> VSCodium may be open source in theory, but it's designed to be deployed in a less functional fashion than VSCode, more like a "Freemium", hence the "Codium", ringing me like "-ish", or "looks like".
VSCodium is not "designed" to be less functional, since it is a project maintained by developers who are unaffiliated with Microsoft. VSCodium is an application that is "deployed" in the exact same way as Visual Studio Code on the desktop. The name VSCodium is a nod to Chromium, not "freemium".[1]
Using the Chrome analogy, Visual Studio Code is like Chrome, proprietary and closed source. Microsoft's "Code - OSS" repo[2] is like Chromium, and serves as a functional open source base for the closed source software with the proprietary client-side features omitted. VSCodium[3] is like Ungoogled Chromium,[4] with both being community projects unaffiliated with Microsoft/Google. VSCodium takes "Code - OSS", strips out the telemetry, and uses the Open VSX Registry[5] for extensions by default instead of Microsoft's proprietary Visual Studio Marketplace.
> Or you can embed it as an editor to your project, but not much more.
Have you ever used VSCodium? It's a full editor that includes almost all of the features of Visual Studio Code. It does not need to be embedded to be used.
> Heck even Atom or its current incarnation is better.
You're entitled to your own opinion, but Atom was developed by GitHub, which was acquired by Microsoft. After the acquisition, Microsoft diverted development efforts to Visual Studio Code, and both VSCodium and "Code - OSS" currently run circles around Atom in both performance and features. It doesn't help that Atom was discontinued last year, with the final version having been released in March 2022.[7]
[1] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/28
[2] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode
[3] https://vscodium.com / Source: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
[4] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
[5] https://open-vsx.org / Source: https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx
As far as I'm aware there's no official guide for self-hosting it on your own server/bring-your-own-server. But allegedly it isn't difficult and there are GitHub Issues you can search for posted by others that have or are in the process of doing it.
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-web-ide-vscode-fork
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode
Chrome/Safari/Firefox extensions certainly don't have full access to everything the browser can do. Nor can IntelliJ plugins. Nor can... practically any other implementation of extensions.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode is available if a developer wanted to contribute something to core, anyway.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode
This repository ("Code - OSS") is where we (Microsoft) develop the Visual Studio Code product together with the community. Not only do we work on code and issues here, we also publish our roadmap, monthly iteration plans, and our endgame plans. This source code is available to everyone under the standard MIT license.
And, maybe you think fixing your IDE yourself makes you a better developer - if you are building IDEs, maybe, sure. I'm more than happy to outsource that a company which does this as its bread and butter.
Microsoft, on the other hand, sells (or tries to) enterprise office solutions. They may have optimized for a single use-case (TypeScript), outside of promoting their web-strategy (typescript), I wouldn't expect them to care one lick about VSCode, once it stops being particularly important.
Its also not open source (VSCode), so I would have no qualms regarding that - there is (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode) OFC but the license for the product everyone uses is not (https://code.visualstudio.com/License/). Similar story for Jetbrains - https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/idea/ is open source while of course IntelliJ, Webstorm are not (https://www.jetbrains.com/opensource/idea/)
A good chunk of the best functionality is behind extensions which are often proprietary, but that actually doesn't bother me that much. Especially because many of the proprietary extensions rely on functionality provided by 3rd party servers, where the owner (usually MS) is eating the cost. That seems fair to me.
The core editor is about as open as you can get. The ecosystem around it is not. That's actually the same model that many Linux distros follow.
--- edit - I'd love to see someone downvoting me provide a compelling response to the full source available here:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode
under the MIT license...
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt
Again - Microsoft customizes that in the same way the google customizes chromium, but having built both from source... I find it hard to argue it's anything other than open source tooling.
Again - the ecosystem is not (although it certainly can be, depending on the extensions used).
Good for you that you're not a student having to use a cheap laptop for everything and sometimes not having access to it at the moment. Not everyone is so fortunate.
Look at the first screenshot in the official VSCode repository, for example: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode Only about 20% of the screen is taken up by code. That may still be somewhat usable if you keep it fullscreen, but I prefer to have a 50/50 split with the web browser.
Most Vim binding plugins are a complete joke. I've heard that Emacs gets it right, but that's not what we're talking about.
I forgot to mention, Vim can be used for every language, including very obscure ones. With JetBrains, you need a separate IDE for each language — if there even is one.
"This simple gateway to the local machine quickly opens some interesting scenarios for using VS Code for the Web as a zero-installation local development tool, such as:
* Local file viewing and editing. Quickly take notes (and preview!) in Markdown. Even if you are on a restricted machine where you cannot install the full VS Code, you may still be able to use vscode.dev to view and edit local files.
* Build client-side HTML, JavaScript, and CSS applications in conjunction with the browser tools for debugging.
* Edit your code on lower powered machines like Chromebooks, where you can't (easily) install VS Code.
* Develop on your iPad. You can upload/download files (and even store them in the cloud using the Files app), as well as open repositories remotely with the built-in GitHub Repositories extension."
Also various interesting URLs are now possible:
"For example, change https://github.com/microsoft/vscode to 'https://vscode.dev/github.com/Microsoft/vscode'.
For Azure Repos, do the same. Change https://dev.azure.com/… to 'https://vscode.dev/dev.azure.com /…'."
