Zed is now available on Windows

(zed.dev)

223 points | by meetpateltech 11 hours ago ago

82 comments

  • Alupis 2 hours ago

    Zed looks and feels amazing to use. I test-drove it for a bit on my linux system, and the feel of it is difficult to convey to those who have not tried it yet. It's easy to overlook the significance of gpu accelerated editor - but I promise you, use it for a bit and you'll be sold.

    The only feature that is preventing me from switching to Zed is the current lack of DevContainer support[1]. After investing a significant amount of time perfecting a devcontainer (custom fat image with all tools/libs + config), it would be a large step backwards to go back to installing everything locally.

    There's a lot of eyes on this feature, so I'm hopeful it will be implemented in the future.

    [1] https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/11473

    • mercutio2 2 hours ago

      What does having a DevContainer get you?

      I’m all for documenting every bit of my setup, but beyond that…

    • droplit 2 hours ago

      Any chance you'd be willing to share more about your custom dev container?

    • 0x696C6961 an hour ago

      It works with devpods

  • miffy900 2 hours ago

    Just wanted to mention that some basic Windows-OS keyboard shortcuts don't work, like ALT+F to open the File menu. Also things like ALT+SPACEBAR to bring up the system context menu for the focussed window (the menu with maximise, minimise, close options etc.) do not seem to work. I'm guessing with the DirectX rendering backend, the 'app' is rendered more akin to a video game than a native win32 process.

    Also after install, the install directory takes up 400MB+. Even VSCode only takes up around 380MB. I believe it when they say it's not an Electron app, but I do wonder what's being packed in there. I was always under the impresion that Rust apps are pretty lightweight, but that install size is nearing Java levels of binary/dependency bloat.

    • tremarley an hour ago

      A 400mb+ install of bloat will upset many people

      This needs to be justified asap to help people understand and reconsider installing it.

      • hdjrudni 22 minutes ago

        I was a little sus, so I checked: https://imgur.com/a/AJFQjfL

        897MB! But it appears to have installed itself twice for some reason. Maybe one is an 'update' which it didn't clean up...? I'm not sure.

        Edit: I just opened it and it cleaned itself up. 408MB now. I guess it was in the process of upgrading.

  • jsheard 5 hours ago

    Have they implemented subpixel font rendering by now? I remember that being a sticking point when it came to Linux because they had designed their custom UI renderer around the Macs ubiquitous HiDPI displays, leading to blurry fonts for the much, much larger proportion of Linux (and Windows) users who still use LoDPI displays.

    • avdwrks 4 minutes ago

      I installed Zed and tested out a bunch of fonts on my 1440p monitor. It looks decent, but not great. I think that's more a byproduct of Windows' awful font rendering in general though moreso than a Zed specific problem. VSCode is no better.

      Seems like the only way to get high quality font rendering these days is a 4k+ display.

    • sapiogram 5 hours ago

      Idk about subpixel font rendering, but font rendering on Linux looks massively better after a patch last week: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992#issuecomme...

      • jsheard 5 hours ago

        That "after" image is still rendered with greyscale AA rather than subpixel, but whatever they changed did make it more legible at least.

      • pulsartwin 5 hours ago

        I'm glad there's finally some progress in that direction. If they actually implement subpixel RGB anti-aliasing, it would definitely be worth considering as an alternative. It's been surprising to see so many people praise Zed when its text rendering (of all things) has been in such a state for so long.

        • byproxy 44 minutes ago

          Yea, I tried to give it a go on Fedora, but the terrible text rendering made it a insta-delete, for me.

    • andyferris 2 hours ago

      > The Windows build uses DirectX 11 for rendering, and DirectWrite for text rendering, to match the Windows look and feel.

      As I understand, DirectWrite font rendering uses Windows subpixel font rendering. It seems OK on my monitor (better than the linux version) but haven't done any pixel peeping.

      They seem to have anticipated this issue and designed it accordingly!

