ZedBuilder

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 -0500

As Microsoft started to get less and less trustworthy, I moved from VSCode to VSCodium, an open-source build of the VSCode source without Microsoft’s add-ons. This mostly-worked for me, but the remote development extensions were still Microsoft-proprietary (I work in DevContainers a lot). I can work around that. What I can’t work around is Microsoft sneakily(?) adding in more and more slop into the only product of theirs I actually care about.

Microsoft caught a bunch of hate for their buggy “feature” that automatically added CoPilot as a co-author to any commit you make in VSCode. It was supposed to add this if you use CoPilot, and it was supposed to respect the “AI Killswitch” in VSCode. Because of the buggy implementation, it did not.

I’m tired of needing to constantly play defense with the software I use. I moved back to Linux for a reason. I’m tired of the cruft. I’m tired of the forced “features”. I’m tired of tech companies removing my agency as a user.

Moving to VSCodium was not enough. I needed to remove the last piece of Microsoft software from my life. So I moved to Zed.

Zed seems great so far. Built by a lot of the same people who built the Atom editor, open-source (GPL!) code, and written in Rust. But Zed isn’t perfect, its still pretty early-on in the project’s public life. Debian packages aren’t directly available from the project, but they are available from a community-repo (even VSCodium has this problem). I really don’t like adding random repos to my system, so avoiding that is important.

Flatpak packages are available, but making a Flatpak package work well with my existing system utilities is (understandably) frustrating. Flatpak is a sandbox, tightly integrating it with system utilities breaks the main point of Flatpak.

I also wanted to change some Zed defaults. It also suffers from AI-infestation. The project leads have posted their reasoning, and it is logically sound, I understand where they’re coming from, they see AI as a tool for humans, not a wholesale replacement. In the current landscape of AI-boosterism, the Zed developers’ take is a reasonable one.

That said, I still don’t want anything to do with the plagarism-machine. I actually enjoy tech, I enjoy writing code, and I enjoy getting more skilled at it under my own power. I love the process of creation, not just the end-result. AI steals much of that joy from me.

So I decided to build a Zed-builder that runs in a container (to avoid polluting your system with build tools), applies some patches to the default settings (to disable AI and telemetry, among others), and gives you an archive that you can install on your system.

Where to get it

ZedBuilder

Instructions are on the Readme on that page.

How it works

Its not too complicated. Its a Dockerfile that includes all of the utilities needed to build Zed. I’ve also used git diff to make some default settings patches that are applied before compilation. More information is in the Readme on that page.

GPLv3 on Tom Webster

ZedBuilder

Where to get it

How it works