alt.hn

5/9/2026 at 5:30:39 PM

Zed Editor Theme-Builder

 https://zed.dev/theme-builder

by cuechan

5/9/2026 at 6:40:04 PM

I'm extremely glad to see something like this. I've tried to use Zed so many times, and this might sound neurotic -- but there are just so many little theming things that make a difference to me.

For example, https://imgur.com/a/ia2GCgg -- top is VSCode, bottom is Zed. Both using Svelte, and using a similar theme.

- Angle brackets are a different color

- Capitalized built-in components are a different color

- Boolean props are a different color

- Brackets are colored differently than text.

The inspector is a game changer, clicking into these specific things in the preview they provide is super helpful.

by thecatapps

5/9/2026 at 8:05:00 PM

I don't use zed or svelte, but this looks like the zed picture is missing a treesitter parser for svelte. Many editors have basic regex-based highlighting for many languages, and optional, more advanced, highlighting available through extensions. You may also get some semantic highlights provided by a language server if your editor uses the Language Server Protocol as well.

I found one extension from a web search. Did you try this? https://zed.dev/extensions/svelte

by TonyStr

5/9/2026 at 9:19:28 PM

It's been a while, but from what I remember you need that extension for any highlighting at all, and that screenshot is with it installed. Also, if I recall, it's something about that extension using an outdated treesitter parser or something along those lines.

by thecatapps

5/10/2026 at 2:11:46 AM

Sounds to me like one major Zed enhancement should be to suggest plugins if you open specific programming language files...

by giancarlostoro

5/10/2026 at 8:08:17 AM

FWIW, I have had good results asking LLMs converting themes from an app/ide to another.

by pjerem

5/9/2026 at 6:26:01 PM

Finally, I can reasonably get something truly high contrast and not just close to it as the current offerings are. This is a little thing, but Zed continues to keep getting so many things right that it has gone from “interesting” to “my preferred editor” after 15 years in vim. The git “follow mode” has been especially great transitioning into heavy usage of LLMs in development. Happy to see the team continues to just get more little things right.

by rhgraysonii

5/9/2026 at 6:35:45 PM

Zed is "almost there" for me.

The theme builder is good and easy to use, and I only needed a few minutes to make my own.

Syntax coloring is almost there, but still lacking (I use C/C++) Small visual adjustment like line height in the UI text is not configurable enough (only two settings)

Scrolling should have a smooth option, nothing prevents it, it should be super easy to add, I find it easier on the eyes when I move around code, especially on a 240Hz monitor.

The editing experience is good, quick launch, no crashes, responsive, not too memory hungry.

by stephc_int13

5/10/2026 at 11:19:52 AM

You could use Mos, which also has the advantage that smooth scrolling works the same in every app (speed, acceleration etc)

https://mos.caldis.me/

by ubercow13

5/10/2026 at 12:58:11 PM

Tried it for a first time and it took five minutes for a major bug to appear - UI fully freezing. I thought it was only scrolling that froze at first, but tried it again (easy to reproduce), and it's the whole UI. Switching apps makes it work again. Haven't seen this behavior in any other app.

When trying to report it, I was presented with a form longer than my tax returns. Bug reporting seems like a good place for an AI. Both for the input and later categorization.

by rplnt

5/10/2026 at 1:42:00 PM

That's interesting. I've been using Zed for over a year. I've had one or two crashes over that year, which is very stable for using it all day every day.

by honeycrispy

5/10/2026 at 9:52:51 PM

It doesn't crash. Just the UI is completely unresponsive until I switch to another app and back. It's weird.

by rplnt

5/9/2026 at 7:57:38 PM

Scrolling is perfectly smooth when you use a trackpad. IMO, clickwheels are a legacy technology for scrolling (even when I use Windows, I left-hand a Magic Trackpad so I still have smooth analog scrolling).

by LoganDark

5/9/2026 at 8:16:37 PM

I never liked trackpad. I am an avid RTS player, the mouse is by far the superious input device.

Besides, I never work on a laptop.

