Our Vision

We’re Zed Industries, a small and passionate team with a vision for building the world’s best text editor—for you, and for your team.

Zed isn’t our first editor. It’s the culmination of more than a decade of experience building tools for developers. We created the hackable text editor, Atom, and the pioneering software platform that launched an entirely new generation of desktop apps, Electron. We also built Tree-sitter, an advanced syntax parsing framework used by the most popular editors in the world. Building tools that matter is in our DNA.

Now, we’re building something new again with that same drive and a new vision. We believe the best software is handcrafted, with unparalleled attention to detail. We believe software development is better when it’s a shared experience. We believe there’s a better way to write software—and this is just the start of the adventure.

We think there's a better way to write code, and it starts with the following assumptions.

Mission-critical tools should be hyper-responsive

When you move the cursor or type a character, you should see pixels on the next refresh of your display—every time. Even sub-perceptual pauses add up over the course of a day to create unnecessary stress.

Real-time collaboration produces better software

Pull requests have their place, but sometimes you just want to code together. It's more fun than code review, builds trust between colleagues, and it's one of the best ways to distribute knowledge through a team. But it has to be easy.

If you want someone's perspective on a piece of code, it should be as easy as sending a message to pull them into your working copy and start coding.

Conversations should happen close to code

If you want to talk about code on GitHub you have to commit and push it first, and pasting code into a chat application sucks. By treating keystrokes as the fundamental unit of change and integrating chat into the editor, we can make it easy to have a conversation about any line of code in any working copy–whether it was committed last year or just typed ten seconds ago.

Your editor should disappear

If you're living in a tool for hours every day, every pixel must carry its weight. The software you're creating should always be the focus. So we constantly ask ourselves how we can maximize signal and minimize noise. Our goal is to find the most efficient way to accomplish each coding task and make it accessible. Joyful coding starts with an editor that stays out of your way.

Want to work with us? Check out our job listings.