"As you can see, vscode.dev URLs are a powerful way for us to deliver new, lightweight experiences. Another example is that Live Share guest sessions will also be available in the browser through the https://vscode.dev/liveshare URL. The sessionId will be passed to the extension to make joining a seamless experience."
The extension that enables Jupyter Notebooks is here: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-jupyter
Its barrier to entry is very low, so you don't need to invest a lot of time to find out whether it's going to be productive for you. It's a real usability jump over older IDEs.
I've switched from a combo of, mostly, Intellij IDEA and Vim to almost exclusively VScode (for development). I do still use Spacemacs just for org mode.
> my vim memory
There are vim compatibility plugins for VScode.
> fully embrace libre route
VScode is open source and MIT licensed, here's the repo: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode
Someone would need to explain to me what values I'm forgoing in order to use this. Although I should warn that someone I'm likely to have a strong rebuttal.
For comparison of numbers and growth rate: VS Code was new in April 2015, had a claimed 2.6 Million active monthly users in Nov 2017[1], became the most popular editor in StackOverflow's user survey in 2018[2] with 34% of respondants and again in 2019 with 50% of respondants, to a claimed 11 million users in 2020[3]. Its codebase has been forked 16,000 times[4].
In 5 years, VS Code has gained more users than the population of Switzerland, than the population of London, than Uber has drivers. I'm not suggesting Emacs ought to chase maximum popularity, but if there was any feeling that "the editor / IDE market was saturated" or "there was no demand for editors", that doesn't seem accurate.
[1] https://vscode-eastus.azurewebsites.net/blogs/2017/11/16/con... - (VS Code has telemetry built in, so Microsoft has some accurate idea of numbers, even if they still have the incentive to hype them up a bit).
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code#Reception
[3] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2020/06/09/go-extension
The blog author complained about "Live Share" as one example. As far as I can tell, "Live Share" is not in the builds one downloads from Microsoft's "Visual Studio Code" website: https://code.visualstudio.com/download
The Live Share feature is downloaded from a separate web page: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliv...
This separation seems similar to SQLite Encryption Extension. Can someone explain how the situations are not analogous?
The github page for "Visual Studio Code" prominently displays "Open Source" in its title: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode
I'm willing to be convinced that it's a marketing deception and "open source" should be removed but so far, I haven't seen any precedent from other hybrid open/closed source projects justifying that.
VS Code is open source. It's MIT licensed. You can get the source code here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode
My name is Isidor and I work on VS Code. Here's some hopefully useful advice:
* Join a screen reader mailing list and get to know the commnity: Program-L is the name of the general list and there is one list for Orca Screen Reader in case you are a Linux user
We try hard to make VS Code accessible so in case you decide to use VS Code:
* We have a gitter channel for accessibility which you can join https://gitter.im/Microsoft/vscode-a11y
* You can file issues and provide feedback as we try to improve continously https://github.com/microsoft/vscode
* Feel free to ping me @isidorn on either of those or on Twitter. And let me know if we can help more.
I wish you all the best
I am not sure why would you want to run your IDE in a web browser, but Visual Studio Code [1] is regarded by the Go community as one of the best code editors (with plugins) [2] to develop Go projects, and in case you do not know already, Visual Studio Code is technically a web browser [3]. That being said, Goland [4] is probably one of the best integrated development environments for Go programming out there.
[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/
[2] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/go
VSCodium main claim to fame is that it is vscode with the telemetry removed, not that it is vscode with the proprietary parts removed. There are no proprietary parts to remove. My experience running VSCodium is that it feels just like running a vscode binary downloaded from Microsoft (namely, from https://code.visualstudio.com/download). For example, you can use VSCodium to install extensions from Microsoft's "extension store" -- with the sole exception of the 3 recently-introduced proprietary remote-development extensions. The fact that VSCodium has been hosted on a site owned by Microsoft (namely, Github) for many months is strong evidence that VSCodium is not violating Microsoft's copyright and that consequently any coder can get the MIT-licensed code at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode and build his own vscode that works just like one of Microsoft's binaries in almost all ways.
The 3 aforementioned proprietary extensions are not included in the vscode binary you download from https://code.visualstudio.com/download: a user has to explicitly install one of the 3 (or the "extension pack" which causes all 3 to be installed) after installing the binary, so after reading this thread a user is not going to accidentally start using proprietary parts of vscode.
VSCodium describes itself as "binary releases of VS Code without MS branding/telemetry/licensing". That last word refers to the fact that the binaries at https://code.visualstudio.com/download have a more restrictive license than the source code at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode. I don't understand why MS's lawyers felt the need for a separate licence for the binaries, but any coder can escape that license by building vscode from the source code, which is MIT-licensed.
You are assuming that these companies are letting engineers to do side-projects that are unrelated to their day to day work?
As far as I know the OSS projects these companies put out are in line what they use internally for day to day work and it is absolutely core to their business.
Examples:
- Amazon: https://firecracker-microvm.github.io - Google: https://github.com/google/guava - Microsoft: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode - Apple: https://github.com/apple/foundationdb
Am I missing the point? Are OSS projects from these companies that are side-projects?
While on the subject, I am not sure about Uber's contribution to OSS. Their projects tend to be outside of my purview.
>> Paying lavish SF engineer salaries to generate cool, but not revenue generating, software
Nobody is forcing Uber to employ people in California.