Zed — A Review
I tested a code editor that was built by the Atom developers. Here are my thoughts.
First off, what is it? According to to their website, Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter. It’s also open source.
I’m honestly not sure what Tree-sitter is, but I know damn well what Atom is — considering it was my code editor of choice (not counting Notepad++ here) when I first started learning how to code, I’m already interested. But, multiplayer? What’s that even mean? Well, let’s dive in.
Zed’s main tagline is “code at the speed of thought”, and they really weren’t kidding. This thing is fast. Blazingly fast. Me-speeding-home-to-beat-traffic fast. Click on the binary and it’s just immediately there, fast. Type zed .
in the terminal and it’s loaded before your pinky’s lifted off the enter key, fast.
I know I exaggerate often, but by no means am I exaggerating in this case. Zed genuinely, really is that fast, and if you don’t believe me then feel free to try it out for yourself, take it for a spin. If, purgatory forbid, Zed ISN’T performing faster than VSCode, then that’s a skill issue and it’s your fault and you should do better.
Of course it’s completely blown out of the water by Vim, but honestly what isn’t blown out of the water by Vim? It’s literally just text in a terminal, it’s as fast as you’re gonna get, short of pulling some sort of sorcery. But Vim isn’t the star of the show today, that honour goes to Zed.
Okay, so it’s fast, whatever, big deal. But what about this multiplayer thing?
Listen. If I ever get around to starting a development firm, Zed is going to be a part of the team’s required tech stack. It makes collaborating on code so incredibly easy. Imagine, if you will, plugging a second keyboard into your teammate’s computer, and you both working on the same instance of their codebase at the same time. You could be in different files, or working on the same file, and you both see where eachother’s cursor is, and can talk vocally through it or jot down notes or whatever else. With me so far?
Okay, good. Now, imagine if you were on the other side of the planet.
That’s Zed’s multiplayer.
Remote collaboration is genuinely a joy with Zed. Gone are the days of having to manually check out my teammate’s branch, or working with them asynchronously, or worrying about merge conflicts, or having several pieces of software just for comms. With Zed, it’s all just there. If they’re stuck on something, I can hop over to their project, we can talk it over and fix whatever needs fixing, then I can hop back over to my project and get back to what I was doing before I got derailed.
It’s seamless. It’s blissful. It’s absolutely glorious. I feel like the first human to receive the gift of fire from Prometheus.
The only thing that’s keeping me from adopting Zed entirely is that it’s currently only supported on macOS. I use all three major operating systems (well, I guess that’s no longer true) on a regular basis, so being able to use Zed on Linux would be great, so in the meantime I’m still using Vim (and VSCode when nobody’s looking) on my desktop. That being said, it’s already found a solid foundation in my development environment on my macbook. VSCode’s bountiful bundle of bloated bullshit has been banned, leaving me to get busy badoinking with the bomb-ass, bodacious Zed.
I am so, so sorry for that sentence.
Just kidding, no I’m not, fuck you.