Notes on Zed

Alternative title: “Shilling Zed”

What is Zed?

Zed is an “IDE” like Visual Studio Code, but unlike VSCode, its interface is native to your computer. This gives it a major speed and memory boost over the sort of google-chrome-in-a-trenchcoat model of development common in today’s commercial software.

How much faster is it?

I’m not too concerned with the exact metrics, but the first website¹ DuckDuckGo pulls up claims Zed starts up 10 times faster and uses 77% less memory on average.

**Startup Speed**
Scenario	Time (Zed)	Time (VSCode)
Cold Startup	0.12sec	1.2sec
1,000 + file codebase	0.18sec	2.1sec
10,000 file codebase	0.25sec	3.8sec

**Memory Usage**
Scenario	Zed	VSCode	Difference
Empty editor with nothing open	45MB	180MB	75% less
1,000+ file project	85MB	320MB	73% less
10,000+ file project	140MB	650MB	78%
Empty editor with 20 extensions	160MB	890MB	82% less

Where can I get Zed?

Right over there: zed.dev/download

It’s open source, to. The full source is available on github. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it!

Are those AI features? Get that shit off my computer! And why is there a sign-in button?

Relax. The developers are not egocentric morons, and they accounted for sane people like you and me. In settings, click Edit in settings.json and replace the main block with this:

{ "title_bar": { "show_sign_in": false, }, "disable_ai": true, }

That should be it. Personally I don’t use Zed all that much except to keep tabs on its development.It is, however my #1 recommendation to anyone looking to start programming who, without guidance, would make the mistake of downloading VS Code. GLHF

References

Zed Editor vs VS Code 2025, Mark Ai code