I generally like what Zed is trying to become. However, all of these features and blog posts are frustraing when they struggle to keep basic editor features stable. Edit a file outside of the editor? It's not going to show up in the project pane or the git diff. Need to work inside a container because it's 2025 and we don't need to clutter our local machine with 100s of dependencies and env managers... well now all the AI stuff is broken. ACP sounds cool until you realize every single CLI in existence works better.

My wish is that Zed gets the core working correctly 100% of the time before moving on to expanding feature sets. For now I'm back in NeoVIM because it always works the first time....

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/38109

Hopefully soon I can give it another shot at full time usage.

I really really don't want comms or multiplayer tools in my IDE.

Don't bring the attention economy to my cave of solitude, it's where I go to escape all that noise

I don't understand why text editors became so complicated. When I ran zed, I think my gpu wasn't properly used and it ran at 5 fps. I couldn't even get the thing to boot.. Remember when people had 1024x768 and coded perfectly fine software without instant messaging pinging every few minutes? We peaked there

I _really really_ want to try this feature, but only if I can selfhost the collaboration server. If there is any way to do this, it's not obvious. Given that as I understand it, lots of project details will pass through Zed's servers, I can't imagine any enterprises would knowingly allow this without some kind of SLA with Zed.

Maybe I'm old, jaded, stubborn and paranoid, but something about a coding editor that is controlled by a company is off-putting to me. It's even more off-putting when you add Zoom, Slack and everything else into said editor.

I like Zed. I pay for pro. I like the integrated agent stuff (though my usage model has changed a bit after 5 months of use).

I'm happy that others can type in each others' space, but this post reveals a tension here. They are building a tool for building the tool, and their own team. I think that's cool, but at a 2-3 person shop heavy polyglotted across 4 OSes and 5+ programming languages, this is not what I really need.

What I'm looking for is a snappy tool (check) that lets me explore, understand, modify code at a next level (marginal). And I want it to not only be snappy by virtue of execution efficiency, but cognitive load. I want the less-is-more experience. I don't need it to do Swift, Kotlin, or Python, because there are bespoke IDEs for each of those that focus on the environments where I deploy them best. What I mostly want from Zed is the ability to see the outline panel at the same time as the directory panel, and to separate the search outline from the file structure outline. I spent too much time toggling views in Zed.

Zed is lovely and I hope it becomes super successful but this kind of mass collaboration might be ok for meeting minutes... maybe. But thinking of it for coding it gives me shingles. Code by mass live committee. Yikes.

Unlike a lot of other commenters, I found this to be an interesting approach. Text files are good. Having an integrated environment that combines files and channels and collaboration seems like a neat idea, and I could imagine building all sorts of neat stuff on it.

However, I just tried it myself and was really shocked to see other people in my sidebar after I clicked on the “collaboration” stuff. I expected to be dropped into my own collaboration environment built around my own channels, like a fresh private Slack instance, but instead I saw the built-in Zed channels and as I clicked around, it looked/sounded like I was joining voice channels. It was as if I’d accidentally joined someone else’s Discord. It was so mentally jarring that I got afraid I was on a live mic or would accidentally be live-sharing stuff with strangers.

I would love to see collab servers take the same path as LSPs in being standarized and integrated across various editors and IDEs. I would love to work more closely with my VSCode peers, for example. Of course some features may be outside the standard and only supported with likewise editors, e.g. voice chat perhaps, but having shared cursors and a text chat would be a good start.

These are definitely some interesting features, though not sure I'm in any position to take advantage of them at all.

The multi-user editing is kind of cool... there's an ANSI art tool (PabloDraw) that you can run a host session so multiple artists can create text art, and I thought back when I first saw it, that it might be cool to be able for multiple editors to work on a project. I've used some of the collab stuff with VS Code, but haven't done enough to even begin to compare.

Not to mention that in a lot of workplaces, self-hosting or otherwise layers of bureaucracy stand in the way.

> Despite attempts to make Atom—an Electron application—more responsive, it never reached the performance standards the team yearned for.

This feels like an attempt at deflecting blame. VSCode is another Electron application that ended up having better performance than Atom. There's another Electron adjacent application that has good performance, the one you're probably using right now to read this page.

Depending on page content of course

  If you've been a developer long enough, you might recall the teletype package for Atom—both built by Zed's founders.