And this is a lame excuse. Smooth scrolling should also work when using keyboard with and pageup/pagedown, at least as an option and with some tuning preferences.

by stephc_int13

5/9/2026 at 11:55:13 PM

Smooth scrolling also worked on the Amiga Cygnus Editor in 1986 - yes, 40 years ago - on a computer with 512Kb RAM and a ~7MHz 68000 CPU, and from keyboard too. And Zed complains at launch if it doesn't find a suitable Vulkan GPU driver, since the fallback CPU driver does not provide a smooth enough experience, despite 4-5 orders of magnitude more RAM, and a ~3 orders of magnitude faster CPU, than a 40 years old Amiga...

by aruggirello

5/10/2026 at 11:41:15 AM

Isn’t this just a case of not wanting to or having the resources to maintain a fallback renderer?

Supporting basically-compliant Vulkan GPUs covers probably 99.9% of developer machines. You need a pretty big user base to make it make sense to support the last 0.1% of people without access to a proper GPU driver.

I hope Zed reaches that scale, since I really like the project. But right now I would be a bit disappointed if that was a priority.

by simonask

5/10/2026 at 12:06:35 AM

"smooth scrolling" with a mouse or keyboard like you mentioned is a lie. Its animating movement but is not precision input at all. its "smooth" sure but you have zero control over the actual scroll (i do wish zed did this too its genuinely useful as an accessibility aid because it lets your eyes follow where the cursor ends up for example but yeah its not the same as having proper precision input for scrolling as you do with a touchpad). I do agree a mouse is far better at precision input wrt pointing at things but when programming,,,, you do not need to be so precise with cursor movement. you're editing text which is largely keyboard centric, and the time offset between moving your hand from a mouse to a keyboard on a desktop is in my opinion far higher than it is to move your hands from a keyboard to a touchpad surface. Not to mention you get actual precision with scrolling with a touchpad. I personally keep both a proper MMO mouse with a dozen programmable buttons on my desk, and a apple touchpad with precision drivers for normal use.

also wrt scrolling, mice like the logitech mx master actually have what is in my opinion a much better solution where the scrollwheel is not stepped and has scrolling inertia, allowing you to have the same level of precision with scrolling as you do with a touchpad (im not sure if the vertical wheel on it is the same but regardless). Its in my opinion a similar jump in capability for mice as continous triggers were for game controllers. Something that must have been initially quite notable, but slowly became expected behaviour (except on the switch for some reason but whatever i guess)

by madokaaoyi

5/9/2026 at 8:51:52 PM

The arrow keys do scroll smoothly in Safari from my testing, but a clickwheel does not. Probably because scrolling inputs are meant to be precise.

by LoganDark

5/9/2026 at 11:14:46 PM

macOS is a whole thing in terms of smooth scrolling, or HID (human interface devices) in general. It seems like Apple just doesn't put a lot of effort in terms of working with third-party HIDs:

* There's a standard way to enable high-resolution scroll reporting (pixel-level instead of line-level), but Apple doesn't use it.

* There's a standard approach to multi-touch digitizers/trackpads (documented and I think to some extent created by Microsoft, called PTP) which Apple doesn't support.

* Apple's own Magic Trackpad speaks a proprietary protocol and it appears you can only speak it if you claim to use their USB VID/PID. And I don't think doing that would go over well in a commercial product. (And if you do manage to speak it, it turns out their driver really doesn't do two-finger scrolling well with tiny trackpads anyway. They probably only tested it on the generous dimensions of their hardware.) (Also, it attaches to your entire device, so having an additional interface with a different driver doesn't appear to work either.)

But...you can inject smooth scrolling events via Core Graphics. So you can run a userspace program with accessibility permission that scrolls smoothly. And you can also communicate with USB devices from such a program. There are some existing programs for doing smooth scrolling with standard mice (Mac Mouse Fix is one). I'm writing a userspace driver for PTP to make my keyboard's built-in trackpad work properly.

by scottlamb

5/10/2026 at 12:46:31 AM

Last I checked, high-resolution scroll reporting over USB is not based on pixels but on fractions of a detent, which is annoying to say the least. Apple probably also didn't want to translate multitouch to scroll in hardware, since scrolls are not reported the same in all contexts (e.g. applications can choose whether it locks to an axis; which axes it can lock to depends on the capabilities of the view; etc.)

> But...you can inject smooth scrolling events via Core Graphics.

Applications can choose to ignore synthetic events, IIRC. Probably not an issue for scrolling, but for instance Little Snitch can be configured to ignore synthetic inputs to its security settings.

by LoganDark

5/10/2026 at 4:40:51 AM

> Last I checked, high-resolution scroll reporting over USB is not based on pixels but on fractions of a detent, which is annoying to say the least.

