Zed was first demoed in May 2022, and the creator linked to the video shortly after on Hacker News.

For now, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zed_(text_editor) redirects to Atom but the official website is https://zed.dev

I started playing with it in May 2024 and have been putting feedback at https://dataverse.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/379673-dev/topic/Zed/near/440085588 and https://github.com/pdurbin/zed/discussions/1

First impressions

I'm using Zed Zed 0.136.2.

The first thing I clicked was "install the CLI" because I can't imagine not being able to launch my editor from a terminal. It worked fine.

Markdown

I'm starting with Markdown, this very wiki page, but my I need to teach Zed that .mdwn is a Markdown file.

The docs at https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#file-types seem clear enough

The default only had this:

"ui_font_size": 16,
"buffer_font_size": 16,

"file_types": {
  "Markdown": ["mdwn"]
}

I'm trying to obviate the need to add this config with https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/12224

Next, I would like to have an HTML preview of the Markdown to one side of the file I'm editing.

There are no hits at https://zed.dev/docs/?search=markdown and Markdown isn't listed under Language Support.

Within Zed, I searched extensions for "markdown" and found something called Markdown Oxide. Would this allow me to preview Markdown? I wasn't sure.

I asked the friend who clued me in to Zed and pointed me at https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/6958 which had a video that enlighted me that I would need to bring up an "execute a command" dialog and type "markdown: open preview". Great! Markdown preview is built in! But how do I execute a command?

After stumbling around, I somehow figured out that I needed to hit cmd-shift-p to bring up the dialog I saw in the video. According to the menus, it's called the command palette.

Suffice it to say that it was fairly non-obvious to me how to activate the built-in Markdown previewer.