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Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first
- ahmetcadirci25 1y agoWas it necessary?
- zahlman 1y agoI think we would all be clearly worse off if OSS developers collectively decided to limit themselves to what is "necessary".
- Tepix 1y agoSo, what‘s Zed?
- jks 1y agoAn AI editor, a competitor to Cursor but written from scratch and not a VS Code fork. They recently announced a funding round from Sequoia. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961172
- athenot 1y agoEven without any AI stuff, it's a fantastic editor for its speed.
- azemetre 1y agoSomeone posted this in the other zed thread but it looks on par with VS Code in speed according to these results: https://mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/112146684329230663 https://mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/112146684329230663
- nicce 1y agoDepends how you measure it. At least my battery lasts hour longer when using Zed and when comparing to VSCode. Also, the link is almost 1,5 years old.
- efilife 1y agoIt wasn't an AI editor for a long time
- fooqux 1y agoYup. Their big design goal seemed to just be "speed" for a majority of development. That's it.
- andrewmcwatters 1y agoI don't understand why people say X is a competitor to Cursor, which is built on Visual Studio Code, when GitHub Copilot came out first, and is... built on Visual Studio Code. It also didn't start out as a competitor to either.
- skrtskrt 1y ago[flagged]
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoHarsh but true.
- zwnow 1y agoSorry I couldn't hear you through the nvim startup time and keyboard noises while you are waiting for your IDE to start
- skrtskrt 1y agoFamous indicator of software quality: how fast an editor opened to write it.
- pjmlp 1y agoWho restarts their IDE all the time? I take more than that to fetch a coffee down the kitchen area.
- jen20 1y agoDepends which IDE. IntelliJ stays open permanently. When I used full-fat visual studio it would crash so often that I’d have developed an even worse caffeine problem had I fetched coffee every time it needed restarting.
- 1y ago
- spagoop 1y agoZed's dead, baby. Zed’s dead.
- jeffreygoesto 1y agoPadadadap - Sound of fingers on a leather hood...
- ricardobeat 1y agoSpiritual successor to Sublime Text. They’ve been doing a lot of AI stuff but originally just focused on speed. https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/
- Jtsummers 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor) More like a spiritual successor to Atom, at least per the people that started it who came from that project.
- lexoj 1y agoIts funny how the same guy who wrote (borderline) the slowest editor, went ahead and built the fastest. Practice makes perfect I guess :)
- ricardobeat 1y agoAtom was based on web tech, like VSCode, while Zed is a native app with a custom GUI framework, just like Sublime Text. And just like ST, the standard option now for a fast barebones text editor. That's what I mean by 'spiritual successor'.
- eviks 1y agoIsn't extensible plugin API part of ST spirit? (so zed can't be a successor until its spirit incorporates a similar one)
- yobert 1y agoZed is a really really nice editor. I consider the AI features secondary but they have been useful here and there. (I usually have them off.) You can use it like cursor if you want to. Where I think it gets really interesting is they are adding features in it to compete with slack. Imagine a tight integration between slack huddles and VS code's collaborative editing. Since it's from scratch it's much nicer than both. I'm really excited about it.
- dmit 1y agoCode editor. Imagine VSCode, but with a native GUI for each platform it supports and fewer plugins. And a single `disable_ai` setting that you can use to toggle those kinds of features off or on.
- barbazoo 1y agoWatch the video on https://zed.dev/ https://zed.dev/, apparently it's really good at quickly cycling through open documents at 120Hz while still seeing every individual tab. Probably something people asked for at some point.
- Scarbutt 1y agoA code editor with a lot of rough edges. If they don't start polishing the turd I doubt the'll make it.
- RestartKernel 1y agoBit premature to post this, especially without some manifesto explaining the particular reason for this fork. The "no rugpulls" implies something happened with Zed, but you can't really expect every HN reader to be in the loop with the open source controversy of the week.
