It's Monday, 12 PM ET, and the entire Zed Industries team is piled into our weekly all-hands meeting. Some teammates jot down their schedule deviations, while others detail what they intend to focus on for the week. Nathan just wrapped up top-of-mind announcements and Morgan is sharing trends from our metrics and covering operational updates. Meanwhile I'm preparing user quotes from the last week to share out, and others add topics to the Discussions section.
Throughout the meeting, screens are being shared, various voices are popping in and out of the conversation, and our notes are growing rapidly as dozens of cursors are concurrently editing the same file in real-time.
This entire meeting is taking place inside Zed.
Our weekly "all hands" Monday meeting in Zed
Our mission from the beginning has been to engineer an editor that will be:
Responsive: The latency between keystroke and re-render should be imperceptible. Focused: The interface should offer minimal distractions and stay out of the code's way. Collaborative: Working with teammates should feel no different than sitting next to them in the office.
Setting the first two properties aside, let's focus on collaboration.
We've been dreaming of building the ultimate collaborative editor for years. The roots of this vision go back to Nathan's early days at Pivotal Labs, where pair programming with two keyboards plugged into the same computer was the standard practice. We set out to recreate that seamless collaboration experience—but for distributed teams.
But wait... doesn't this technology already exist in other editors?
Yes! If you've been a developer long enough, you might recall the teletype package for Atom—both built by Zed's founders. Teletype enabled developers to share "portals" into their workspaces, which was an initial step towards Zed's collaborative vision. Despite attempts to make Atom—an Electron application—more responsive, it never reached the performance standards the team yearned for. Nathan left the Atom team and eventually began work on gpui, Zed's GPU-accelerated UI rendering framework, written in Rust, and Atom would later be sunset by GitHub after. No more Atom, no more Teletype.
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