I'd just be happy if it let me use the multiplier; don't care if it's not exactly pixels.

> Apple probably also didn't want to translate multitouch to scroll in hardware,

That much doesn't seem unique to Apple; both Windows and Linux appear to prefer accepting raw multitouch data.

> since scrolls are not reported the same in all contexts (e.g. applications can choose whether it locks to an axis; which axes it can lock to depends on the capabilities of the view; etc.)

I don't think they're actually taking advantage of this. My MBP's built-in trackpad will lock into pinch/rotate gestures when the cursor's over say Zed or iTerm2. (Zed's a bad example actually, as it has no accessibility tree to speak of. But I think it will lock into pinch/rotate anywhere.)

And for my own app, as far as I know (I'd be very happy to be corrected) there's no way to inspect a view to know what kinds of gestures it supports. It certainly would be nice to eliminate the possibility of locking into pinch/zoom in a place where that's meaningless but I don't see a way to do it.

> Applications can choose to ignore synthetic events, IIRC. Probably not an issue for scrolling, but for instance Little Snitch can be configured to ignore synthetic inputs to its security settings.

Yuck. I'm doing everything this way, including cursor movement and taps. I hope I don't come across such an app/configuration.

by scottlamb

5/10/2026 at 2:13:07 AM

Used to have a mouse that had a scroll wheel that would toggle if it did the clicking motion or a smoother scrolling motion, I loved that one. I use Trackbals now, so if I need to scroll drastically I use the sidebar. Source Code map sidebar is the best though.

by giancarlostoro

5/10/2026 at 2:42:20 AM

I have a mouse that can toggle the detents too, but unfortunately even with the detents off it does not read fractional scroll positions. :(

by LoganDark

5/9/2026 at 6:15:45 PM

This feels shallow, but one of the biggest things keeping me from using zed is the lack of a good default dark theme.

The defaults all feel very low contrast, gray on gray that makes the experience feel dull and off putting to me, even if the editor itself is great.

by MeetingsBrowser

5/10/2026 at 2:12:21 PM

Add this to fix the contrast in all your dark themes:

  "experimental.theme_overrides": {
    "background": "#111",
    "panel.background": "#111",
    "text": "#eee",
    "text.muted": "#ccc",
    "title_bar.background": "#111",
    "tab_bar.background": "#111",
    "toolbar.background": "#111",
    "status_bar.background": "#111",
    "element.selected": "#333",
    "editor.background": "#000",
    "editor.gutter.background": "#000"
  }

by hyperknot

5/9/2026 at 6:28:53 PM

It's not just you and it's not just Zed. Dark themes tend to be low contrast gray on gray.

I usually look for a dark theme that looks good and then make a custom version with darker the background colors and brighter the foreground colors.

Maybe it's time for to start publishing high contrast dark themes instead of just fixing it for myself.

by jeorb

5/10/2026 at 5:02:13 AM

I do a lot of markdown editing, techdocs, static site generator, and the gray on gray makes me want to swap back to VSCodium for that task.

by rapnie

5/9/2026 at 6:37:18 PM

It should take less than a minute to install a nice, high contrast dark theme, if you just search for the theme inside the Extensions window in Zed.

But I understand your point, no reason for it not to come with a couple good high contrast dark themes.

by helloplanets

5/10/2026 at 9:29:36 AM

It may feel even more shallow, but what keeps me on emacs are modus-themes. With luck, you can find a passable theme in your editor/ide of choice, but to find a good, high-contrast light theme is almost impossible.

by lycopodiopsida

5/9/2026 at 6:19:35 PM

Try this one, it’s my recent favourite and very polished: https://zed.dev/extensions/amp-theme

by hmokiguess

5/9/2026 at 6:26:07 PM

The repo for this theme is no longer available

> The page you are trying to reach either does not exist, has been removed or you are not authorized to view it.

by MeetingsBrowser

5/9/2026 at 6:49:32 PM

Yeah unfortunately looks like the maintainer made their stuff private, but it still works, I may republish it if gets removed from the store it’s so good.

by hmokiguess

5/9/2026 at 6:25:27 PM

The repository link on that page does not work. Is there a preview?

by lindig

5/9/2026 at 9:04:44 PM

Zed generally feels very engineer-designed and not in a good way.

