ZIm/docs

Zed Docs

Welcome to Zed's documentation.

This is built on push to main and published automatically to https://zed.dev/docs.

To preview the docs locally you will need to install mdBook (cargo install mdbook@0.4.40) and then run:

mdbook serve docs

It's important to note the version number above. For an unknown reason, as of 2025-04-23, running 0.4.48 will cause odd URL behavior that breaks docs.

Before committing, verify that the docs are formatted in the way Prettier expects with:

cd docs && pnpm dlx prettier@3.5.0 . --write && cd ..

Preprocessor

We have a custom mdbook preprocessor for interfacing with our crates (crates/docs_preprocessor).

If for some reason you need to bypass the docs preprocessor, you can comment out [preprocessor.zed_docs_preprocessor] from the book.toml.:

Images and videos

To add images or videos to the docs, upload them to another location (e.g., zed.dev, GitHub's asset storage) and then link out to them from the docs.

Putting binary assets such as images in the Git repository will bloat the repository size over time.

Internal notes:

• We have a Cloudflare router called docs-proxy that intercepts requests to zed.dev/docs and forwards them to the "docs" Cloudflare Pages project.
• CI uploads a new version to the Pages project from .github/workflows/deploy_docs.yml on every push to main.

Table of Contents

The table of contents files (theme/page-toc.js and theme/page-doc.css) were initially generated by mdbook-pagetoc.

Since all this preprocessor does is generate the static assets, we don't need to keep it around once they have been generated.

Referencing Keybindings and Actions

When referencing keybindings or actions, use the following formats:

Keybindings:

{#kb scope::Action} - e.g., {#kb zed::OpenSettings}.

This will output a code element like: <code>Cmd+,|Ctrl+,</code>. We then use a client-side plugin to show the actual keybinding based on the user's platform.

By using the action name, we can ensure that the keybinding is always up-to-date rather than hardcoding the keybinding.

Actions:

{#action scope::Action} - e.g., {#action zed::OpenSettings}.

This will render a human-readable version of the action name, e.g., "zed: open settings", and will allow us to implement things like additional context on hover, etc.

Creating New Templates

Templates are just functions that modify the source of the docs pages (usually with a regex match & replace). You can see how the actions and keybindings are templated in crates/docs_preprocessor/src/main.rs for reference on how to create new templates.

References

• Template Trait: crates/docs_preprocessor/src/templates.rs
• Example template: crates/docs_preprocessor/src/templates/keybinding.rs
• Client-side plugins: docs/theme/plugins.js