Zed is pretty nice
Date:
Recently, the Zed editor had its 1.0 release. While I can't say what it's going to be like in a few years, even now it has largely replaced Visual Studio Code as my editor for non-IDE tasks (though I still keep Notepad++ around for some more persistent tabs, like notes).
This won't be a super formal or structured review, but just my first impressions, setup and some thoughts so far. I will probably test drive it for a few months and see how it goes! It might also be a really nice replacement for Visual Studio Code on my M1 MacBook Air, because it doesn't have that much memory and Zed even on Windows is using about 159 MB of RAM in total right now.
If anyone is curious, I set it up in a pretty comfy way and here's what it looks like:
So, what's the selling point?
Essentially, a lot of why I was looking in the direction of CudaText, a self-contained editor that doesn't need a frickload of plugins to be useful, while at the same time having most of the features you'd want out of the box, alongside great performance. CudaText had a few oddities about it and while I liked that project, it felt more like a replacement for Notepad++, while Zed feels like a replacement for Visual Studio Code - most of the stuff you're used to there, is also available here. In addition, it is also really fast (personally I already found Visual Studio Code to be nicely optimized, but this is one step further).
Some AI features
They even support a bunch of AI stuff out of the box, if you're into that kind of a thing - rather than just running TUI/GUI based agents separately, to have something right in your editor. It's nice to have an editor where you don't need to switch between a bunch of awkward plugins (also RIP RooCode), I really liked that one to be fair, felt like a step up above Cline, but not as cluttered as KiloCode:
Of course, it isn't exactly perfect in all the ways. For example, when using their integrated Zed agent, it seems to have trouble doing file edits with some models, like DeepSeek in particular kept corrupting fairly simple HTML templates more than once (while "LSP Edit" would show up as tabs):
It's odd, because the DeepSeek V4 Pro model itself is quite good - to the point, where I might replace my current Anthropic 100 USD subscription with it (or probably downgrade to the 20 USD tier and use it more sparsely), given that their API prices are also really, really great. After some digging around, it looks like the issues are all on the default Zed agent, because the code edits work just fine in OpenCode, it can even fix the previous corruption:
I do have to note that running OpenCode inside of WSL is an exercise in frustration in and of itself if you have to use Windows, though, so if you're curious about OpenCode, probably just install it directly with npm instead of following their instructions. Otherwise you'll need to replicate your entire dev environment in WSL and also many other integrations with OpenCode (that don't know about WSL) won't work locally, this will become relevant just in a second:
Why do I mention that? Because I found that having OpenCode installed on your PC directly and having Zed use that (yes, it can do that), is a way better setup for AI. They support Agent Client Protocol (ACP), which essentially means that an IDE can talk to an AI agent directly. It actually works pretty nicely in practice and is easy to setup, you just add the agent from their registry:
They support a whole bunch, by the way, you can probably look up the tools that you're already using:
The more basic features
The AI doesn't really mean anything, if the other editor features would suck, though! So, do they?
I'd say that no, albeit it does take a little bit of getting used to. For example, by default things seem to open in a single instance/window. You do get a nice switcher at the top and your active terminal and chat sessions seem to all be preserved when doing these switches, but I'm kind of used to opening multiple separate instances personally:
It's a bit odd, in the sense that they don't seem to have something like the Visual Studio Code workspace files, where I can just save such a file in a repository and then double click it and have a new window with the workspace open. Zed does have a nice context menu option, but it also seems to just add the folder to the open workspaces in the main window:
Personally, I think it would be quite nice to have TWO options added to the context menu:
- Open in Zed
- Open in Zed (New Window)
The good news is, that I dug around the configuration and found this:
I can confirm, that changing that default setting does actually resolve the issue, something I found out about while writing this and having the thought: "Hey, I wonder if they support changing that?" Now, one could feasibly argue that the context menu and CLI might need to work differently in some cases, but honestly it's not a big deal, and I'm happy that I can get a really close approximation of what I want!
This more or less matches my experience with Zed so far - it feels thoughtful and like it's actually made to be used daily, not as a loose collection of various plugins that don't fit together well. It might not have every feature under the sun, but I don't think it needs that, just the features people will use.
