Zode

Zode is a fork of Zed, the code editor built by Zed Industries. This fork exists to answer one question: what does Zed look like with every account, cloud, AI, and telemetry code path removed rather than merely disabled?

What's different from upstream Zed

This fork removed:

• Authentication and accounts — no sign-in, no session, no credential storage.
• Cloud and collaboration — no real-time collaboration server, no channels, no shared projects. Editing is single-player.
• AI and agent features — no AI providers, no edit predictions, no agent panel.
• Telemetry and crash reporting — no usage analytics, no event tracking, no minidump upload. telemetry::send_event is a no-op by construction, not by setting.
• Auto-update — no in-app updater. Updates come from wherever you installed this from (see Installing, below).

What's kept: the editor itself, LSP integration, the terminal, git integration, the debugger, and extensions.

SSH remote development is a middle case. The code is still here and still builds from source, but the released installers do not ship the remote_server binary it needs on the far end: building it doubles the build time and disk of every release, which does not fit the free GitHub-hosted runners this project releases from. Build it yourself with cargo build --release --package remote_server if you want it.

One dependency was kept and disclosed rather than removed: browsing and installing extensions still queries Zed Industries' extension registry (api.zed.dev). Dropping it meant either running an independent marketplace or losing the extension ecosystem entirely; for now, this fork keeps the registry and says so plainly instead. See legal/third-party-terms.md for the full disclosure and legal/privacy-policy.md for what does and doesn't leave your machine.

Why

Not a judgment on Zed's product decisions — its cloud, AI, and collaboration features are legitimate choices for a company building a business. This fork is for people who want the editor itself without any of that surface area: nothing phoning home, nothing to sign into, nothing to disable in settings because it was never wired up to begin with.

Installing

Grab an installer from Releases. Tagged releases are built from the tag; nightly is a single rolling pre-release rebuilt from main once a day, so its assets are replaced rather than accumulated.

Platform	Asset
macOS, Apple silicon	Zode-aarch64.dmg
macOS, Intel	Zode-x86_64.dmg
Linux, x86_64	zode-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
Linux, arm64	zode-linux-aarch64.tar.gz
Windows, x86_64	Zode-x86_64.exe
Windows, arm64	Zode-aarch64.exe

Read this before you install

Three limits are real, not caveats to skim:

1. The binaries carry an ad-hoc signature only, and are not notarized. codesign -dv on a release bundle reports Signature=adhoc and TeamIdentifier=not set — enough for Apple silicon to execute them at all, and nothing beyond that. No Developer ID vouches for where they came from, so your OS will say so and it is right to: nothing has verified their origin except you. If that is not a trade you want, build from source below.
2. Updates are manual, but they are in-app. Nothing checks in the background and nothing phones home. When you want to know, use Help → Check for Updates: it reads this repository's latest published release, and if there is a newer one it downloads and installs it for you. A published release only — a draft is invisible to it.
3. Debug symbols are stripped in release builds, so a crash backtrace will be mostly empty. Reproduce against a source build if you want a useful one.

To open despite the warning — do this for the one file, and never disable Gatekeeper or SmartScreen system-wide:

• macOS: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Zode.app. Recursive, and not -d: the flag lands on 18 paths inside the bundle, six of them executables — Contents/MacOS/{cli,git,zode,zode-db-mysql,zode-db-postgres,zode-db-sqlite}. Clearing only the bundle root leaves the other seventeen flagged, and script/bundle-mac notes what that costs: a driver Gatekeeper blocks fails silently, so every database connection just fails to start one with nothing saying why. Control-click → Open is gone — Apple removed that bypass in macOS 15, so on 15 and newer it does nothing. The GUI route is System Settings → Privacy & Security → the blocked-app notice → Open Anyway. That records an approval for the app; it does not clear the attribute, so the flags stay where they were. The xattr line is the one that actually removes them.
• Windows: on the SmartScreen prompt, More info → Run anyway.
• Linux: tar -xzf zode-linux-$(uname -m).tar.gz and run zed.app/bin/zed. The directory inside the archive is zed.app, not zode.app — the bundle keeps upstream's layout so libexec/zed-editor stays where the database drivers look for it.

Linux builds need glibc 2.35 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04 and newer, Debian 12 and newer). They are built inside an ubuntu:22.04 container so that floor holds regardless of which runner image GitHub offers, and script/check-glibc-floor fails the build if anything in the bundle asks for more.

From source

git clone https://github.com/tgiap04/zode.git
cd zode
cargo build --release

The binary lands at target/release/zode. See docs/ for the full development setup (this fork's docs still describe most of upstream Zed's build process, since the build system itself wasn't touched).

License

GPL-3.0-or-later for the application (LICENSE-GPL) and Apache-2.0 for gpui and related crates (LICENSE-APACHE). See NOTICE for attribution to the upstream Zed project.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md, which still describes upstream Zed's contribution process (largely unchanged by this fork) — apart from its references to Zed's own CLA and hosted forums, which don't apply here.