  Appropriately working together on a truly collaborative tool, Martin Ott, Martin Pittenauer, Dominik Wagner, and Ulrich Bauer of Technische Universitat Munchen won the Best Mac OS X Student Project for Hydra 1.0.1, a Rendezvous-based text editor that enables multiple people to contribute to a shared document. (Adam and about ten other attendees at MacHack used Hydra to take notes during this year’s Hack Contest.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubEthaEdit

https://tidbits.com/2003/06/30/apple-announces-design-awards...

Because I'm apparently a billion years old, I still use Sublime Text and just text editor. If I do switch, it will be to this. However, is it as responsive? Do file changes just appear if I change them elsewhere in like terminal?

I don't work at zed anymore but I do find it funny that anyone would think that the collaboration features of zed are "tacked on"...

We started building zed in zed using it's collaboration in early 2021. Collaboration has always been part of it's DNA. Nearly everything at zed is written in pairs over collab.

I tried the collaborative features to pair program with a colleague a few months ago, but it was bad. It was very flaky in establishing a connection. In the cases we were able to establish a connection, the voice chat would not work. We tried to make it work for a couple of days, and then we gave up. Has there been lots of work in the past few months on the collaborative features?

I was very surprised to find a "forum" integrated in Zed when I first opened it. But to be honest, it is not something I ever felt the need for and overall I don't like having this in my text editor. So far it never got in my way and that's a good thing, I hope it stays that way :)

Really user here: Switched from vscode to zed for ~2 weeks entirely in a windows PC, getting back to vscode today, just not feeling good enough: 1. zed updates frequently, but I'm not feeling any update at all. I mean, no new features, not fixing stuff that I'm experiencing that's not good enough; 2. while it put heavy in AI stuff, the ACP thing and the integration of codex and claude code just not working as expected as is. Especially I'm getting really poor outcomes from the same tool in zed compared to the cli itself, which is really frustrating; 3. the terminal in windows zed is barely usable, it's slow and slugish, sometimes the texts or some symbols are not rendering properly, it's just not stable at all. I really like to use the terminal inside the ide especially when I need to start up dev server, but with zed I'm used to open an extra terminal app when I need to start up dev server; 4. I'm a frontend dev, which means the tech stack should have great support in morden editors, but the case is not quite right in zed. I got jetbrain style inline type hints for typescript files with deferred types, but it is so annoying cause it makes a line too long I may even need to scroll horizontaolly more than may screen width to see the content at the end of the line, but the line has only 40 chars. At the same time, I'm not sure how to shutdown this feature after openning the settings. And when I want to set wrap width to 80 chars, I don't know how to do this either. The settings maybe there and are easy to tweak but it is not doing great to make the user understand it and use it; 5. it constantly showing some language servers are down and I don't know why, I do not like to tweak with settings so it could not be my bad, I don't event know how to touch the language servers;

I have more to input here but I forgot some of them, overall, I just want to get back to vscode which is much easier and battle tested. I think zed have a totally different perspectives on feature sets and stuff, that's good, so people could have another choice. Hope zed could do great and I will definitely come back one day.

PS: I don't think collab worth too much effort in an IDE, you have much better tooling out there and have better intergrations.

Their collab feature looks promising. But I can't move to Zed yet, because it's laggy on both my Linux laptop and workstation. They need to fix these issues first.

Is this the new Zawinski's Law? Instead of extending to read email, Zed extends to enable chat and voice-video. :)

I understand interacting with other engineers right in the editor but I dont get why so many collab tools need to be bolted on to what is basically a text editor. This will only fragment communications since its not just engineers that work in any company. Meaning you'll now have communication spread out in Slack and Zed making collaboration difficult, not easy.

I dont honestly dont get the allure of pair programming. My pair programs are the unit tests which I run as often as I can and limit discussions to Gitlab/Slack. I have worked ag FAANGs and large companies and never once pair programmed anything.

I honestly cannot think of a single software or process problem that requires real time collab in the editor. Having said that it is a cool feature and I quite like Zed as an editor.

It would have been good to include a link to the collaboration docs https://zed.dev/docs/collaboration in the article. There were a lot of links in that article and a lot of assumptions that I knew how things worked. And I daily drive and like Zed, but I had so many questions.

Looks a lot like Google Wave. This is interesting for some things but I don't think coding is it, for the same reason that IntelliJ's CodeWithMe doesn't work for pair programming. And apparently one of the guys is a former Pivot, so it's a little surprising.

Pair programming is Two People One Cursor. A critical aspect of it is you're both looking at the same lines of code and working on the same problem and following each other's thought processes.

CodeWithMe (and it seems Zed) is Same Codebase, Same Day. There's no shared focus. You edit stuff, I edit stuff, maybe there's overlap. But this isn't much different from doing separate git commits.

