Zed

Zed is written in Rust and renders through GPUI, a GPU-accelerated UI framework the team built for the editor. The payoff is low input lag and quick project-wide search, which you notice most in large repositories where other editors start to drag. If you have ever waited on a slow "find in files," this is the part you'll feel first. Speed sounds like a small thing until your editor makes you wait. It isn't small.

The Agent Panel takes a plain-text request and lets an AI agent search your codebase, edit files, and call tools to finish it. You can run more than one agent at the same time, so a long task doesn't block you from working elsewhere. According to Zed, agents can also work through a task in the background while you keep typing.

Collaboration is a core feature, not a plugin. You can share a project, chat with teammates, and edit the same files together, and shared screen and terminal views are part of the same flow. As a collaborative code editor, Zed makes pairing feel like sitting at the same desk. For remote teams, this cuts out the usual dance of screen-sharing during a review, where one person drives and everyone else leans in to see a shared screen that keeps blurring at the exact moment it matters most.

Zed Pro includes hosted models out of the box, but you can also bring your own API keys from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others. That gives you a way to keep using an existing AI contract instead of paying twice. Think of Zed as a flexible AI coding assistant that plugs into whichever provider you already trust, rather than locking you to one. The free trial even bundles some usage credit so you can test hosted models first.

Beyond chat-style agents, Zed predicts your next edits as you type and you accept them with a keystroke. It's the kind of feature meant to disappear into your normal workflow rather than demand attention, and unlimited accepted predictions come with Pro. Not flashy. Just useful.

The whole thing matters most when you're deep in work. The whole editor is open source under GPL v3, including the AI work, so you can read exactly what the agent panel does under the hood. No black box. Extensions cover language servers, themes, and Vim-style keybindings for people who can't live without modal editing.