The Zed team rebuilt their settings editor from scratch, moving from a distributed, macro-based architecture to a centralized, strongly-typed model. The refactoring consolidated scattered settings definitions into UserSettings and ProjectSettings types, treating configuration files as the organizing principle rather than implementation details. They enhanced their GPUI framework with automated focus handling through tab groups and local state management similar to React's useState. The project revealed architectural weaknesses (including an auto-update bug) but resulted in a cleaner foundation for future features.

How We Rebuilt Settings in Zed — Zed's Blog

Zed code editor introduces rainbow brackets, a highly-requested feature that colors nested brackets at different levels for improved code readability. The implementation uses a chunk-based approach with tree-sitter queries rather than maintaining full syntax trees in memory. Brackets are colored in 50-row chunks that invalidate on buffer changes but only re-query when visible, avoiding the complexity of global state management. The feature is opt-in per language, reuses theme accent colors, and includes performance optimizations to tree-sitter's query execution.

Best of Zed — December 2025