We're welcoming 2024 by shipping a fundamentally new version of Zed to the preview channel. Over the past several weeks, we've completely rewritten Zed's UI framework to incorporate everything we've learned over the past two years building UI in Rust. GPUI 2's ergonomic improvements will make contributing to Zed more fun and help us ship faster. We've also laid down a solid foundation for upcoming improvements such as multi-platform support and animation.
After completely rewriting Zed's UI on top of the new framework, we've spent the last 2-3 weeks using revamped version of Zed as our daily driver. Now you can try it out as well. Most of the benefits of this preview release are internal, and will be revealed over time. We have however added one popular feature request: The ability to customize and scale the UI font.
We're still burning down a list of small issues, and we plan to ship preview releases more frequently as things stabilize over the next few weeks. We don't plan additional major stable releases until preview is ready to promote to stable, at which point we'll also be ready to go open source. If you try the new version, we'd greatly appreciate if you could help us find any regressions.
With your helpful feedback, we're very excited to finish this big upgrade and go back to shipping new features every week. With open source looming, we're even more excited to share our work more deeply and see what you contribute. Happy Zednesday!