Fresh programmer's editor on Linux lies Zed ahead

Zed - sorry, US readers, that's its name, not "Zee" - is a new coding tool. Until very recently it was Mac-only, but not any more.

Zed Industries has just released version 0.143.6 of its new source code editor for developers, with a fresh feature that its users have been requesting pretty much since it appeared: it now runs on Linux as well as macOS.

Zed is one of the newer code editors around: it was first released in 2023, and went open source at the start of this year. The Register sister site Dev Class checked it out back then and that story is worth a read to find out about the program.

The program is no first-timer's effort, though: founder Nathan Sobo was also one of the creators of the Atom editor, which was one of Github's flagship products. Although it's a local desktop app, Atom was built using web technologies, notably Javascript, and in order to create a local standalone editor, the team built the Electron framework, originally called Atom Shell, and the same team also built the Tree-sitter code-parsing framework. Electron is now used by hundreds of widely-used apps, including the world's most popular editor, VS Code.

But in 2018, Microsoft bought Github. At the time, new CEO Nat Friedman pledged in a Reddit Ask Me Anthing:

Even so, four years later, Github stopped developing Atom. The same day, Sobo announced Zed on Twitter/X.

Zed is a high-tech and high-performance program for a text editor. It's implemented in Rust, and it calls directly to your computer's GPU in order to render text as fast as possible. On macOS it uses Apple's Metal GPU API, which debuted in iOS 8 and came to OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" the following year. This is one of the things that made the Linux port tricky: there's no standardized equivalent to Metal on Linux. Back in May, the company blogged about the difficulties of a Linux version, crediting contributor Dzmitry "Kvark" Malyashu:

As the project's first blog post described, internally Zed uses data structures called CRDTs which simplify colloborative editing. CRDT is short for Conflict-free Replicated Data Type, and while they aren't brand new - the Reg first mentioned them in 2018 - they are a pivotal part of the Local First web development initiative, a subject to which the Reg FOSS desk plans to return in the future.

Zed is still in its early days, but Zed Industries has a public roadmap for the directions it's planning to go, as well as a FAQ page, which tackles thorny questions such as how the company plans to make money when the editor is free (in brief: subscription-based collaboration features). For now, the editor only supports two platforms: macOS and Linux. There's an open Github issue entitled Platform Support with as-yet-incomplete entries for "Windows" and "Web support." Although it does support extensions, there aren't many yet.

There are some extremely positive reviews out there. For what it's worth, this article was written entirely in the Zed editor, and we can attest that it certainly is fast, and compared to our usual Markdown editor Panwriter it is positively svelte. At launch it used 73MB of RAM, which isn't much for 2024.

If you use all the features of a modern full-fat editor such as VS Code - or even an old-fashioned full-fat editor such as Emacs - then this may not be the weapon you are looking for. Saying that, though, it's already highly functional, and this jaded old vulture would take it over either of those - or Vim - in a heartbeat.

Downloads are on the project's Github page, for both macOS and Linux in both x86-64 and Arm64 formats, as well as from Zed Industries's downloads page. We tried it on macOS 12 and Ubuntu 24.04 and it worked flawlessly on both. ®