Zed 1.9.0 Preview: Agent Panel Search, Terminal Sandbox Controls, and Telescope-Style Pickers

Zed’s 1.9.0 preview dropped on June 24, carrying three substantial changes: in-thread search for the Agent Panel, a dedicated sandbox settings page for agent terminal commands, and a resizable picker with live file previews that resolves the single most-requested Zed feature.

Agent Panel Search

You can now search within agent threads using Ctrl/Cmd+F. This was contributed by a community member (@dandv on GitHub) and closes a gap that became more noticeable as longer agentic sessions became common. A thread with 80 messages documenting a multi-hour coding session was effectively unsearchable before this.

File search results from the agent’s grep tool also now open at the matched line when you click them, instead of just opening the file. Small change, but it saves a lot of scrolling when the match is deep in a large file.

The options menu in the Agent Panel also gets a quick-add entry for remote MCP servers, so you can connect a server without leaving the panel to dig through settings.

Terminal Sandbox Settings

This release introduces formal controls for the agent terminal sandbox, which governs what commands agents can execute when they use the terminal tool.

Two key additions:

An agent.sandbox_permissions.enabled setting to toggle agent terminal sandboxing on or off
A dedicated Sandbox settings page with persistent controls: allowed domains for network access, writable path allowlists, a toggle for unrestricted filesystem writes, and a list of commands that can run outside the sandbox

Previously, sandbox permissions had to be approved one at a time through prompts during agent sessions. The new settings page lets you define baseline permissions upfront and update them without interrupting active threads.

Windows gets terminal sandboxing for agent commands in this release too, bringing it in line with macOS. Git operations also get tighter sandboxing: metadata access, worktree operations, and SSH commit signing are now properly scoped.

Telescope-Style Resizable Pickers

The most-requested open issue in the Zed repository (860 upvotes) was a Telescope-like search experience: a resizable picker with live file or text previews alongside the results. This release ships it.

The file finder now shows a preview to the right or below the results depending on available space. A new text finder picker does the same for project-wide text search, with searches shared between the two views so you can switch between them without losing your query.

All picker modals in Zed are now draggable and resizable. Shell completion generation for the zed CLI also lands in this release via zed --completions <SHELL>.

New Models

GLM 5.2 and Kimi K2.7 Code are now available for OpenCode Go. DeepSeek V4 Pro is available for OpenCode Zen. On the deprecation side, MiniMax M3 Free is removed, and GLM 5, Kimi K2.5, and MiniMax M2.5 are restricted to Zen only.

Git Panel Updates

The Git Panel gets a few quality-of-life changes: a split button that keeps Stage All and Unstage All as primary actions while grouping other change actions in a dropdown, a blame toggle in the gutter context menu, and view options for switching between list and tree view with configurable sorting.

ACP: Embedded Resources in Tool Calls

The Agent Client Protocol now supports embedded resources in tool calls. This allows ACP-compatible external agents to include file content, images, or structured data directly in their tool call responses rather than referencing paths that Zed then has to fetch separately.

Zed 1.9.0 is on the preview channel at zed.dev/download/preview. The full release notes are on GitHub.

Source: Zed v1.9.0-pre release notes