ZedRail

Zed with an Activity Bar — a community fork of Zed.

Not affiliated with Zed Industries. Zed Cloud services (Collab, AI, accounts) are provided by zed.dev.

ZedRail adds an optional VS Code-style vertical activity bar for panel buttons, while tracking upstream Zed stable releases.

Features

• Activity Bar — vertical panel rail (disabled by default; enable in settings)
• Upstream sync — rebased on Zed stable releases
• Auto-update — via GitHub Releases
• Side-by-side install — separate config directory (~/.config/zedrail/)

Download

Linux (one-liner)

curl -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Qu3ntinS/zed-rail/zedrail/script/install-zedrail.sh | sh

Or download manually from GitHub Releases:

Platform	Asset
Linux x86_64	zedrail-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
Linux aarch64	zedrail-linux-aarch64.tar.gz
Windows x86_64	ZedRail-x86_64.exe
macOS (unsigned)	ZedRail-aarch64.dmg

Linux install

Extract the tarball to ~/.local:

tar -xzf zedrail-linux-x86_64.tar.gz -C ~/.local

Run via ~/.local/zedrail.app/bin/zedrail or the .desktop entry.

macOS (unsigned)

macOS builds are unsigned in v1. After opening the DMG, run:

xattr -cr /Applications/ZedRail.app

Then open ZedRail via right-click → Open.

Enable the Activity Bar

Open the Settings Editor and search for activity_bar, or add to ~/.config/zedrail/settings.json:

{
  "activity_bar": {
    "enabled": true
  }
}

See docs/FORK.md for all activity bar settings.

Building from source

See upstream Zed development docs:

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows

cargo run -p zed

Contributing

ZedRail-specific changes (activity bar, fork branding, release infra) belong here. Fixes that benefit all Zed users should go to zed-industries/zed.

See CONTRIBUTING.md and docs/FORK.md.

Licensing

Same as upstream Zed: primarily GPL-3.0-or-later, with Apache-2.0 components where marked.