Zed is a code editor for MacOS with a minimal design that aims to improve developer productivity by being lightweight and simple, with a number of useful features.

“Productive coding starts with a tool that stays out of your way. Zed combines the power of an IDE with the responsiveness of a lightweight editor for productivity you can feel under your fingertips,” the project website states. 

When compared to other text editors, Zed had a startup time of 338ms, while Sublime Text 4 took 381ms, VS Code took 1444ms, and CLion took 3001ms. 

Zed offers features like code highlighting, auto-indent, a searchable outline view, and structural selection. 

It also has a shared workspace so that multiple developers can work together; has collaboration channels for discussing, planning, and writing software with a team; and has the ability for multiple users to follow each other as they navigate through the code. 

“We believe software development is better when it’s a shared experience. We believe there’s a better way to write software—and this is just the start of the adventure,” the creators said. 

Zed also integrates with GitHub Copilot, has an integrated full-featured terminal, and offers Vim-style editing. 

Zed was created by the same team that created Atom and Tree-sitter, Zed Industries. As of the time of this writing, the project has 32.9K stars on GitHub.