Zed v1.9 Ships Telescope-Style Resizable Pickers After 860 Upvotes

Zed v1.9 is out, and the headline feature is one the community has been asking for loudly: resizable picker modals with live file previews. The feature resolved a GitHub issue that had accumulated 860 thumbs-up reactions, making it one of the most-demanded quality-of-life improvements in the editor's history. If you've ever used Telescope in Neovim, the new experience will feel immediately familiar.

Pickers That Actually Show You What You're Picking

The core change is that Zed's file finder and search modals are now draggable and resizable, and they show a live preview pane alongside the results list. The preview renders to the right or below the results depending on how much space is available. No more opening a file blind just to check if it's the right one.

• Resizable picker modals , drag the edges to set your preferred size; Zed remembers it
• File finder preview , see the file contents before committing to opening it
• Text finder with live preview , a new search modal that shows matching lines in context as you type, opened via text finder: toggle in the command palette
• Pre-filled queries , the text finder automatically picks up whatever you were searching in the project search or buffer search, so context carries over

This week's release adds Telescope-style resizable pickers with file and text finder previews, resolving a request with 860 thumbs-up, including a new search modal that previews results live as you type, opened via the text finder: toggle action in the command palette, plus search in the Agent Panel.

Search Inside Agent Threads

The other major addition targets anyone doing heavy agentic work. Long agent conversations are now searchable. In-thread search has been added to the Agent Panel via Ctrl/Cmd+F. This is a small-sounding change that matters a lot in practice: agent threads can get long fast, and scrolling back through hundreds of lines of LLM output to find a specific code snippet or explanation is genuinely painful.

Agent Panel file search results from the agent's grep tool now open files at the matched line when clicked. Combined with in-thread search, navigating the output of a long agentic session is significantly less frustrating.

What Else Landed

Beyond the picker overhaul, v1.9 packs a solid set of editor and agent improvements:

• Shell completions for the CLI , shell completion generation for the zed CLI is now available via zed --completions <SHELL>.
• Git Panel view options , a new View Options menu lets you switch between list and tree view, sort by path or name, and group by status.
• Git blame toggle , git blame can now be toggled directly from the gutter's context menu.
• Improved startup performance , startup performance has been improved.
• MCP server shortcut , an entry has been added to the Agent Panel options menu to quickly add a remote MCP server.
• New model support , GLM 5.2 and Kimi K2.7 Code have been added to OpenCode Go, and DeepSeek V4 Pro is now available for OpenCode Zen.

The Community-Driven Development Story

What's notable about this release is how explicitly community-driven it is. The picker feature was contributed by ozacod, a community member who resolved an 860-upvote issue. The in-thread search was contributed by dandv. Multiple other improvements across Git, Vim/Helix mode, and the terminal came from external contributors. The Zed repository currently sits at 86.3k stars on GitHub with 9.3k forks.

This pattern , the Zed team shipping the core architecture while the community fills in the UX gaps , is accelerating. The v1.9.0-pre release notes credit community contributors on nearly every significant feature.

Getting It and What It Costs

Zed v1.9 is available now on macOS, Linux, and Windows. The Zed editor itself is free and open-source. Zed Pro ($10/month) is an optional subscription for hosted AI features, but you can bring your own LLM API key for unlimited AI use on the free plan. A two-week free trial of the Pro plan comes with $20 of token credits and unlimited accepted edit predictions. Students get a better deal: the Zed Student plan gives access to Zed Pro for free for one year.

The new text finder and resizable pickers are available to all users regardless of plan. If you're already on Zed, update via the editor's built-in updater. If you're coming from VS Code or Cursor and have been waiting for a more polished search experience, this release is a reasonable moment to give it a fresh look.