The Mission

“I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

The Gram text editor is a fork of the Zed text editor. This document is an attempt to explain why the fork exists.

Performance, but at what cost?

Programming is more than just productivity. We need tools that are fit for purpose, that aren't beholden to investors or share holders. There are aspects of the Zed code editor that I think are wrong in the moral and ethical sense, and there are aspects that I think are simply bad choices from a technical perspective.

At first, the promise of Zed seemed alluring. I moved from Emacs to Neovim because I started coding in Rust, and using the Rust LSP in Emacs was a very frustrating experience at the time. Whenever the LSP did any work the editor would freeze, drop keystrokes or otherwise behave badly.

Neovim was better in this aspect, but as soon as I worked on any larger rust project I would have the same kind of experience. Not good. At the same time, more and more languages assume that the editor can use a language server and don't even try to support editors without it.

When Zed appeared, promising an actually fast and smooth editing experience able to handle large Rust projects without getting bogged down, and also came with good support for Emacs- and Vim-style editing, it seemed like exactly the thing that I ought to try.

However, I never even managed to get the editor installed. When I tried to download and install the binaries from the Zed website or Github page I would get presented with the Zed End User Terms. To install, I would have to accept them.

So, I read the terms!

The quotes below are excerpts from the Zed End User Terms.

PLEASE READ THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE SERVICE OR SOFTWARE OFFERED BY ZED INDUSTRIES, INC. ("ZED", OR "WE"). BY ACCESSING OR USING THE SOLUTION (AS DEFINED BELOW) IN ANY MANNER, YOU ("YOU" OR "CUSTOMER") AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THESE TERMS (THE "AGREEMENT") TO THE EXCLUSION OF ALL OTHER TERMS.

My (non-lawyer) interpretation of this section is that if I agree to these terms, I am waiving my right to use any software by Zed Industries under any other license. Does this mean that I could no longer use any of the code from Zed under an open source license, if the rights afforded by that license contradicts these terms? That is my interpretation.

Let's read on, to section 2 "TERMS APPLICABLE TO THE EDITOR", paragraph 2.2, "License Limitations":

You agree that You shall not: (a) exceed the scope of the licenses granted in Section 2.1; (b) make copies of the Editor; (c) distribute, sublicense, assign, delegate, rent, lease, sell, time-share or otherwise transfer the benefits of, use under, or rights to, the license granted in Section 2.1; (d) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to learn the source code, structure or algorithms underlying the Editor, except to the extent required to be permitted under applicable law; (e) modify, translate or create derivative works of the Editor; or (f) remove any copyright, trademark, patent or other proprietary notice that appears on the Editor or copies thereof.

...

You shall not [..] make copies of the Editor

...

You shall not [..] reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to learn the source code, structure or algorithms underlying the Editor

...

You shall not [..] modify, translate or create derivative works of the Editor

...etc.

I cannot try to learn the source code, structure or algorithms underlying the Editor? I cannot create derivative works?

I couldn't accept it. I didn't want to agree to any of it. So I gave up.

Zed kept popping up. People I had respected left their jobs to go work for Zed, and not only that - to work on AI integration in Zed.

I don't want AI in my editor. I don't want AI in anything. It's not just because I think AI is bad for productivity, performance and quality (I do), but because I think the companies behind the technology and the cost of the technology make it not only unsustainable but unethical. Even if AI tools did work to make their users more productive (which I doubt), I still don't want to use them. At all.

I also object to making myself and my work depend on paying a subscription fee to anyone. I don't want an outage at Anthropic to affect my ability to do my work. I think it is a grave mistake to build anything on such shaky foundations as the sustainability and profit margins of the AI industry.

I think these are bad features to put in a code editor. Why should a code editor have a license agreement that flies in the face of open source? Why should my code editor integrate with technology that I find distasteful?

Thinking is a feature. Generative LLM technology is not.

Another selling point of Zed is "multiplayer editing" and built-in collaboration.

I don't want it. In fact, I think these are bad features to put in a code editor. In my team, we use different operating systems, different editors and work from different time zones. We keep meetings to a minimum, and when we do pair programming or mob programming, one person is typing while the others think.

Multiple people editing the same files at once while video chatting at the same time sounds like a nightmare.

I don't want to sign in, or sign up, or join the community. I want my tools to be hammers, screwdrivers and saws. I don't need my hammer to come with a subscription fee.

In Zed, the editor will automatically update itself, downloading binaries from the Zed website vetted only by Zed. Its extensions are binary blobs hosted by Zed, automatically updated and downloaded without user control. Those extensions will, in turn, download and install anything they feel like.

As a band aid for this, newer versions of Zed have copied the workspace trust mechanism from VS Code. I think this is, once again, a bad solution to a problem that should not exist.

I don't want my software to update itself automatically, or to download binaries without me explicitly asking it to.

The editor can offer to download and install something from source, but it should tell you exactly what it wants to download and from where, and it should ask first. In Zed, everything invasive and exploitative is opt out: AI, Telemetry, auto updates - auto-installation isn't even offered as something to opt out of. Zed does not respect you.

I believe that the tools I use should belong to me. My tools are not there for corporations to bind me with.

Curiosity and spite

At first, I tried to build some other efforts I found online to make Zed work without the AI features just so I could check it out, but didn't manage to get them to work. At some point, the curiosity turned into spite. I became determined to not only get the editor to run without all of the misfeatures, but to make it a full-blown fork of the project. Independent of corporate control, in the spirit of Vim and the late Bram Moolenaar who could have added subscription fees and abusive license agreements had he so wanted, but instead gave his work as a gift to the world and asked only for donations to a good cause close to his heart in return.

This is the result. Feel free to build it and see if it works for you. There is no license agreement or subscription beyond the open source license of the code (GPLv3). It is yours now, to do with as you please.

To be honest, I am happy in Neovim. For most projects I still prefer it over this editor. Don't expect this project to keep pace with Zed or to be a Zed-killer, unless other people take it and keep building from here. This project is mainly therapeutic. I had to get it out of my system.

Features

  • Open: No telemetry, AI or privacy-invading third party integrations.
  • Performance: Focuses on helping you with your programming tasks instead of spending CPU and GPU cycles on communicating with AI services, sending your keystrokes to a company server in the US or convincing you to sign up for a subscription.
  • Integrated: Gram includes the documentation directly in the editor. Long term, the goal is to include language support for most languages without requiring the use of extensions.

Other options

If you don't want to use an editor that has gone down the AI route but do want a capable, general-purpose, open source text editor, what other options are there?

Here are some other editors that I have used and would consider reasonable alternatives to Zed.