Two Zed editors at once on a Mac
Keep a second setup in a second Zed on the same Mac: both open at once, each signed in to its own account, with its own notifications and Dock icon. Parallex is free and open source.
How
- Install Parallex (below). Your Zed isn't changed.
- Choose New Instance and pick Zed. Name it for what it's for, like “Zed Work”, and give it a color.
- Open it and sign in with the other account. Both run at once, each in its own windows, each with its own Dock icon.
What you get with Zed
- Its own copy of Zed, with its own Dock icon, name and color, its own notifications, and its own macOS permissions.
- Its own Library and keychain, so its sign-in, settings and caches are separate from your other Zed, and it has its own encryption key in the keychain.
- Guard keeps the copy out of the original's data, and the isolation check shows what the copy has opened of yours.
- Kept up to date by Parallex: Zed's own updater is turned off in the copy, and Parallex refreshes the copy when your Zed updates.
- Zed opens a fixed local port to keep itself to one window per Mac; in a copy, that port is moved to one of its own, so the copy opens instead of handing over to your Zed.
- Share settings (an option): your settings, keymap, snippets, themes and extensions, kept in step.
Tested every night
Parallex's compatibility lab makes a fresh copy of Zed 1.18.1 every night on a clean Mac and opens it. On October 1, 2026, on macOS 26.6.2, the copy ran, and nothing reached the original's data. Its copies have run clean on all 2 nights since September 30. See every app's latest result.
Questions
Why does a plain second Zed just switch to the first?
Zed finds a running Zed through a fixed port and hands over to it. A Parallex copy has a port of its own, so both stay open.
Get Parallex
Free and open source, for macOS 14 and later. In Terminal:
curl -fsSL https://parallex.mandip.dev/install | shOr download it from GitHub, or with Homebrew: brew tap mandipadk/parallex https://github.com/mandipadk/parallex then brew install --cask parallex. Then choose New Instance, pick Zed, and give it a name.
Already have Parallex?
This opens New Instance with Zed picked; you name it and choose its color.
Make a second Zed