Zed

Zed is built from scratch in Rust to be the fastest code editor you can run. It is not an Electron app wrapping a browser. Every pixel is GPU-rendered, and it shows: files open instantly, scrolling is smooth, and search across a huge repo feels immediate. Built by the team behind Atom, it has real-time multiplayer editing baked in, so you can share a workspace and pair without setup, plus AI assistant integration with Claude, GPT, and local models through Ollama.

After five years in beta, Zed shipped 1.0 in 2026. That matters, because the 'is it still early?' question is now settled. The editor is stable, free, and open source. You can run it forever without paying a cent, using your own API keys for any AI features you want.

Pricing is now clear instead of evolving. Personal is free and includes a couple thousand AI edit predictions a month. Pro is 10 dollars a month for unlimited predictions plus 5 dollars of hosted-model token credit, usage-based after that. Business is 30 dollars per seat for org-wide model policies, data governance, and access controls. Solo developers get the fastest editor available for nothing. Small teams gain from the multiplayer editing. Larger teams weigh the governance tier against the one real gap below.

The catch is the extension ecosystem. VS Code has tens of thousands of extensions; Zed has hundreds. Before you switch, confirm your language server, your debugger, and the niche extensions your workflow depends on actually exist. The editor is excellent. The ecosystem is still catching up.