> VSCode is an IDE designed to suffocate the open source alternatives, so that they retain full strategic control
What open source alternatives? Atom was a mess that kept breaking. LSP plugins are now used in almost every featureful editor and have really made editing a lot better. You spent more time configuring Vim and Emacs than they saved you. Microsoft made a really good code editor that set a standard and likely took market share from their own (mostly Windows) Visual Studio.
I do not use it anymore because of the creep of closed source plugins (+ they keep breaking my workflow) but I still think it is a great improvement.
> I wish software was secure by design, like browsers are.
Someone does not remember (or was not around) for the ActiveX or Flash days.
> You spent more time configuring Vim and Emacs than they saved you
I trade whatever default workflow that VSCode and other IDEs are imposing for a better editing experience. And even the initial time investment is short these days due to the trove of config and tutorials online.
After learning Vim, I ditched the files explorer and embrace the buffer workflow instead. Opening many windows at the same time to peek at multiple files, then switching to a new tab only if I don’t want to lose the current windows configuration. Then fuzzy searching for navigation, and using the quickfix list for search and errors. No friction from thought to action.
Another plus for me. I have an emacs session opened for weeks now inside a VM on my desktop to work on a side project. Whatever the computer (laptops or said desktopj, it’s a quick ssh, then resuming the dtach sessiom and my workspace is ready. Multiple files opened (almost all of them), a postgresql REPL, Tasks runners, and a lot of packages (magit, project.el, consult,…) working together to streamline working on code.
> I trade whatever default workflow that VSCode and other IDEs are imposing for a better editing experience. And even the initial time investment is short these days due to the trove of config and tutorials online.
You can configure VSCode with plugins. They aren't imposing any more defaults than vim or emacs do.
As VSCode is good enough, there is no oxygen for an open source effort to reinvent that wheel. At some point it will stale long enough that some bigger communities will want to tackle the challenge, but that won't be tomorrow.
I see VSCode as a net positive, but I think it's healthy to keep in mind the embrance->extend bigger picture.
What are we actually talking about here?
VS Code is open source, the existence of a de-microsofted alternative, that's actually just as capable (VS Codium) is just confirming this.
> there is no oxygen for an open source effort to reinvent that wheel.
Also, VS Code is just a great product. I mean, why is it a bad thing? It's not like Micrsoft is exerting as much negative control if at all on the whole ecosystem like Google did with Chrome. What I can see is that the dev's are keeping a good and healthy relationship to the users. While I see that this can change arbitrarily, given that it's Microsoft, right now you have (or at least I do) give them the benefit of the doubt.
Many important plugins are only in the official marketplace, and it's not allowed to use this marketplace from open source builds.
The practical effect is that open builds like VSCodium don't have access to things like the C# plugin, making them not useless, but much less viable than actual VS Code.
C# has a fork of the official plugin which uses NetCodeDbg by Samsung. And the language server itself is a part of the SDK anyway. It works in VSCodium without any additional effort required.
I didn't know that it isn't allowed?
VS Codium even endorses downloading the files from there and installing them in Codium. Is this against their TOS or something?
> I see VSCode as a net positive, but I think it's healthy to keep in mind the embrance->extend bigger picture.
It is a terrible point. Emacs and vim have been around for 'how' long and they are still niche and difficult to use.
VSCode made it better, especially with LSPs. Make all the terrible arguments you want. Still does not change that before more people used the Windows only VS Studio and now they can use the (mostly free) VSCode on Linux. Whatever attempt Microsoft is making to embrace Linux to prevent a possible dev shift they are still cannibalizing their VS Studio sales to do so and Vim/Emacs still does not offer a good response to Code.
It’s not. Its core is open source, but the actual build that is branded VS Code and that people download is not. I’m not even referring to many of the key extensions that many people use, such as the SSH remote and Pylance, which themselves are proprietary.
If you want to use only open source code, you need a rebuild like VSCodium.
Thirty years, two CEOs, and at least two industry redefining tidal waves ago. The people who trot out Microsoft's HTML 2.0 strategy as a reason their work 30 years later is a trap, are deep in tin foil hat land and jumping at shadows.
Look at their wall street filings for the last decade. If Microsoft is running an elaborate EEE with their open source work, that first "embrace, extend" phase is now 10+ years in and responsible for an enormous portion of their bottom line with the fastest growth rates anywhere in the company. "Extinguish" would be suicidal.
One has to wonder if these same people also think Apple still secretly doubts the "think different" vision that Steve Jobs introduced in the same time frame, and could revert to beige boxes at any time. Or that IBM is really a hardware company and will drop services any moment.
VSCode is part of their Embrace Extend Extinguish strategy.
It embraced open standards.
Then extended them with proprietary plugins.
And then extinguished alternatives by making their plugins incompatible.
Why did they buy GitHub?
Well, it turns out to be massively relevant for AI.
VSCode is well integrated with not just GitHub, but also Copilot, and Devcontainers, all of which strengthen their proprietary grip.
But GitHub provides free hosting? And offers freemium GitHub Actions.
Open source software uses these free solutions, but in doing so make their technology mainstream, to an extent where even suggesting alternative is thought ridiculous, "just use github actions bro".
Speaking of tin foil hats, the CICD pipelines could make it possible to selectively infect binaries at the distribution level, which is virtually impossible to detect, especially if the signing keys are part of the pipeline, which I assume is almost everyone. This is critical militarily.
Cloudflare is another example of a militarily interesting freemium strategy, where a vast number of businesses have allowed a man-in-the-middle, which practically defeats TLS encryption, allowing surveillance. And, selectively and virtually impossible to prove, could hijack your cookies, and gain access to all kinds of things. And infect the binaries you download.
Which is to say that EEE strategy is extremely powerful and effective. Otherwise, why would companies surrender the security of their users so readily?
