Zed

Welcome to Zed, a lightning-fast, collaborative code editor that makes your dreams come true.

Development tips

Dependencies

• Install Postgres.app and start it.

• Install the LiveKit server and the foreman process supervisor:

  brew install livekit
  brew install foreman
  

• Ensure the Zed.dev website is checked out in a sibling directory:

  cd ..
  git clone https://github.com/zed-industries/zed.dev
  

• Set up a local zed database and seed it with some initial users:

  script/bootstrap
  

Testing against locally-running servers

Start the web and collab servers:

foreman start

If you want to run Zed pointed at the local servers, you can run:

script/zed-with-local-servers
# or...
script/zed-with-local-servers --release

Dump element JSON

If you trigger cmd-alt-i, Zed will copy a JSON representation of the current window contents to the clipboard. You can paste this in a tool like DJSON to navigate the state of on-screen elements in a structured way.

Staff Only Features

Many features (e.g. the terminal) take significant time and effort before they are polished enough to be released to even Alpha users. But Zed's team workflow relies on fast, daily PRs and there can be large merge conflicts for feature branchs that diverge for a few days. To bridge this gap, there is a staff_mode field in the Settings that staff can set to enable these unpolished or incomplete features. Note that this setting isn't leaked via autocompletion, but there is no mechanism to stop users from setting this anyway. As initilization of Zed components is only done once, on startup, setting staff_mode may require a restart to take effect. You can set staff only key bindings in the assets/keymaps/internal.json file, and add staff only themes in the styles/src/themes/internal directory

Experimental Features

A user facing feature flag can be added to Zed by:

• Adding a setting to the crates/settings/src/settings.rs FeatureFlags struct. Use a boolean for a simple on/off, or use a struct to experiment with different configuration options.
• If the feature needs keybindings, add a file to the assets/keymaps/experiments/ folder, then update the FeatureFlags::keymap_files() method to check for your feature's flag and add it's keybindings's path to the method's list.
• If you want to add an experimental theme, add it to the styles/src/themes/experiments folder

The Settings global should be initialized with the user's feature flags by the time the feature's init(cx) equivalent is called.

To promote an experimental feature to a full feature:

• If this is an experimental theme, move the theme file from the styles/src/themes/experiments folder to the styles/src/themes/ folder
• Take the features settings (if any) and add them under a new variable in the Settings struct. Don't forget to add a merge() call in set_user_settings()!
• Take the feature's keybindings and add them to the default.json (or equivalent) file
• Remove the file from the FeatureFlags::keymap_files() method
• Remove the conditional in the feature's init(cx) equivalent.

That's it 😸

Wasm Plugins

Zed has a Wasm-based plugin runtime which it currently uses to embed plugins. To compile Zed, you'll need to have the wasm32-wasi toolchain installed on your system. To install this toolchain, run:

rustup target add wasm32-wasi

Plugins can be found in the plugins folder in the root. For more information about how plugins work, check the Plugin Guide in crates/plugin_runtime/README.md.