side quests
the projects around the editor — tree-sitter, xray and memo, gpui, zeta, acp, the community programs, and the fork that took the name away.
the founders' quests
- 2013–tree-sitter · handed-offbrunsfeld's nights-and-weekends side project that ate the industry — incremental glr parsing now inside github.com, neovim, helix, emacs, lapce, and zed itself, whose extensions compile tree-sitter grammars to wasm. the founders' largest prior artifact, bigger than atom.
- 2017–2019xray and memo · endedthe failed restart inside github — rust core, web ui turned client/server, rgasplit-variant crdt — plus memo, the operation-based vcs tracking changes at keystroke level. github shelved it post-microsoft-acquisition; every idea in it shipped later inside zed, and memo shipped eight years late as deltadb.
- ~2019–2021the ditto crdt years · endedscandurra's between-jobs chapter — roughly two years at ditto building a crdt database in rust while zed stayed a nights-and-weekends repo. the reason zed's multiplayer internals were designed by someone who had already built the same primitives twice.
- 2020–2021the warp detour · endedsobo's three-month employment at warp — he brought the zed code with him, then left because he 'couldn't let go' of the editor. the ip separation is undocumented; recorded in the gaps ledger.
the company's quests
- 2021–gpui · activethe gpu-accelerated rust ui framework — apache-2 since january 2024, metal on macos, vulkan on linux, a hand-built directx 11 backend on windows. deliberately not published as a supported standalone crate; the community builds on it anyway — longbridge's gpui-component, and apps like loungy, zedis, gtop, and termy in the awesome-gpui catalog.
- 2024–the extension registry · continuingthe wasm/wit-sandboxed extension ecosystem — a registry repo since february 2024, ~1,119 listed entries and ~1,562 tracked including unlisted by mid-2026 across themes, grammars, lsps, mcp context servers, and debug adapters. deliberately narrower than atom's api — and the durable criticism of the platform.
- 2024–2026channels and chat · handed-offchannels and in-editor chat — 'zed is our office' made the collaboration thesis literal, but adoption stayed low ('very few people leverage collab today'), the chat panel was removed wholesale, and the collaboration bet re-platformed into delta rather than dying.
- 2025–agent client protocol · activethe agent client protocol — open json-rpc over stdio, apache-2, gemini cli as reference agent, adopted or echoed by jetbrains; a registry since january 2026; agents include claude code, codex, opencode, and cursor. zed's bid to be the neutral surface, not the deepest bundled agent.
- 2025–zeta, the open model · continuingthe open edit-prediction model line — zeta (a qwen2.5-coder-7b fine-tune) shipped with open weights and an open dataset on hugging face; zeta2 rebuilt 'from the training data up' in march 2026; zeta2.1 claims 3x fewer tokens and 50ms faster predictions (self-reported).
- 2025–deltadb and delta · activethe 'second half of the plan' — operation-based crdt version control compatible with git, versioning worktree and conversation together. private beta august 12, 2026; public beta september 16 with pull requests disabled on its own repo; product at delta.dev. the memo idea from xray, finally shipped.
- 2024–fireside hacks to the zed guild · continuingthe community-program stack — fireside hacks at open-sourcing, 'hired through github' contributor-to-employee pipeline, community champions (june 2026), and the zed guild experiment with its june 16 retrospective.
the community's quests
- 2024zed decoded · endedthe engineering interview series thorsten ball ran — rope and sumtree, async rust, 'why not just embed neovim?', extensions, and the founder postmortems. it made zed's blog a respected rust-engineering publication independent of the product, then ended when ball left in january 2025.
- 2025–zedless · continuingthe community's answer to the trust ledger — a privacy/local-first fork that removes telemetry, crash reporting, non-selfhostable cloud dependencies, and the cla: 'no rugpulls.' proof that gpl means forkable, and a standing vote of no-confidence in the defaults.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.