So far the only remote pairing tool I've found that works competently is pop.com.

/offtopic

Is it just my vision, or are websites getting super low contrast these days, esp the text-heavy ones?

I ... don't like this one bit. I hope Slack doesn't start including a text editor.

Random thing spotted in the article:

> "Wish there was a windows laptop I could buy that is good"

What does it even mean? There are macs, there are chromebooks and there are just laptops. Wth is a Windows laptop? There's a good Linux laptop?

Just a nit :P

I use Zed instead of my normal text editor because it opens instantaneously. But I don't write code in it, and still use my IntelliJ + IdeaVim with Claude Code and Codex in a separate terminal in Ghostty.

But Zed is an insanely fast text editor to open text files in. Just double click and it's on the screen. Love that. Maybe over time I'll do more in it.

I love Zed’s minimal design language ... clean, restrained colors, low visual noise.

The screenshot below surprised me:

https://zed.dev/img/post/zed-is-our-office/this-week.webp

All the colorful avatars and the busy side/top panels feel out of character with the usual Zed aesthetics.

Please work on decreasing the binary size - it's whopping 400mb!

I hadn't realized Zed was built from the ground up to support collaborative programming. I liked it already, and I like it even more now.

There is a lot of complaints about Zed in the comments here. I don't think that they are "hate", per se; they all definitely care about Zed and want it to succeed.

I daily drive Zed for work across several languages and I love it. I use a lot of its features, like the git interface, agentic editing, etc. I might even consider paying for Pro in the future if I want unlimited edit predictions.

However, all of these complaints are fully justified. I think Zed is a massive undertaking, only one that a VC-backed company has the capital to do. iirc, it requires 70k lines of Rust just for the cloud part [1]. I cannot fathom the amount of fundamental infrastructure they have to get the editor functional at all. That doesn't excuse all of the papercuts in Zed though.

If I were Zed I would do the following:

1. stop all work on future features, like DeltaDB etc. They all seem extremely cool but they won't meaningfully contribute to increasing Zed adoption or fixing its issues.

2. remove all agentic editing features. if Zed tries to simultaneously become the world's best agentic editor and a good general-purpose text editor, it will fail at both. Keep around ACP so users can still use other agents, but remove all of Zed's built in agent stuff.

3. fix literally every papercut. Triage every single issue and go through every PR, even if it will take half a year to do so. People won't switch to Zed until it's perfect, and the existence of this many issues means it's not perfect enough.

4. make extensions actually good. Every programming language, library, etc. has it's own ecosystem, and many such ecosystems mainly rely on VSCode extensions for advanced features. Zed needs to be extremely extensible like VSCode is; obviously its architecture makes this slightly harder, as it's nontrivial, for example, for extensions to render their own GUI, but there are a lot of low(er)-hanging fruit for extensions that need to get solved. People will only switch to Zed if they can get a similar breadth of ecosystems.

Of course, this won't happen, and given that none of these will really make them money, Zed has no incentive to focus on these, especially given the amount of time they would need to do this. But I think that if Zed can't nail the core experience, it won't get anywhere.

[1] https://maxdeviant.com/posts/2025/head-in-the-zed-cloud/

i'm now guessing the software engineering universe is becoming like the lawyer ones

1. big corporate shops / vc funded ones - many tens of programmers working on features (this is where zed collab features might be needed) 2. bespoke high productive small teams - less than 5 product programmers in a company e.g basecamp - these would be your bespoke law firms 3. the indies (injury lawyers) -> 1 - 3 programmers chunning out products at scale or eating of one product + maybe with help of A.I

for 2 & 3 - a lot of stuff being shilled is not needed. a legal pad + some notes that can be posted via a google doc is all that's needed. Jira isn't needed too

Zed sounds desperate, nobody in the world would use Zed as office. Zed is a niche. Nobody wants it's multiplayer features since coding id usually asynchronous until crunch happens and nobody wants crunch All the time. All office have their own communication tools , you can't expect all developers just to use zed l, it is missing features and the whole ecosystem which would take one more decade and non development people won't even touch it. Then the office cannot happen inside Zed for the rest of the world, except Zed team.

Here is where I've settled on for Zed. I initially thought it might be a Sublime replacement for one-off files, but it seems it's geared towards projects. It's not as powerful as Jetbrains (RustRover, PyCharm etc), but is much faster. So here's how I'm using Zed:

  - On my Tablet, which is too slow for Jetbrains IDEs to run smoothly
  - On certain projects I have which choke Jetbrains IDEs. (Due to macro use maybe?)

