Zed is now available on Windows
60 comments
·October 15, 2025jsheard
sapiogram
Idk about subpixel font rendering, but font rendering on Linux looks massively better after a patch last week: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992#issuecomme...
jsheard
That "after" image is still rendered with greyscale AA rather than subpixel, but whatever they changed did make it more legible at least.
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pulsartwin
I'm glad there's finally some progress in that direction. If they actually implement subpixel RGB anti-aliasing, it would definitely be worth considering as an alternative. It's been surprising to see so many people praise Zed when its text rendering (of all things) has been in such a state for so long.
TranquilMarmot
I tried it out on macOS and have a 1440p external monitor that the fonts just look horrible on. Looks fine on the laptop's "retina" display but blurry enough every else that it actually gave me a headache after a few hours.
typpilol
No lol
mythz
Nice but too little/too late, already switched to Linux - where Zed already works great!
1a527dd5
[Window Title]
Critical
[Main Instruction]
Unsupported GPU
[Content]
Zed uses DirectX for rendering and requires a compatible GPU.
Currently you are using a software emulated GPU (Microsoft Basic Render Driver) which
will result in awful performance.
For troubleshooting see: https://zed.dev/docs/windows
Set ZED_ALLOW_EMULATED_GPU=1 env var to permanently override.
[Skip] [Troubleshoot and Quit]
jsheard
That's more of an issue with your system than an issue with Zed, you have to veer pretty far from the beaten path to not have proper DirectX nowadays. Are you running Windows in a VM?
1a527dd5
No, but I am remoted in to my dev box (over RDP/mstsc).
Maxatar
If you're using it via RDP then you won't notice any rendering performance issues since RDP itself has terrible rendering performance.
neurostimulant
Maybe try gaming-oriented remote desktop tools, like steam link or sunshine/moonlight. Those work great with directx, assuming you have a working gpu (at least integrated gpu) on your remote box. They also have way better latency, though use a lot more bandwidth.
perching_aix
What does a text editor have to do to achieve >>awful performance<< when software rendering?
aniviacat
I also get that message when opening Zed in a VM. The performance is not actually awful, I can use it just fine.
twoquestions
It's extremely refreshing to see the editor's memory and processor usage be smaller than the webapp tab I'm working on.
I'm really liking it thus far!
eviks
Its binary is half a gig in size, so just like a browser, nothing fresh about that.
kstrauser
It has a huge amount of treesitter modules, etc., statically compiled into the executable. They're not all loaded the instant you fire it up.
zamadatix
Size on disk is about 64x less relevant than size in RAM for me. To give Zed some credit in this area, it's statically linked and the Linux binary is half the size as the Windows one.
Rohansi
What could they be statically linking to have a 400MB executable?
waterTanuki
considering how cheap storage is nowadays nitpicking about binary size is a very weird take. Are you editing code on an esp32?
breadwinner
I watched the video on the home page and thought it is weird that they spend an inordinate amount of time on frame rate. Who picks an editor based on frame rate?
If you want to talk about perf in the context of a text editor show me how big of a file you can load--especially if the file has no line breaks. Emacs has trouble here. If you load a minified js file it slows to a crawl especially if syntax highlighting is on. Also show me how fast the start up time is. This is another area where Emacs does not do well.
So Zed is available on Windows--but only if you have a x64 processor. Lots of people run Windows on Arm64 and I don't see any mention of Arm64. This is where the puck is heading.
Also noticed Emacs key binding is in beta still.
STKFLT
High frame rates (low frame times, really) are essential to responsiveness which, for those who appreciate it, is going to make much more of a difference day to day than the odd hiccup opening a large file (not that zed does have that issue, I wouldn't know as I haven't tried opening something huge).
breadwinner
That's an interesting take. For whatever reason, frame rate is not one of my complaints about existing editors such as Emacs, VS Code, etc.
poly2it
It's not just frame rate, but also input delay. If you're using Visual Studio Code, you might be used to waiting 100 ms for a character you typed to appear. My personal workflow is based on Kitty and Neovim, which I've configured so that it can launch within 20 ms. Working without any input delay allows me to explore and edit projects at typing speed. As such, even tiny delays really bother me and make me lose my flow. I would believe Zed's focus on performance is motivated similarly.
