Zed, the code editor from Atom creator Nathan Sobo, just hit 1.0 — and it's a clean break from the past. Atom famously forked Chromium to build a desktop app, inadvertently birthing Electron along the way, the framework that later became the backbone of VS Code. Sobo's team decided web tech puts a ceiling on editor performance, so they ditched Electron entirely and rewrote everything in Rust. The entire UI is rendered like a game engine: data goes straight to GPU shaders, powered by their own framework called GPUI.
Five years, over a million lines of code, and support for Mac, Windows, and Linux later, Zed has checked all the modern editor boxes: Git integration, SSH remote development, a debugger, rainbow brackets. On the AI front, Zed can run multiple agents in parallel inside the same window — each on its own thread. The editor predicts your next edit at the keystroke level and suggests what to change next. Its open Agent Client Protocol (ACP) already works with Claude Agent, Codex, OpenCode, and most recently Cursor.
Zed is also launching an enterprise tier, Zed for Business, with centralized billing, role-based permissions, and team management. The company raised a $32 million Series B led by Sequoia in February, bringing total funding to over $42 million. The team is already building DeltaDB, a sync engine based on CRDTs (conflict-free replicated data types) that tracks every character-level change. The goal: let multiple people — and multiple AI agents — share a live code view, making it possible to review AI-generated code in its original context instead of waiting for a pull request. Zed is open source and claims hundreds of thousands of daily active developers.