Introducing Channels for Collaboration
January 17th, 2024
Channels
With today’s preview release, we’re launching a new feature called channels, which we have been using internally at Zed for the last few months.
We believe that great things are built by great people working together. Most programming today happens in isolation, primarily because the tools we have for working together are not great, yet...
Channels are the next step: a virtual office optimized for software teams. They allow you to actively pair together, to passively see what's going on, and work together better as a team.
Channels provide structure for organizing the work of a team. Each channel corresponds to a stream of work and is long-lasting enabling you to work together with people on large projects that take days or weeks to complete.
Joining a Channel lets you collaborate remotely on shared Zed projects. Our CRDT-based replication layer ensures that no matter how far away your peer, it feels like you are editing files locally.
Each Channel has an associated text file, the "Notes", that give you a free-form space to share ideas and updates. This enables frictionless handover between several people working on the same thing (or just lets you remember what you were doing yesterday!).
You can always see who is in which channel, which makes it easy to informally catch the people you need to talk to wherever they are in the world.
It's early days but channels have already changed the way we work and run the company. They made it not merely possible, but extremely effective, for everyone at the company to participate in the GPUI2 upgrade.
As we move closer to open source, we look forward to collaborating with all of you. Lets improve Zed in Zed!