Zed

Our take

Zed is the editor for people who notice latency. Built by the team behind Atom and Tree-sitter, it's written entirely in Rust with GPU-accelerated rendering, and the difference is visceral. Scrolling through a 10,000-line file feels like a native macOS app, not a web browser pretending to be one. With full Windows support (DirectX 11, WSL integration) shipping alongside macOS and Linux, the platform coverage gap that held Zed back in its early days is gone.

The AI layer is capable but deliberately not the center of gravity. Zed's assistant panel supports a wide range of providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Ollama, OpenRouter, and more), and their in-house Zeta2 model handles edit predictions. It works well for inline help and conversational coding. What it won't do is match Cursor's multi-agent orchestration or Claude Code's sustained reasoning on complex refactors, and that's a conscious design choice, not an oversight.

Where Zed stands alone is multiplayer. Built-in real-time collaborative editing means you can pair-program with a teammate in the same buffer, with cursors and selections visible live. No plugin required, no latency penalty. If your team does regular pairing or mob programming, nothing else on this list comes close.

The value proposition is unusually clean, though not quite as free once you lean on hosted AI: the editor is free, open source, and complete without AI. If you want Zed-hosted models, Pro is $10/month with $5 of included token credit and usage-based billing beyond that. Verified university students can get the equivalent plan free for a year, with $10/month in included credit. If you'd rather bring your own API keys, you pay nothing. For developers who want a fast, modern editor and treat AI as a useful addition rather than the main event, Zed is one of the strongest options available.