- decentrality 1y agoSeems like it might be reacting to or fanned to flame by: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
- Squarex 1y ago[flagged]
- barbazoo 1y ago> Are they really boycotting jews now? Just because they're boycotting someone who happens to be Jewish doesn't necessarily mean they're boycotting them because of it. > Zed just announced that they are taking money from Sequoia Capital, which has a partner, Shaun Maguire, who has recently been publicly and unapologetically Islamophobic. It seems hard to believe that the team didn't know about this, as it was covered in the New York Times. In addition, Maguire has been actively pro-occupation and genocide in Palestine for nearly 2 years. > How can anyone feel like the Code of Conduct means anything at all, when Sequoia is an investor? I'm shocked and surprised at the Zed team for this - I expected much better. Reads like it has more to do with what they said and done in the past which seems reasonable.
- _benj 1y agoI’m curious how this will turn out. Reminds me of the node.js fork IO.js and how that shifted the way node was being developed. If there’s a group of people painfully aware of telemetry and AI being pushed everywhere is devs…
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jazzyjackson 1y agoI'm confused how the "contributors" feature works on GitHub, is this showing that this fork has 986 contributors and 29,961 commits? Surely that's the Zed project overall. I feel like this gives undue reputation to an offshoot project. https://github.com/zedless-editor/zed/graphs/contributors https://github.com/zedless-editor/zed/graphs/contributors
- Aurornis 1y agoIt's contributors to the codebase you're viewing. It's fair because those people contributed to the codebase you're seeing. Someone can't fork a repo, make a couple commits, and then have GitHub show them as the sole contributor.
- rubbietheone 1y agoYeah i get it, it looks like zedless itself has been going on for a while. However, i'm not sure what's the best way to approach this, the fork still carries zed's original commit history
- brailsafe 1y agoIt's the zed project overall from the point where the fork was created, plus any downstream merges and unique contributions to zedless
- max-privatevoid 1y agoYeah it looks pretty funny. Probably happens because it's not a fork as far as GitHub is concerned (had some problems with that). Looking at PR creators should give you a better idea. It's basically just me right now. https://github.com/zedless-editor/zed/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed https://github.com/zedless-editor/zed/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Ac...
- conradev 1y agoChrome : Chromium :: Zed : ???? I don’t view Chrome and Chromium as different projects, but primarily as different builds of the same project. I feel like this will (eventually) go the same way.
- max-privatevoid 1y agoI like to think of the relationship between Zed and Zedless more like Chromium and ungoogled-chromium.
- some_furry 1y agoIf this project receives yet another fork, might I recommend naming it Zedless Zed Zero? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenless_Zone_Zero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenless_Zone_Zero
- 201984 1y agoComment from the author: https://lobste.rs/c/wmqvug https://lobste.rs/c/wmqvug > Since someone mentioned forking, I suppose I’ll use this opportunity to advertise my fork of Zed: https://github.com/zedless-editor/zed https://github.com/zedless-editor/zed > I’m gradually removing all the features I deem undesirable: telemetry, auto-updates, proprietary cloud-only AI integrations, reliance on node.js, auto-downloading of language servers, upsells, the sign-in button, etc. I’m also aiming to make some of the cloud-only features self-hostable where it makes sense, e.g. running Zeta edit predictions off of your own llama.cpp or vLLM instance. It’s currently good enough to be my main editor, though I tend to be a bit behind on updates since there is a lot of code churn and my way of modifying the codebase isn’t exactly ideal for avoiding merge conflicts. To that end I’m experimenting with using tree-sitter to automatically apply AST-level edits, which might end up becoming a tool that can build customizable “unshittified” versions of Zed.
- haneefmubarak 1y ago> relying on node.js When did people start hating node and what do they have against it?
- muppetman 1y agoYou might not be old enough to remember how much everyone hated JavaScript initially - just as an in-browser language. Then suddenly it's a standalone programming language too? WTH?? I assume that's where a lot of the hate comes from. Note that's not my opinion, just wondering if that might be why.
- skydhash 1y agoJavaScript is actually fine as the warts have been documented. The main issue these days is the billions of tiny packages. So many people/org to trust for every project that uses npm.
