The Community Champions Program

Since we published Zed's source code two years and four months ago, interest in our repository has grown well beyond what we could've imagined: today, the repository has accumulated more than 84k GitHub ⭐s, placing it in the top 200 most-starred repositories on the platform.

A star-history comparison between Zed and Atom (previously built by Zed's founders) puts the momentum we've experienced into perspective:

... and with those stars came contributions... a LOT of contributions!

So many contributions that we've never reached inbox zero, despite having an open-source team and many other engineers dedicating healthy amounts of time to reviewing and merging pull requests. From January through May of 2026, we merged 4,325 non-bot pull requests, 1,194 of which came from 527 unique non-staff contributors. It's a daunting amount of code to review, but we're honored that so many people take time from their lives to make Zed better.

In September 2025, Esther, our Head of Community, proposed a Community Champions program to formally recognize Zed's most committed and active contributors.

What is a Community Champion?

Community Champions are contributors who consistently help make Zed better through code, issues, and community engagement.

These champions:

• contribute quality code to repositories in our organization (zed, extensions, etc.)
• respond well to suggestions and feedback during code review
• open well-formed issues with clean reproduction steps

A Community Champion is someone the team genuinely knows and wants to work with. You'll notice the community champion label on pull requests and issues throughout the Zed repository; it's how we signal to our engineers that this one's worth prioritizing. We're actively building toward making that more consistent, and it's a big part of why programs like the community champion label and the Zed Guild exist.

How are Community Champions Identified?

Community Champions aren't identified by any single metric. We have internal dashboards that surface contribution data so we can see who's been active across our repositories, but often times, champions are selected by individual team members based on their first-hand experience working with that person. Again, these are people we've come to know and simply enjoy working with. From there, we add them to a public list in a GitHub workflow that automatically tags their issues and pull requests with community champion.

Today, we have over 60 recognized champions submitting fantastic PRs, filing high-quality issues, and helping other users in Discord and GitHub.

To Our Community

If you've spent time writing up an issue, or opening a pull request to close one, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you! ❤️ It has been an incredible experience to witness the steady growth of our community, from a handful of alpha testers in a private GitHub repository back in 2021 to hundreds of thousands of users and contributors today. Whether you're a user, a contributor, or both, your belief in Zed means more than we can easily put into words.

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If you're looking to contribute, check out the CONTRIBUTING.md guide. Join our Discord as well; we're happy to pair with you to help you land your pull request.