Migrating from Zed to Gram

Gram is a fork of the Zed code editor made roughly around the version 0.217. From there, a lot of "features" have been stripped out:

  • All telemetry was removed
  • All AI-related functionality was removed
  • Collaboration and its proprietary server component were removed
  • Automatic extension installation was removed
  • Auto-updates were removed
  • There is no license agreement to accept beyond the GPL open source license

However, some functionality has also been added or changed that is not available in Zed.

  • Integrated documentation viewer
  • Various bugfixes
  • Rewritten documentation
  • Modified defaults
  • More themes included

Configuration

The configuration should be mostly compatible: Try copying your keymap.json and settings.json files from ~/.config/zed/ to ~/.config/gram/ and renaming them keymap.jsonc and settings.jsonc. It might work.

Extension support

Since Zed extensions in the Zed editor are installed as binary blobs from the proprietary servers owned by Zed Industries, this installation method has been removed from Gram. Instead, extensions can be installed using the extension repository URL directly. Language extensions that need to be compiled to WASM require a rustup toolchain to do the compilation.

If the extension doesn't work, check the Gram log file using cmd-shift-p Open Log (also available in the Command Palette).

Currently, this functionality is very crude, and as Zed continues to develop it is likely that extensions that compile to WASM will stop being compatible with Gram. Therefore, the plan is to eventually replace the extension system from Zed with something else, but also to integrate language support for the most popular languages directly into Gram so that language extensions aren't needed in most cases.

Note: This is a work in progress. The goal is not to keep up with Zed and to stay a stripped-down version of the same editor. I am not interested in Zed. The goal is simply to have a good-enough baseline editor which is simple to install and use, and can replace VS Code as the editor to recommend to beginners.