A customized code editor forked from Zed, focused on better terminal workflows, visual git integration, and deep theme customization.

Lathe is a personal fork of Zed. I maintain it so I can ship small editor tweaks for my own workflow without waiting on upstream review, and without needing each change to fit Zed's product scope. Upstream Zed is the primary project — this fork tracks it closely and layers on my own changes.

Platforms: macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux (x86_64), and Windows (x86_64; experimental).

Stability: Lathe is maintained for my own daily use. Upstream syncs can occasionally introduce breakage; bug reports are welcome.

Lathe ships with its own default theme and a refined syntax highlighting palette applied across all supported languages. The theme is tuned for long coding sessions — balanced contrast, distinct-but-not-loud accent colors for keywords, strings, and types, and deliberate choices for diagnostic and git-status colors so the editor stays readable when things go wrong. Pair it with the Theme Customizer (below) to tweak any of the 135+ color tokens to taste.

A built-in panel for editing all 135+ theme colors with HSLA sliders and live preview. Includes category filters, Lathe-specific color badges, and per-color reset. Open via the command palette: theme customizer: Open.

Tabs and project panel entries are color-coded by git status — modified, created, deleted, conflict, error, and warning states each get distinct colors.

The Git Explorer panel renders Local and Remote branches as a collapsible folder tree, splitting names on /. So feature/auth/login and feature/auth/signup collapse under a single feature/auth/ folder you can fold or expand. Folders show counts of contained branches and remember their open/closed state per section. When the filter input is active the tree flattens so filter results stay legible.

From any commit in the Git history view, create a new branch off that revision without first checking out. Useful for forking experimental work off a specific point.

Check out any commit SHA from the history view into detached HEAD. For inspecting old state without losing your current branch position. Local repositories only for now; collab projects bail with a clear error.

The interactive rebase modal supports drag-and-drop reordering of commits and per-row pick / squash / edit / drop actions inline. Dragging a branch onto another in the history view shows a confirmation modal with a preview of what the rebase will do before anything runs.

The git panel has three tabs. Changes is the familiar staging view, History shows the commit log inline, and Explorer lists branches, worktrees, and stashes for the repository in one filterable tree. A multi-repo strip keeps every repository in the workspace one click away, with fetch-all and pull-all actions.

Expand any file row in the Changes list to see its individual hunks and stage or unstage them one at a time, without opening a diff view.

Creating a worktree from a remote branch fetches the latest origin state first, so the new worktree starts from the current remote tip instead of a stale local ref.

Open the full commit history of a single file from the project panel and browse how it changed over time.

A pull request panel with browser-based auth for GitHub and Bitbucket Cloud: browse PRs, read and leave review comments, see reviewers, and approve or request changes. Verdict buttons toggle, so clicking Approve again retracts your approval. Hidden in the current beta while the credentials UI is finished.

Shows a return icon in the terminal tab and title bar when Claude Code or other interactive prompts are waiting for input.

Terminal tabs get a subtle green background when active, making them easy to spot among editor tabs.

Switching to a terminal tab via ctrl+tab properly activates the cursor without needing to click into the terminal.

Choose what sound plays when a terminal rings its bell via the terminal.bell setting. Imported automatically from VS Code's accessibility.signals.terminalBell when migrating settings.

Sign in to multiple subscription accounts for the external agents in the Agent Panel (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini) and switch between them from the panel's account chip. An approval selector picks each agent's approval / sandbox level; the level is applied when the agent process spawns, so changes take effect on the next thread.

Sign into more than one Zed Cloud account and switch between them from the avatar menu. Saved accounts are listed under Accounts by their GitHub username, with Add Account… and Sign Out actions.

When generating a shareable collab link, a dialog lets you pick which saved account to link from — useful when you work across personal and work Zed Cloud accounts.

Save the set of currently open projects as a named workspace group, then reopen the whole group in a new window later. Each group can optionally be bound to a saved collab account, so opening the group automatically switches to that account first.

Commands (via the command palette):

• workspace groups: Save Workspace Group
• workspace groups: Open Workspace Group
• workspace groups: Update Current Workspace Group
• workspace groups: Rename Current Workspace Group
• workspace groups: Bind Workspace Group Account
• workspace groups: Unbind Workspace Group Account

Cmd +, Cmd -, and Cmd 0 adjust the buffer and UI font size of only the active Lathe window, so two windows side-by-side can be zoomed independently. The "Reset Zoom" menu action and Cmd +scroll-wheel (when mouse-wheel zoom is enabled) also stay scoped to the focused window. The persisted variants (the menu's … (persisted) items) still write to settings.json and apply globally.

