The Rise of Zed: A New Open Source Code Editor

For nearly 10 years now, Microsoft’s vs code has been the dominant text editor among the soy deev Community. I use it on my Microsoft Windows machine to write Microsoft typescript code with help from the latest AI models in Microsoft co-pilot. It installs my Microsoft npm packages, pushes my code to Microsoft GitHub, and automatically deploys it to Microsoft Azure, which I then admire from the Microsoft Edge browser. But almost nothing in tech stays cool forever, and today we’ll look at a fast new open source code editor named Zed.

The Arrival of Zed

It is February 21st, 2024, and there are exciting developments in the world of code editing. A few weeks ago, a code editor named Zed, built in Rust, was open-sourced. It’s built by the team behind the Adam editor, which is a great editor that your grandpa might remember. In fact, the very first video I made on this channel used Adam and not vs code. But wait a minute, who cares about a new editor?

The Future of Coding and AI

I was told that programming is dead, a skill that will soon be replaced by artificial intelligence. Some people believe this will happen any day now, and a new startup called Magic just raised 145 million, in part from the founders of GitHub, to build a coworker, not just a co-pilot. They’re betting on the idea that coding will ultimately lead to artificial general intelligence, at which point we’re all totally screwed. But I, for one, am not giving up on coding until AI straps me into a pod to harvest my organs.

As of today, AI is just a mediocre tool. It hasn’t actually replaced any programmers and has even showed signs of a plateau. In fact, many people have complained that chat GPT has gotten worse at coding recently. Like back in 1969, people thought by 2024 we’d have moon bases and intergalactic light speed travel, but that technology was never meant to be because people figured out that we live on a flat stationary plane. Right now, everybody wants you to think that AGI is coming. They could be right, and maybe you should just give up and join the infantry. But right now, there’s also a race going on to build the best AI-enabled code editor.

Zed: The Fast and AI-Enabled Code Editor

First and foremost, Zed is an extremely fast, high-performance editor, but it also does a great job integrating AI. One thing that really bothers me about vs code is that it can be slow. I’m too old to torture myself learning Vim, too poor to afford JetBrains, and Zed is an attractive option because it’s extremely fast. The insertion latency, startup time, and memory footprint are all much better than the competition. It achieves this performance by leveraging all of your CPU cores along with the GPU using its own GPU framework. It works like a video game, where it rasterizes the entire window to deliver 120 frames per second.

When you open it up the first time, you’ll notice it’s very minimal. It has a Vim mode, syntax highlighting, a few different themes to choose from, and an integrated terminal. It has a command pallet and overall feels pretty similar to most other editors. The company itself raised $10 million last year and has another feature geared more towards teams, where multiple people can collaborate in real time on the same code base.

AI Integration and Limitations

Another unique feature is that the editor is also integrated with AI out of the box. It supports GitHub co-pilot but also allows you to bring in your own OpenAI key to have conversations about your code right in the editor. So, instead of paying for a subscription, you just bring in your own OpenAI API key and pay based on the number of tokens that you use. You can also highlight a piece of code and then tell the AI to refactor it; it rewrites the code right in front of your eyes. Currently, Zed only supports OpenAI, but it may have additional models in the future.

My initial impression of Zed is very positive. It’s clean and fast, but there are some limitations. Currently, it’s not extensible, so if there’s a feature missing, there’s not going to be a plugin to help you out. They do plan on releasing a plugin API in the future but it’ll be Rust-based and likely never be as big as the JavaScript-based vs code.

By far the biggest limitation as of today is that it’s only available on Mac OS. That’s a big disappointment for a lot of people. They do plan on supporting Linux and Windows in the future, as long as they find a viable business model. So, it may not be a vs code killer as of today, but it does have the potential to get there, assuming that programming is still a thing done by humans in the next few years.

Conclusion

This has been The Code Report. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.