The Gram Code Editor - 2026-08-30

Hia! Saw gram on lobste.rs and thought id say hello. The project looks really cool. I left Zed in part due to disagreements with the founders about the use of AI so the mission statement here really resonates with me. I worked on zed for a while early on and was the one who set up the vim bindings originally with the testing infrastructure. I noticed that a couple days ago yall removed the neovim based testing and all references to neovim. I have guesses for why that might be but I figured I'd ask and see. For what its worth I think some kind of automated testing against a known base implementation (one could imagine that version being vim classic instead of neovim but the apis would likely be more complicated) is a pretty nice feature to have as the inevitable end point of a lot of vim extensions is drifting or failure to match the small things that make the editor feel right. The neovim based testing was my attempt to make sure that never happened though at the cost of a neovim install for that testing. One feature I worked on originally to try to ensure that a full neovim install wasn't required to actually run the tests was a file format that could be generated that contained the response of the source truth editor. I wonder if that would be a nice thing to add back before fully dropping neovim support. Write out the expected output test cases and then drop the neovim dependency rather than just relaxing the test suite by removing all of those tests. Obviously I dont have a stake here, just thought id weight in <3 again the project is really cool and Id hoped somebody might do this after I left Zed. Wish yall well and I hope I can contribute some to the project in my spare time.

Hi! Thank you, first of all for all the work you’ve put into the editor! And sorry for removing your work.. Yeah losing the tests is not great, there are a lot of other tests that I deleted early on in the fork when I was just trying to make it work and didn’t think of it as a project to share with anyone yet.. at some point it would be nice to try to reconstruct the tests in some way. Oh and I also want to say that I really appreciate a lot with the editor and especially all the work that must have gone into making such a solid vim mode.

Removing my work is no problem at all :) I was mostly just curious as to the thinking so absolutely no hard feelings there. And thanks! I was proud of the foundation I laid at the time. Its clear other folks have taken up the torch since then so I definitely cant take all that credit.

Removing all the neovim stuff was entirely me getting upset about the DHH connection, that’s the truth of it.

I figured that might be case. And tbh I agree with you. That whole thread was a really bad look

Thank you again, I appreciate that.

I'll be playing around with gram in the next few days. Definitely excited to see where yall take it

Awesome! If you ever feel the urge to reconstruct the vim mode test coverage without a neovim dependency…

A couple features I really miss in Gram coming from neovim myself (aside from my silly animated cursors which I might take a stab at at some point) are oil.nvim or some similar text mode first file management and some kind of floating terminal. I may take a stab at adding one or both of those. It was always weird to me that Zed removed the floating dock as it was pretty crucial to my work flow when I was there but I guess not enough people used it. Re automated testing, Ill think about it. It may be possible to do it targetting vim classic if that would be less odius. I also think a similar approach would be good to take with the other binding targets like helix or kak. If one advertises a mode based on an editor, its nice to have some data to back that. Plus authoring tests in that way is SO nice.

Yeah the helix mode in gram is probably pretty broken at the moment, haven’t backported many zed patches there and it doesn’t have nearly the same level of coverage

That makes sense. Maybe theres a way to shell out to each of these editors rather than requiring them to be embedded like the old testing did. Idk might not be worth the effort I guess

Oh wow you made neovide, am I right? That’s awesome. Hope you decide to jump on board with Gram, it seems to be trucking along and picking up contributors. Thank you again for your support!

Actually now that I looked, the cache infrastructure is still in the repo and the data is still committed: https://codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram/src/branch/main/crates/vim/test_data Ill make a PR that leaves the neovim dependency out but adds back the tests just backed by cached expected values. That way you dont lose test coverage. You wont be able to author new tests using that system but thats still better than nothing and they can always be implemented manually

And yes! I did write neovide originally. Theres been a lot of maintainers on that project though so i cant take credit there either :) Neovide was actually how I got the chance to work on Zed for the time that I did. I was only there for a year before i was asked to leave though. In retrospect it was very good that I left when I did as I dont think the disagreements would have gotten better

Ooh, good thing I don’t know what I’m doing :D and yeah I watched an interview about deltadb recently and they seem fully on the vibe train…

its quite rough. There are people there I deeply respect but the willingness to ignore the harm of llms is troubling

btw do you have an xmpp client you recommend? Im just using the link from the docs, but I should probably make an actual account or something with a more permanent client if im gonna keep an eye on things here

I have to go sleep but yeah, that’s true of so many people not just there. It’s a hard time for people who care right now. I’m using an iOS client called Monal. Very bare bones but seems to work OK.

ok thanks for the rec! Nice to meet you!

you too!