Zed: A High‑Performance Rust‑Based Collaborative Code Editor and Its Open‑Source‑on‑Zed Initiative

Zed is a new project led by the original author of Atom — a code editor that supports multi‑person collaboration.

Atom is the open‑source text editor created by GitHub. After Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, Atom’s development slowed and the project was officially discontinued in June 2022.

Subsequently, Atom founder Max Brunsfeld launched Zed, a spiritual successor built with Rust.

Zed’s core is written in Rust, ships with built‑in rust‑analyzer, emphasizes high performance and attractive UI, and includes features like native Vim mode that appeal to power users.

Performance tests from the Zed team show its startup speed far exceeds Electron‑based VS Code and Sublime Text, with the lowest memory usage.

Zed is currently in beta, but many developers have praised its high‑quality UI and performance.

Zed announced an unconventional open‑source plan: “open source Zed on Zed”, meaning contributors will use the Zed editor itself to work on Zed.

The first step is to open a public coding channel, allowing external developers to watch the team’s coding, chat via text, and even edit code directly.

The second step is to build text‑based conversations linked to persistent code comments; the team can locate any character in any version of a document, and they aim to support asynchronous workflows before fully open‑sourcing.

The Zed team explains they favor conversational code collaboration over diff review, a practice born from remote development, and now want to extend this model to external contributors.

Related links: https://zed.dev/blog/open-sourcing-zed-on-zed https://zed.dev/download