Thank you for the quick fix! Your steps worked perfectly.
In any case, I'd like to add that I'm hoping an ACP adapter for OpenAI Codex is in the works; I've grown pretty fond of GPT-5, and would like to be able to tap into my existing ChatGPT Plus subscription; I'd rather not use API pricing at the moment. I prefer using Claude Code vs directly hitting the Anthropic API for the same reason.
Heck, an ACP adapter for Cursor CLI (itself based on Gemini CLI, right?) would even be useful; as that would also let me pick GPT-5.
That doesn't guarantee it will have paid contributors indefinitely, but the same is true of the other editors you listed. It does, however, guarantee that if Zed (the company) were to disappear, community members would be free to continue using the Zed editor (and developing it) in perpetuity!
The problem is the concern of future development. Zed the company controls what gets merged. If it is profitable to leave some features out, will they leave them even if there is PR? Or something else. Compare it to the problems of Chromium.
You can pay for Zed today if you'd like - https://zed.dev/pricing - and also the editor itself is open-source under the GPLv3 license. So if at any point in the future Zed changes direction in a way you don't like, you are perpetually free to build the version you liked from source (or make a community fork and take it in a different direction).
No, it's not odd, I like this take a lot. They almost need a dropdown menu indicating where you'd like your money to go to (editor, LSP, etc).
I'd also much rather have a means of paying a single flat fee to indicate my support than yet another subscription which is misleading because I have zero interest in the AI components of Zed.
I'm enjoying using Zed, and I do pay for tools I use regularly. It's now approaching a month of daily use for me and I don't see that changing. But to echo the other replies, I'm uninterested in the LLM tools. I don't use those normally and paying for that as a way to support Zed would send the wrong signal. You have to be careful when you restrict what people can pay for, because that will become what you optimize for which may not be what your users actually care about.
Zed is fast, easy to configure (so far, maybe some hard parts I haven't run into yet), works well with the languages I care about via LSPs, and the collaboration features are compelling. I want to pay to support that, I don't want to pay for an LLM feature I don't care about that ends up distracting from the progress on the things I want to see maintained or improved.
I already pay for Zed Pro, but my fear (and likely GP's as well) is that this doesn't provide enough revenue for the team.
Since switching from Emacs last year, I have absolutely loved how this editor has evolved, and I am looking for any way to directly support the effort. I have been a Zed Pro subscriber for quite a while now, and I have started trying to contribute to the codebase, but I really wish there were monetization options beyond making a spread on Anthropic API pricing.
Big fan of Zed. I want to echo a sibling comment that I don't see that as paying for Zed, I see it as paying for LLM usage. And since I already have my own LLM keys, I just use those instead.
I can't pay for Zed Pro using my work funds because it's an unapproved AI service. Can you provide another way to pay? E.g. cross device settings sync or professional support.
I'm a big fan of Zed and having met much of the team I think it's some great people building a great product. But I do echo concerns that while the intentions are all honorable the incentives of the pricing structure, business environment, and now a funding round are concerning in the long term. I don't think anyone at Zed has a single ill intent or a secret master plan but these days anything I'm not paying for I just assume is going to be enshittified eventually. Especially for an app where the only paid features are AI-centric and there's a VC expecting to make multiples on a $60m investment.
So here's my ask: let me pay for it without paying for AI! None of my use cases will stress your servers; I have `"disable_ai": true` in my settings.json. Give me a $5/mo "support the devs tier" or a $10/mo tier with some random app quality-of-life features and I'm there. I specifically want to pay for good software without paying for AI to signify the value proposition that still exists there cause I don't think a VC would believe me otherwise.
> Given Rust's numerous benefits, is having subpar compilation time really that big of a deal?
As someone who uses Rust as a daily driver at work at zed.dev (about 600K LoC of Rust), and Zig outside of work on roc-lang.org (which was about 300K LoC of Rust before we decided to rewrite it in Zig, in significant part because of Rust's compilation speed), yes - it is an absolutely huge deal.
I like a lot of things about Rust, but its build times are my biggest pain point.
A better argument against vector embeddings for AI code agents is that model performance degrades with number of tokens used (even when well below the context window limit), and vector chunks are more prone to bloating the context window with unhelpful noise than more targeted search techniques.
Claude Code doesn't do vector indexing, and neither does Zed. There aren't any rigorous studies comparing these tools, but you can find plenty of anecdotes of people preferring the output of Claude Code and/or Zed to Cursor's, and search technique is certainly a factor there!
