Gram: Zed, but with AI and chat features removed
Gram is a new text editor written in Rust, created by removing almost all the fancy features from Zed… and it has already seemingly caused Zed Industries to change its terms of use service, according to Gram's developer.
Gram 1.0 is a brand new fork of the existing Rust-based programmer's editor. What's different about Gram is that it removes most of the non-text-editing features from Zed: it has no LLM-bot integration, and no chat tool for talking to your colleagues. Gram's developer also states that he couldn't accept Zed's Terms of Use, and so Gram has none. He says:
The Reg FOSS desk first described Zed when it was ported to Linux back in 2024. Until then, it was Mac-only. Zed is an all-new editor for programmers written in Rust by several of the team who created the Atom editor. Atom was the original Electron app, and thus, it led to tools such as the handy Balena Etcher. Etcher is great: it's a friendly graphical tool for writing disk images onto USB keys. The latest version is a 159 MB download which unpacks to a 409 MB application. (We looked at version 2.1.4 on Intel macOS.)
Compared to Balena Etcher, Zed does a lot more, and yet is smaller… although it is still not tiny: the latest version 0.225.12 is a 145 MB download containing a 391 MB application. But then, it does a great deal more than just edit text: as well as syntax formatting and so on, it also integrates with a variety of LLM coding assistants. Indeed, in July last year, it finally introduced a function to turn off "AI" integration, which was significant enough that we wrote a story about it. Later in 2025 the first Windows version also appeared.
We are in the 2020s: high-end pocket devices have storage in the terabyte range, and a quad-core 64-bit computer with half a gig of RAM costs $15; it is effectively disposable. Even so, this jaded old vulture considers that 150 megabytes is quite a lot. A decade ago, when a Pi Zero cost a fiver, we compared the machine with Project Oberon. 150 MB is about one thousand times as much space as Niklaus Wirth needed for an entire multitasking OS, windowing system, editor, and compiler. Zed is not small.
Zed stores text using conflict-free replicated types which means that several people using Zed can work on the same file at the same time and the editor can reconcile their changes with one another as they work. To coordinate that, Zed also has a built-in chat function so that you can communicate with your co-workers.
You can probably tell from all this that Zed is quite a complex app. Gram removes most of this functionality. Gram developer Kristoffer Grönlund has removed all Zed's Artificial Idiocy support, as well as all telemetry that reports back to Zed Industries. He has removed all collaboration features: if you work in Gram, you're on your own. Gram does not support Zed's subscriptions or accounts.
Zed contains these things partly because it is able to integrate with various online plagiarism-bot providers, and it needs the user to sign in so that they can interact with others in the chat sidebar. But that in turn meant that Zed has its own Terms of Service to which you must agree in order to use the online functionality. Among other things, those Ts&Cs required users to be over the age of 18, and the legalese also included paragraphs instructing users not to reverse-engineer, decompile, or disassemble it. Such restrictions are unusually onerous conditions for a FOSS app, and indeed, arguably are unenforceable.
Remarkably, the very day that the Gram editor went public, Zed Industries overhauled its terms. As Grönlund puts it explaining why he forked the project, "it sure is a funny coincidence." He offers more explanation in Gram's mission statement, which opens with a quote from the late Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed, which happens to be one of this vulture's favorite books… as if we didn't like the sound of it enough already.
Gram is not the first stripped-out fork of Zed: that distinction belongs to Zedless, but it looks as if Gram goes rather further. We hope for some sort of cooperation between the two projects, and ideally, some ready-made binaries. True, it is a little inconsistent for those of us who are vibe-coding skeptics to use an editor that itself was at least partly coded using LLMs – but hey, it's there, it's free, it works, and it doesn't have a UI that makes it look like it time-travelled from 1976.
For now, if you want ready-to-run binaries, Zed is still an option. There are separate versions for macOS, Linux, and Windows, and all three come in both x86-64 and Arm64 variants. Just remember, kids – don't you dare go online with it if you're under 18. Talking to LLM bots can be hazardous for your mental health. ®
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To refresh our memory, this article is being written using Zed. We can't use Gram, because at this point it's so new that prospective users must compile it themselves – and the 11-year-old iMac we're using is too old to run the latest Xcode, Homebrew, and associated tooling. (Yes, we do know all about OpenCore Legacy Patcher, thanks, but for most purposes we're still quite happy with Monterey.)
