Zed

Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor written in Rust by the people who created Atom. Nathan Sobo, Max Brunsfeld (creator of Tree-sitter), and Antonio Scandurra spent years at GitHub building Atom, watched it lose to VS Code, and started over with a clear thesis: an editor should be fast, multiplayer, and AI-native from the ground up. As of August 2026, Zed is fully past its 1.0 milestone (shipped 29 April 2026). The headline product story since spring is agentic editing at native speed: parallel agents in one window, Agent Client Protocol (ACP) so external agents such as Claude Agent, Codex CLI, OpenCode, and Cursor can run inside Zed, Zeta2 edit predictions, and a Business plan for org-level AI policy. Stable builds have continued weekly; community installs report releases in the 1.1x line through mid-August, with Mac, Linux, and Windows treated as first-class platforms after 1.0 parity work. The speed difference is still the first thing most people notice. Zed opens large projects in well under a second, scrolls 10,000-line files without jank, and keeps memory in a much lower band than Electron editors for the same monorepo. That comes from GPUI, the team's GPU-accelerated UI framework that paints via Metal on macOS. Collaboration remains built into the core, channels, multiple cursors, voice chat, and screen following, rather than bolted on as an extension. AI is optional but deep. Hosted models on Zed Pro currently include Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.x / Sonnet 5 / Sonnet 4.x, the GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna family, GPT-5.5/5.4 variants, and Gemini 3.x Flash/Pro. Free Personal users get 2,000 accepted edit predictions plus unlimited BYOK and external agents. You can disable every AI surface if you only want a fast editor. The honest trade-off remains the extension ecosystem. It is growing via WebAssembly extensions, but it is still smaller than VS Code's marketplace. For TypeScript, Python, Rust, Go, and web stacks the daily experience is excellent; niche languages and specialized VS Code-only tooling may still require staying put or dual-driving. Operationally, treat Zed as three products that share one binary: a GPU-native editor, a multiplayer runtime, and an agent host. Many Mac users only need the first layer and should stay on Personal with AI disabled or BYOK. Teams that standardize on hosted models should budget Pro seats plus a spend cap, then graduate chatty org policies to Business when compliance asks who can send code to which vendor. Compared with May-era content that still described $20 prompt bundles and older model codenames, the August 2026 story is cheaper entry for Pro, clearer token metering, and a much stronger external-agent story. Apple Silicon Macs benefit immediately from Metal rendering; keep macOS permissions for accessibility and full-disk access only if your extensions require them.