For a developer, choosing a code editor is kind of like choosing an apartment. You’re going to spend a lot of time in it, so it has to be just right or you won’t enjoy it.
In my roughly fifteen years of coding, I’ve tried a bunch of editors, from simple Notepad and Geany, to the Blender script editor and Gedit, to Brackets and Eclipse. None of them really managed to grab me for long, there always was something that irked me. Too little power, too overwhelming, too slow.
First (Code Editor) Love
Then I discovered Atom and it quickly became my editor of choice and stayed it until it was killed by Microsoft in favour of VS Code back in 2022.
I went on a bit of an Odyssey back then, trying to find a good replacement, but there didn’t seem to be one. It was during that initial search, however, that I first came across Zed, a new kind of editor by the team that had originally built Atom (and brought us the blessing/curse that is Electron). It was teased as the editor to end all editors (hence the name, the last letter in the alphabet and so on), but beyond big promises and bold claims, the website didn’t offer much more than a field to sign up for a newsletter.
I even signed up, something I usually don’t do, but I never received any mail from them. So while I waited, I grudgingly installed VS Codium and moved on. If code editors are like apartments to developers, using VS Codium felt like picking the only place available in an entire city, overpriced, kind of sketchy and breaking down in various little ways all the time, but still a roof over the head. I made my peace with it, kind of.
Enough is Enough
Until it broke one too many times earlier this year. By then, Zed had had various releases and I had kept up with its updates irregularly by checking the website and even trying it on a machine here and there, but never seriously because it just wasn’t there yet.
Except it worked that day when Codium didn’t. So I configured it, accepted its quirks, and learned to work around them. It wasn’t perfect, but it had a refreshing simplicity going for it. Something I dearly missed from my days using Atom.
To my surprise, I just kept using it even when I figured out how to fix Codium. Suddenly, Zed had basically all the features I needed. It was fast, it got out of the way. It felt nice, like it could become home.
An “AI”-first editor. Really?
Now, despite all this praise, there was something that always irked me a little with it: the strong focus on “AI”. Of course, it had to have support for LLMs built-in. It is 2025 after all. The features were easy enough to disable by setting some configuration flags, but just their presence made me worry about the company behind Zed eventually pushing them more strongly.
But then the developers introduced a single setting to disable the features all at once and published a blog post about it, teasing that soon enough people would be able to turn them off right during onboarding when running the app for the first time. That was refreshing to see.
Now, I’ve been burnt one too many times by VC-funded companies to really trust the people behind Zed, but for the time being, I’m quite happy with where the journey is going. The editor has been very stable, and I’ve enjoyed the frequent but unobtrusive updates.
Tentatively Positive
I haven’t had the chance to try out its more team-oriented features yet, but I might get to once a Windows version comes out and my colleagues at work can start using Zed as well. I’m curious how that’ll go. The lack of a Windows version is what is keeping me from suggesting it to my students as well, but there is one on the horizon, so perhaps it’ll be out in time for the new semester starting in October.
If you have a soft spot for Atom or are in the mood for trying out a new editor, feel free to give Zed a shot. You might enjoy using it so much you’ll stay. 😉
As always, feel free to let me know your thoughts on Mastodon or otherwise. Thank you for reading!
I am not associated with Zed in any way or form and was not asked to write this article, nor did I receive compensation for doing so.