I used to use Atom as my main editor but it somehow lost its popularity and withered sadly. Then I switched to VS Code which is also Electron based and similar to Atom in some ways. VSC was great until recently I heard about Zed, which I immediately felt excited about it, for a few reasons:

• Zed is created by the same team who built Atom, so this is like a new Atom born from the ashes of the old one. All my muscle memory of those Atom shortcuts and combos will be awakened!
• It’s written in Rust, so it is faster than Electron by magnitudes and much more memory efficient at the same time
• It uses GPU, not rendering your silly Fortnite hero but syntax highlighted text, again it’s faster

Recently I completely replaced VSC with Zed and everything still works, only better. Currently Python, Jsonnet and HCL/Terraform are all well supported. Also while I’m using Mac at work I’m still very pleased to see Zed is now available on Linux!

A few minor details which make me love Zed even more:

• Dark mode by default
• Can open a terminal using Ctrl + ` combo, if you played Doom before you know what this means
• Can switch current document to full screen using Shift + ESC, very handy when using split panes and working on long text
• Rubbish like trailing spaces will be cleaned up on save(same as Atom), but if I choose to keep it using Cmd K, S combo Zed will respect it

🙂