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Remove text thread and slash command crates#52757

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benbrandt merged 10 commits intomainfrom
sunset-text-threads
Mar 31, 2026
Merged

Remove text thread and slash command crates#52757
benbrandt merged 10 commits intomainfrom
sunset-text-threads

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@benbrandt
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🫡

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 ❤️!

@cla-bot cla-bot bot added the cla-signed The user has signed the Contributor License Agreement label Mar 30, 2026
@zed-community-bot zed-community-bot bot added the staff Pull requests authored by a current member of Zed staff label Mar 30, 2026
@benbrandt
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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
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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.

@benbrandt benbrandt force-pushed the sunset-text-threads branch from 1bd6c33 to 97a139c Compare March 31, 2026 13:44
benbrandt and others added 3 commits March 31, 2026 15:53
@benbrandt benbrandt marked this pull request as ready for review March 31, 2026 14:11
@zed-codeowner-coordinator zed-codeowner-coordinator bot requested review from a team, bennetbo and probably-neb and removed request for a team March 31, 2026 14:11
@benbrandt benbrandt merged commit 76c6004 into main Mar 31, 2026
31 checks passed
@benbrandt benbrandt deleted the sunset-text-threads branch March 31, 2026 15:55
MrSubidubi added a commit that referenced this pull request Mar 31, 2026
@taoeffect
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taoeffect commented Apr 2, 2026

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:

@KorigamiK
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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.

@zed-zippy zed-zippy bot added the PR state:needs review Used to label PRs that are in need of a post-merge approval label Apr 6, 2026
@benbrandt
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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.

@MrSubidubi MrSubidubi removed the PR state:needs review Used to label PRs that are in need of a post-merge approval label Apr 7, 2026
@buraktamturk
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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
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feraxhp commented Apr 8, 2026

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

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feraxhp commented Apr 8, 2026

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

@tredondo
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tredondo commented Apr 8, 2026

Yessss! I was SO confused by this feature.

@liam-k
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liam-k commented Apr 8, 2026

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.

lukemarsden added a commit to helixml/zed that referenced this pull request Apr 9, 2026
- HeadlessConnection: add missing agent_id() method, fix new_session()
  signature to take PathList instead of &Path
- Remove dead text_thread_history imports and TextThreadStore creation
  (upstream removed assistant_text_thread crate in zed-industries#52757)
- Remove dead History enum (unused after upstream changes)
- Remove AgentV2FeatureFlag reference (upstream removed flag in zed-industries#52792,
  feature is now always-on)

Spec-Ref: helix-specs@de2777e8a:001723_merge-latest-zed
lukemarsden added a commit to helixml/zed that referenced this pull request Apr 9, 2026
Document upstream changes discovered during the 509-commit merge:
- assistant_text_thread crate removal (zed-industries#52757)
- AgentV2FeatureFlag removal (zed-industries#52792)
- selected_agent_type → selected_agent rename
- ContextServerStatus::AuthRequired variant addition
- AcpServerView vs ConversationView ConnectedServerState differences
- Add 5 new rebase checklist items (35-39) for patterns to watch
- Update commit history with merge commits

Spec-Ref: helix-specs@f6b4bdf0e:001723_merge-latest-zed
@JavaGamer
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It be nice to have a non-agentic interface to an llm.

tredondo added a commit to tredondo/zed that referenced this pull request Apr 10, 2026
Removed 'Text Threads' option from the mode dropdown for AI issues after zed-industries#52757
SomeoneToIgnore pushed a commit that referenced this pull request Apr 10, 2026
Removed 'Text Threads' option from the mode dropdown for AI issues,
since #52757 removed the feature

Self-Review Checklist:

- [x] I've reviewed my own diff for quality, security, and reliability
- [x] Unsafe blocks (if any) have justifying comments
- [x] The content is consistent with the [UI/UX
checklist](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#uiux-checklist)
- [x] Tests cover the new/changed behavior
- [x] Performance impact has been considered and is acceptable

Release Notes:

- N/A
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