A drop-in .zed/tasks.json template and a setup walkthrough for building and installing Expo apps on Android devices without Android Studio. See docs/mobile-development.md. Lathe also ships a first-class Mobile panel (device list, per-app logcat, one-click debug build & run, EAS cloud builds), a status-bar device selector that appears when an Expo project is open, and a one-click Android toolchain installer that downloads JDK 17 and the Android SDK into a Lathe-managed directory with licenses accepted.

brew tap paterschris/tap
brew install --cask lathe

Download the latest release from Releases:

• macOS: Download the .dmg, open it, and drag Lathe.app to /Applications. A .zip is also available if you prefer. macOS builds are code-signed and notarized by Apple.
• Linux: Download the .tar.gz and extract it, or use the install script after building from source (see below). Like upstream Zed, the editor needs the host's ALSA runtime (libasound2 on Debian/Ubuntu, alsa-lib on Fedora/Arch) and working Vulkan drivers; both are preinstalled on typical desktop distros.
• Windows: Download the x86_64 setup .exe or .zip. Windows builds are currently unsigned; see Installing on Windows.

The setup .exe is the simplest option. Because Lathe's Windows builds are unsigned, Microsoft Defender SmartScreen may show a warning. Select More info, verify that the file came from the Lathe GitHub release, then select Run anyway.

For the portable path, download the x86_64 .zip, open PowerShell in a Lathe source checkout, and run:

script/install-fork-windows.ps1 -ArchivePath C:\path\to\Lathe-version-x86_64-windows.zip

The install script removes Mark-of-the-Web from the extracted files, installs Lathe under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Lathe, adds its CLI to your user PATH, and creates a Start Menu shortcut. If Lathe installs but no window appears, run script/diag-windows.ps1 from the source checkout and include its output in a bug report.

macOS:

git clone git@github.com:paterschris/lathe.git
cd lathe
script/build-fork      # ~10-15 min first time
script/install-fork    # copies to /Applications

Linux:

git clone git@github.com:paterschris/lathe.git
cd lathe
script/build-fork-linux      # installs system deps, builds
script/package-fork-linux    # creates .tar.gz
script/install-fork-linux    # installs to ~/.local/share/lathe, symlinks CLI to ~/.local/bin

Windows:

git clone https://github.com/paterschris/lathe.git
cd lathe
script/build-fork-windows.ps1 -Architecture x86_64
script/package-fork-windows.ps1 -Architecture x86_64
script/install-fork-windows.ps1

Installs as Lathe and runs alongside stock Zed without conflicts.

To run the build without installing to /Applications, launch the bundle directly:

open target/release/bundle/osx/Lathe.app

Lathe ships on two channels:

• Stable — tagged vX.Y.Z, the recommended build for daily use.
• Beta — tagged vX.Y.Z-beta, published as GitHub prereleases with a distinct app icon. Beta builds typically contain the latest upstream Zed sync before it's rolled into stable.

Homebrew installs stable by default. To try a beta, grab the -beta asset from Releases.

brew upgrade lathe

git pull
script/build-fork
script/install-fork

git pull
script/build-fork-linux
script/package-fork-linux
script/install-fork-linux

Lathe periodically merges from upstream Zed to stay current with new features and fixes. Custom changes are kept in separate commits to make merges straightforward.

Last synced with upstream Zed: 2026-07-14.

2026-04-24: main was rewritten to fix a long-standing ancestry tangle that made the fork display as ~37k commits ahead and ~37k behind upstream. The new history is 9 thematic commits on top of upstream/main, and the source tree is unchanged. Original SHAs are preserved on the archive/pre-rebuild-20260424 branch. Existing clones can recover with:

git fetch origin
git reset --hard origin/main

Lathe inherits its licensing from upstream Zed:

• The application is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.
• gpui and several foundational crates are licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
• Other components are licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

All upstream license terms are preserved. See the individual LICENSE-* files at the repo root.

Lathe is primarily a personal fork, but I want to preserve the open-source feel of Zed. If you hit a bug, want a tweak, or have an idea that fits the spirit of the fork, feel free to open an issue or PR. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the inherited Zed guidelines; Lathe-specific conventions live in CLAUDE.md and .rules.

script/release-fork

Builds, packages, and publishes a GitHub release. Requires the GitHub CLI.

• First builds take significantly longer than incremental rebuilds
• On macOS, the app shares settings and extensions with stock Zed (~/Library/Application Support/Zed)
• On Linux, the app installs to ~/.local/share/lathe with the CLI symlinked to ~/.local/bin/lathe
• cargo-bundle is installed automatically from zed-industries/cargo-bundle