I'm also trying their GPUI library, but am in the early stages, so can't really comment on how it compares to EGUI.

I love Zed as an idea. They built some impressive tech. They're clearly a smart and capable bunch. I tried zed out for a bit, then I switched back to vscode.

I'm just too hooked on that OpenVSX ecosystem.

people live-dumping their comments into a text doc while i'm presenting with no ability to know _who_ left a comment (unless they manually prefix their name) really showcases that its the wrong tool.. https://i.imgur.com/vEttouw.png

Technically really impressive. In practice, completely unpractical in any medium to large organization. And although I adore Zed's speed and reliability, I still don't understand why we need these features at all.

Haha it's like Google Wave!

To me it feels like 2 different set of products, what they are showcasing here seems very similar to slack/teams.

Of course, it would be awesome to have a faster and open source slack, and if I can take notes on the same style as my editor great. So I guess, it would be nice to be able to embed zed in another product.

I think this would be appealing for a company that it's core product is code, like zed, but I do wonder if other companies even need this functionality.

This is interesting to read and very important to me since I am building a coding agent with team collaboration in mind. I used to use Zed daily till the point that I moved away from writing code directly and instead generate all my projects only from prompts.

I think collaboration for people who eventually use the software will be more critical in the era of agentic coding. Project Management will change. We are not waiting for 2 weeks to build prototypes, it gets done in a hour. What does that mean for end users - do they prompt their changes and get access to new software? Who would double-check, would AI reviews be good enough, would AI agents collaborate along with humans in the loop?

There are so many questions not answered. If anyone is keen on having these talks, I would happy to share what I think. Here is what I am building: https://github.com/brainless/nocodo

I want to see a future where end users can prompt their needs, have collaborators in the company to help clear things up and in an hour the feature/issue is tackled and deployed.

I’m always _this_ close to adopting Zed, but I just can’t get used to the project search. I’m too used to telescope now. Maybe I need to bite the bullet because I think Zed’s search is objectively better. Old dog, I suppose…

Zed looks really cool and I would love to give it a try, but I am just too beholden to devcontainers. I know there are workarounds to use them with Zed but with many extra steps compared to VS Code and it's forks. I can't go back to not having a totally integrated container per repo.

Very cool idea, and helps promote owning your own data, and it being highly interoperable (plain text!)

I do wonder if we need a term for shoe-horned dogfooding though. Like sure, you can do this. You could do this in Figma! Or in Notion! Or in LEETCODE if you wanted to.

At least with Zed though, its plain text. If you find another way to collab realtime on plain text, you're not bound to 1 vendor.

From reading some of the comments, I'm not sure which is worse, Zed Shaw or Zed the code editor

Any plans to leverage 3D at all in the interface?

was floored by the "explode all layers in the user interface and simulate a 3D camera rotating around them" graphic when i first saw it !

3D is always difficult to get right, but felt it had some really cute possibilities,

any way to open this up so devs can try things out?? < 3

You guys need to figure out how to create Slack shared channels in Zed and we're all switching until they won't be needed anymore.

oh good Slack embedded inside my editor. Just exactly what I have always wanted.

When it comes to writing tool the trend has been strong that people want distraction free writing with no interruptions.

Seems like code editors are going the other way on speed.

What's up with the letter spacing on that blog? It looks bad.

I have been trying to figure out how this works in concert with Git (or SCM in general). Is one of the developers in the session merely responsible for it?

commence feature creep

Don't tell the Posthog guys about this. Far too much collaboration going on here!!!

I lost all faith and interest in Zed after they introduced AI features.

Welcome back, Google Wave.

This looks more like a collab note-taking app. Don't know about code since i don't code anymore inside an editor but for collab things who knows

It's nice to see Zed's collaboration features discussed in their blog. The collaboration features are really what makes Zed such an interesting project and product. I was worried they'd gone full AI hype train. There's so much opportunity to improve digital collaboration tools.

As long as I don't have to use, feel free to include it. It is really not essential feature for editor.

I run update and Collab requires you to sign in... which again, it is fine if you want it. I don't, so it can be dormant, icon is really tiny, doesn't take much space.

The feature of Zed that is most annoying yet essential is frequent updates. Pretty much daily when I switch to Zed window, I can expect update and restart, which messes up my window layout, so this is annoyance. Getting updates and knowing you guys are shipping good stuff is what is essential.

I think integrating terminal ai's is great move and useful. Sometimes I use it like that, often I use it in terminal (like the outside of the editor terminal) and switch to editor to review or update stuff. Same with git. I am old-fashioned.

