Zed
FreeAn editor rewritten in Rust, fast enough that you notice
An open-source code editor from the original Atom team, written in Rust with a GPU-rendered interface. Startup, opening large files, searching and navigation are all noticeably faster than Electron-based editors. It ships with LSP language support, Vim mode, a terminal, Git integration and real-time collaboration.
Why we picked it
VS Code is capable, but it is an Electron app — a browser underneath. As a project grows and plugins accumulate, startup drags, search spins, and a thirty-megabyte log file stalls it. That is architecture, not configuration.
Zed is the original Atom team's second attempt — no Electron this time. The whole editor is written in Rust with a GPU-rendered interface. 88,618 stars, with the editor itself under GPL-3.0.
Speed is the headline and it is the kind you actually feel: cold start is essentially instant, large files scroll without dropping frames, project-wide search responds quickly in big repositories, and input latency is low enough to make you realize how much lag you had accepted. Going back to an Electron editor afterwards is genuinely uncomfortable.
It is also no longer the "fast but empty" tool of its early days:
- LSP language support: completion, go-to-definition, refactoring and diagnostics for mainstream languages come through LSP — the same protocol VS Code uses, with a comparable experience.
- Built-in Vim mode, more complete than most editors' Vim plugins.
- Built-in terminal and Git integration: change highlighting, blame, staging and committing all happen in the editor.
- Real-time collaboration: several people edit one project simultaneously, seeing each other's cursors as in a shared document. This is its signature differentiator.
- AI integration: connect various providers for completion and chat, including local models.
To be clear about:
- The extension ecosystem trails VS Code by a wide margin. Those tens of thousands of plugins represent a decade of accumulation; Zed's catalogue is still small. If you depend on a particular plugin, check its extension list first.
- Windows support arrived later. macOS and Linux are its home ground; the Windows build works and ships as an official installer, but it is less mature than the other two.
- Collaboration requires an account (sign in with GitHub), so it is not account-free in that mode. Writing code locally requires no login.
- Read the licensing carefully: the editor is GPL-3.0, its GPUI graphics framework is Apache-2.0, and the collaboration server is AGPL-3.0. All open source, but not one licence.
Who it suits: anyone tired of a sluggish editor who works mainly in Rust, Go, Python or TypeScript where LSP support is mature, and who does not depend on niche plugins. If you need the full plugin ecosystem, stay with VS Code or VSCodium.