zed/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Zed

Thank you for helping us make Zed better!

Before you start

• Keep no more than three PRs open at a time. This limit helps us keep up with reviews and ensures all contributors get a fair share of our reviewing capacity. Start with one and see it through; we're lucky to get a lot of contributions, and the pattern we've seen is that landing your first PR dramatically improves the odds for every PR after it. A stack of open PRs on the other hand tends to go stale as main changes.
• Discuss features with us before you start writing code for them. If there isn't a GitHub issue with staff confirmation that we want it, start a GitHub discussion, not a PR or a new issue. This especially applies to changes to the Zed Extension API.
  • Before proposing a larger feature, read the Zed Feature Process for the context, integration points, and design decisions to cover.

All activity in Zed forums is subject to our Code of Conduct.

Things we will (probably) not merge

There are few hard-and-fast rules, but we typically don't merge:

• Changes that can be provided by an extension, such as new languages or themes. See the extension development docs.
• Extension API changes without prior discussion involving Zed staff.
• New file icons. Our default icons are hand-designed to fit together; please don't submit off-the-shelf SVGs.
• Features whose complexity outweighs their benefit, in our judgement, for the number of people who would use them.
• Giant refactorings.
• Non-trivial changes without tests.
• Style-only code changes that don't alter app logic. Reducing allocations, removing .unwrap()s, and fixing typos are welcome; making code "more readable" alone may not be.
• LLM-generated work the author doesn't understand.

We love PRs that...

• Fix or extend the docs: browse docs issues.
• Close issues curated for the community: good first issues, good non-first issues.
• Fix bugs: start with triaged bugs with confirmed reproduction steps, or browse area labels for parts of Zed you care about. Select a label, then add type:Bug to the search.
• Make existing features work for more people through small enhancements, such as support for more platforms or modes.
• Add small features, like keybindings or actions you miss from other editors.
• Join a Community Program like Let's Git Together or The Guild.
• Build features we've explicitly invited contributions for, listed on the community feature board.

AI Policy

We welcome the use of LLMs for coding, but we hold a high bar for all contributions, and we expect a human in the loop who genuinely understands the work an LLM produces on their behalf.

For that reason, we don't accept contributions from autonomous agents. Pull requests that appear to violate this may be closed without notice.

Don't rely on LLMs to write the whole thing for you when communicating with the maintainers (meaning replies to comments, PR descriptions, and alike). The readers are humans, and we'd like to hear from you, not from a model (we have models at home).

If you're a non-native English speaker using an LLM to thoroughly edit or translate your messages to the maintainers, we'd encourage you to put the machine translation in a quote block and include the original text in your native language after it.

If you think it's helpful/necessary to share context from a chat with an LLM, please put the relevant part of it in a quote block (e.g., using >), disclose it as AI-generated, and add your own commentary explaining why it's relevant and what you take from it.

This policy was adapted from ripgrep's AI policy.

Sending changes

Build and run Zed locally, then manually test your changes before opening a PR. Follow the guide for macOS, Linux, Windows, or FreeBSD.

When preparing your PR:

• Review your own work, including any AI-assisted code. Follow the pull request template for testing details and the self-review checklist.
• For visual changes, attach screenshots or a video and work through the UI/UX checklist. For non-visual improvements and changes, include benchmarks or other artifacts produced when testing.
• Keep each PR about one thing, leaving unrelated features and refactoring for another PR.
• Sign the Contributor License Agreement so that your contribution can be merged.

Opening a PR does not guarantee a merge. We may decline a change that doesn't fit Zed's direction or quality standards, even after you've put work into it. Confirming interest early and following this guide give your PR the best chance.

Pinging maintainers by username or emailing them does not raise your PR's priority; it takes time away from review.

Resources

UI/UX checklist

For UI changes, use the UI/UX checklist in the development docs.

Bird's-eye view of Zed

For a tour of the main crates, see the codebase overview in the development docs.

Packaging Zed

Check our notes for packaging Zed.