After the shutdown of the Atom text editor project, its creators built a new editor named Zed. Written in Rust and optimized to leverage modern hardware, Zed feels fast. It has all the features we expect from a modern editor: support for many programming languages, a built-in terminal and multibuffer editing to name a few. AI-assisted coding is available through integration with several LLM providers. As ardent pair programmers we're intrigued by the remote collaboration feature built into Zed. Developers find each other via their GitHub IDs and can then collaborate on the same workspace in real time. It's too early to tell whether development teams can and want to escape the pull of the Visual Studio Code ecosystem, but Zed is an alternative to explore.
