Zed Editor v1.16.0-pre リリースZed Editor Releases v1.16.0-pre

Zed, the Rust-based code editor developed by Zed Industries, has published a preview build tagged v1.16.0-pre, bundling a handful of practical additions across its AI assistant, Git tooling, diagram rendering, and terminal behavior. As a pre-release, the build is aimed at users who want to test features ahead of a stable rollout, and it reflects the project's continued cadence of shipping incremental improvements on a roughly weekly basis.

The headline addition is support for Gemini 3.6 Flash, extending the range of Google models available inside Zed's assistant features. Flash-tier models are generally positioned as faster, lower-cost options relative to larger "Pro" variants, making them a common choice for interactive coding tasks where latency matters more than maximum reasoning depth. Adding it gives Zed users another endpoint to select when configuring the editor's AI integration, alongside the other providers Zed already supports. This fits a broader industry pattern in which editors increasingly treat model choice as a configurable setting rather than a fixed dependency, letting developers weigh speed, cost, and capability for their own workflows.

On the version control side, the release refines the Git Panel, the interface Zed provides for staging, committing, and managing changes without leaving the editor. Grouped changes can now be collapsed, which should make large changesets easier to scan by letting users fold sections they are not currently reviewing. The update also introduces optional stash messages, so that when developers set aside work in progress using Git's stash mechanism, they can attach a descriptive label. Stashes in Git are otherwise identified by autogenerated references that can be hard to distinguish, so an optional message makes it easier to recall what a given stash contains before restoring it.

The build additionally improves how Zed handles Mermaid diagrams, adding zooming and horizontal scrolling. Mermaid is a widely used text-to-diagram syntax that renders flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and similar visuals from plain-text definitions, and it commonly appears inside Markdown documents and technical documentation. Larger or wider diagrams can be awkward to view when they exceed the available preview area, so the ability to zoom and scroll horizontally addresses a practical limitation for anyone embedding complex diagrams in their notes or docs.

Rounding out the changes is a new setting that controls whether the Terminal Panel opens automatically in new workspaces. This is a small but meaningful workflow adjustment: some developers prefer an integrated terminal to be immediately available, while others want a cleaner initial layout and open the terminal only when needed. Making the behavior configurable rather than fixed lets each user match the editor to their preference, and it is consistent with Zed's general approach of exposing behavior through its settings system.

For context, Zed is a relatively young editor that emphasizes performance, collaborative editing, and native rendering, and it was created by several developers previously associated with the Atom editor and the Tree-sitter parsing library. The project has increasingly leaned into AI-assisted development, positioning itself alongside other tools in the space that integrate large language models directly into the coding environment. The pre-release channel is where features like the ones in this build typically surface first, giving early adopters a chance to exercise them and report issues before they reach the stable release.

None of the items in this build appear to represent a fundamental architectural shift; rather, they are targeted refinements to existing subsystems that many users interact with daily. The combination is fairly typical of Zed's release notes, which tend to pair a new model integration with usability polish across panels and rendering. Users interested in the Gemini 3.6 Flash support should confirm that they have appropriate API access or configuration in place, since model availability generally depends on the provider's own terms and any account-level requirements.

Taken together, v1.16.0-pre is an incremental update that touches AI, Git, documentation tooling, and terminal ergonomics in a single pass. Because it is a preview build, behavior may still change before a corresponding stable version ships, and anyone relying on Zed for production work may prefer to wait for that stable release or to test the preview in a non-critical setup first.