Workspace Persistence

Zed creates local SQLite databases to persist data relating to its workspace and your projects. These databases store, for instance, the tabs and panes you have open in a project, the scroll position of each open file, the list of all projects you've opened (for the recent projects modal picker), etc. You can find and explore these databases in the following locations:

  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Zed
  • Linux and FreeBSD: ~/.local/share/zed (or within XDG_DATA_HOME or FLATPAK_XDG_DATA_HOME)
  • Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Zed

The naming convention of these databases takes on the form of 0-<zed_channel>:

  • Stable: 0-stable
  • Preview: 0-preview

If you encounter workspace persistence issues in Zed, deleting the database and restarting Zed often resolves the problem, as the database may have been corrupted at some point. If your issue continues after restarting Zed and regenerating a new database, please file an issue.

Settings

You can customize workspace restoration behavior with the following settings:

{
  // Workspace restoration behavior.
  //   All workspaces ("last_session"), last workspace ("last_workspace") or "none"
  "restore_on_startup": "last_session",
  // Whether to attempt to restore previous file's state when opening it again.
  // E.g. for editors, selections, folds and scroll positions are restored
  "restore_on_file_reopen": true,
  // Whether to automatically close files that have been deleted on disk.
  "close_on_file_delete": false
}