Kristoffer Grƶnlund, who works at SUSE, has announced the creation of a fork of the Zed code editor that will be developed under the name Gram. The reason for creating the fork is the desire to have a code editor that can serve as an alternative to VS Code, does not leverage AI-based functionality, does not require signing a Terms of Use agreement incompatible with open licenses, and does not send telemetry to corporations. Development will focus on creating a product that is user-friendly for beginner developers and students taught by the fork's author. The project's code is distributed under GPLv3 and AGPLv3 licenses.
Differences between Gram and Zed include the cessation of AI tool delivery and code for sending telemetry, the removal of ties to proprietary server-side handlers, third-party services, and components used for collaborative coding and automatic update installations. Users of Gram are not bound by separate Terms of Service and paid subscriptions.
Future development of the fork is planned to be conservative, independent of Zed and corporations, focusing primarily on ensuring stability. Changes to Gram can be accepted without the need to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). Changes under the Apache 2.0 license will not be accepted in Gram; only GPLv3 and AGPLv3 licenses may be used for new code (Zed was shipped under three licenses: Apache 2.0, GPLv3, and AGPLv3, which allowed its code to be used in proprietary products without disclosing changes).
The first release of Gram has been published, removing code related to AI, telemetry, updating and installing updates, collaborative coding, and account binding. Among the additional features, the editor now includes documentation, support for programming languages Gleam, Zig, and Odin, and a Vim Supertab-style input autocomplete system has been implemented. Installed extensions in Gram must be built from source code and are not automatically updated. To load LSP (Language Server) and Node components, user confirmation is now required for the operation. Pre-built binaries are available for Linux and macOS.
Notably, this is not the first fork of Zed ā the Zedless project develops a fork focused on ensuring privacy and isolated local work without contacting third-party servers. Like Gram, Zedless has removed ties to proprietary cloud services, eliminated code for sending telemetry and automatically generated crash reports, and does not require a CLA agreement. However, collaborative functionality has not been removed and is centered on deploying oneās own infrastructure, but users can choose to return to using external services at their discretion.
The Zed project is led by Nathan Sobo, the creator of the Atom editor (the basis for VS Code), with participation from a team of former Atom developers, the Electron platform, and the Tree-sitter parsing library. The development takes into account the experience of creating Atom and attempts to embody some ideas about what the ideal editor for programmers should look like. Zed combines a lightweight text editor with the functionality of modern integrated development environments. Great attention is paid to performance and responsiveness of the interface ā as envisioned by the project creators, all editing actions should be performed instantly, and coding tasks should be solved in the most efficient way. High performance in Zed is achieved through active use of multithreading, engaging all available CPU cores and utilizing the GPU in the rendering process.
Source: opennet.ru
