That license agreement covers their online service if you opt in to use it. This reads like every ToS for a SaaS product I’ve read in ages. If you don’t want to use their paid service, don’t create an account and configure it in Zed, and then this doesn’t apply to you.

I’m not associated with Zed in any way except as a user. That said, this is a bonkers misinterpretation of their ToS. You don’t grant them the right to eat all your data just by using the editor. You do give them the right to process your data if you sign up for an account and opt in to send them all your data for processing.

People love to feel like they're the clever ones in the know who see the "real" world that others miss. It's the same underlying motivator behind conspiracy theorists. It's nice that you see what's really happening, which clearly makes you better than all the others who stumble around blindly. They're not special like you are.

I read "AI slop from the looks of it" in the same tone of voice as "that's what they want you to believe".

You, uh, OK now?

You are not, I assure you.

That's silly. Turn it off if you don't want to use it, but don't expect anyone to build a special fork for you.

I don't. I'm asking them to let me make my own fork, like I can do with VSCode.

RESPONSE EDIT (clear and intentional rate-limit evasion): hey thanks! that changes things quite a bit! Now I'm curious how well Claude could vibe-code the AI out of that project. Mostly just for the irony of it, but I can't deny that it would probably be faster than doing it myself - at least to start.

anyway, I appreciate the simple and straightforward solution without getting side-tracked by how my ignorance and misunderstandings made you feel.

You can do that, from their repo it seems it's licensed as GPL3. I'd expect someone to do a fork in the same vein of vscodium or ungoogled-chromium. Maybe call it unzedium.

They've prioritized supporting AI for people who want to use it, but it's highly respectful of devs who don't want to.

Zed got me off of Emacs for the most part, which is about the highest praise I can offer. I've never used an editor that 1. closely mapped to how I think about code, and 2. is easily extensible enough that it's broadly supported with a gazillion third-party packets, and 3. is lightning fast. Emacs does 1 and 2. VSCode excels at 2. Sublime is good for 2 and 3, and Vim, and BBEdit 2 too. Zed's the only one I've ever tried that nailed all 3, plus excellent out of the box defaults.

I think it's fantastic. I still keep my Emacs chops up because it's 50 years old and I know it'll be here another 50 years from now, but Zed's open on my desktop more than any other app.

Hopefully Neomacs, “A GPU-powered Emacs written in Rust with a modern display engine … starting with the display engine and expanding to the core“, will succeed.

https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs

I know there've been a couple of stabs at this in the past, but I hope beyond hope that one of these catches on now. Given some extra LLM boost for the grunt work, I'm more confident today than before. Crossing my fingers!

I’ve gotta agree. Some horror stories were going around about their interview process. It seemed highly optimized to select people willing to put up with insane top-down BS.

There's a nice built-in tutorial for actually editing text with it. Press control-h then t to launch it. But that's just for using the editor. For actually configuring it, I've found that Opus 4.6 (inside Droid) is exceptionally good at tweaking my init.el.

Yesterday I typed "Set the default YAML indentation to 2 spaces." It came up with

  (use-package yaml-mode
    :defer t
    :config
    (setq yaml-indent-offset 2))
  
  (add-hook 'yaml-ts-mode-hook
            (lambda ()
              (require 'yaml-mode)
              (setq-local indent-line-function #'yaml-indent-line)))

Now I can hit tab to indent YAML by 2 spaces, and I learned a little in the process. I'm delighted with this setup.

> I've found that Opus 4.6 (inside Droid)

What does (inside Droid) mean ? Do you use any package to integrate to claude code in emacs?

Droid is my employer's alternative to Claude Code, which I personally prefer. But the general point is that LLMs are really good at Emacs Lisp these days.

I've started using Droid inside Emacs via the agent-shell package I learned about here a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45561672). It handles quite a few other agents, too.

Same here. I paid for my family's accounts for many years until the app suddenly became much worse. Honestly, Apple's own Passwords app has 95% of the features of, and the ones it does have work far better than the 1P equivalent. I can't imagine paying for a personal account again.