Fork guide

What is ZedRail?

ZedRail is an independent fork of Zed that adds an optional activity bar. It is not affiliated with Zed Industries.

Branch strategy

Branch	Purpose
main	Tracks the latest stable Zed release tag (same as zed.dev / GitHub Releases)
zedrail	Activity bar + ZedRail branding + release config

Release tags use the format v{stable_version}-rail.{patch} (e.g. v1.16.1-rail.1).

Upstream sync

The sync-upstream.yml workflow checks zed-industries/zed releases every 6 hours. When a new stable release is published:

1. main is reset to that release tag (not upstream/main)
2. main is merged into zedrail (fork commits stay on top)
3. A new v{stable}-rail.{patch} tag is created if Cargo.toml matches the stable version

upstream/main is development-only (often ahead of stable). ZedRail always follows stable so binaries match what zed.dev ships.

If zedrail has diverged too far from stable, the workflow stops and flags a one-time manual rebase (script/rebase-on-stable.sh).

Zed Cloud

ZedRail uses zed.dev for Collab, AI, and account services. Your Zed account works in ZedRail. Config and data are stored separately under ~/.config/zedrail/ (Linux) or equivalent paths.

Licensing

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