by pretzel5297

5/9/2026 at 6:54:02 PM

If you use Omarchy, the 3.8 update includes dynamic theming for Zed. It's very cool: https://github.com/APS6/omazed

by phren0logy

5/9/2026 at 7:57:38 PM

That is cool. It's a shame DDH is who he is, which stops me using it.

by fenaer

5/9/2026 at 9:04:02 PM

The fact that he's so anti-immigration as an immigrant himself is so odd. My rather negative interpretation is he doesn't consider himself to be an immigrant which screams white supremacy.

by pretzel5297

5/10/2026 at 6:13:43 AM

Anti immigration or anti illegal immigration?

by self_awareness

5/10/2026 at 11:43:41 AM

Immigrants are called “expats” when they are white.

I’m from the same country as DHH. Personally, not terribly sad that he left.

by simonask

5/10/2026 at 12:00:16 PM

Cool to see all the progress with Zed, but it feels a bit too tied to user accounts. Prominent 'Sign In' buttons and ads like 'Try our new agentic...' They do have to make money and that's fine - but too often incentives start out this way and begin to corrupt the application...

Whats next, ads inside file searches? (ubuntu blundered this way and soured the community) - "LQQKING for something? try new ai search by blah blah corp!"

So it's hard to 'invest' my time tweaking my editor and theme only to have it start to betray me in the future. VSCode has already gone down this path - signing commit messages with 'copilot'

by rbbydotdev

5/9/2026 at 6:46:21 PM

Does Zed have "I work for corp where ie. only github copilot is allowed, I don't want free auto completions or anything that sends code to 3rd party" flag?

by mirekrusin

5/9/2026 at 6:56:25 PM

Yes you can disable Zed AI and connect to Github Copilot through the LLM Providers UI

by praet

5/9/2026 at 10:43:13 PM

Can you now? I've tried to keep "AI" machine assist features on, but disable "Zed AI" provider, keeping only non-cloud LLMs as an option.

Last time I checked (about half an year ago) it was hardcoded and unconditional, so disabling it required a patch.

by drdaeman

5/9/2026 at 6:51:55 PM

You need to create and sign into a Zed account to use their prediction AI (Zeta) in order to get 2000 free predictions.

https://zed.dev/docs/ai/edit-prediction

by janice1999

5/9/2026 at 7:12:39 PM

You can also download the same model and run it locally without data leaving your machine, the Zed tram released it as open weights: https://huggingface.co/zed-industries/zeta-2

by iamskeole

5/10/2026 at 8:22:33 AM

That's all great (genuine), however my concern is less around "I can do X", more around "I can guarantee it cannot do Y" – ideally in one, global, obvious place.

At the moment it seems it's great for personal development and development in environments where concerns around IP are less of an issue.

It's not so clear how to use it in corporation context where you'd be in breach of employment contract accidentally because defaults mean sending confidential IP to 3rd parties.

by mirekrusin

5/10/2026 at 3:39:54 PM

Or you can use any other local model you already have.

by sev_verso

5/12/2026 at 2:53:36 PM

Yes, Zed was first harness where you could seriously use local models. The issue is more about not having to check so many options to make sure it's all local. You can set up local model for chat but your auto completions will still be sending your code remotely.

by mirekrusin

5/10/2026 at 11:09:24 AM

I tried using it to reproduce my favourite Soda Dark / Sunburst colour combination from Sublime Text. It was a really sisyphean task.

In the end I fed some screenshots (and original ST4 config) to AI studio and it came up with something workable but not exactly a replica. Naturally different editors have different semantic tokens.

by odiroot

5/10/2026 at 11:31:05 AM

You could solve this fairly easily by giving an LLM the json definition of your sublime text theme and just transforming it onto a zed spec theme? No need for screenshots.

by calmoo

5/10/2026 at 1:30:00 PM

Wasn't enough (at least with Gemini 3). I had do a few round trips with screenshots until it got all the details.

by odiroot

5/10/2026 at 6:47:31 PM

Interesting - now that I think about it, feeding Claude my particular Xcode theme from VS code to replicate in Zed, the color tones were quite far off how it looked in cursor. I don't know enough about color rendering to know why that is, but I feel you!

