Zed Editor Theme-Builder (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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'

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

its time to go back to Zed