Zed

Zed starts from a different place than most editors you've used. Instead of building on Electron and a browser engine, it's written from scratch in Rust and designed to spread work across multiple CPU cores while rendering through your GPU. The source on zed.dev even shows the team's own UI framework, GPUI, being worked on inside the editor. That architecture is the whole pitch: Zed calls itself "a minimal code editor crafted for speed and collaboration with humans and AI," and the speed claim rests on that native, from-scratch foundation, not on caching tricks layered over a web runtime.

The AI side runs on top of that same engine. Zed lets you run agents in parallel to edit files, navigate code and run tools "at native speed." The demo shows an agent reading crates, searching a codebase for "accessibility" and listing directories before proposing changes, with Claude Opus 4.6 selected as the model. You aren't locked into Zed's hosted models either. The free Personal plan allows unlimited use with your own API keys or external agents like Claude Agent and Codex CLI, which is a fair deal if you already pay for model access elsewhere. Edit predictions, Zed's inline completion feature, are capped at 2,000 accepted predictions on the free tier and unlimited on paid plans.

Collaboration is built in rather than bolted on. You can chat with teammates, code together in the same project and share your screen without leaving the editor. It's available on macOS, Linux and Windows, it's open source (there's a "Clone source" button right on the homepage), and the team ships weekly releases. There's also something called Delta now in public beta, though the scraped pages don't explain what it does. If you care about an editor that feels instant and treats AI agents as a first-class workflow instead of a sidebar chat, Zed is worth a serious look.