

Collaborative mode

Zed has a built-in collaborative mode. You can share your local codebase with a teammate and work together in the same environment.

It works surprisingly smoothly:

  • you can talk via voice
  • follow what your teammate is doing
  • edit related parts of the code together in real time

It feels a bit like Google Docs, but for your local code.

AI assistant

Zed includes an AI assistant that can be configured to use different modern LLMs.

I recommend watching the video on their homepage — it gives a good overview of how it works.

I experimented with running Ollama locally (https://ollama.com/) to generate JSDoc for some of my functions. The only model that produced somewhat reasonable results was deepseek-coder. I also tried gemma, llama, and qwen (both with and without the code variants), but they didn’t generate anything particularly useful.

Running LLMs locally turned out to be very resource-intensive. It requires a lot of RAM, the CPU easily hits 100%, and responses can take several minutes.

The main reason I tried running models locally is that many cloud AI providers don’t work in Russia. I still haven’t gotten around to setting up a VPS with a VPN to use them instead.

Still, it was an interesting experiment.

Right now, Zed allows you to use its built-in assistant (based on Claude 3.5) for free because the feature is still new and currently being tested.

Familiar shortcuts

Zed ships with VSCode keybindings by default, and you can also enable Vim mode if you prefer that workflow.

I’m not personally a Vim user, but I know many developers appreciate having that option.

Multi-buffers everywhere

One particularly interesting architectural idea: everything in Zed is implemented as text buffers, including the built-in terminal.

More details here: https://zed.dev/features#multi-buffers

Extensibility

Zed is surprisingly extensible.

  • Most programming languages are already supported: https://zed.dev/extensions
  • That’s not surprising considering the Zed team also created tree-sitter.
  • Extensions for Vue and PHP work great. Navigation works well — you can jump to definitions, find references, and use multi-buffers to edit related symbols across multiple files.
  • A nice bonus: for PHP you can reuse your Intelephense license if you already use it in VSCode. That makes working with PHP much more comfortable.
  • Themes, icons, and other customization options are also widely available.

My impressions

Pros

Performance is incredible. I can open a ridiculous number of files and nothing lags or freezes. Everything feels instant. It honestly feels like my brain starts working faster.

Pair programming built in. This alone could be a big deal for teams.

Highly configurable.

Cons

SVG support is still lacking. You can’t preview SVG files directly inside the editor yet. There’s an open issue for this that has been around for about a year: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/10454

Maybe a good opportunity to contribute.

Git integration isn’t as deep as in VSCode (yet). Resolving merge conflicts is still easier in VSCode. But the basics like git blame are already there.

Final thoughts

Zed already feels extremely fast and promising. The core ideas behind the editor — performance, collaboration, and multi-buffers — are genuinely interesting.

It’s not a full replacement for VSCode for me yet, but it’s definitely something I’m keeping an eye on.