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Frequently Asked Questions

Zed

How can I contribute?

Check out our contribution guide to learn how you can contribute to Zed.

How can I download Zed?

You can obtain the release build via the download page.

How do I log out of GitHub in Zed?

We currently don’t offer a convenient way for users to log out of GitHub from within Zed. If you’d like to log out, follow these steps:

Open the Keychain Access application
In the login keychain, find and delete the https://zed.dev entry
Restart Zed

How does private beta testing work?

When you receive an invite to test a feature in private beta, your user record in our database is registered to a particular feature flag. During the beta period, you must log in via the Sign in button in the upper right corner of Zed, which authenticates you through GitHub. A network connection is required when opening Zed during private beta testing, as Zed sends a request to our server to verify your access. If you are not associated with the feature flag, UI elements related to the feature will be hidden.

For features in private beta, we prioritize updates to the preview channel. During a private beta, we accelerate our preview patch release schedule to roughly a minimum of one update per day, including all the latest additions and fixes since the previous preview patch build.

Some users have noticed that, in certain cases, they can access private beta features on the stable channel. This occurs because private betas are not tied to a particular release channel, but rather scoped to specific users. Depending on the duration of the beta testing period, code related to the feature will gradually make its way into stable builds, as our minor update release cycle remains the same. While we recommend testing private beta features on the preview channel to access the most recent updates and improvements, you can use older preview patch builds, or potentially stable builds, if you don’t have access to preview—such as when using third-party packages maintained by developers who don’t ship Zed preview. However, be aware that you will be working with outdated versions of the feature.

Some deep-divers have found they can enable feature flags by changing a small snippet of code and compiling Zed from source; we’ll leave digging up that code as an exercise for the reader.

Is Zed extensible?

Yes! Zed currently supports various types of extensions, with support for deeper extension APIs planned.

Is Zed free?

Yes! Zed (the editor) is free for all to use, with binaries for macOS and popular Linux distributions readily available for download.

Is Zed open source?

Yes! Zed is open source!

Check out the announcement post for more details.

What are the release channels?

Nightly: Built daily from the main branch with the latest features. It has not gone through any testing and may have stability issues. Nightly isn’t public.
Preview: Our weekly release with recent features that have undergone initial internal testing. More stable than Nightly, but potentially less stable than Stable. Preview may contain experimental functionality and might experience reverts of recently-added features.

You should anticipate experiencing a higher frequency of updates if you are on Preview. If the frequency of these updates is distracting for you, you can disable automatic update checks via "auto_update": false and run manual update checks via command palette > auto update: check.
Stable: Our most production-ready version that has been tested in Preview for a week. This release is recommended for those relying on Zed for mission-critical work.

On a typical release Wednesday, we follow these steps:

Promote last week’s preview to stable
- The preview branch from the previous week (e.g., v0.180.x) is promoted to stable by taking the most recent preview tag and creating a new tag on the latest commit without the -pre suffix (e.g., v0.180.1-pre → v0.180.1)
Create a new preview branch
- A new branch is forked off of the main branch
- A tag with a -pre suffix is added to the latest commit (e.g., v0.181.0-pre) to mark the branch as preview
Prepare main for the next cycle
- The version number on main is bumped to the next minor version

During the week between minor releases, we may cherry-pick important fixes to the preview or stable branches and release new patches. The frequency of preview patch updates will increase during periods where we are conducting private beta testing of new features.

What can I expect of the beta?

While we are committed to building a stable, professional-grade editor, you’ll likely run into bugs and pain points throughout the beta phase. Additionally, Zed may not support all languages you use and may not be available for your preferred operating system. What we can confidently say is that we are working hard to bring you the features, support, and stability you need to make Zed your homebase editor for building great software.

As diligent as we try to be with every line of code we write, human error is inevitable, especially during periods of rapid development. Make sure to properly backup any code you are working on in Zed to protect yourself from potential catastrophic events. While we believe Zed to be safe to use, it is always advisable to err on the side of caution in these early stages.

