Zed 1.8.0 Preview: Worktrees from the Sidebar, Terminal Init Commands, and Smarter Text Selection

Zed’s 1.8.0 preview landed on June 17, the same day as the 1.7.2 stable release. The preview channel carries the next round of features before they ship to stable: worktree creation from the sidebar, a new terminal init command setting, and two editor actions for selecting content within delimiters.

Worktrees from the Sidebar

You can now create a new worktree directly from the sidebar’s new-thread button. Previously, starting a thread that used a worktree required setting one up through a separate flow before opening the thread. This shortcut handles it in one step.

Worktrees let agents work on code in an isolated branch without touching your current working tree. The sidebar integration makes that workflow easier to reach, which matters if you’re running multiple agent threads on different parts of a codebase simultaneously.

agent.terminal_init_command

The new agent.terminal_init_command setting accepts a shell command that runs automatically whenever an agent opens a new terminal thread. This is for environment setup that every session needs: activating a virtual environment, setting environment variables, changing to a project directory, or running any other initialization that shouldn’t have to be typed manually each time.

Without this, you’d either prompt the agent to run setup commands at the start of each thread, or include setup instructions in your project’s AGENTS.md. The setting handles it automatically at the infrastructure level.

Select Inside and Around Delimiters

Two new editor actions extend Zed’s selection model:

• editor: select inside delimiters — selects content between the nearest matching bracket pair or quote characters, excluding the delimiters themselves
• editor: select around delimiters — same, but includes the delimiters

Both actions expand through nested structures, so you can run them repeatedly to grow the selection outward through nested brackets and quotes. If you’ve used similar actions in Vim or VS Code, the behavior is familiar.

Archive Search by Project

The thread archive now supports filtering by project name in addition to thread title. If you’ve accumulated threads across multiple projects over time, you can scope the search to just the project you’re working on without scanning through everything.

Git Performance

The release includes several git performance improvements: faster HEAD resolution, faster uncommit operations, optimized remote and branch retrieval, and fewer unnecessary git processes on file changes. These aren’t headline features, but git operations in large repositories have been a noticeable latency source.

The context menu for changed files also gains a “View File” option that opens the file without switching to diff view, which is useful when you want to read the file in full rather than just the changed hunks.

Other Changes

• workspace: reset pane sizes equalizes all panes in the center group, useful after dragging panels out of proportion
• Prettier now respects .editorconfig files when formatting
• REPL cells gain a Stop button for interrupting kernel execution without closing the session
• Agent panel Markdown rendering now treats single newlines as line breaks

Zed 1.8.0 is available on the preview channel now at zed.dev/download/preview. Stable users will see these changes when 1.8.0 graduates to stable in the coming weeks.

Source: Zed v1.8.0-pre release notes