Zed, the code editor
The Last Editor
2023-11-11 — 2026-09-03
Wherein the Atom Diaspora Is Repurposed for the GPUI Framework, Forty-Two Million Dollars Is Amassed via Sequoia, and the Agent Client Protocol Is Mandated for the Integration of Silicon-Brained Laborers.
Some authors of Atom started work on another hype editor called Zed.
Zed comes out of the Atom diaspora. You have likely used it even if you haven’t heard of it because the authors wrote so much useful tooling that it ended up everywhere. Of the two founders, for example, Nathan Sobo and Max Brunsfeld — the latter was also the author of tree-sitter, whose parser generator used in many other code editors. While building it out, for example, they built the GPUI framework that seems to be a Rust GUI default.
- Open-sourced in January 2024: GPL for the editor, AGPL for the server-side components as announced, and Apache 2 for the GPUI framework underneath so that it can be reused in unrelated licences.
- Linux builds the same year, Windows in October 2025.
- A $32M Series B led by Sequoia in August 2025, taking the total to $42M.
- Version 1.0 in April 2026
- The profit model is something called Zed for Business.
1 Owning the stack
Their USP is that they wrote everything themselves, following the no borrowed foundations maxim. Rust, no Electron, no browser engine — it is the opposite of Atom. Instead of laying the interface out like a web page, Zed is organized like a video game both visually and in terms of trying to get stuff onto the GPU ASAP. As usual, pundits claim impressive speed metrics.
Collab via CRDT-based multiplayer editing. Hype tech underlying this includes DeltaDB, the sync engine announced at 1.0, which tracks changes at the character level, keeping consistency between many users.
They have gone very hard on being friendly to making space for agents as well as — or instead of — humans.
Zed wrote the Agent Client Protocol to standardize how agents interact with editors, and the protocol is all over the place now.
2 Extensibility
Extensions are Rust compiled to something called wasm32-wasip2. Supported targets: languages, debuggers, themes, icon themes, snippets, MCP servers. This excludes arbitrarily powerful and complicated extensions that render animations into the viewport or whatever.
3 Ecosystem
Gram is a March 2026 fork that strips the AI features, the collab, and the telemetry to produce a lean, fast, native editor.1
GPUI, the Rust GUI infra, is only supporting Zed-relevant functionality atm.
Footnotes
Zed’s own answer is that AI can be switched off in one line.↩︎