However, "hard to connect" with Microsoft, is not the case. When it came from their own notes. It's also not hard to connect IBM with the Fuhrer, but that's also in the past. Doesn't mean it never happened, though.
"Extinguish" is about their competition, not the extended product/field. They will always invest to embrace and extend, that's the condition to outpace and cut off the competitors.
Another happy doom user (and formerly unhappy vim configure-er).
Although the objection I see is more like "Why bother learning to use emacs/vim when VSCode is free and does everything I care about and my friends use it?" Which, to be fair, the emacs/vim learning curve isn't for everyone. I sometimes wish they had less "leet programmer" cred, though, since what is cred to the leet programmer is (in this case at least) stigma to the majority.
I want to like/use Doom (also to be able to recommend it to to new-comers), and it neatly solves many "beginner issues", but I can never get it to do code-folding like in my own emacs-config.
Specifically, I'd want these 3 types of folding in the same buffer:
- "Chapter & Block-based", like in `org-mode`
- "Arbitrary lines folded", like in `vimish-fold`
- "Semantic folding, any level", like in `hideshow`
(Un-)folding should always be done with TAB, only for folding vimish-style, initial visual selection is needed.
When doing that in DOOM, I always end up with visual corruption, when some of fancier default eye-candy is switched on and then I use several types of fold in the same document.
I think, I saw code-comments, that there is an all-encompassing folding function in the works, but not yet finalized/activated. Hmm, maybe I should give it another spin, last time was 5ish months ago.
That is "does not work" for most people, including on HN. Nobody should be expected to spend half an hour installing vidual studio and building a project before they can start to use an IDE.
So why not fix that? You can absolutely build a binary and release it and save thousands of people that effort.
Comments like this remind me of people who complain about an error they saw on Wikipedia: "So, you're going to fix that, right?"
If you have a pain point in OSS that you care about, you can fix that. Yes, you the person reading these words right now. That's the entire point of OSS.
I could, but nobody is going to trust my binary. And they shouldn't.
The build should come from the official maintainer. Period.
And participating in open source? Oh, I can assure you I am a seasoned open source contributor, but I am not going to just contribute to a random project. Wasted too much time on issues and pull requests that nobody looked at.
Easy to criticize other people, right? What have you done?
So help the official maintainer. Become the official maintainer of the Windows build.
If you don't want to, or can't be bothered with the time commitment, that's fine, but realise that every time you complain about an OSS project's failings, you're really complaining about your own inability to contribute, not their's.
You're taking offence where none was intended. I was not referring to competence, as I have no means to judge, your inability was a reference to your decision to not to contribute for whatever reason you have chosen.
You've made clear that you are not going to do this. Fine. My point is that this failing you perceive then, is about your decision/inability/choice/forced situation/whatever you want to call it, to not fix it, not theirs.
If you're anywhere near as experienced as you state you are at maintaining OSS projects, you'll know the issue I'm referring to here: entitled armchair quarterbacks telling maintainers what they "should" be doing, but not doing anything to contribute themselves.
Your original remark was that kind of entitled snide, back-handed, snarky comment that deflates OSS maintainers every day.
Engage with it, or accept that's where it is. Don't race around pointing out all the things it doesn't do that you want, that you're not prepared to make happen. You could offer time, you could offer actual hard cash, you could just move on and decide not to care.
That's my point. If you have maintained OSS, you know that's the point, I even contextualised it with an easy to understand metaphor in the form of "broken things" on Wikipedia that literally take seconds to fix.
If you didn't get that on the first or second pass, perhaps you're not quite the experienced maintainer you claim to be, in which case, just hold off criticising for a beat next time, and think about what you could actually do, and if it's nothing that's fine. Move on.
If Zed wants to treat Windows as a second class citizen, I don't want to change their mind. I am sure plenty of people other than me are willing to help and have the ability to contribute. The fact that there is no official build for Windows for so long says plenty about the project. The writing is on the wall.
I am not an idiot. Recent developments in the open source world should already give everybody a better idea of where they should spend their time and energy.
And on Mac, it just does the wrong thing for most shortcuts (the basic moving ones, like Option-Left/Right, which work on any Mac app, including browsers, but not on Kate), which is a huge shame because otherwise it's a very good editor.
> Someone does not remember (or was not around) for the ActiveX or Flash days.
"Hey wouldn't it be handy if every webpage can download binary code and run it? Oh and let it talk to every DLL in the system as well. Super handy! What could go wrong?" - Microsoft in 1998 :)
I mean sure we were all a bit naive in the 90s and 00s but did they really not see that coming?
Doom kept breaking, spacemacs is just kinda annoying, and I don’t wanna go through doing my own from scratch again. I basically only use emacs for my couple literate configs because I haven’t found an equal alternative
That’s why I’ve been checking out zed/helix/kakoune lately. Zed to replace VSCode which feels bloated and the other two to replace vim. The keybindings are more intuitive to me and having auto complete of commands out of the box with a full menu showing shortcuts saved me a lot of frustration from day 0
> You spent more time configuring Vim and Emacs than they saved you.
Uh? I‘ve always used vim out of the box, and Emacs I got it just like I like by searching the .emacs file of a youtuber who has a configuration I likes. Exactly 1 minute.
What open source alternatives? Atom was a mess that kept breaking. LSP plugins are now used in almost every featureful editor and have really made editing a lot better. You spent more time configuring Vim and Emacs than they saved you. Microsoft made a really good code editor that set a standard and likely took market share from their own (mostly Windows) Visual Studio.
I do not use it anymore because of the creep of closed source plugins (+ they keep breaking my workflow) but I still think it is a great improvement.
> I wish software was secure by design, like browsers are.
Someone does not remember (or was not around) for the ActiveX or Flash days.