Zed, Open-Source Code Editor by the Creators of Atom, Now on Linux!

There's no dearth of modern open-source text editors for Linux in today's time, with options such as VSCodium, Gedit, Kate, Geany, VS Code, and the recently introduced Theia IDE being some of the most impressive ones.

There's another interesting editor that has been making waves in recent times by the creators of the now defunct Atom and Tree-sitter. You might've already heard about it, it's called Zed.

Earlier this year, the developers had open-sourced it under various licenses for handling the different components of it. Back then, many of our readers were unhappy to see that there was no Linux version available, just macOS.

Luckily, the developers have finally introduced a dedicated version for Linux.

Zed Debuts On Linux: What to Expect?

a screenshot of zed running on linux with a readme file open

Being a Rust-based editor, Zed is a great addition for Linux, and people who like to code on the various distributions now have one more option that they might potentially daily-drive.

During the launch, Software Engineer at Zed Industries, Mikayla Maki added that:

Zed's community has been vital to the rapid development of this Linux build. As we've discussed before, building a UI toolkit and application for Linux means working with an incredibly variable environment. From your GPU, to your distro, to your window manager, Zed has to handle it all.

And, I agree with her, building an app for Linux is not a task that can be taken lightly. The Zed team were also able to implement their in-house, open-source UI framework GPUI on Linux, thanks to its platform-agnostic nature.

Moreover, they are open to the idea of helping the community package Zed for distros or even making it available in the repos, and collaborating with them to make sure it works the way intended.

If you are interested in learning more, then you can go through the announcement blog.

📥 Get Zed

The suggested way of getting Zed for Linux is by running the following script:

curl https://zed.dev/install.sh | sh

You can also refer to the official website if you are looking for instructions on how to install it on other platforms.

Zed

If the above method is not your style, then you could try your hand at manually building Zed from source. Head to the official documentation to get started.

💬 Better late than never, am I right? Are you going to try this out on your computer?

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