    • TranquilMarmot 5 hours ago

      I tried it out on macOS and have a 1440p external monitor that the fonts just look horrible on. Looks fine on the laptop's "retina" display but blurry enough every else that it actually gave me a headache after a few hours.

    • typpilol 5 hours ago

      No lol

  • qwertytyyuu 7 minutes ago

    What is Zed? A vscode like editor?

  • 1a527dd5 4 hours ago

      [Window Title]
      Critical
    
      [Main Instruction]
      Unsupported GPU
    
      [Content]
      Zed uses DirectX for rendering and requires a compatible GPU.
    
      Currently you are using a software emulated GPU (Microsoft Basic Render Driver) which
      will result in awful performance.
    
      For troubleshooting see: https://zed.dev/docs/windows
      Set ZED_ALLOW_EMULATED_GPU=1 env var to permanently override.
    
    
      [Skip] [Troubleshoot and Quit]
    
    Ah bummer.
    • jsheard 4 hours ago

      That's more of an issue with your system than an issue with Zed, you have to veer pretty far from the beaten path to not have proper DirectX nowadays. Are you running Windows in a VM?

      • 1a527dd5 4 hours ago

        No, but I am remoted in to my dev box (over RDP/mstsc).

        • Maxatar 3 hours ago

          If you're using it via RDP then you won't notice any rendering performance issues since RDP itself has terrible rendering performance.

        • neurostimulant 4 hours ago

          Maybe try gaming-oriented remote desktop tools, like steam link or sunshine/moonlight. Those work great with directx, assuming you have a working gpu (at least integrated gpu) on your remote box. They also have way better latency, though use a lot more bandwidth.

          • KetoManx64 4 hours ago

            How am I supposed to ask for permission from IT to install Steam or gaming related tools like Moonshine just to use a code editor?

            • heavyset_go 2 hours ago

              They're productivity tools, not gaming software. You'll be faster and deal with less errors using the correct optimized remote desktop tool for your job, versus what you're using now, which can be slow and error prone.

              • rafram an hour ago

                > Moonlight

                > Open source game streaming client

                > Moonlight allows you to play your PC games on almost any device

                OK, fine, maybe Sunshine will be different.

                > Sunshine is a self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight.

                Maybe not.

                • heavyset_go 14 minutes ago

                  My post was answering the question of how they should ask for permission to use it. You pitch it as productivity software that helps you do your job better.

            • xmcp123 2 hours ago

              Every part of this sentence made me so sad.

              Your company trusts you to write code but not run code?

            • pezgrande 4 hours ago

              By explaining the advantages over "older" methods. A lot of people use Moonlight/Sunshine for non gaming related stuff, specially considering than the alternatives are all proprietary.

    • perching_aix 4 hours ago

      What does a text editor have to do to achieve >>awful performance<< when software rendering?

      • tom_ 2 hours ago

        Maybe it's misdetecting something? I used to use Remote Desktop for game development sometimes, as weather could make the journey to the office impossible, and the performance was always pretty ok, even with UE5 stuff making heavy use of Nanite running at 1440p.

        And if it was actually software emulated, which I can't believe for a moment, though I admit I never checked (I just always assumed the window contents were transmitted via some kind of video encoder) - then I can't imagine that a text editor would be a problem.

        The input latency might not be as good as you'd like.

      • aniviacat 4 hours ago

        I also get that message when opening Zed in a VM. The performance is not actually awful, I can use it just fine.

  • anta40 27 minutes ago

    I use this as Sublime replacement on my macOS. So far happy with it. Only use it as a general purpose text editor.

    Okay, I may ocassionally do some code editing on it. But most of the time it's gotta be VSCode or vim/nvim.

  • twoquestions 6 hours ago

    It's extremely refreshing to see the editor's memory and processor usage be smaller than the webapp tab I'm working on.

    I'm really liking it thus far!

    • eviks 5 hours ago

      Its binary is half a gig in size, so just like a browser, nothing fresh about that.