- zahlman 1y agoNobody is forcing you to use the tiny packages. The fact that the tiny packages are so popular despite their triviality is, to me, solid evidence that simply documenting the warts does not in fact make everything fine. And I say this as someone who is generally pro having more small-but-not-tiny packages (say, on the order of a few hundred to a few thousand lines) in the Python ecosystem.
- pnathan 1y agoI'm glad to see this. I'm happy to plan to pay for Zed - its not there yet but its well on its way - But I don't want essentially _any_ of the AI and telemetry features. The fact of the matter is, I am not even using AI features much in my editor anymore. I've tried Copilot and friends over and over and it's just not _there_. It needs to be in a different location in the software development pipeline (Probably code reviews and RAG'ing up for documentation). - I can kick out some money for a settings sync service. - I can kick out some money to essentially "subscribe" for maintenance. I don't personally think that an editor is going to return the kinds of ROI VCs look for. So.... yeah. I might be back to Emacs in a year with IntelliJ for powerful IDE needs....
- dilDDoS 1y agoI'm happy to finally see this take. I've been feeling pretty left out with everyone singing the praises of AI-assisted editors while I struggle to understand the hype. I've tried a few and it's never felt like an improvement to my workflow. At least for my team, the actual writing of code has never been the problem or bottleneck. Getting code reviewed by someone else in a timely manner has been a problem though, so we're considering AI code reviews to at least take some burden out of the process.
- Aurornis 1y agoAI code reviews are the worst place to introduce AI, in my experience. They can find a few things quickly, but they can also send people down unnecessary paths or be easily persuaded by comments or even the slightest pushback from someone. They're fast to cave in and agree with any input. It can also encourage laziness: If the AI reviewer didn't spot anything, it's easier to justify skimming the commit. Everyone says they won't do it, but it happens. For anything AI related, having manual human review as the final step is key.
- pnathan 1y agoThat's a fantastic counterpoint. I've found AI reviewers to be useful on a first pass, at a small-pieces level. But I hear your opinion!
- adastra22 1y agoThank you. That's all I have to say right now, but I feel it needs to be said. Thank you for doing this.
- ComputerGuru 1y agoOn the same day a Code of Conduct violation discussion was opened against Zed for accepting funding from Sequoia after Maguire's very loud and very public Islamophobia and open support for occupation and genocide: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/36604
- colesantiago 1y agoI welcome this, now we get Zed for free with privacy on top without all the AI features that nobody asked for. As soon as any dev tool gets VC backing there should be an open source alternative to alleviate the inevitable platform decay (or enshittification for lack of a better word) This is a better outcome for everyone. Some of us just want a good editor for free.
- jen20 1y ago> Some of us just want a good editor for free. Sums up the problem neatly. Everyone wants everything for free. Someone has to pay the developers. Sometimes things align (there is indeed a discussion in LinkedIn about Apple hiring the OPA devs today), mostly it doesn’t.
- fooqux 1y ago> Someone has to pay the developers. Agreed. Although nobody ever mentions the 1,100+ developers that submitted PRs to Zed. And yeah. I know what you mean. But this is the other side of the OSS coin. You accept free work from outside developers, and it will inevitably get forked because of an issue. But from my perspective, it's a great thing for the community. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here.
- alpha_trion 1y agoThis feels unnecessary.
- johanneskanybal 1y ago[flagged]
- trostaft 1y ago??? The first line of the README > Welcome to Zed, a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter. The second line of the README (with links to download & package manager instructions omitted) > Installation > On macOS and Linux you can download Zed directly or install Zed via your local package manager. I do not dispute that HN is an echo chamber. But how did you come to your conclusions?
