Zed, 2023: the editor written from scratch in Rust
The last commit to Atom was merged on December 15, 2022. GitHub had announced the shutdown six months earlier — Atom’s usage had declined steadily since Visual Studio Code launched, and it showed no signs of recovering. Nathan Sobo, one of the engineers who had spent nine years building Atom from scratch at GitHub, was not watching. He had already quit to start Zed Industries, and was well into building the answer.
Sobo founded Zed Industries in 2021 with two other Atom veterans: Antonio Scandurra and Max Brunsfeld. Brunsfeld had built Tree-sitter — a parsing library that reads source code as a structured tree rather than a flat string of characters — and that tool became Zed’s spinal column, giving it syntactic awareness that most editors fake with regular expressions. The trio raised a seed round from Root Ventures, moved to San Francisco, and set about writing an editor in Rust with no Electron, no JavaScript, and no apologies.
The public beta arrived in March 2023, accompanied by a $10 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures and backed by, among others, Figma’s Dylan Field and GitHub’s own Tom Preston Werner. Twelve thousand developers were on the waitlist. The pitch was collaboration first: “Coding is inherently social,” Sobo told TechCrunch, “yet the tools available for talking about code limit conversations.” Zed wanted to be to programming what Figma had been to design — a canvas where multiple people could type in the same file, in real time, without emailing diffs.
The technical design was singular. To make Zed fast, the team built GPUI — a custom framework that rasterizes the entire editor window on the GPU, the same way a three-dimensional video game renders a battlefield. Every frame is computed in parallel by graphics hardware, not processed line by line by the CPU. The result is an editor that responds to keystrokes in a way that makes VS Code feel, in the words of early testers, like it is “thinking.” For collaboration, Zed used CRDTs — conflict-free replicated data types, borrowed from distributed systems research — so two engineers in different cities could write in the same buffer without a merge conflict.
On January 24, 2024, the team open-sourced everything: the editor under GPL, server components under AGPL, GPUI itself under Apache 2. The reasoning was blunt. “Our users are programmers,” the team wrote. “We need all the help we can get.”
One detail that did not make the press releases: the GitHub issue filed in Zed’s own tracker to track the public beta launch was Issue #2024. The number was a coincidence. The team found it funny enough to mention — the machine had filed its own timestamp.
The editors that followed — Fleet, Cursor, Windsurf — drew the same conclusions: performance is not optional, collaboration is native, AI belongs in the buffer. What Zed proved in 2023 was that you could write an editor from scratch, refuse every inherited convention, and still end up somewhere a programmer would want to live. The cursor blinks. It just does so considerably faster now.
Sources
- Zed (text editor) — Wikipedia — founding, open-source date, Rust implementation, version history.
- Zed raises $10M — TechCrunch — March 2023 public beta, Series A details, Sobo’s collaboration pitch.
- Zed is now open source — Zed Blog — January 24, 2024 announcement, GPL/AGPL/Apache 2 licensing, team quote.
- Zed code editor open-sourced — InfoQ — GPUI GPU rendering architecture, Rust and Tree-sitter technical details.