Zed: Fast By Default

Most editors feel like they’re doing you a favor by opening. Zed doesn’t.

Built in Rust by the team behind Atom and Tree-sitter, Zed is a code editor that treats performance as a feature, not a marketing bullet. It starts instantly, scrolls without friction, and handles large files without the usual theater of spinning indicators and memory warnings. If you’ve spent years in Electron-based editors, the difference is physical. Your hands feel it before your brain registers it.

Not long ago, Zed hit version 1.0, a signal that the core experience is stable enough to commit to.

What it is

Zed is a GPU-rendered text editor built for speed and collaborative editing. It uses its own UI framework (GPUI) written in Rust, which means the bottleneck you’re used to, the JavaScript runtime, simply isn’t there. The result is an editor that feels closer to a native app than any web-wrapped alternative.

It ships with LSP support, tree-sitter syntax highlighting, a built-in terminal, multi-cursor editing, and an AI panel. The defaults are sensible. The config is a single JSON file.

Why I use it daily

Because it’s fast. Also because I’m tired of editors that feel like they’re running a small country’s bureaucracy in the background just to open a TypeScript file.

No popups asking you to install recommended extensions. No extension manager. No thirty-second cold start after an update. You open a file and work. The vim mode is solid. The fuzzy file finder is snappy. Multi-buffer editing, fragments of different files in a single view, is genuinely useful for cross-file refactoring.

The catch

Zed is still maturing. Some things don’t work the way I expect them to. Debugger support is limited. Certain language servers behave differently than in VS Code. When I hit one of those walls, I switch to Cursor or VS Code, fix what needs fixing, and come back.

That’s fine. It’s where Zed is in its lifecycle. The core experience is already better than the alternative for most of what I do. The rough edges are real, but they’re shrinking.

If you’re curious, give it a week as your main editor. The speed alone is worth the adjustment period.

Go grab it from their website - zed.dev