Zed’s Intuitive IDE is Reshaping Coding

This article was published on

Hello MacOS users; have you heard? There's a new IDE on the block. Its name is Zed! Developed and maintained by the same good people that brought us Electron and Atom, among other awesome projects.

Zed isn't completely new; in fact, it was recently rewritten in Rust. The IDE aims to solve its predecessor's shortcomings by maximizing coding efficiency, among other things. And the community is showing extreme signs of hype. Most notable about the smooth scrolling and high-performance that Theo discussed in-depth when reviewing the IDE in his YouTube video.

Innovations in Collaborative Coding

One of Zed’s premier features, currently in Private Beta; Channels aims to reshape the way developers collaborate by providing out of the box support for tasks such as pair-programming, and passive observation among team members. An intuitive feature that essentially allows developers to completely avoid the good-old git merge conflict problem. A common roadblock that has plagued developers since Git’s start.

Solving git-based challenges is just the beginning. With Channels you can share projects, follow and communicate with your teammates, or other developers on the platform and watch what they're doing in real-time. A promising prospect for live streaming, educational content and more.

It’s Open Source!

The Editor’s source code is licensed under GPL. The server-side code is licensed under AGPL, and GPUI under Apache 2 license; quite the mix, there. Nathan Sobo goes into depth in this article as to why Zed went fully open source.

Open source doesn’t mean that Zed is giving everything away for free. The company is niching in on an interesting intersection between commercial and open-source success, with plans to sell services like Zed Channels and AI compute. As well as the potential for more proprietary products that we can assume will also integrate seamlessly with Zed. Considering this ecosystem like a business model, the possibilities are endless, and the decisions are transparent. An exciting future for the development community.

Curious to learn more? Zed uses the standard Language Server Protocol for language support, essentially making Zed intelligent to every major programming language. If you’re a Visual Studio Code user, Zed allows you to port your existing Visual Studio Code key bindings directly into Zed - which could help provide a familiar experience right out of the box.

Linux Release: There is an active roadmap in place for a Linux release. You can check out this GitHub issue for more details about the current progress: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7015

Have you tried Zed, and if so, what are your first thoughts? They’d love to hear about it over on their discussion board. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions