zed-fonts VS zed

I like the build of Iosevka that the Zed editor people made, called Zed Mono. It's hosted on github [0] but there are no screenshots. You can see kind of how it looks in the screenshots of their editor on their website though [1]

0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed-fonts/releases

1: https://zed.dev/

did https://github.com/zed-industries/zed-fonts/releases/tag/1.2... not work for you?

In case anyone else stumbles across this, they created a custom build of Iosevka called Zed Mono. I also needed to create a custom build to support ligatures (see https://github.com/zed-industries/zed-fonts/issues/2)

Devcontainers + Claude + Pi

[1] Zed https://zed.dev/

[2] Terminal threads https://zed.dev/blog/terminal-threads

As sort of byproduct also replaced Alacritty + Zellij (i just don't have the need to use more, 3 weeks of new setup)

That said, sometimes you do just want an editor, not a full blown IDE, and for that for the last few months I've been experimenting with Zed. It's okay. I've had some weird issues with their terminal emulator; I don't know what they are doing but my ZSH config doesn't load right so it sometimes gets stuck in what looks like an infinite loop, and then my PATH is all messed up... IDK, I expect my editors to kinda just work, but overall, I like the look and feel and for when I just need to edit a file, it's fine.

That's a link to a hacker news post, which links to a reddit post, which links to https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589 if anyone wants to go right to the 'open' issue.

This is a post-mortem, not a launch post. Paneflow is a native terminal workspace, splits, panes, branch-aware workspaces, session restore, built in pure Rust on top of Zed's GPUI framework and the upstream alacritty_terminal crate. It started as a port of cmux, a macOS-only Swift/AppKit project, and the Rust rewrite forced a string of decisions I had no good intuition for at the start. I want to walk through the ones that mattered: which UI frameworks I tried and rejected, how the GPUI/alacritty boundary actually looks, how dev-server detection works under the hood, the N-ary layout tree that replaced binary splits, the cross-platform PTY plumbing, the JSON-RPC control plane that makes agents first-class, and four lessons that surprised me.

Copying my own comment below, with GH links and my (non-AI) summary after skimming:

> https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7054

> https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589

> TL;DR: Mix of language tooling, unsigned proprietary blobs, corrupted and/or GLIBC-dependent files, redundant copies of already-installed executables. The Node packages especially are able to run scripts on install. Personal preference aside, might also create issues with security laws, certifications. All without user consent.

> Issues opened in January and June 2024. They've been rejected, closed, and opened a couple times since then. No changes directly improving this yet as of April 2026.

So... If you want broad language support via LSP servers, then you're going to have to bring in other ecosystems, and Node/Typescript is a big one that doesn't always have alternatives. [0] That's not a Zed-specific problem.

IMO the real issue with Zed is the "runs them by default without asking" part. Plus the questionable practices with binary blobs and the cavalier attitude towards it, when I can just use an editor that... Doesn't do any of that.

[0] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/impleme...

Just injecting this here: What I've been missing is an equivalent for GitHub's "blame prior revision" feature to quickly follow through the history of individual source lines.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/42583

Thanks for building an awesome product :)

Zed - https://zed.dev/

Integrates a lot of agents (I use it with OpenRouter and directly with Pi) natively, is fast (you don't realise how laggy VSCode and its forks are).

Biggest disadvantage: lack of extensions. Lots of quality of life missing (e.g. gitignore integration to add/append gitignore files for different languages).

This might have been bad timing. Copilot API broke things last weekend with caused a lot of tool calls in various agent harnesses to start failing like the edit tool.

Example zed issue https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/54219?issue=zed...