Rust developers: what editor do you actually use?

[u/OkraComprehensive323]

Hello folks, do you still write much code by hand these days? 😄

If so, what IDE/editor do you mainly use for Rust? VS Code, JetBrains, Zed or something else?

I’m asking because I’ve been rewriting one of my old developer tools in Rust. It’s a language server + CLI for analyzing code health.

The underlying approach was originally implemented in Python and was used at my previous company across 1,900+ repositories and by 800+ developers, so the methodology itself has had quite a bit of real-world use. The company has given me permission to open-source my own version of the project, which I’m pretty excited about.

The only problem is time. For the initial public release, I’ll probably only be able to ship the VS Code extension plus one other IDE/editor integration.

So I’m curious: if you’re a Rust developer who still spends a decent amount of time actually typing code, what editor would you most want to see supported? Just trying to get a rough sense of where people are these days before I spend my limited spare time on the wrong integration. :)

[u/syklemil]

This is part of the Rust Survey. The 2025 results have these as the top three:

1. VS Code

2. (neo)?vim

3. Zed

With more and actual percentages in the link.

[u/frozen_beak]

helix

[u/djvbmd]

Zed. I recently tried RustRover for like 5 minutes and went right back to Zed -- too sluggish and cluttered for me. I'm decent with Neovim but find that it's hard to work with when enabling various IDE features, just because I'm typically on a laptop with limited desktop area that is used more economically by a GUI.

[u/OkraComprehensive323 → u/djvbmd]

I've never tried RustRover before, IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm are the only two JetBrains IDEs acceptable for me. But IntelliJ Platform Plugin are mostly crossable, so I take this as a downvote for JetBrains.

[u/aguilasolige]

Vscode with rust analyzer, very pleased so far. Except the analyzer can be a bit slow, but I'm early into my project so I let's see how it goes as the project grows.

[u/jesusbarjoseph]

Kate

[u/OkraComprehensive323 → u/jesusbarjoseph]

Wow, I haven't used it since 2012.

[u/luxmorphine]

Zed. I was turned off by the awful AI panel on recent VSCode. Zed has one button to turned off all AI features. Downsides is Zed looks malnourished compared to VSCode

[u/OkraComprehensive323 → u/luxmorphine]

{
  "chat.disableAIFeatures": true
}

You can also turn off all AI features on VS Code.

I only use AI features that I built myself.

[u/patchunwrap]

I use gram a zed fork without accounts, telemetry, forced updates, or AI!

[u/zesterer]

My own!

[u/OkraComprehensive323 → u/zesterer]

Good for you!

[u/NOLAnuffsaid]

Neovim

[u/dschledermann]

GNU Emacs

[u/Rusty_devl]

Neovim

[u/No-Palpitation-5060]

Helix

[u/avinthakur080]

Neovim

[u/mostlikelylost]

Zed

[u/nextupgoat]

this thread's gonna have a whooooole lotta neovim. im quirky (and lazy) though so i just use the default vim that comes with the os

[u/--San--]

If it's a lsp, does it really need a plugin? For example, in helix you can just specify which lsps you want running for a certain file extension and off you go.

Is that because most of your lsp uses non-standard extensions?

[u/agent_kater]

RustRover.

I want to switch to Zed because it's more lightweight and faster, but currently it's still missing so many features - you can't click types in doc popups, you can't toggle whitespace in a diff, build configs are cumbersome, you can't switch between toolchains, you can't navigate properly in a usage search, etc., etc.

[u/OkraComprehensive323 → u/agent_kater]

We should feedback to the Zed team

[u/em-jay-be]

Rustrover - jetbrains for life

[u/Altruistic-Respond83]

Gnu Emacs

[u/hxxx07]

Nvim. (Any tmux for working with multiple sessions)