Using Zed Editor - pure focus

DX oriented UI

In the era of AI Code Editors and IDEs, Zed is just a refreshment. It's open source and configurable, fast and awesomely engineered. I found it's UI to be very clean and focused. Minimalistic and without tons of distractions, icons, options. Default text size and colors just speak "peace", for me at least. Switching from Cursor, which I was using lately was like a breath of fresh air.

AI - model agnostic and quiet assistant

As fas as it code completion, zed is not screaming to you while typing. It is not agressive, but on the other hand it is very fast. The built in one, called Zeta, you get for free when you sign up with the Personal package and it is Zed's open source model. You can also configure Zed to use Copilot or Codestral if you prefer.

Zed is model agnostic, meaning you have the freedom to use any AI model you want and have subscription for or you can use. This means you can use local models, cloud models with your API keys or Zed hosted ones.

They have the open source approach to AI code editing, which I really appreciate, like any other open source project. You can explore more about it in their documentation As far as the pricing goes, for someone not going heavy on agentic or AI development, their free plan is pretty generous I found it enough for my daily general use where I mostly use AI for code completion. It includes 2,000 accepted edit predictions and unlimited use with your API keys or external agents like Claude Code.

However if you're doing more advanced AI coding and require heavier code generation you'd have to use a paid plan or bring your own LLM. Since, the whole point of me using Zed is to have more focused developer experience, I'd have to be honest here and say that I hadn't use their chat editor feature since it requires a paid plan or local LLM setup. However local LLM setup won't give it a fair review since I can't run the most powerful models on my machine. Currently I have Cursor subscription and no other paid API keys which I could test on. However, I'll probably give it a try with a free trial using the most powerful models and then I'll write an honest review comparing it to Cursor and other alternatives for my case (the way I use AI to code). For now, no review on that part.

Keymaps

Zed comes with bring your own keyboard shortcuts, meaning it lets you import settings from another editor, like Cursor or VSCode or configure your own keymaps. This was a huge bonus for me, since a lot of my coding depends on keyboard to move quickly while coding, it was easy to just import Cursor settings. This meant minimal "getting used to" time when switching. Zed also has a nice Vim-like mode which you can enable if coming from the editor like Neovim.

Performance

Definetely the biggest advantage in my opinion. Being developed in Rust brings a huge performance boost. Opening files, moving trough code, overall responsivness was just lightning fast. This was especially noticeable for me as I write TypeScript daily which is known for not having so performant language server which when paired with Electron based app (VSCode) can feel really sluggish. Zed on the other hand felt like using a screen with 120hz refresh rate vs 60hz one. They achieved this by developing their own UI framework in Rust called GPUI. You can find more about it here or by reading this interesting article from their blog

I found that Svelte has it's own passionate community of engineers that really enjoyed making the framework better.

My overall impression

If you appreciate DX like I do, you might enjoy Zed. If you're heavy on AI stuff I can't provide honest feedback there. But, if you appreciate performance with subtle AI code completion and a clean, minimal UI and open source approach I can definitely recommend it. Zed just feels developer oriented and really fun to use. Looking at some files in Zed vs VSCode based editors was just relaxing for my eyes to be honest. Often when doing some serious debugging I found myself closing Cursor and openning a project or file in Zed and going trough lines of code much more lately. Other things worth mentioning Zed has:

• built-in terminal
• git ui
• extensions store
• zed cli (similar to vscode one)
• command palette

Things I didn't like too much:

• full workspace search: I found it a bit overwhelming. Not sure why, but I prefer a vscode-like approach to this. It's personal preference though, but instead of getting every file matched opened in focused window by default, I would prefer to see a list of files which contain the search term and then manually open it myself, since in most cases I know what I am looking for I just want to quickly find in which file it lives. However Zed's approach might be more intuitive for search and replace operations, so some hybrid version of this would be awesome.