- techlatest_net 1y ago[dead]
- syntaxing 1y agoThis is awesome, honestly with the release of Qwen3Coder-30B-A3B, we have a model that’s pretty close to the perfect local model. Obviously the larger 32B dense one does better but the 30B MoE model does agentic pretty well and is great at FIM/autocomplete
- dang 1y agoRelated ongoing threads: Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964366 Sequoia backs Zed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961172
- dkersten 1y agoWhat I really want from Zed is multi window support. Currently, I can’t pop out the agent panel or any other panels to use them on another monitor. Local-first is nice, but I do use the AI tools, so I’m unlikely to use this fork in the near term. I do like the idea behind this, especially no telemetry and no contributor agreements. I wish them the best of luck. I did happily use Zed for about year before using any of its AI features, so who knows, maybe I’ll get fed up with AI and switch to this eventually.
- arresin 1y agoYes same here. I tried it out because of all the discussion about it then saw I couldn’t pop the panel out (or change some really basic settings cursor has had for over a year) then closed and uninstalled it.
- popalchemist 1y agoWould be wise to not invoke their name, which is trademarked.
- cultofmetatron 1y agoI've been using AI extensivly the last few weeks but not as a coding agent. I really don't trust it for that. Its really helpful for generating example code for a library I might not be familiar with. a month ago, I was interested in using rabbitmq but he docs were limited. chatgpt was able to give me a fairly good amount of starter code to see how these things are wired together. I used some of it and added to it by hand to finally come up with what is running in production. It certainly has value in that regard. Letting it write and modify code directly? I'm not ready for that. other things its useful for is finding the source of an error when the error message isnt' so great. I'll usually copy paste code that I know is causing the error along with the error message and it'll point out the issues in a way that I can immediatly address. My method is cheaper too, I can get by just fine on the $20/month chatgpt sub doing that.
- ElijahLynn 1y agoI on the other hand would probably only switch to Zed with the AI integration. Want to learn a new language? Using AI speeds it up by a factor of months.
- withinrafael 1y agoThe CLA does not change the copyright owner of the contributed content (https://zed.dev/cla https://zed.dev/cla), so I'm confused by the project's comments on copyright reassignment.
- ItsHarper 1y agoIt may not technically reassign copyright, but it grants them permission to do whatever they want with your contributions, which seems pretty equivalent in terms of outcome.
- withinrafael 1y agoYes, you grant the entity you've submitted a contribution to, to use (not own) your contribution in whatever it ends up in. That was the whole point of the developer's contribution right?
- nicce 1y agoWithout CLA, they can’t sell, for example, the code under different license, or be an exception themselves for the current GPL license requirements. But yeah, there might be some confusion with terms. Relevant part: > 2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to Company, and to recipients of software distributed by Company related hereto, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute, Your Contributions and such derivative works (the “Contributor License Grant”). Further, to the extent that You participate in any livestream or other collaborative feedback generating session offered by Company, you hereby consent to use of any content shared by you in connection therewith in accordance with the foregoing Contributor License Grant.
- Huppie 1y agoMaybe not technically correct but it's still the gist of this line, no? > Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to Company, and to recipients of software distributed by Company related hereto, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute, Your Contributions and such derivative works (the “Contributor License Grant”). They are allowed to use your contribution in a derivative work under another license and/or sublicense your contribution. It's technically not copyright reassignment though.
- st3fan 1y agoI like this but can we stop calling product telemetry “spyware” please.
- JoshTriplett 1y agoWhy? Any non-opt-in product telemetry is spyware, and you have no idea what they'll do with the data. And if it's an AI company, there's an obvious thing for them to do with it. (Opt-in telemetry is much more reasonable, if it's clear what they're doing with it.)
- mgsloan2 1y agoCollection of data from code completions is off by default and opt-in. It also only collects data when one of several allowlisted opensource licenses are present in the worktree root. Options to disable crash reports and anonymous usage info are presented prominently when Zed is first opened, and can of course be configured in settings too.
- jart 1y agoIt kind of is. I don't want Richard Stallman knowing every time I open a file in emacs or run the ls command. Keep that crap out of local software. There should be better ways to get adoption metrics for your investors, like creating a package manager for your software, or partnering with security companies like Wiz. If you have telemetry, make it opt-in, and help users understand that it benefits them by being a vote in what bugs get fixed and what features get focused on. Then publish public reports that aggregate the telemetry data for transparency like Mozilla and Debian.
