Zen is simply a fork of Zed for those who are happy to use an IDE free from AI, telemetry, and other cloud-based services. I use it as my daily driver and intend to maintain it so that I can also use it as the base for some non-developer tooling I want to create.
Only tested on Linux for now, though Zed’s support for other platforms should be (mostly?) intact.


Yeah, if you don’t mind the UI clutter/teasers, it doesn’t make much of a difference. For now, the most noticeable difference is that the default layout is more old-school, with the project layout and the git panel on the left-hand side again, though even without this fork you can configure it to be like that too.
Yeah so far I’ve been content. It’s good that forks are popping up for stuff like this though, if zed decides to go the way of Microsoft in any way it’s nice to know there are some alternatives already.