A new Libre, open source programmer's text editor written in Rust.
"We believe the best software is handcrafted, with unparalleled attention to detail. We believe software development is better when it’s a shared experience. We believe there’s a better way to write software—and this is just the start of the adventure."
—Zed Industries
Zed is developed in part by Nathan Sobo, who worked on the Atom text editor. it aims to provide a powerful, yet straightforward tool for coding, with a focus on speed, efficiency, and simplicity. Written in Rust, it's fast, and is designed and developed by programmers for programmers, with many features to enhance productivity and efficiency for developer teams. Integration with git and Github is built in to enhance communication and streamline project development. There is of course support and tooling for major programming languages (and I don't think they just mean syntax highlighting!).
Now I am not a software developer. I once in a while delve into writing little scripts to get my housekeeping jobs done or otherwise enhance or simplify my technical life. A few things in Bash and occasionally Python. Take everything I say with a pinch of salt as I've not yet used the program myself. Vim is my standard for text editing, and while Zed includes vim keybindings, I don't need any features more advanced than Vim has to offer. However, from what I've read, Zed has an extraordinary amount of power and control, and is naturally tweakable and easy to configure.
For collaboration, it includes communication tools and Github integration, meaning that co-operation between developers should be a breeze. It is designed to be fast and responsive, so your next sprint may well be a sprint in reality. It certainly has the appearance of sleekness and simplicity, and apparently stays out of your way when writing, with a clear and simple interface. Maybe it's the new WordPerfect of text editors o replace vi/VIm. If so, I may sign up as I chose my desktop environment and Vim for the same reason. I hate clutter and complexity.
It was originally only released for MacOS running on their ARM chipsets, but has since been ported to Linux (they suggest running curl https://zed.dev/install.sh | sh and it just might¹ work under the Windows Subsystem For Linux, although an official release for Windows is not yet available). Give it a try using the install script above and let me know¹. Yes, you are my guinea pig, I haven't even looked at Windows for seven or eight years.
Currently, it is available in software repositories in the following Linux distros:
Arch Linux (natch!)
Alpine Linux: both Arm and X64
Nix:
Fedora/Ultramarine
Solus:
Parabola:
Manjaro:
Zed is very much alive and improving‼
¹ It probably won't work, given that I just looked at the install script and saw that it checks for "Linux" or "Darwin", o I'm not at all confident it will get the right details from uname in WSL.
$ xclip -o | wc -w