      • kstrauser 4 hours ago

        It has a huge amount of treesitter modules, etc., statically compiled into the executable. They're not all loaded the instant you fire it up.

      • zamadatix 5 hours ago

        Size on disk is about 64x less relevant than size in RAM for me. To give Zed some credit in this area, it's statically linked and the Linux binary is half the size as the Windows one.

        • Rohansi 5 hours ago

          What could they be statically linking to have a 400MB executable?

          • waterTanuki 23 minutes ago

            They wrote their own graphics renderering library for starters, that's bundled into the editor when compiled.

            https://www.gpui.rs/

      • waterTanuki 2 hours ago

        considering how cheap storage is nowadays nitpicking about binary size is a very weird take. Are you editing code on an esp32?

        • archargelod 2 hours ago

          I just refuse to use any software that baloons it's filesize. Not because I can't afford storage, but because there are always alternatives that have similar features and packed into fraction (usually less than 1%) of filesize. If one of them can do it and other can't, it's a bad product, that I have no intention to support.

          We should strive to write better software that is faster, smaller and more resilient.

          "Storage is cheap" is a bad mentality. This way of thinking is why software only gets worse with time: let's have a 400mb binary, let's use javascript for everything, who needs optimization - just buy top of the shelf super computer. And it's why terabytes of storage might not be enough soon.

          • waterTanuki 33 minutes ago

            I can empathize with how lazy some developers have gotten with program sizes. I stopped playing CoD because I refused to download their crap 150+ GB games with less content than alot of other titles that are much smaller.

            That said, storage is cheap, it's not a mentality but a simple statement of fact. You think zed balloons their file sizes because the developers are lazy. It's not true. It's because the users have become lazy. No one wants to spend time downloading the correct libraries to use software anymore. We've seen a rise in binary sizes in most software because of a rise in static linking, which does increase binary size, but makes using and testing the actual software much less of a pain. Not to mention the benefits in reduced memory overhead.

            VSCode and other editors aren't smaller because the developers are somehow better or more clever. They're using dynamic linking to call into libraries on the OS. This linking itself is a small overhead, but overhead none-the-less, and all so they can use electron + javascript, the real culprits which made people switch to neovim + zed in the first place. 400mb is such a cheap price to pay for a piece of software I use on a daily basis.

            I'm not here to convince you to use Zed or any editor for that matter. Use what you want. But you're not going to somehow change this trend by dying on this hill, because unless you're working with actual hardware constraints, dynamic linking makes no sense nowadays. There's no such thing as silver bullet in software. Everything is a tradeoff, and the resounding answer has been people are more than happy to trade disk space for lower memory & cpu usage.

  • timfsu 4 hours ago

    Unfortunately, I tried to use zed as my daily driver, but the typescript experience was subpar. While the editor itself was snappy, LSP actions like "jump to declaration" were incredibly slow on our codebase compared to VS Code / Cursor.

    • 0x696C6961 3 hours ago

      That doesn't make sense, they both use tsserver under the hood.

      • foobarbaz33 3 hours ago

        You could have an lsp server of infinite speed, but that wouldn't help one bit if the bottleneck is how the client deals with the messaging.

        The specific techniques used to send, receive, and parse JSON could matter.

        • hdjrudni 16 minutes ago

          Could, ya, but I'd be pretty impressed and sad if Rust didn't have really good JSON parsers/serializers by now.

          • steveklabnik 10 minutes ago

            It’s had them for a very long time, pre-1.0.

  • hdjrudni 13 minutes ago

    I switched from VSCode to Zed as my "I just need to edit this 1 little text file" app because VSCode was way too spammy. Every time I open it it wants to update something or complain about some extensions or complain that I had a file open and now it MUST close it because heaven forbid I open two things at once.

    I hope Zed stays clean. We'll see. So far so good. Was quite happy they had a JetBrains base hotkey setup. Had to add a few of my own but I could pretty easily, nothing missing so far.

