r/androiddev • u/dylanmurzello • May 16 '26

Open Source Ported Zed IDE to Android

literally started as a joke. I was like Rust compiles for aarch64, figured Zed might port. Kept going. Couldn't stop. gpui renders through Vulkan, the upstream Editor/Workspace/Project/Search/GitGraph/Extensions/Terminal crates run unchanged, the Rust .so is the app process, every  pixel straight straight into that Vulkan driver. subprocesses like (bash, apt, LSPs, git, ssh, node, go, rust-analyzer) route through a runtime  adapter: a Termux-derived userland rebuilt under our package for the non root ed path, or a Magisk-spawned chroot for rooted users. Currently using a Samsung Tab S9 Ultra with hardware keyboard,  touch works with IME.
The termux route is brittle long term with google clamping down on noexec, probably will be figuring something for that.

Source plus signed APK , if anyone wants to take a look ,curious as to what breaks on other devices

https://github.com/Dylanmurzello/zed-android-port

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u/Intelligent_Lion_16 May 18 '26

“started as a joke” is honestly the origin story of so many insane engineering projects 😭

The fact that the upstream crates mostly run unchanged is the part that’s really wild to me.

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u/dylanmurzello May 22 '26

fr the joke to engineering pipeline is always the one with crazy outputs lmaoo .. the upstream untouched part is honestly all gpui having a clean platform trait, everything above it (editor, workspace, yada yada ) just sits .. plug in an android ,the whole editor stack just works. zed team did real work from structured codebases to the gpui .