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?
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_eventis 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.
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.
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 |
Three limits are real, not caveats to skim:
- The binaries are not code-signed or notarized. Your OS will say so, and it is right to: nothing has verified where these came from except you. You are choosing to trust an unsigned build. If that is not a trade you want, build from source below.
- There is no in-app updater. Nothing will tell you a new version exists; you have to come back here and download it.
- 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 -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Zode.app, or open it once via right-click → Open. - Windows: on the SmartScreen prompt, More info → Run anyway.
- Linux:
tar -xzf zode-linux-$(uname -m).tar.gzand runzode.app/bin/zed.
Linux builds are produced on Ubuntu 24.04, so they need glibc 2.39 or newer. Older
distributions — including Ubuntu 22.04 — will fail with a GLIBC_2.39 not found error;
build from source there.
git clone https://github.com/tgiap04/zode.git
cd zode
cargo build --releaseThe 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).
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.
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.