Zed + Claude Code

An unofficial build of Zed with native Claude Code IDE integration. Run the real claude CLI in Zed's integrated terminal and it connects on its own — your selection, diagnostics and Keep/Reject diffs appear in the editor. Prebuilt for Windows, macOS and Linux. Zed's own code is barely touched: the integration is a self-contained crate plus an 43-line graft, which is what lets this build follow upstream Zed rather than drift away from it.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Zed Industries. This is a personal fork. For official Zed, go to zed.dev or zed-industries/zed.

What it does

Zed already offers Claude Code as an agent in its agent panel. This is the other direction: the claude CLI, running in Zed's terminal, drives the editor — the same protocol the official VS Code and JetBrains extensions speak.

• Auto-connect. No /ide needed; the terminal is told where to find the editor.
• @-mention your current selection.
• Model-visible diagnostics from Zed's language servers.
• Open a file, save it, check whether it is dirty, list open editors.
• Keep/Reject diffs. A proposed change opens as a side-by-side tab and the CLI waits for you.

Install

Download from Releases — the changelog says what each one is built on and what has been verified. Every release ships a .sha256 beside each asset; verify with sha256sum -c <asset>.sha256 (shasum -a 256 -c on macOS). The binaries are unsigned — the source is this repository at the commit named in the release, and can be rebuilt from it.

Windows — unzip into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\ZedDev and run zed.exe from there. conpty.dll and OpenConsole.exe must sit beside it or the integrated terminal will not open. No installer, no admin rights.

macOS (Apple silicon) — open the .dmg, drag Zed Dev.app to /Applications, then clear the quarantine flag or macOS will report it as damaged:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Zed Dev.app"

Linux (x86_64) — ALSA is not bundled and the editor will not start without it:

sudo apt install libasound2t64          # libasound2 before Ubuntu 24.04
tar -xzf zed-claude-code-linux-x86_64.tar.gz -C ~/.local
ln -sf ~/.local/zed-dev.app/bin/zed ~/.local/bin/zed

Built on Ubuntu 24.04, so glibc 2.39 is the floor — verified to fail on Ubuntu 22.04 and Debian 12.

Updating

These are dev-channel builds, which switches Zed's own updater off deliberately: a stable-channel build would download official Zed over the top and silently discard the patch. Use the updater scripts instead.

script/update-zed.sh  [--pre] [--dry-run]     # macOS and Linux
script/update-zed.ps1 [-Pre]  [-DryRun]       # Windows

Both read /releases/latest, which excludes prereleases — so nothing updates itself to a build nobody has looked at. --pre / -Pre tries one anyway; --dry-run / -DryRun previews. Mind the spelling: PowerShell takes a single dash, and --pre there binds to the first positional parameter instead of failing.

Known limitations

• No inline streaming diffs. openDiff opens a side-by-side tab. That is what the IDE protocol offers, not a shortcoming of this build.
• Unsigned binaries, so Gatekeeper and SmartScreen will object the first time.
• No auto-update, by design — see above.
• Tracks Zed stable, one or two releases behind. A weekly job rebases onto each new upstream stable; see the changelog for what a given release is built on.
• Linux is verified headlessly, not on real graphics hardware. The editor starts and the integration connects under Xvfb with software rendering; the artifact checks out too — the binary reports the right channel and commit, its only unbundled dependency is libasound2t64, and the updater installs and self-detects. What is untested is a real GPU and a real desktop session. Reports from one are welcome.
• Best-effort support. Issues are open.

How it works

Each Zed window binds a loopback port and writes ~/.claude/ide/<port>.lock describing itself. The CLI finds it there, connects over a WebSocket authenticated by a token from that file, and speaks JSON-RPC 2.0 / MCP. Zed's integrated terminal exports CLAUDE_CODE_SSE_PORT and ENABLE_IDE_INTEGRATION, which is what makes the connection automatic.

The patch is small on purpose: one new crate, crates/claude_code_ide/, plus a 43-line graft into existing Zed code. Keeping it that small is what makes tracking upstream cheap — moving from Zed 1.16.3 to 1.17.2, across 118 upstream commits, took a one-line fix. See crates/claude_code_ide/README.md.

You do not have to take that on trust. This compares official Zed against this fork — every line of the difference, nothing else:

zed-industries/zed@v1.18.1 ... ixiion001:main-patched

To download the change rather than read it, append the format to that URL. GitHub generates both on demand, so they are never out of date with the branch. Every release from cc-v1.17.2-1 on also attaches the same diff, gzipped and pinned to that build, so a release stays self-contained:

• .diff — one flat diff, about 200 KB. git apply it to a checkout of upstream v1.18.1 and you have this fork. Verified: it applies clean, and the graft measures 43 lines in the result.
• .patch — the same change as its individual commits, authorship intact. Apply it with git -c core.symlinks=false am: without that flag it stops partway, on a commit that adds CLAUDE.md before its file mode was corrected, with File name too long.

The graft is the part that matters, and it is reproducible from a clone. The fork does not carry upstream's tags, so name the base tag once — the commits themselves are already there, because this branch is rebased directly onto it:

git remote add zed https://github.com/zed-industries/zed
git fetch zed tag v1.18.1
git diff --shortstat v1.18.1..main-patched -- \
  crates/project/ crates/zed/src/main.rs crates/zed/Cargo.toml Cargo.toml
#   5 files changed, 43 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

script/claude-ide-probe.py checks a running editor end to end — lock file, handshake, MCP, tools/call — and exits non-zero if anything regressed.

Building it yourself

cargo build --release --package zed --package cli

macOS additionally needs full Xcode: gpui compiles Metal shaders with xcrun -sdk macosx metal, which the Command Line Tools do not ship. Linux needs ./script/linux first. Always build with the dev channel — see the release-channel note in CLAUDE.md, which is the single easiest way to end up with a binary that quietly replaces itself.

Credits and licence

• Zed Industries — the editor.
• vitaly-andr — the original crates/claude_code_ide integration, which is the substance of this fork.
• This fork — Windows discovery, handshake and path fixes (offered back upstream), and the cross-platform release pipeline.

GPL-3.0-or-later, as Zed is. The corresponding source is this repository, which stays public.