Yes and no. An ecosystem can grow, even grow exponentially. But it is sensitive to competitive pressures. VSCode today is so much more widely adopted than anything before it. More than emacs, vim, anything really. So Zed has a good chance because it's simply excellent and many people (myself included) will be motivated to make it happen. But it's not determined that it will succeed in growing a comparable ecosystem.
One thing that works in favour of Zed, which previous IDEs didn't have, is that it's a lot easier to program things today, because of AI. It may even be possible to port many of the more popular extensions from VSCode to Zed with relatively low investment.
Zed's only real differentiator I can see right now is that they're not VSCode, and not run by Microsoft. Their AI isn't really any better than major competitors', and AI integration is table stakes for most new IDEs now anyway. They're missing a LOT of basic features still, their extension system is very lacking, and the extension library us still small.
If the community goodwill can be maintained, and they can expand their extension system capabilities, the community will probably catch them up to the effective VSCode extension library size pretty quickly (at least for a 95% of user's needs cases). But I'm seeing a lot of indications they're headed toward enshitification before they even get fully off the ground. I'm just hoping they avoid the obvious pitfalls of prioritizing only profitable new features and flavors of the month when their only real path to success relies so much on tons of unpaid open source community contributions.
I would question that logic and offer the following example: Panic released Nova, a very nice editor that included a JS plugin system to make porting extensions easier. It was not originally (but might be now) set up for easy porting of VSCode extensions.
To date I know of barely anyone using it.
VSCode kind of had Atom’s audience to build off of, and other editors don’t always have that runway.
Awesome, thank you. I've been trying it for the last few minutes, really liking it. Pretty impressed with how well it works using ollama + qwen3:32b
Two nitpicks:
1) the terminal is not picking up my regular terminal font, which messes up the symbols for my zsh prompt (is there a way to fix this?)
2) the model, even though it's suggesting very good edits, and gives very precise instructions with links to the exact place in the code where to make the changes, is not automatically editing the files (like in the video), even though it seems to have all the Write tools enabled, including editing - is this because of the model I'm using (qwen3:32b)? or something else?
Edit: 3rd, big one, I had a js file, made a small 1 line change, and when I saved the file, the editor automatically, and without warning, changed all the single quotes to double quotes - I didn't notice at first, committed, made other commits, then a PR - that's when I realized all the quotes changes - which took me a while to figure out how they happened, until I started a new branch, with the original file, made 1 change, saved and then I saw it
Can this behavior be changed? I find it very strange that the editor would just change a whole file like that
1. You can specify your terminal font via terminal.font_family in zed settings.json
2. Not sure.
3. For most languages, the default is to use prettier for formatting. You can disable `format_on_save` globally, per-language and per project depending on your needs. If you ever need to save without triggering format ("workspace: save without formatting").
Prettier is /opinionated/ -- and its default is `singleQuote` = false which can be quite jarring if unexpected. Prettier will look for and respect various configuration files (.prettierrc, .editorconfig, via package.json, etc) so projects can set their own defaults (e.g. `singleQuote = true`). Zed can also be configured to further override prettier config zed settings, but I usually find that's more trouble than it's worth.
If you have another formatter you prefer (a language server or an external cli that will format files piped to stdin) you can easily have zed use those instead. Note, you can always manually reformat with `editor: format` and leave `format_on_save` off by default if that's more your code style.
Thank you for the excellent and informative reply. Will try it out
It would be nice for prettier to throw a user warning before making a ton of changes on save for the first time, and also let them know where they can configure it
agreed! I was not a huge fan of the AI integration before in Zed and would always switch to Cursor (or, lately Claude Code) to actually get something done. Now that Zed can target specific pieces of code from the sidebar and edit them directly, it's been my goto for the last 24 hours. I've yet to "eject" to my old tools.
> I don't want "agentic" tools, I just want to back and forth with an LLM to get a better idea.
Ah! So you can get that experience with the agent panel (despite "agent" being in the name).
If you click the dropdown next to the model (it will say "Write" by default) and change it from "Write" to "Minimal" then it disables all the agentic tool use and becomes an ordinary back-and-forth chat with an LLM where you can add context manually if you like.
Also, you can press the three-dots menu in the upper-right and choose New Text Thread if you want something more customizable but still not agentic.
- Start a new Claude Code Thread, which will kick off the background download of the new Claude Code ACP adapter.
- Wait a few seconds, then start another Claude Code Thread. The new thread will use the updated one.
We're working on a nicer UX for getting updated versions, which we'll definitely ship before Claude Code support leaves beta!
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