Zed, the Rust-Made Coding Editor, Hits 1.0

Zed is a completely new software coding text editor written entirely in the memory-safe Rust programming language. It just hit the 1.0 milestone with native app versions for Windows, Windows 11 on Arm, Apple Silicon Macs, and Linux.

“To create a fundamentally better editor, we had to invent a new approach to building desktop software,” Zed co-founder and CEO Nathan Sobo writes. “So we started over. Instead of building Zed like a web page, we built it like a video game, organizing the entire application around feeding data to shaders running on the GPU. That meant writing our own UI framework, GPUI, from scratch in Rust.”

The makers of Rust were behind the Atom code editor, which uses a fork of the Chromium web browser engine and led to the creation of the Electron framework used by Visual Studio Code and probably half the most popular web apps on earth, including Notion, Discord, and Slack. As they describe it, using web technologies to create Atom was relatively easy and flexible, but it also imposed a ceiling: “No matter how hard we worked, we couldn’t make Atom better than the platform it was built on,” Sobo writes.

Using Rust and owning every layer of the software stack allowed Zed’s makers to deliver a lightning fast native code editor that runs on all the desktop platforms. It’s modern in every way, and supports dozens of programming languages, Git integration, SSH remoting, a debugger, and agentic AI capabilities, including integration with Claude Agent, Codex, Cursor, and more.

You don’t need to use AI to use Zed: This is a code-first editor with what its makers call “blazing-fast performance,” true multiplayer collaboration, and a focus on developer productivity, and you can disable all AI features if you’d like.

Zed is free for personal use, and that version supports 2,000 AI-based editing predictions per month and unlimited use of external AI agents. There’s a Pro version for $10 per month that provides unlimited edit predictions, $5 in token credits, and usage-based billing beyond that. And now there’s a new Enterprise version with usage analytics, single sign-on (SSO) capabilities, security and privacy guarantees, shared billing, and premium support. You can learn more about pricing on the Zed website.

I’ve installed Zed on Windows 11, Windows 11 on Arm, and my MacBook Air, and the performance is indeed breathtaking: It makes Visual Studio Code feel like a slug. This is a fascinating product, and if you’re a developer of any kind, it’s worth checking out.

You can learn more—and download this editor—from the Zed website.