- hiccuphippo 1y agoIt is a tool for developers. Give them a link to your bug tracker and let them tell you themselves.
- jart 1y agoPeople file issues when they're unhappy. If that's you're only vantage point you're gonna be crying yourself to sleep each night.
- jemiluv8 1y agoI always have mixed feelings about forks. Especially the hard ones. Zed recently rolled out a feature that lets you disable all AI features. I also know telemetry can be opted out. So I don’t see the need for this fork. Especially given the list of features stated. Feels like something that can be upstreamed. Hope that happens I remember the Redis fork and how it fragmented that ecosystem to a large extent.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoIt's nice to have additional assurance that the software won't upload behind your back on first startup. Though I also run opensnitch, belt and suspenders style.
- barnabee 1y agoI'd see less need for this fork if Zed's creators weren't already doing nefarious things like refusing to allow the Zed account / sign-in features to be disabled. I don't see a reason to be afraid of "fragmented ecosystems", rather, let's embrace a long tail of tools and the freedom from lock-in and groupthink they bring.
- jemiluv8 1y agoFor what they provide, for free, I'd say refusing to disable login is not "nefarious". They need to grow a business here.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
- Quitschquat 1y agoI think this guy has to be trolling in the testimonials page: “Yes! Now I can have shortcuts to run and debug tests. Ever since snippets were added, Zed has all of the features I could ask for in an editor.”
- leshenka 1y agoShouldn’t this just be a pull request to Zed itself that hides AI features of behind behind compile flags? That way the ‘fork’ will be just a build command with different set of flags with no changes to the actual code?
- bitbasher 1y agoI knew it was a matter of time before this happened. I even considered starting it myself, but didn't want the burden of actually maintaining it. I even thought of calling it zim (zed-improved.. like vim). Glad to see the project!
- nsonha 1y agoSoftware engineers: add otel to help debug their own products, while relentlessly protest any telemetry on someone else's
- faangguyindia 1y agoI loved Zed Editor, Infact i was using it all time but being a "programmer", i wanted to extend it with "extensions", it was hard for me to roll out my rust extension, with apis and stuff missing. I went ahead with Vscode, I had to spend 2 hours to make it look like Zeditor with configs, but i was able to roll out extension in javascript much faster and VScode has lot of APIs available for extensions to consume.
- johnfn 1y agoThis fork has around 20 net-new commits on it. The Zed repository has around 30,000 commits. This is a wee bit premature, no?
- yogorenapan 1y agoThis just reminded me that I have Zed installed but haven't used it at all yet. Neovim is a bit too sticky with all my custom shortcuts. Will uninstall it and try this version out when I eventually decide to migrate
- lordofgibbons 1y agoZed makes it incredibly easy to both turn of telemetry and to use your own LLM inference endpoints. So why is this needed?
- djabatt 1y agoRight On! I use Zed and appreciate what the team is building.
- fatata123 1y ago[dead]
- dartharva 1y agoWhy not just use Sublime Text? It even has LSP! https://lsp.sublimetext.io/ https://lsp.sublimetext.io/
- toastal 1y ago“Privacy focus” that states to “No reliance on proprietary cloud services” should not hypocritically lock their code & collaboration behind Microsoft’s GitHub.
- pixxel 1y ago[dead]
- Wowhappyfun 1y ago[flagged]
- lttlrck 1y agoI would like to try Zed, but it doesn't run on my system due to impenetrable MESA/Vulkan errors with Intel UHD 700, even though vkcube runs fine. Running a text editor should not be this hard, it's pretty ridiculous. Sublime Text is plenty fast without this nonsense.
- selinkocalar 1y agoLove seeing privacy-first approaches to dev tools. This is the same philosophy we apply to compliance tooling. Your code, your compliance data, your business processes - these shouldn't have to live in someone else's cloud by default. Sometimes local processing isn't just about privacy, it's about performance and reliability. The big platforms want you dependent on their infrastructure. Tools that work offline and keep your data local give you actual control. Props to the Zedless team for prioritizing user agency over SaaS revenue models.