Also, I do not believe Windows on Arm64 is a very large demographic? Especially for developers, unless they're specifically into that platform.
breadwinner
It is 18% according to this story: https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/projections-show-that-a...
kbolino
Most of that is macOS and ChromeOS, not Windows.
jay_kyburz
Yeah, Kate will choke on a large single line file. Its one of the very few issues I bump into from time to time.
scuff3d
This always makes me laugh. The editor was barely announced two years ago. They've built it from the ground up with native support now for three different operating systems. They're experimenting with some cool new features, and even though I don't care about it I've heard their AI integration is pretty damn good.
But waaaaah they don't support a processor that accounts for probably less then 10% of Windows Machines
breadwinner
Ubiquity is pretty important when you're going to invest in learning a new editor. This is one of the advantages of vim for example. It is available everywhere... linux, windows, terminal, gui, etc.
timfsu
Unfortunately, I tried to use zed as my daily driver, but the typescript experience was subpar. While the editor itself was snappy, LSP actions like "jump to declaration" were incredibly slow on our codebase compared to VS Code / Cursor.
0x696C6961
That doesn't make sense, they both use tsserver under the hood.
foobarbaz33
You could have an lsp server of infinite speed, but that wouldn't help one bit if the bottleneck is how the client deals with the messaging.
The specific techniques used to send, receive, and parse JSON could matter.
_fzslm
I have waited for this for months... but it's still only an x86_64 binary!
I love my ARM Surface Pro, and Zed would make a wonderful editor on this hardware. If anyone from Zed is reading this, please think about it!
sunshowers
I build Zed for Windows aarch64 from source -- works great, though the build process is quite slow on my 16GB Surface Pro. Definitely hoping for official binaries, though!
_fzslm
I think I got as far as installing the Visual Studio Installer so I could install Visual Studio and I just bailed on that whole thing, lol. I'll have to take some time out on a weekend to take another look :)
eyeris
For whatever reason, zed compilation on windows with msvc is extremely slow compared to the Linux counterpart.
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/145864 was opened because of the the discrepancy
mathnode
I tried it for a bit. But unless you want to use their choice of lsp/linter/whatever from what you are used to, then you will waste even more time customising zed to your needs from your previous solution.
the__alchemist
Is this something like Sublime? Light/responsive editor for one-off files? But maybe with some better introspection? That would fill a niche for me; trying it. FYI download+install is the smoothest experience of any software I've loaded recently I didn't build myself. Going to daily-drive it for a bit and see what's up; promising!
hbbio
Still on Sublime, and helix in terminal.
Tried zed, it's interesting but several things are missing including the ability to skip extensions auto-update... which imho is critical for security.
evil-olive
as a 10+ year Sublime user, Zed is the best of the more "modern" GUI editors I've tried.
I haven't fully switched over to using it as my daily-driver because Zed's heavy reliance on GPU rendering means that it locks up every time I suspend & resume my Linux box [0,1] but I'm optimistic about the progress they're making on it.
SnowingXIV
Was a heavy sublime user for many years, slowly migrated to vim (first sublime with vim keybindings) but now daily drive lazyvim and the defaults with that are very sane.
Quick install on any platform and just works. And obviously plenty of configuration that’s available to you but if you haven’t I’d give that a go.
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KetoManx64
I still Sublime for quick text file changes and then Zed for programming/AI assisted tasks.
olive-n
I installed the beta a week or two ago. Many of the files I tried opening in it just did not work at all. It can only open utf-8 encoded files.
That is not a problem for code, but if you just want to open some random .txt file or .csv file, these are often enough not utf-8 encoded, especially if they contain non English text.
The github issue for this is showing progress, but I think it's a mistake to promote the editor to stable as is.
rovingeye
The windowing is pretty broken if you use system scaling https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/40272
8cvor6j844qw_d6
> Zed isn't an Electron app; we integrate directly with the underlying platform for maximal control.
Sounds great. Looking forward to doing a simple test run with Astro SSG
Have they implemented subpixel font rendering by now? I remember that being a sticking point when it came to Linux because they had designed their custom UI renderer around the Macs ubiquitous HiDPI displays, leading to blurry fonts for the much, much larger proportion of Linux (and Windows) users who still use LoDPI displays.