by calmoo

5/10/2026 at 5:26:25 AM

Oh wow. I tried zed, but I couldn't get the colour scheme to make the whole thing look like the classic "cobalt" from gedit/gtksourceview. I am legit willing to pay fair $ if someone wants to build such a theme for me.

by purpleidea

5/10/2026 at 5:27:41 AM

I actually even tried to get the AI models to build such a theme, but they couldn't figure it out! They would just generate something wrong. When that works, I'm interested!

by purpleidea

5/9/2026 at 7:02:42 PM

This is super cool - Started using Zed a couple weeks ago. Is there also something like a Theme gallery? Where one can look at Themes other people created? I would imagine not everyone has the inspiration to build their own "form scratch" but would still love to customize.

by 7777777phil

5/9/2026 at 6:51:45 PM

Ha.. thats a very cool way of adjusting. themes. I hoped for being able to adjust a lot of things around markdown edit and markdown preview though. My biggest problem with Zed right now. Themes are actually ok to me. Maybe thats on their todo though who knows.

by riidom

5/10/2026 at 8:36:10 AM

For markdown preview, a recent release added these two settings (top-level in your settings.json):

    "markdown_preview_font_family": "Fira Sans Condensed",
    "markdown_preview_theme": "Ayu Dark",
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/54003

by lejalv

5/9/2026 at 8:01:43 PM

A feature request of sorts. An option to reveal and highlight the element the color is for would be cool. There are so many colors and so many elements of the UI that it’s not immediately obvious where it is to properly see the changes I make.

by pointlessone

5/10/2026 at 6:12:05 AM

If Zed would have a remote development plugin that can attach to both containers, and Windows remote hosts, then it would be an awesome VSCode replacement one day.

by self_awareness

5/10/2026 at 6:13:37 AM

Was just using this to tweak a few settings in an existing theme. It was really helpful to finding out which theme token associates with which UI element.

by pyr0hu

5/10/2026 at 7:26:06 AM

Definitely a step in the right direction, always felt like new editors like Fleet (from Jetbrains) and Zed lacked quite a lot for themes

by AdityaAnuragi

5/9/2026 at 8:58:39 PM

How come I see my own github avatar in the designed editor along with others? I assume people also visiting the builder? Not very cool if I may say so.

by mosselman

5/9/2026 at 9:01:16 PM

I think those are placeholders, lol

by seanthemon

5/9/2026 at 10:05:20 PM

I really would like semantic highlighting. E.g. i want to highlight definitions of types/methods in a different/stronger way than usages.

by ddlah

5/9/2026 at 10:03:47 PM

Got Zed for the first time last week. Turned it on and said “the visuals are so perfect I have nothing to change.” The defaults are amazing.

by jshaqaw

5/10/2026 at 8:29:07 AM

Using the editor, I did not manage to select the gutter to get editor.gutter.background (I found it via the search box).

edit: clarity

by lejalv

5/10/2026 at 4:08:31 AM

call me a noob but would be nice to see which elements on the right panel are going to get affected when I hover over items on the left panel. right now now I have no clue what got changed :D for some of the elements.

by lhousa

5/9/2026 at 11:27:51 PM

My biggest problem with Zed right now is the font rendering doesn't look that good on MacOS. To me Sublime Text always had the best font rendering on Mac. Electron slowly over the years has gotten better and decent now. Zed just doesn't do the font justice. It's too thin or something.

by dham

5/9/2026 at 7:56:39 PM

tried using zed, didn't understand how to set up claude code integration, went back to vscode where setting up claude code is trivial

by VeejayRampay

5/9/2026 at 11:04:26 PM

Use the command palette to pick "agent: toggle" - that'll open the agent pane. Pick "Claude Agent" from the dropdown at the top if you see the Zed agent. Should be all you need.

by fredoliveira

5/10/2026 at 5:40:59 AM

Their ACP integration with Claude agent is extremely broken to the point of being almost unusable. It desyncs and breaks in other ways constantly requiring frequent IDE relaunch. I get that they want you to use their built-in agent but $200 Codex/CC plans are such a good deal it makes very little sense atm and the broken integration is just embarrassing...

by dilyevsky

5/10/2026 at 1:19:51 PM

its time to go back to Zed

by jgm22

5/9/2026 at 11:48:26 PM

[dead]

by Jimmy0252

5/10/2026 at 11:45:23 AM

[dead]

by thesuperevil