What is Quality Week?

Zed is a large, complex codebase. While we work to ship a steady stream of bug fixes in our releases each week, periodically, we conduct what we refer to as “Quality Week.” During this time, we halt work on feature additions and pivot to working solely on user pain points within Zed. Prior to Quality Week, the community team spends time curating a project board of issues. We focus on finding issues that try to balance a small amount of work with a potentially large impact. We prioritize reducing cases where Zed can panic. The overall goal of Quality Week is to ship a more stable, refined Zed.

What is “Zednesday”?

We publish new minor patches for Stable and Preview every Wednesday (aside from some holidays), so we internally celebrate it by calling it “Zednesday!”

Don’t worry, we don’t know how to pronounce it either.

What platforms does Zed support?

Zed supports macOS, Linux, and Windows. You can download the latest builds here.

Where are language servers stored?

Language servers are stored at ~/Library/Application Support/Zed/languages. See language servers for more information.

Where are my configuration files located?

The settings.json can be found at ~/.config/zed/settings.json. See configuring Zed for more information. The keymap.json can be found at ~/.config/zed/keymap.json. See key bindings for more information.

Where can I find Zed’s log output?

See the troubleshooting documentation.

Where is Zed’s workspace data stored?

See the troubleshooting documentation.

Why a new editor? Why not contribute to an existing editor?

We stopped working on Atom and started on the foundations of Zed when we realized that we couldn’t shape Atom into our vision for the ultimate editor. While we respect and appreciate the innovations brought by Visual Studio Code, we never found ourselves loving it enough to give up on the dream. Ultimately, we think we’re going to add the most value to the world by creating something new. It’s also a lot more fun.

Why “Zed?”

We liked the simplicity of the name “Ed”, but we didn’t want to shadow ed, the editor in which the Unix was originally developed. We liked how adding the letter “Z” formed the word “Zed”, which is also the name for the letter “Z” in some dialects of English. As the last letter of the alphabet, it seemed like an appropriate name for the ultimate editor we are building.

Zed Pro

Where can I get help with my Zed Pro subscription?

If you have any questions about your Zed Pro subscription, feel free to send us an email at [email protected]. Make sure to write us from the email account associated with your Stripe/Zed Pro subscription.

Where can I learn about Zed Pro?

For information on plans, billing, and models offered through Zed Pro, see the documentation, or visit our pricing page.

GPUI

Why not use an existing Rust GPU UI library?

When we started on Zed, the Rust UI framework space was much younger. In absence of a mature solution that met our exact needs, the simplest path for us was to build it ourselves. We’re too far into things now to change at this point. We also like our framework. It’s working well for us.

Data And Privacy

Are collaboration sessions hosted on a server?

Yes. Collaboration traffic is proxied through our servers, which is more reliable than peer-to-peer connections and lets new collaborators join quickly.

For shared projects, Zed’s servers act as a relay. We maintain only the transient state needed to route the session, and that state is deleted as collaborators disconnect.

What data gets sent to your servers when collaborating?

user identification - Collaboration requires signing in. When you’re signed out, Zed doesn’t connect to the collaboration service. Once you sign in, we establish a WebSocket connection to one of our servers that’s associated with your Zed account, but we don’t send any other data.

project metadata - When you’re in a call and you share one of your projects, we send to our servers the name of that project and the relative paths of all of the files in that project. We also send the names of any language servers that are running for that project, and their status messages. Note that we only store relative file paths, language server statuses, and git status codes of the shared project on our server; all other data stays on the host and is proxied through our servers when requested by a guest.

file contents - When you’re sharing a project in a call, your collaborators can open any file in your project, as well as files that are returned by your language servers from requests like ‘go to definition’ and ‘find all references’. When they do open these files, we send them to our servers, which forward them to the collaborator. File contents are never persisted on our servers.

In general, collaboration access is limited to what’s needed to provide the session. Shared project contents, audio, video, and screen sharing are relayed in real time rather than stored. Session state is transient and deleted as collaborators disconnect and when the room ends.