To me, the most interesting thing about Zed is the GUI framework they’re building along with it, called GPUI. Its approach to text rendering seems like it would do a much better job than any other newish GUI framework that I’ve seen at preserving the look of a windowing system’s native glyphs.

AFAIK, they don’t plan to generalize it for use by other projects, at least for now. But if their approach to this stuff ends up working as well as it seems on paper, I could see it leading to a new cross-platform GUI toolkit capable of rivaling Qt in certain areas where there are vanishingly few good options.

https://zed.dev/blog/videogame#text-rendering

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/main/crates/gpui

https://www.gpui.rs/