// the find
zed-industries/zed
Code at the speed of thought – Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter.
Zed is a native code editor written in Rust, built on a custom GPU-accelerated UI framework (GPUI) by the team behind Atom and Tree-sitter. It targets developers who want VS Code-level features with significantly lower latency and CPU/memory overhead. Real-time collaboration is a first-class feature, not an afterthought.
- GPUI renders every frame on the GPU, giving genuinely snappy response times on large files where Electron editors stall — this isn't marketing, it's measurable with a profiler
- Tree-sitter integration is deep and native since the team literally wrote Tree-sitter, so syntax highlighting and structural editing are more correct than most editors
- The codebase is well-structured for a project this size — crates are cleanly separated (editor, language_model, collab, etc.) and CI includes randomized tests and perf comparison workflows
- Multiplayer collaboration is built into the core data model, not bolted on — the CRDT-based buffer means concurrent edits are handled at the architecture level
- Extension ecosystem is still catching up to VS Code — many niche language servers, linters, or workflow tools simply don't have Zed extensions yet, which is a real daily-use blocker for some stacks
- GPUI is a completely custom UI framework with almost no outside documentation or community; contributing UI code means learning a framework that only one company uses, and major API changes happen without warning
- Windows support is recent and visibly less polished than macOS — several core features and rendering edge cases lag behind, making it a risky choice as a primary editor on Windows right now
- It's a for-profit company with a VC-backed model and the core collab server is proprietary; the AGPL license on parts of the codebase means self-hosting the full collaborative experience requires running their backend stack, which isn't well documented for self-hosters