This is insanely cool but it would be hard for non dev people to join the meetings and there is always an annoying "camera on" policy.

Moreover, this would be competing with Google Meet, Teams, Slack, Gather - way too much tech for collaboration

And I wish we were more async-first and less forced to deal with humans, especially over the network.

I'm now more convinced that I made the right choice to invest in Neovim.

Whenever a product tries to be too many things, it dilutes the core USP. Try to be an excellent code editor. Add extensibility. Done.

I get it, you are VC funded, investors want to turn this into a multi billion dollar unicorn.

Do not focus on investors, but developers.

Looks very cool, and of course it's nice to basically have Slack inside of Zed.

But personally, what I want in a Code Editor / IDE, is to be the very best experience at writing code and working with code projects. That is what will save me time and make the coding experience better.

Collaborative features are nice but not essential since there are other tools out there. It's not likely to move a team away from Slack (though if it's self-hosted, it stands a chance).

I'm not yet at the point where I can rely solely on Zed for python coding. I mostly use Zed because I like new initiatives, especially open source ones, and it's fast and responsive. But PyCharm is still better for python development at this point, with its one black mark being endless indexing on large codebases / dependencies, and I find myself falling back to it regularly. I would argue that the priority should be to achieve parity as a _code editor / IDE_, and then we can talk about other shiny new features.

Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead

Haha: Can't find a good Windows laptop.

It's true, most of them are bad. Galaxy Book5 Pro or Microsoft Surface are OK.

Just another fence for monkeys :)

I love Zed. I, mostly, love the direction they are taking the editor in.

But. There are now two times I see Zed going in the wrong direction. The AI integration was one. This feels like the wrong direction again.

I never really liked the AI integration. It felt off to me. I do love coding with Claude and I think I know why. It presents the "information I need to know" in a way my puny brain can handle it. Colored diffs. Summaries of what happened. It isn't perfect, but it has been incredibly productive for me. I never got that from Zed's AI integration; perhaps this has been improved, but I was up and running with Claude in a way that I never was with Zed.

This write-up sounds like "slack in my editor." If it is that, I hate it. Slack has destroyed company culture and communication. People, who are inherently lazy (I'm an old Perl programmer, so I can say that), have stopped thinking carefully and writing carefully, and in that void just throw the first thing in their head into a slack channel and think that is "collaboration" and "communication." It's toxic.

For example, this comment rubs me the wrong way: "Staff members hop in, volunteer to show off a cool feature or bug fix they worked on, and get real-time feedback from the rest of the team." I don't think our human brains work well with "real time feedback" UNLESS we have the information presented in a way that gives us massive clues on what's right and what's wrong. Reading a wall of text is not the way. A colorized git diff, or a video, or an entirely new way of presenting information might make real time feedback possible, but I am highly skeptical a text editor is the way or place to do that. And, I'm an emacs user and love text UIs, don't get me wrong.

Do I want to have "generalized one off rooms for things that don't fit anywhere?" I definitely don't want that. I want you AS THE AUTHOR to be really intentional about what's important and fit that into the proper channels. I need to know that information, but I don't want to know about, nor have the unspoken expectation that I SHOULD have known, about the other stuff. And, I want "managers" (if that still exists) to be carefully thinking about those channels and how the company is organized and push that structure down to people in the organization.

As Zed is the office, having one off rooms instead of in person coffee time feels very dangerous. That's the world a lot of people live in, but I don't like that office.

If this comment is the guiding light, then I'm worried: "We're building toward a future where collaboration is continuous conversation, not discrete commits—where every discussion, edit, and insight remains linked to the code as it evolves, accessible to both teammates and AI agents." I'm human, I have kids, I have other interests. A continuous conversation is impossible for me. I want discrete ideas, and right now, discrete commits and PRs are better, IMHO, than what I hear here. It's hard, but setting the expectation that to be successful I need to be paying attention to a river of information flowing by seems like a bad idea to me. I don't buy that Zed solves the problem of hiding the pieces of information that I don't need to see.

Oh hey! I have an idea. Why not use AI to summarize those conversations into discrete pieces! </joke>

I do love Zed. It is the best GUI editor out there. I know they will get it right. I just am skeptical about this direction and feel it misses the forest for the trees.

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I could imagine that in ten years git will feel strangely slow and ceremonial. Why not just continuously work and continuously deploy live-edited software

It's truly showing that the zed team is chauvinistic by dismissing different encodings not being supported and focusing on other things. "It wurks in merica", it gut i guess

Don't want to sound negative, yet when I read "it's in our DNA", I immediately lose interest.