zed-swiss-keymap

Printable cheatsheet for using Zed editor on a Swiss German (QWERTZ) keyboard layout on macOS.

The problem

Zed's tooltips show keyboard shortcuts in US QWERTY canonical form. On a Swiss German keyboard, many of those characters require Option to type (e.g. [ is Option+5), which conflicts with Zed's modifier handling. Zed is supposed to automatically remap these bindings to key equivalents — characters you can type without Option. But the tooltip still shows the US character, so you have to know the mapping.

Known bug (Zed Preview 1.13.0)

The built-in use_key_equivalents remapping is currently broken. The key equivalents table loads correctly (visible in dev: open key context view), but remapped bindings show "(no match)" when you press the equivalent key. This affects all remapped bindings on Swiss German (and likely other extended Latin layouts).

Workaround: add explicit bindings to ~/.config/zed/keymap.json that bind the Swiss German character directly, bypassing the broken remapping mechanism. The cheatsheet includes a copy-pasteable workaround section with the most common bindings.

What's in here

A printable cheatsheet (HTML + PDF) listing every binding in Zed's default macOS keymap that uses a character remapped under Swiss German, with:

• The tooltip text (US QWERTY canonical form)
• The key to press instead (Swiss German equivalent)
• The action name
• The context where the binding fires
• A workaround section with explicit keymap.json bindings

Organized by context: Editor (most common), Pane, Workspace, InlineAssistant, AcpThread, and global font-size bindings.

Files

• index.html — self-contained HTML, print-optimized for A4. Open in any browser and print, or Cmd+P → Save as PDF.
• zed-swiss-keymap-cheatsheet.pdf — pre-rendered PDF (Chrome headless).

Regenerating the PDF

"/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome" \
  --headless --disable-gpu --no-pdf-header-footer \
  --print-to-pdf=zed-swiss-keymap-cheatsheet.pdf \
  "file://$(pwd)/index.html"

Scope

• macOS only (the key equivalents mechanism is in gpui_macos).
• Zed ≥ 0.162 (Nov 2024), when keyboard localization shipped.
• Applies to all modifiers (cmd, ctrl, shift, alt) — the remapping is character-based, not modifier-specific.
• Characters not in the table (letters, digits, -, _, = without modifier, etc.) are not remapped — press them directly as shown.

Debug tool

Run dev: open key context view from Zed's command palette to see exactly what keystroke Zed receives under your layout. Useful for confirming any mapping in this cheatsheet.

Sources

• Zed keyboard localization blog post
• Zed key bindings docs — Non-QWERTY keyboards
• key_equivalents.rs source