Documentation

Gram is a hard fork of the Zed editor, with the following list (incomplete) of changes:

  • All AI integration has been removed
  • All Telemetry has been removed
  • All collaboration integration has been removed
  • No proprietary server component
  • No auto updates
  • No license agreement on installation
  • Only install language servers when explicitly allowed
  • Integrated documentation viewer
  • Support for more languages built in
  • More syntax highlighting themes built in
  • Extensions are installed from source only
  • Partial support for WASM extensions (due to AI removal)
  • Added SuperTab

For more details on the motivation behind this fork, read the Mission Statement.

Migrating

Features

  • Debugger: Integrated support for DAP, the debugger adapter protocol.
  • Remote Development: Connect to remote servers via SSH and edit as if working on a local project.
  • Extensions: Add support for additional languages, themes and icons using the extension system.
  • Supported Languages
  • Language Servers: Gram relies on language servers for providing advanced semantic functionality for various programming languages.

Development

Configuration

Using Gram

Platform Support

Handling Problems

Legal note on accepting contributions

If you have previously installed Zed and agreed to their license agreement, you may be legally prevented from contributing to Gram despite the open source license of the code. I am not a lawyer and I suspect that the license that they use would not hold up at least in European court, but I don't know. For that exact reason, I never agreed to their license. This is the main reason this fork even exists.

If you do want to contribute patches, you will have to accept full responsibility for ensuring and warranting that you are legally allowed to do so.

You are the community

Gram is proudly open source, in spirit, not just in words. That said, we have strong opinions about what we want to include in the editor. For example, the main reason for this fork from Zed is to remove certain "features" that we disagree with, morally. However, you are of course free to make it your own in any way you see fit.

I don't use AI and if you submit a patch created with AI I might reject it (especially if it doesn't work and you can't explain or fix it). That said, the upstream Zed project does use it, so this project is not AI free in any sense.

There is no official discord or reddit community.

Extensions

The Zed extension system relies on a closed-source server component, which is stripped from Gram. Instead, all extensions have to be built from source. Currently, there is no extension registry so the extensions have to be installed either via the suggestion popups or an URL and WASM extensions need rustup installed in order to compile.