Speaking of which, it does support double tapping the SHIFT key (I'm using the JetBrains keymap, by the way; it also supports Visual Studio Code, Sublime and some others, alongside custom configuration) to bring up a command menu where I can easily search for the commands I have available to me right now. I'm pretty sure that almost any GUI software package would benefit from something like this - not even just ones like Blender, that aren't really that approachable without (due to having a lot of features in there), but this feels immediately better than having to rely on only navigating bunches of nested menus:
Similarly, there's a pretty nice integrated file search/switch functionality, where I can just press CTRL+SHIFT+N and get a popup where I can look for files - both by the filename, as well as the directory where they are:
There's also a regular code search (CTRL+SHIFT+F), which optionally supports regex and various case options if you're into that, but otherwise is just a new tab (that you can come back to later, your search results are saved there) that will show which files have the results that you seek, in some ways this is way better than what JetBrains IDEs do:
The one thing I didn't really like that much, was the way they do shell integration. In Visual Studio Code, for example, it's easy to switch between the various different shells, you can even have something like one PowerShell tab, and three Git Bash tabs, and then another CMD tab. Over here, you just have a default one, which more or less pushed me in the direction of having to setup an alias for Git Bash in Windows (since typing in bash just opens WSL, which again doesn't have all the tools available through Git Bash directly on the machine):
What's more, they don't really seem to have presets for the most common shells, they just have an option to invoke a program with some arguments if you'd like. It's nice that you can configure it, but some more convenience would go a long way! Luckily, it's not a dealbreaker and I've also included the PowerShell instructions in another short blog post, if you'd like.
Speaking of the settings, they're pretty good! You can search for what you want and can change most of the things you'd like in an editor - I also enjoyed that they have presets for line heights, so instead of having to figure out exactly what 10 or 1.0 means in how they render fonts, I could just pick "Standard" line height instead of "Comfortable" and get a nice amount of lines per a screen of text. That's a good example of the convenience and common sense I talked about! Secondly, you can change both the code and also the UI fonts, which is a nice bit of customization, alongside the sizes and most of the other things you'd expect:
In addition, they also have some autocomplete if you come from Cursor or are looking for something new after GitHub Copilot decided to change their terms and moved to usage based billing:
Zed still expects you to get a subscription from them for unlimited edit predictions, but that makes a decent amount of sense to me, since the editor itself is free and they don't seem to be gating the actual editor features behind paywalls. So as a business, I don't have a problem with them so far.
Come to think of it, I had a closer look at the terms and they say that you get 2'000 "accepted" edit predictions for free, which makes me think that ones that pop up and you don't need/accept don't count towards the limit and therefore don't even waste what you get for free - I'm not sure how much sense it makes for them to do that, given that those predictions still need to be paid for by them in the form of compute, but on the bright side, most of these autocomplete models are quite small, so it's not like I'm raising the global temperature by 0.001C every time it pops up. In other words, if you do most of your development with agentic tools and only occasionally need to do manual edits, and from those only occasionally accept the suggestions - it will essentially be free for you forever (or at least until they alter the limits or terms themselves).
Summary
These are my first impressions with Zed - it takes a bit of getting used to, but this is the first time in a bit, where I've felt a sense of joy and pleasant surprise, looking at a new editor. If anything, they're proving that you can build new code editors in 2026 even when ones like Visual Studio Code are so well established, and still succeed in making something good!
I just hope that they also succeed in the financial sense, and can support this project for the years to come - JetBrains also tried doing something similar with their Fleet editor, but sadly that didn't really work out. Their blog post titled "The Future of Fleet" then proceeds to explain how Fleet does not have a future, a bit sad and ironic, given that I also wanted Fleet to succeed.
I guess the difference here is that Fleet felt like a worse Visual Studio Code - it was kind of slow and sometimes awkward, even if it had a lot of potential to be a good competing project/product. I could have imagined that with a few years of polish it could have indeed gotten up to speed and I could easily imagine myself daily driving it, though maybe there were technical underlying issues for why it'd never achieve the same level of performance and comfort as VSC, I'm not sure.
At the same time, Zed has already replaced Visual Studio Code for this trial period - I've straight up uninstalled it, because Zed already feels good enough for daily driving. I'm not sure how two different groups of people can develop similar types of software and have such wildly different outcomes. Either the Zed people are those mythical 10x developers you hear about, or they picked a really good set of technologies for building their editor, or they had a slightly better architectural idea and vision of what they want to build and how, or maybe it's just a mix of all of those.
Either way, it's pretty cool and you should maybe check it out for yourself!
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