Zed.dev

zzzz im so sleepy

Zed.dev is a minimal code editor that is super fast, open source, and built around collaboration.

Why I use it:

• It is extremely fast and responsive.

  • It’s created in Rust and uses a gpu accelerated renderer, and the whole product feels very focused around responsiveness. Feeling fast and responsive makes my thinking faster and clearer, where usually each moment spent waiting for something to happen results in my attention waning.

• Tasteful AI integration:

  • Agentic editing, inline tab completions, AI chats, are all included but unlike Cursor, Zed isn’t an ‘AI first’ IDE where hands off agentic swarms are prioritised. Cursor often changes their UI to experiment with new ways of editing code with agents, but Zed stays as a text IDE without compromising on features.

    • I really like this because I use Cursor and other agents for when I want something implemented and don’t mind how, and use Zed for when I want to actually learn programming and implement myself.

  • You can also use bring your own API keys, run local models, and also connect external agents from other providers!

• Collaboration features:

  • This is something i’ve barely experimented with, but is emphasised a lot in their marketing and feature list. Zed has heaps of features for live collaboration on codebases etc,

For me at least the main downside of Zed is that some file types aren’t natively supported by the app. E.g. you cannot open PDFs in Zed itself.

They just launched an education plan where users get a free year of Zed Pro! I’d definitely recommend signing up and making the most of it.