  • _fzslm 5 hours ago

    I have waited for this for months... but it's still only an x86_64 binary!

    I love my ARM Surface Pro, and Zed would make a wonderful editor on this hardware. If anyone from Zed is reading this, please think about it!

    • sunshowers 5 hours ago

      I build Zed for Windows aarch64 from source -- works great, though the build process is quite slow on my 16GB Surface Pro. Definitely hoping for official binaries, though!

      • _fzslm 5 hours ago

        I think I got as far as installing the Visual Studio Installer so I could install Visual Studio and I just bailed on that whole thing, lol. I'll have to take some time out on a weekend to take another look :)

    • eyeris 3 hours ago

      For whatever reason, zed compilation on windows with msvc is extremely slow compared to the Linux counterpart.

      https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/145864 was opened because of the the discrepancy

  • breadwinner 4 hours ago

    I watched the video on the home page and thought it is weird that they spend an inordinate amount of time on frame rate. Who picks an editor based on frame rate?

    If you want to talk about perf in the context of a text editor show me how big of a file you can load--especially if the file has no line breaks. Emacs has trouble here. If you load a minified js file it slows to a crawl especially if syntax highlighting is on. Also show me how fast the start up time is. This is another area where Emacs does not do well.

    So Zed is available on Windows--but only if you have a x64 processor. Lots of people run Windows on Arm64 and I don't see any mention of Arm64. This is where the puck is heading.

    Also noticed Emacs key binding is in beta still.

    • STKFLT 4 hours ago

      High frame rates (low frame times, really) are essential to responsiveness which, for those who appreciate it, is going to make much more of a difference day to day than the odd hiccup opening a large file (not that zed does have that issue, I wouldn't know as I haven't tried opening something huge).

      • breadwinner 4 hours ago

        That's an interesting take. For whatever reason, frame rate is not one of my complaints about existing editors such as Emacs, VS Code, etc.

    • poly2it 4 hours ago

      It's not just frame rate, but also input delay. If you're using Visual Studio Code, you might be used to waiting 100 ms for a character you typed to appear. My personal workflow is based on Kitty and Neovim, which I've configured so that it can launch within 20 ms. Working without any input delay allows me to explore and edit projects at typing speed. As such, even tiny delays really bother me and make me lose my flow. I would believe Zed's focus on performance is motivated similarly.

      Also, I do not believe Windows on Arm64 is a very large demographic? Especially for developers, unless they're specifically into that platform.

      • breadwinner 4 hours ago
        • kbolino 3 hours ago

          Most of that is macOS and ChromeOS, not Windows.

          • jsheard 3 hours ago

            Yeah. The Steam survey isn't a perfect sample since it's skewed towards gamers, but that currently shows just 0.08% of Windows users are on ARM, while 81.5% of Mac users are on ARM.

            • breadwinner 3 hours ago

              That may be true if you're looking at all windows computers in existence. If you look at new laptops being sold you see different numbers. As of 2025, Arm processors hold about 13% to 20% of the market share for new Windows laptops. This is important because these are the people who are more likely to download and install your software.

    • bschwindHN 2 hours ago

      > Who picks an editor based on frame rate?

      Me! Frame rate and input latency are very important for a tool I use for hours every day. Obviously that's not the only feature I look for in an editor but if an editor _doesn't_ have it, I skip it. I also try to work on devices with 120Hz displays and above these days.

    • jay_kyburz 4 hours ago

      Yeah, Kate will choke on a large single line file. Its one of the very few issues I bump into from time to time.

    • scuff3d 4 hours ago

      This always makes me laugh. The editor was barely announced two years ago. They've built it from the ground up with native support now for three different operating systems. They're experimenting with some cool new features, and even though I don't care about it I've heard their AI integration is pretty damn good.

