How to Install Zed Code Editor on FunOS

Table of Contents

What is Zed?

Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor developed by the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter. As an open-source tool, Zed is designed to offer developers a seamless and productive coding experience. Combining the power of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with the responsiveness of a lightweight editor, Zed aims to keep you in the flow of coding with minimal distractions.

Zed is engineered to leverage modern hardware capabilities efficiently, including every CPU core and the GPU, ensuring instantaneous startup, rapid file loading, and keystroke responsiveness. With built-in support for AI-powered code generation and a strong emphasis on collaborative features, Zed is tailored for both individual productivity and team-based projects.

Key Features of Zed

Code at the Speed of Thought
Zed is crafted to keep pace with your thought process, allowing you to code swiftly and efficiently. Its design philosophy prioritizes staying out of your way while you work, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted coding experience.
High Performance and Responsiveness
Zed leverages every CPU core and the GPU to deliver exceptional performance. The editor starts instantly, loads files quickly, and responds to keystrokes on the next display refresh. This unrelenting performance helps you maintain your flow and makes other tools feel sluggish in comparison.
AI-Powered Code Generation
Zed supports GitHub Copilot out of the box and allows you to use GPT-4 for code generation and refactoring. By pressing ctrl-enter and typing a natural language prompt, you can interact with the AI model conversationally within the built-in assistant panel, saving time and keystrokes.
Language-Aware Editing
Zed maintains a full syntax tree for every buffer, enabling precise code highlighting, auto-indent, a searchable outline view, and structural selection. It speaks the Language Server Protocol to provide features like autocompletion, code navigation, diagnostics, and refactorings.
Real-Time Collaboration
Zed facilitates real-time collaboration by allowing multiple developers to navigate and edit within a shared workspace. This feature supports nuanced conversations about any part of your codebase, regardless of whether the code has been committed or not.
GPUI Framework
Built like a video game, Zed’s performance is driven by the GPUI framework, which rasterizes the entire window on the GPU. This approach results in fast, reliable, and smooth delivery of pixels on every frame, enhancing the overall user experience.
Multi-Core Era Design
Zed utilizes Rust’s unique type system to parallelize work across multiple cores without compromising stability. By using copy-on-write data structures and Rust’s async primitives, Zed shifts CPU-intensive tasks away from the main thread, ensuring unparalleled responsiveness.
Extensive Fuzz Testing
To ensure reliability, Zed’s critical code paths undergo extensive fuzz testing. This method of creating controlled chaos helps identify and fix rare edge cases, resulting in a stable and robust editor.
Principled Syntax Parsing
Zed employs Tree-sitter, an open-source parsing framework based on context-free grammars, for its syntax parsing. Tree-sitter’s incremental version of generalized LR parsing enables advanced language-aware features that were previously only possible in language-specific IDEs.
CRDT-Based Buffers
In Zed, every buffer is a Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT), which allows for consistent data synchronization despite concurrent mutations. This feature underpins Zed’s collaborative capabilities and contributes to its multi-threaded architecture, enhancing the user experience both individually and collaboratively.

Zed Code Editor stands out as a powerful and modern tool designed to enhance the productivity of developers. Its high performance, sleek design, AI integration, language-aware features, and robust collaborative capabilities make it an excellent choice for coding. By leveraging the latest hardware and software advancements, Zed delivers a responsive and efficient coding environment, ensuring that developers can stay in the flow and code at the speed of thought.

How to Install Zed on FunOS

Installing Zed on FunOS is a straightforward process. Follow these steps to get started:

Install using the official Zed .tar.gz package

1. Open a Terminal

2. Download the Zed .tar.gz Package:

wget https://zed.dev/api/releases/stable/latest/zed-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

3. Create zed.app directory on $HOME/.local:

mkdir $HOME/.local/zed.app

4. Extract the tar.gz file to the $HOME/.local/zed.app directory:

tar -xvzf $HOME/zed-linux-x86_64.tar.gz --strip-components=1 -C $HOME/.local/zed.app

5. Create bin and applications directory on $HOME/.local:

mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/bin" "$HOME/.local/share/applications"

6. Create a symbolic link to the Zed executable so you can launch it from the terminal.

ln -sf "$HOME/.local/zed.app/bin/zed" "$HOME/.local/bin/zed"

7. Create a desktop entry for Zed:

This will allow you to launch Zed from the application menu.

tee $HOME/.local/share/applications/dev.zed.Zed.desktop << EOF > /dev/null
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Zed
GenericName=Text Editor
Comment=A high-performance, multiplayer code editor.
TryExec=$HOME/.local/zed.app/libexec/zed-editor
StartupNotify=true
Exec=$HOME/.local/zed.app/libexec/zed-editor %U
Icon=zed
Categories=Utility;TextEditor;Development;IDE;
Keywords=zed;
MimeType=text/plain;inode/directory;x-scheme-handler/zed;
Actions=NewWorkspace;

[Desktop Action NewWorkspace]
Exec=$HOME/.local/zed.app/libexec/zed-editor --new %U
Name=Open a new workspace
EOF

8. Add $HOME/.local/bin to your PATH:

echo 'export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc

source ~/.bashrc

9. Remove the downloaded Zed .tar.gz package:

rm zed-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

10. Click the menu in the bottom left corner of the screen. Next, click the Reload menu. The objective is to display Zed in the menu.

Launching Zed

After the installation is complete, you can launch Zed by typing zed-editor in the terminal or by searching for “Zed” in the applications menu.

How to Uninstall Zed on FunOS

If you need to uninstall Zed from your system, you can do so with the following steps:

1. Open a Terminal

2. Remove the zed.app directory:

rm -r $HOME/.local/zed.app

3. Remove the symbolic link:

rm $HOME/.local/bin/zed

4. Remove the desktop entry:

rm $HOME/.local/share/applications/dev.zed.Zed.desktop

5. Remove user data (optional):

rm -r $HOME/.config/zed

rm -r $HOME/.cache/zed

rm -r $HOME/.local/share/zed

6. Click the menu in the bottom left corner of the screen. Next, click the Reload menu. The objective is to remove Zed from the menu.

FunOS