4.7 KiB
Zed
Welcome to Zed, a lightning-fast, collaborative code editor that makes your dreams come true.
Everything is under construction, including this README, but in the meantime, here is a high-level roadmap:
Roadmap
We will organize our efforts around the following major milestones. We'll create tracking issues for each of these milestones to detail the individual tasks that comprise them.
Minimal text editor
[Tracking issue][https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/2]
Ship a minimal text editor to investors and other insiders. It should be extremely fast and stable, but all it can do is open, edit, and save text files, making it potentially useful for basic editing but not for real coding.
Establish basic infrastructure for building the app bundle and uploading an artifact. Once this is released, we should regularly distribute updates as features land.
Minimal code editor for internal use
[Tracking issue][https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/6]
Turn the minimal text editor into a minimal code editor. We define "minimal" as the features that the Zed team needs to use Zed to build Zed without net loss in developer productivity. This includes productivity-critical features such as:
- Syntax highlighting and syntax-aware editing and navigation
- Language server support for Rust code navigation, refactoring, diagnostics, etc.
- Project browsing and project-wide search and replace
We don't need to implement everything, just anything stopping us from being productive. For example, maybe we don't implement soft wrap and continue to edit prose in another editor at first.
Minimal collaborative code editor for internal use
Once we're using Zed every day, our next goal is to collaborate in Zed every day. What features do we need to stop pairing over Discord screen sharing, then stop using Discord screen sharing entirely, then spend increasingly less time talking about code in Discord, etc? How much team collaboration can take place inside of Zed with code as its focus?
Private alpha for Rust teams on macOS
The "minimal" milestones were about getting Zed to a point where the Zed team could use Zed productively to build Zed. What features are required for someone outside the company to use Zed to productively work on another project that is also written in Rust?
This includes infrastructure like auto-updates, error reporting, and metrics collection. It also includes some amount of polish to make the tool more discoverable for someone that didn't write it, such as a UI for updating settings and key bindings.
The initial target audience is like us. A small team working in Rust that's potentially interested in collaborating. As the alpha proceeds, we can work with teams of different sizes.
Private beta for Rust teams on macOS
Once we're getting sufficiently positive feedback from our initial alpha users, we widen the audience by letting people share invites. Now may be a good time to get Zed running on the web, so that it's extremely easy for a Zed user to share a link and be collaborating in seconds. Once someone is using Zed on the Web, we'll let them register for the private beta and download the native binary if they're on macOS.
Expand to other languages
Depending on how the Rust beta is going, focus hard on dominating another niche language such as Elixr or getting a foothold within a niche of a larger language, such as React/Typescript. Alternatively, go wide at this point and add decent support several widely-used languages such as Python, Ruby, Typescript, etc. This would entail taking 1-2 weeks per language and making sure we ship a solid experience based on a publicly-available language server. Each language has slightly different development practices, so we need to make sure Zed's UX meshes well with those practices.
Future directions
Each of these sections could probably broken into multiple milestones, but this part of the roadmap is too far in the future to go into that level of detail at this point.
Expand to other platforms
Support Linux and Windows. We'll probably want to hire at least one person that prefers to work on each respective platform and have them spearhead the effort to port Zed to that platform. Once they've done so, they can join the general development effort while ensuring the user experience stays good on that platform.
Expand on collaboration
To start with, we'll focus on synchronous collaboration because that's where we're most differentiated, but there's no reason we have to limit ourselves to that. How can our tool facilitate collaboration generally, whether it's sync or async? What would it take for a team to go 100% Zed and collaborate fully within the tool? If we haven't added it already, basic Git support would be nice.