IslandZed

A fork of Zed carrying a small set of patches for floating-island chrome, rounded content masks, and a few other UI tweaks.

Layout

• source/ — git submodule pointing at upstream Zed, pinned to a specific SHA.
• patches/ — generated patch files applied on top of the pinned source.
• scripts/ — patch tooling.

Patch workflow

Patches are stored as files in patches/, but the source of truth is a local branch islandzed/applied inside source/. Each commit on that branch corresponds to one patch file. Editing a patch means editing a commit; patches/*.patch are regenerated from the branch via git format-patch.

This means you never hand-edit unified-diff hunk headers. git rebase handles upstream drift automatically.

First-time setup (after fresh clone)

git submodule update --init
./scripts/init-patches-branch.sh

This builds islandzed/applied by replaying patches/*.patch as commits on top of the pinned SHA. Identity/date are fixed so the resulting commit SHAs are reproducible across machines.

Apply patches to a working tree

./scripts/apply-patches.sh         # apply
./scripts/apply-patches.sh reset   # reset source/ back to pin

apply-patches.sh uses git apply against a clean checkout at the pin. Run reset before re-applying after changes.

Edit an existing patch

cd source
git checkout islandzed/applied
# edit code, then commit/amend/rebase as usual
git commit --amend       # or: git commit, git rebase -i, ...

cd ..
./scripts/regen-patches.sh

regen-patches.sh runs git format-patch <pin>..islandzed/applied and rewrites patches/*.patch. It enforces that the branch has exactly the expected number of commits in the expected subject order — if you reordered commits, added one, or removed one, update the EXPECTED_PATCHES array in all three scripts (apply-patches.sh, init-patches-branch.sh, regen-patches.sh) and rerun.

Bump the submodule pin

cd source
git fetch origin
git checkout islandzed/applied
git rebase <new-upstream-sha>
# resolve any conflicts per-commit using normal git merge tooling

cd ..
git -C source checkout <new-upstream-sha>   # update detached HEAD that submodule tracks
./scripts/regen-patches.sh
git add source patches/

The rebase uses 3-way merge, so context drift in upstream (the pain point that string-based git apply chokes on) is handled by git itself. Conflicts surface one commit at a time.

Adding a new patch

1. Check out islandzed/applied and make a commit with a descriptive subject (the subject becomes the patch filename).
2. Add the patch name to EXPECTED_PATCHES in all three scripts in the desired apply order.
3. Run ./scripts/regen-patches.sh.