Zed Editor

Yesterday the demise of Atom was a very hot topic for many programmers.¹ One thing I noticed in the comments here and there was that the original team behind Atom is now working on a new editor, named Zed.

I assume the name alludes to something like “Zed is going to be the last editor you’ll ever need”. It’s a good name. Zed hasn’t had any public releases yet, so relatively little is known about it at this point:

• It’s written in Rust and supposedly it’s very fast
• It has some built-in collaboration features for software engineers
• It uses TreeSitter for syntax highlighting and code navigation
• It’s in a private alpha right now.

You can learn more about Zed from this intro presentation.

It does look like an interesting project, but I assume it’s going to be another proprietary editor (like TextMate in the past and Sublime Text), so I doubt it will have a major impact on the editor landscape. Those projects typically start strong and quickly fade away. Still, I’m always curious about the new ideas a new editor will bring along. Perhaps we’ll adapt some of them to Emacs down the road…

I still believe that Emacs is the last editor you’ll ever need.

1. I wrote a short commentary on Emacs Redux. ↩