The Rust-based, GPU-accelerated spiritual successor to Atom has exited beta

The developers of Zed (who previously developed Atom) have announced the release of Zed 1.0, after over two years of work. It's a major point release that signifies, according to the announcement, only that Zed is at a state that many developers are relying on it daily to ship software.

What's new

There was a ton of well-documented improvements with this release. Here are just a few that caught my eye:

• GIFs in Markdown previews: If you're inserting a GIF in a Markdown document, that GIF now properly animates in the preview.
• Command for viewing git commits: You can now view commits with git: view commit in Zed's command palette.
• Command for copying extensions: The command palette now lets you copy a list of your extensions to the clipboard, for easier sharing.
• Additional AI models: The APIs for DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash have been added.

Zooming out

Why this update matters: The developers' previous project, Atom, was a well-loved as a text editor, even if it was limited by Electron. Zed is a modern spiritual successor that doesn't have those limitations.

My take: I'm sticking with Kate for most of my development, but I'm glad to see a Rust-based open source competitor doing well.

Diving in

The fineprint: Go to the the full v.1.0.0 release notes to see everything added and fixed. The blog post announcing it also talks about upcoming plans, like an enterprise edition and a specialized change-tracking database.

Get it now: If you've never tried Zed, you can get it from the official Zed download page. My fellow Linux fans should check out the complete list of ways to install Zed on Linux.