The open source Zed editor, built with Rust, has added SSH remoting to its feature list, though both the feature and the editor itself are in preview, and there is still no debugging support.
Zed remoting means that the editor runs locally but “language servers, tasks, and terminals run on the remote server,” according to the introductory post from developer Conrad Irwin. This is a critical feature for many developers and strong remote development support is one of the reasons for the popularity of Microsoft’s VS Code. There was an earlier version of remoting which sent traffic via Zed servers and this is now obsolete.
According to Irwin, Zed was always designed for remote code editing, but adding SSH remoting proved complex to implement. It is based on a remote daemon that continues running even if the connection drops. It also works with Zed collaboration, a shared editing experience, and getting this working correctly was another challenge.
SSH remote editing works with Linux and Mac targets but currently extensions are not supported on the remote machine. There is no automatic port forwarding, but it supports SSH arguments to enable this.
The main appeal of Zed is performance. Zed’s native code is faster and smaller than editors based on an embedded web browser (VS Code) or built with Java (JetBrains editors). Zed though is best thought of as an editor, and still lacks IDE-like features such as debugging support.
Collaboration is also a key feature. Irwin said, in a recent Apple podcast, that “one of the key kind of design things, is how do we build real-time collaboration correctly?” He also compared Zed to VS Code, stating that “you can take the browser emulator and the extensions APIs and all of that stuff that makes VS Code slow and clunky, and rebuild it natively in Rust using fast GPU native rendering.”
Zed was first released for the Mac and has official binaries for Linux, but Windows support comes only in the form of community builds.
The Zed roadmap shows a number of gaps in the features developers might expect. The to-do list includes not only debugging, but also general-purpose extensions, Git Commit and History, and a test runner.
There is AI support built in though, including an Assistant panel which can be configured for different model providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, Ollama, Google Gemini, and Copilot chat.
Zed is free, and according to the FAQ the company intends to make money through team collaboration features and possibly “enterprise-focused features”.
The Zed project is of interest partly as a faster alternative to VS Code, and partly as an example of a Rust desktop application. Zed is built using its own framework. It has a superficial resemblance to VS Code, making it an easier transition than switching to an editor such as neovim or emacs.
That said, the current Zed beta is too bare-bones for many developers and lacks the rich ecosystem that has grown around Microsoft’s editor.