      But waaaaah they don't support a processor that accounts for probably less then 10% of Windows Machines

      • breadwinner 4 hours ago

        Ubiquity is pretty important when you're going to invest in learning a new editor. This is one of the advantages of vim for example. It is available everywhere... linux, windows, terminal, gui, etc.

        • scuff3d 27 minutes ago

          You mean... like a GUI editor that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux?

  • mythz 2 hours ago

    Nice but too little/too late, already switched to Linux - where Zed already works great!

  • olive-n 5 hours ago

    I installed the beta a week or two ago. Many of the files I tried opening in it just did not work at all. It can only open utf-8 encoded files.

    That is not a problem for code, but if you just want to open some random .txt file or .csv file, these are often enough not utf-8 encoded, especially if they contain non English text.

    The github issue for this is showing progress, but I think it's a mistake to promote the editor to stable as is.

  • marcelr 43 minutes ago

    tried to switch a few times

    i can’t describe it in any other way other than it feels cold to use

    i wonder if anyone else felt the same in earlier versions and feels that it’s fixed

  • chrysoprace 2 hours ago

    Nice to see. Will probably start using it over quick edits on Windows.

    I'd like to properly give it a go one day due to the effort put into its vim keybindings, but until then I'll stick to neovim.

  • mathnode 5 hours ago

    I tried it for a bit. But unless you want to use their choice of lsp/linter/whatever from what you are used to, then you will waste even more time customising zed to your needs from your previous solution.

  • newswangerd 2 hours ago

    I'm so impressed by how quickly this team can ship new features. It seems like every few weeks there's a new major update!

  • the__alchemist 4 hours ago

    Is this something like Sublime? Light/responsive editor for one-off files? But maybe with some better introspection? That would fill a niche for me; trying it. FYI download+install is the smoothest experience of any software I've loaded recently I didn't build myself. Going to daily-drive it for a bit and see what's up; promising!

    • evil-olive 3 hours ago

      as a 10+ year Sublime user, Zed is the best of the more "modern" GUI editors I've tried.

      I haven't fully switched over to using it as my daily-driver because Zed's heavy reliance on GPU rendering means that it locks up every time I suspend & resume my Linux box [0,1] but I'm optimistic about the progress they're making on it.

      0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7940

      1: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/23288

      • SnowingXIV 3 hours ago

        Was a heavy sublime user for many years, slowly migrated to vim (first sublime with vim keybindings) but now daily drive lazyvim and the defaults with that are very sane.

        Quick install on any platform and just works. And obviously plenty of configuration that’s available to you but if you haven’t I’d give that a go.

    • hbbio 2 hours ago

      Still on Sublime, and helix in terminal.

      Tried zed, it's interesting but several things are missing including the ability to skip extensions auto-update... which imho is critical for security.

    • KetoManx64 4 hours ago

      I still Sublime for quick text file changes and then Zed for programming/AI assisted tasks.

  • 8cvor6j844qw_d6 7 hours ago

    > Zed isn't an Electron app; we integrate directly with the underlying platform for maximal control.

    Sounds great. Looking forward to doing a simple test run with Astro SSG

  • rovingeye 5 hours ago

    The windowing is pretty broken if you use system scaling https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/40272

  • kundi 4 hours ago

    First, you should fix fundamental operations on Mac and other distributions - for example when you stash or perform operations on files from other tools, it will put the state out of sync.

    You can build the most beautiful and fastest IDE, but with this bugs, it’s useless

  • nwah1 7 hours ago

    Is it on winget?

    • janpio 6 hours ago

        > winget search zed
        Name                             Id                                Version     Match                             Source
        -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Zed Preview                      ZedIndustries.Zed                 0.208.4-pre Moniker: zed                      winget
      
      So not fully updated yet it seems.
  • desireco42 3 hours ago

    I don't use windows, but this is good development as all platforms should be present for editors to be worth using. I am happy Zed user since long time, I am happy it had kept with out demands, with adding AI, Git etc. Also integration of cli tools into AI is excellent and really refreshing.