Zed
Welcome to Zed, a code editor built using web technologies, designed to rethink some of the assumptions that underly most editors today. Some of the editor’s core features are the features it does not have:
- Tabs
- Always visible file tree
- Menus and buttons and bells and whistles
What you get instead is a bare bones, simple yet powerful editor that focuses on what matters most: making you as productive at editing code and text as possible. To enable this, Zed has:
- Multiple cursors. Once mastered, you will never edit code the same way again.
- Code completion based on symbols defined in your project, current file and snippets.
- Efficient project navigation at various levels of granularity:
- Files, quickly jump to the file you want
- Symbols, Zed indexes all symbols defined in your project and lets you quickly jump to the one you’re interested in
- (Vertical) split views, either 1, 2 or 3 vertical splits.
- Auto-updating preview split for various languages (including markdown and coffeescript).
- Editing of local files (via Chrome-specific APIs) and remote files (check the manual on how to do this)
Installation (Chrome App)
You can install Zed via the Chrome Web Store, or by cloning the github repo:
$ git clone https://github.com/zedapp/zed.git
$ cd zed
$ git submodule update --init
Then, in (a recent version of) Chrome, go to the “three-lined” menu > Tools > Extensions and click the “Load unpacked extension…” button, navigate to the app directory inside the Zed repository checkout. Zed should now run!
Installation (Standalone)
To build locally:
$ git clone https://github.com/zedapp/zed.git
$ cd zed
$ git submodule update --init
After this you can either build the version for your platform of choice:
$ make apps-mac
$ make apps-win
$ make apps-linux32
or
$ make apps-linux64
The builds end up in nw/build and the gzipped versions in release.
Inspiration
Inspiration for Zed comes from:
- Notational Velocity: the goto bar combining search with new file creation
- Apple’s iOS and recent Mac file management: abstraction from whether a file is open and by removing the idea that a file has to be explicitly saved.
Technology
- The excellent ACE editor
- Architect
- jQuery
- Underscore.js
- Require.js
Support
