Mission statement: https://gram-editor.com/docs/mission/
- Fork of Zed
- No telemetry
- No AI “features”
- No Terms of Service
- No automatic binary downloads without consent
- Ursula Le Guin quotes on their website
- Project hosted on Codeberg
- Cute toad
Holy fuck, I’m in love 
I’m sorry but I’m too far deep into emacs to ever use anything else
I wish I got into emacs when my brain was still playable lol. Every time I open it to try and learn I feel like I spend 70% of my time messing with configs and scripts/extensions. Same with Vim (though vim/vi/micro/nano are fantastic when I just want to quickly edit a file).
I hate that I’m just a VSCode plebian now, but the defaults are good enough to just work for me. Maybe one day I’ll set up a whole dotfile management system, but I have too much work to do lol
I used VCCode for the longest time because yeah it just kinda works. My emacs config started very slim and I just add a little to it over time when I want something new. It keeps me from getting overwhelmed.
That’s what I’m probably going to end up doing too. I have to use Windows for work though, and interact with weird ass APIs that only have closed plugins though Microsoft channels though.
Like the ArcGIS Pro debugger only works with VisualStudio and VSCode, I need to be able to hook into the running process so I can set breakpoints in my scripts since their codebase is so fucked that sometimes the only way to tell what’s happening is to read a dump.
I want you get away from ESRI, but it’s like trying to get away from Autodesk. Even if you have a solution that works well, getting anyone to accept it is almost impossible unless they happen to have some weird nerd or a Dutchman on staff.
Isn’t the whole point of Zed being an open source Agentic IDE/Text Editor? I can’t say I really understand stripping it down from it’s main concept, considering that VSCodium, Helix, Kate, Geany, Emacs, Neovim, etc., are all great and ethical foss projects.
But I’m not complaining either. The more FOSS projects, the better actually.
nah, a few centuries ago it was actually an editor with a novel idea. Basically centered around collaborative features like live-coding, chats and etc. That was its main focus but the more AI became shoved into everything, they followed suit i guess and the zed we know today isn’t really the same anymore.
It started as a replacement for Atom after Microsoft killed it with VSCode after the GitHub acquisition, then they pivoted to be AI focused because they saw that Cursor was beating VSCode by just having AI stuff, and now everything sucks.
It started as a nice rust gui-based editor with a focus on collaborative editing. I think it shifted into the LLM stuff after its initial releases.
I much prefer GUI editors with traditional keybindings and I’m very picky about their looks and behavior. VSCode and Zed were the only ones that I found were good enough. I considered VSCodium, but I think it has some issues with telemetry and AI stuff constantly leaking in from upstream. Gram is a hard, independent fork of Zed, so it shouldn’t have those issues.
It’s really good as a regular text editor/IDE. I don’t use any of the AI features.
AI features are how devs get funding/plan to make money I guess.
The two main draws are that its an “AI Editor” and most of the development has been working on those kinds of features. The other is that its in Rust, so should be very performant in general. Definitely seems to be defeating point 1 by forking it.
This is what I used to use in college:
It’s FOSS that’s been around for a long time, but seems to have been kept up to date by a dedicated community.
