Remove text thread and slash command crates

[benbrandt]

🫡

Self-Review Checklist:

• I've reviewed my own diff for quality, security, and reliability
• Unsafe blocks (if any) have justifying comments
• The content is consistent with the UI/UX checklist
• Tests cover the new/changed behavior
• Performance impact has been considered and is acceptable

Release Notes:

• Removed legacy Text Threads feature to help streamline the new agentic workflows in Zed. Thanks to all of you who were enthusiastic Text Thread users over the years ❤️!

[benbrandt]

cc @maxdeviant I'd love a review of the proto/extension changes to make sure I didn't screw something up there...

i'm still wrapping up some cleanups and we need to make an official decision here, but I wanted to see the blast radius

[maxdeviant]

cc @maxdeviant I'd love a review of the proto/extension changes to make sure I didn't screw something up there...

i'm still wrapping up some cleanups and we need to make an official decision here, but I wanted to see the blast radius

Extension changes look good. I think it's the right call to leave the extension API intact, for now, and just remove the registration code. So extensions that provide slash commands are just a no-op.

Proto changes look okay to me (main thing I know to be aware of is reserving the version ranges), but might want to run by someone else who has worked with the Collab protocol more. We'll probably also want to bump the minimum Collab version.

[taoeffect]

This is the exact opposite direction I was expecting to see and it saddens me as my favorite editor has been gutted and its soul ripped out.

The Text Threads feature is incredibly useful and the agent panel just can't do stuff like be used for editing saved prompts.

If anyone wants to restore and empower text threads in a Zed fork, please see these links for ideas:

• Merge the Agent panel back into Zed's text-based discussions #30187
• restore tabs: Agent Panel: New Agent panel breaks multi-tab support and loses context #30172

[KorigamiK]

This is a real bad move. Ignoring the best developed feature in zed that has historically been very so well received.
These discussions actually meant a lot for people using zed.
#30159

If this is removed, I would personally not find any good reason to keep using zed as all other features can very well be covered by the competition.

I request @benbrandt to please consider reverting this decision.

[benbrandt]

Hey all, I know this is frustrating to you. However, a few things we are trying to balance:

• We are actively working on new experiences with agents that will take a lot of what made Text Threads so great and bring them into the world of 2026, hopefully bringing the best of both worlds together
• Text Threads predate a lot of the current agent paradigms and were causing real maintenance burden as we iterated on the new experiences today

So while we ideally would have everything in place for the new experiences before ripping these out, it actually would have required not only more work, but significant product rethinking for how to incorporate a feature we would remove in a few months anyway. So I made the call that we may as well deal with this feedback now, and spend the effort to make using agents in Zed better today.

Usage of text threads has dropped dramatically as users have adopted newer agent workflows. Obviously you were one of the remaining happy users, which I know sucks. We never take a decision like this lightly. I still think it was the right call given all of the work the team is doing at the moment. This PR won't be reverted, which isn't easy to say given your posts here, but hopefully as fellow engineers you can recognize sometimes hard decisions need to be made for the future good of the project.

[buraktamturk]

There is no justification for the removal of this feature. Since the AI endpoint clients are already there, the burden of maintenance should be minimal (i.e. only the UI and the existing slash commands). I find this feature very helpful especially when coding in C# (which is not supported/extremely buggy by Zed editor), I have always opened a text thread and gave my prompt and manually copied it to Rider back! Also this feature is very useful when asking an advice about an idea (i.e. asking alternative ideas of implementation) or very helpful when finding an existing software/library.

I could just /file implementation.cs, /file stacktrace.txt, /tab or /prompts "X Application Background" then type.. And this had Vim keybindings..

This feature is what made Zed great! This feature is crazy good. I can not understand why not to keep it.

[feraxhp]

What a terrible decision. text threads where the best of its kind... this breaks my workflow... I am terribly sad.

[feraxhp]

Nobody is happy with this decision, and they still approve it... is zed no longer care about its users?

[tredondo]

Yessss! I was SO confused by this feature.

[liam-k]

I understand the decision but I do want to join in to say that this feature was absolutely beautiful and incredibly versatile for power users. I would love to see something like this coming back. Some of my favorite features were actually quite simple and probably easy to port, like adding all currently open tabs to the conversation, or the fact that mentioning files in the prompt would actually inline the context which you could easily edit or copy for use elsewhere. Agents are great, but they're not always the best or the fastest workflow.

[JavaGamer]

It be nice to have a non-agentic interface to an llm.

[bsutton]

so this change seems to have inadvertently broken slash commands. As far a I can tell (global) slash commands where only available in the text threads.

The slash commands that I have been developing, as part of a dart language extension , no longer show up in any part of the ui (that I can find).

[zvodd]

I have to weigh in here and say this decision or at least the way it has been executed is completely insane
OBJECTIVELY BAD and MALICIOUS.

Zed is a text editor right? And inside the Text Threads feature is the storage of a bucket load of user generated textual data:

• This USER GENERATED TEXTUAL DATA is otherwise inaccessible - as it is stored inside a database file and serialized with custom data scheme using rust's Serde library.
• Removing this feature has either deleted / made-practically-inaccessible untold quantities of USER DATA.
  No prompting - no escape button - no option given to export that data.

JUST DELETED VIA AN UPDATE

THAT IS STRAIGHT UP MALWARE

What the hell is going here? How did no one clue onto this? What is a text editor anymore? I am dreaming, is this a nightmare?

[benbrandt]

Hey all, your conversations are still available.
Depending on when you did your first text thread, it will either be in

~/.config/zed/conversations

Or
~/.local/state/zed/conversations

(Windows will be in C:\Users\Alice\AppData\Local\ or C:\Users\Alice\AppData\Roaming\)

These are just json files that should be parseable.

We know it isn't convenient, but we did not delete the files that powered the conversations if you really need to grab something from there.

[benbrandt]

@bsutton the slash commands from extensions were only ever used in text threads, that is correct.

[bsutton]

@benbrandt so two features deleted in one go...

Is there any intent to resurface the feature?

[benbrandt]

Well these slash commands were only available in text threads anyway so they were tied together.

This use case will likely be handled via skills in the future for the main agent panel

[bennetbo]

@bsutton If you want to add custom slash commands for "normal" threads you can provide an MCP server that exposes Prompts

[thezetrax]

I loved the text thread feature, that was the main reason I used zed.dev from the beginning

[17twenty]

Thanks for removing - it was confusing to have the legacy behaviour as the agentic stuff rolled out 🎉

[ksdev-pl]

Text threads were the main reason I used Zed.