Suzuri

Code and write in one place.

Suzuri adds a writing environment to Zed without giving up the code editor: Obsidian-style live preview for notes, Typst and LaTeX for papers, and a PDF pane for reading — all over plain markdown on your own machine. The agents you already code with draft, import, and cite; you verify and publish.

Suzuri (硯) is Japanese for inkstone — the stone a scholar grinds ink on before writing begins.

Note

Suzuri is early and in active development, built in the open and dogfooded daily. Expect sharp edges.

Key Features

• Writing — Markdown renders in place and reveals its source when your cursor touches it: editable tables, resizable images, citation chips, Obsidian-style embeds, and screenshots that attach themselves when you paste. Files autosave, so agents and you always see the same thing.

• Reading — A native PDF viewer with continuous scroll, zoom, and real text selection, built on hayro. PDFs reload in place when they change on disk.

• Typesetting — Write Typst or LaTeX in one pane and watch the PDF update in the other, a second after you stop typing. If you have no compiler installed, the first preview offers to fetch one.

• Linking — [[wikilinks]] with completion, ⌘-click follow, backlinks, and broken-link diagnostics, built in with no extension to install.

• Everything Zed does — LSP, tree-sitter, multi-buffer editing, terminals, git, and the rest of a fast, mature editor.

Install

Download the latest installer:

• macOS — Apple Silicon
• macOS — Intel
• Windows
• Linux — x86_64
• Linux — ARM64

The macOS builds are signed and notarized — open the DMG and drag Suzuri to Applications. The Windows installer is not yet signed, so SmartScreen shows a warning: choose "More info → Run anyway".

That first install is the only manual one. Suzuri checks for new releases while it runs, installs them in the background, and shows a "Restart to update" button in the title bar; Suzuri → Check for Updates does the same on demand. Set "auto_update": false in settings to turn the background check off.

The Linux build is a plain tarball. Extract it somewhere permanent, put its bin/suzuri on your PATH, and optionally copy its share/ folder into ~/.local/share for an app-menu entry and icon:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
tar -xzf suzuri-linux-x86_64.tar.gz -C ~/.local
ln -sf ~/.local/suzuri.app/bin/suzuri ~/.local/bin/suzuri
cp -r ~/.local/suzuri.app/share/. ~/.local/share/

Or build from source, the same way Zed builds:

• Building for macOS
• Building for Linux
• Building for Windows

Testbed Data

suzuri-testbed is a companion vault of test data for exercising Suzuri by hand. Each folder targets one rendering surface — markdown live preview (including image reloading), Python REPL and notebook execution, LaTeX and Typst preview, and the PDF viewer — and several fixtures are self-checking notes with a checklist at the top, so you can open them and verify behavior by eye. Clone it and open the folder in Suzuri to smoke-test a build or reproduce a rendering bug against known fixtures.

Credits

Suzuri's own code is the work of:

• Harry Wang
• Silouan Wright — live-preview concealment fixes
• David Turnbull — the PDF viewer (zed#51040) and the hayro text-extraction work it builds on

GitHub's contributors sidebar also lists everyone who has contributed to Zed since this fork began, because Suzuri merges upstream weekly.

And it stands on generous shoulders:

• Zed — the editor underneath everything
• hayro by Laurenz Stampfl — pure-Rust PDF rendering
• markdown-oxide by Felix Zeller — the PKM language server behind wikilinks, backlinks, and link diagnostics
• Typst — the compiler behind Typst live preview
• TinyTeX by Yihui Xie — the relocatable TeX Live behind LaTeX live preview

Relationship to Zed

Suzuri is a modified version of Zed, the editor by Zed Industries, Inc. It tracks Zed's main branch and merges upstream changes; the modifications are additive and live mostly in fork-owned crates (markdown_live_preview, pdf_viewer, typeset_preview), with small changes to crates/editor, crates/project_panel, and crates/languages.

Suzuri is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Zed Industries, Inc. "Zed" is a trademark of Zed Industries, Inc.; it is used here only to identify the upstream project from which Suzuri is derived.

Licensing

Suzuri, like Zed, is licensed primarily under GPL-3.0-or-later, with Apache-2.0 components where marked. See LICENSE-GPL and LICENSE-APACHE.

Copyright for the upstream code remains with Zed Industries, Inc. and Zed's contributors; per-file copyright notices are preserved.

License information for third party dependencies must be correctly provided for CI to pass. Suzuri uses cargo-about to automatically comply with open source licenses, as Zed does. If CI is failing, check the following:

• Is it showing a no license specified error for a crate you've created? If so, add publish = false under [package] in your crate's Cargo.toml.
• Is the error failed to satisfy license requirements for a dependency? If so, first determine what license the project has and whether this system is sufficient to comply with this license's requirements. If you're unsure, ask a lawyer. Once you've verified that this system is acceptable add the license's SPDX identifier to the accepted array in script/licenses/zed-licenses.toml.
• Is cargo-about unable to find the license for a dependency? If so, add a clarification field at the end of script/licenses/zed-licenses.toml, as specified in the cargo-about book.