What's New

Zed has introduced Theme Builder, a visual editor that lets developers craft custom editor themes without touching a single line of JSON. Instead of manually tweaking hundreds of color tokens in configuration files, users can now use an interactive interface with a live preview to design their perfect theme.

Key Features

The Theme Builder interface includes:

• Live preview pane showing an interactive replica of Zed's UI, updated instantly as you make changes
• Inspector tool that lets you right-click any element to see exactly which theme tokens control its appearance, eliminating guesswork
• Color linking that allows tokens to reference each other—change a source color and all linked tokens update automatically, with suggested links between related elements
• Tree-sitter syntax highlighting for pixel-perfect code previews that match Zed's actual highlighting
• Import/export functionality to load existing themes or generate exportable theme files

The Problem Solved

Modern code editors like Zed now include 16 categories of UI colors, 10 categories of syntax colors, and player colors for multiplayer collaboration. Managing these interdependencies in raw JSON is tedious and error-prone. Color linking prevents visual inconsistencies, while the inspector eliminates the trial-and-error of determining which property controls which element.

Getting Started

The Theme Builder includes several built-in themes (One, Ayu, Gruvbox) as starting points. Developers can import existing themes, customize them visually, and export the results either as theme overrides or as extension files for sharing.

The tool is available at zed.dev/theme-builder.