Zed Ported Its Text Editor to Linux and It’s Pretty Special
If you’re a programmer or a Linux admin who really appreciates a good text editor, you’re going to want to learn about Zed.
According to the Zed website, the goal was to build the world’s best text editor. That’s a fairly tall order, especially given how everyone who uses a text editor either has their favorite or knows exactly what makes for a great tool.
What Sets Zed Apart
So, what makes Zed so special? First off, it comes from the same minds behind the Atom editor and anyone who’s ever used Atom knows why that editor is so popular. That means, out of the gate, Zed should have your attention.
The thing that really sets Zed apart from so many other code-worthy text editors is that it’s fast… as in super fast, like faster than any major text editor you’ve used. Click the icon to launch the app and it’s ready to go in the blink of an eye. Part of the reason for this is that Zed was written completely in Rust. The only editor you’ll ever use that’s faster is a terminal-based editor, such as vim.
Another reason why Zed rises above the competition is its real-time collaboration tools. This is where Zed raises eyebrows with its “multiplayer” feature. Essentially, this allows you to code with anyone (no matter where they are) in a way that’s pretty spiffy.
Zed ‘Multiplayer’
Imagine you’re collaborating with someone across the globe and they run into a problem. Instead of having to work with them via chat or checking out their code, you can hop right onto their project, help them, and then get right back to what you were working on. To make this even better, Zed has an integrated chat functionality. Along with the real-time collaboration feature, Zed becomes much more than just an editor. All you need to have to make use of the collaboration features is a valid GitHub account. Log in and you can start adding contacts and channels.
Then there are panels for chat, notifications, assistant, terminal access, and GitHub Copilot. One thing to keep in mind is that to use the assistant panel, you must add your OpenAI API key. Of course, the OpenAI account must have credits before it can function with Zed, but that’s fairly common. Another really cool feature is the inline Assistant, where you can click a button (while you’re working on a project), ask a question, and receive an answer. This feature alone makes Zed a compelling option. Run into an issue with a line of code, open the in-line Assistant, ask your question, and receive the answer.
Other Features of Zed
Other features include:
- User-configurable buffer size
- Customizable UI
- Project outline panel
- Automatic language detection
- Selection controls
- Inline Git Blame
- Split pane view
- Go to (line or column)
- Project diagnostics
- Terminal access
I installed Zed on Pop!_OS Linux and used it for some Python projects and found it to be quite the stellar application. Let me show you how to install Zed on any Linux distribution.
Installing Zed
First off, Zed is free to use and can be installed with a handy script the developers created. To install, open your terminal window and issue the command:
curl https://zed.dev/install.sh | sh
After the installation is completed, you must make sure ~/.local/bin is added to your $PATH with the command:
Once you’ve taken care of that, you can either log out and log back in or source your .bashrc file with:
source ~/.bashrc
At this point, you can either run Zed from your desktop menu or issue the command:
zed
Upon first start, I would suggest you log into your GitHub account. To do that, click on the collaboration icon at the bottom left of the Zed app and you’ll be prompted to log in. Once you’ve logged in, you’ll see the default channels that are available (Figure 1).
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Figure 1: The default Zed channels where you can chat with anyone who’s logged into their GitHub account through Zed.
Zed’s Built-In Chat
That built-in chat is a major bonus. You could hop onto the docs channel and get help with Zed or your project.
Think of Zed as a community-driven editor that’s far more than the typical tool. It’s an editor supercharged with collaboration, AI, and GitHub that can not only make creating your next project easier, but makes it easy to collaborate, get help, and even extend the feature set.
I will say, however, that the extensions “market” could be improved with better filters. For example, there are a lot of themes included in the pool of extensions and it would be nice to be able to filter them out so it’s easier to find what might interest you. I was surprised that I found zero Python extensions but did find extensions for the likes of Kotlin, Docker Compose, C#, CSV, Terraform, LaTeX, Bash, and more. And, as I mentioned, there are a lot of themes to choose from.
If your current editor doesn’t do much for you, and you’re looking for one that really sinks its teeth into real-time collaboration, Zed is a real treat. Give this editor a go and see if it doesn’t immediately pique your interest enough that it becomes your default.
You can install Zed on Linux and macOS. There is currently no Windows version available.
