My First Week with Zed

Installation

The installation was fast. The one-liner from their homepage was all it took:

curl https://zed.dev/install.sh | sh

Flawless and quick — typed zed, hit enter, and it was open.

First Impressions

The default theme was One Dark, which was no surprise given that the Zed team previously built Atom, the editor that popularized it. It looks clean: pastel code colors, a soft background that's neither too dark nor too bright, with a slight blue tint. The version Zed ships has a bit more yellow in the background text colors, but the overall palette feels largely unchanged from what Atom users will remember.

Vim Mode & Git Blame

I opened my c/ folder, turned on Vim mode, and started gliding through lines. What immediately caught my attention was the git line blame — it was instantaneous. Genuinely responsive in a way that felt snappy.

Configuration

Next I adjusted a few settings: disabled cursor blinking and switched the font to JetBrains Mono. Both were done by editing a single JSON file, and Zed's built-in autocomplete made it surprisingly easy. It was even completing font names inside the config — something I'd never managed to do in VSCodium despite trying multiple times. The JSON-based config is new territory for me, but Zed's implementation made it feel approachable. That level of polish in something as mundane as settings editing says a lot about the care put into this editor.

My Take on the Dev Setup

For those who still want an IDE, Zed is my pick. It's minimal but powerful. It has fewer extensions than VS Code, which some see as a limitation — but consider reframing it: the core features in Zed are better than VS Code's. For everything else, you can reach for the right tool:

• Shell — e.g., Git
• Web UI — e.g., Postman
• Separate app — e.g., a dedicated database client