[HN Gopher] Zed is now available on Windows
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Zed is now available on Windows
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 86 points
Date : 2025-10-15 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zed.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (zed.dev)
| nwah1 wrote:
| Is it on winget?
| janpio wrote:
| > winget search zed Name Id
| Version Match Source ----
| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| ---------------------------------------------------- Zed
| Preview ZedIndustries.Zed
| 0.208.4-pre Moniker: zed winget
|
| So not fully updated yet it seems.
| metaltyphoon wrote:
| Soon https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/pull/303728
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| > Zed isn't an Electron app; we integrate directly with the
| underlying platform for maximal control.
|
| Sounds great. Looking forward to doing a simple test run with
| Astro SSG
| twoquestions wrote:
| It's extremely refreshing to see the editor's memory and
| processor usage be smaller than the webapp tab I'm working on.
|
| I'm really liking it thus far!
| eviks wrote:
| Its binary is half a gig in size, so just like a browser,
| nothing fresh about that.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Size on disk is about 64x less relevant than size in RAM for
| me. To give Zed some credit in this area, it's statically
| linked and the Linux binary is half the size as the Windows
| one.
| Rohansi wrote:
| What could they be statically linking to have a 400MB
| executable?
| rovingeye wrote:
| The windowing is pretty broken if you use system scaling
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/40272
| olive-n wrote:
| I installed the beta a week or two ago. Many of the files I tried
| opening in it just did not work at all. It can only open utf-8
| encoded files.
|
| That is not a problem for code, but if you just want to open some
| random .txt file or .csv file, these are often enough not utf-8
| encoded, especially if they contain non English text.
|
| The github issue for this is showing progress, but I think it's a
| mistake to promote the editor to stable as is.
| jsheard wrote:
| Have they implemented subpixel font rendering by now? I remember
| that being a sticking point when it came to Linux because they
| had designed their custom UI renderer around the Macs ubiquitous
| HiDPI displays, leading to blurry fonts for the much, much larger
| proportion of Linux (and Windows) users who still use LoDPI
| displays.
| typpilol wrote:
| No lol
| sapiogram wrote:
| Idk about subpixel font rendering, but font rendering on Linux
| looks massively better after a patch last week:
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992#issuecomme...
| jsheard wrote:
| That "after" image is still rendered with greyscale AA rather
| than subpixel, but whatever they changed did make it more
| legible at least.
| pulsartwin wrote:
| I'm glad there's finally some progress in that direction. If
| they actually implement subpixel RGB anti-aliasing, it would
| definitely be worth considering as an alternative. It's been
| surprising to see so many people praise Zed when its text
| rendering (of all things) has been in such a state for so
| long.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| I tried it out on macOS and have a 1440p external monitor that
| the fonts just look horrible on. Looks fine on the laptop's
| "retina" display but blurry enough every else that it actually
| gave me a headache after a few hours.
| _fzslm wrote:
| I have waited for this for months... but it's still only an
| x86_64 binary!
|
| I love my ARM Surface Pro, and Zed would make a wonderful editor
| on this hardware. If anyone from Zed is reading this, please
| think about it!
| sunshowers wrote:
| I build Zed for Windows aarch64 from source -- works great,
| though the build process is quite slow on my 16GB Surface Pro.
| Definitely hoping for official binaries, though!
| _fzslm wrote:
| I think I got as far as installing the Visual Studio
| Installer so I could install Visual Studio and I just bailed
| on that whole thing, lol. I'll have to take some time out on
| a weekend to take another look :)
| mathnode wrote:
| I tried it for a bit. But unless you want to use their choice of
| lsp/linter/whatever from what you are used to, then you will
| waste even more time customising zed to your needs from your
| previous solution.
| 1a527dd5 wrote:
| [Window Title] Critical [Main Instruction]
| Unsupported GPU [Content] Zed uses DirectX for
| rendering and requires a compatible GPU. Currently you
| are using a software emulated GPU (Microsoft Basic Render Driver)
| which will result in awful performance. For
| troubleshooting see: https://zed.dev/docs/windows Set
| ZED_ALLOW_EMULATED_GPU=1 env var to permanently override.
| [Skip] [Troubleshoot and Quit]
|
| Ah bummer.
| jsheard wrote:
| That's more of an issue with your system than a problem with
| Zed, you have to go pretty far out of your way to not have
| proper DirectX nowadays.
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(page generated 2025-10-15 23:00 UTC)