It's left a very sour taste in my mouth. I've used Emacs for ages and despite being a much more niche editor, it's never been so hard-dependent on centralized repositories, and the centralized repositories it does have (ELPA/MELPA) are apparently a lot more reliable than OpenVSX. Installing Emacs packages manually from source is a breeze, doing so with VSC is masochistic.
VSC is not really "open source" in any meaningful sense. It is just plainly unusable if you don't do things the way Microsoft wants you to. I do respect the VSCodium devs for trying to make VSC more properly open, but it does feel like a futile effort.
Yes, VSC is less hackable than emacs, but I don't think it's necessarily the same thing. VSC (and others like it) are going for a more streamlined "App Store" experience, while emacs is going for a more DIY/hackable style editor. You can always fetching the VSIX file and sideload it is if the "store" is down though.
Yes, VSC is less "open source" than emacs. if "open sourceness" is a score out of 10 or something. Pretty sure RMS would argue linux is less "open source" than emacs too.
Not sure why this is futile for the VSCodium devs. They are taking a dependency on a service for installing extensions. The solutions is more readonly mirrors for the official OpenVSX endpoint.
If your main archlinux mirror is down, you don't cry about the centralized state of our life. You use a different mirror. You throw in 5 or 10 in case one or two are down. I understand why a company like Microsoft might want a more centralized service to distribute the extensions. But for an open source clone? is Microsoft also expected to create the mirror clone?
I expected it to be a little less convenient to leave Microsoft's beaten path. I did not expect it to be a massive waste of time. This is what I meant by futile. Not only is it apparently very brittle, it's missing large swaths of VSC's ecosystem. Hell, I don't even know if the extension I wanted is available on OpenVSX because it's still down!
If Microsoft hadn't openwashed their product, I wouldn't care nearly as much.
Besides, Emacs still provides a streamlined system for managing packages on top of being hackable. It even makes installing and upgrading packages straight from a Git repo easy. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too.
VS Code is not Open Source, period. What exists in the “Visual Studio Code - Open Source” repo that is MIT licensed but cannot be used to build VS Code. Once-upon-a-time it was just branding, telemetry, and a license to use the Microsoft Extension Marketplace. Now, however, there are proprietary, closed-source extensions and additions that are only available in the proprietary-licensed VS Code.
> You can always fetching the VSIX file and sideload it is if the "store" is down though.
No, you cannot do so legally (in the context of using Vscodium or similar), as it is a violation of [the VS Code Marketplace ToS][1]: “You may not import, install, or use Offerings published by Microsoft or GitHub, or Microsoft affiliates in any products or services except for the In-Scope Products and Services.”
[1]: https://cdn.vsassets.io/v/M253_20250303.9/_content/Microsoft...
Allowing open source VS Code (ie. VS Code you compiled from Microsoft’s repo) to access extensions would be enough. Nobody is asking Microsoft for more than basic access. It’s does not even require a code changes, just a policy change.
Even Google allows Chrome forks to access the Chrome Store.
The word you're looking for is 'free'. Free as in freedom and free software. The open source philosophy focuses on the openness of the code base and the associated advantages. Free software philosophy highlights the freedom that the software gives its user on their devices. Opening the source code is just a means to that end for the free software philosophy. Most open source software are also free software. But a few software like VSC and Chrome manages to be open while holding back the freedom from its users. Stallman and others tried to highlight this difference, but were largely neglected. The large scale ignorance of this distinction is what led to spread of travesties like the Chrome browser.
I completely agree with GP on this matter. I use centralized repos for Emacs like ELPA and MELPA like a metadata source. The actual packages are downloaded directly from their git repos. All these happen transparently and failure is practically non-existent, even in the absence of mirrors. In contrast with such convenience, the only way to fully utilize VSC extensions market is to use MS's proprietary build of VSC. If you tried installing some essential extensions (like remote editing and editor sharing) on a fork or an open source build of VSC, it would 'conveniently' tell you that it doesn't work on an alternate build and instead give you the link to download the proprietary build. Some of these functionality don't even need an extension on Emacs (eg: tramp). What are the justifications for such restrictions? They alone know. But I'm sure that they aren't technical. You're probably too busy to worry about the politics behind it, whenever you find yourself in such a situation. It's quiet manipulative in my opinion. And all these were before MS started banning VSC forks from their marketplace.
The Open VSX registry is open source (https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx) and self-hostable, although I have no experience with that. I assume it's possible to host your own instance with the extensions you want instead of relying on the free public instance.
Personally I'm more of a Sublime guy, but people looking for an open VSC alternative should consider Theia over VSC forks. It seems like the smarter long term investment if you want to get out from Microsoft's control.
Just because pylance is available doesn't stop jetbrains/Google/OSS from creating an LS. Maybe no such exists as if now, but not from a technical blocker. Just no one created one.
VS Code itself does not work without various propriety stuff, but that is a different thing. A large number of open-source projects work that way. If you don’t like the proprietary stuff, the recourse is to fork it, modify it, and implement the remaining stuff yourself.
Walmart. Bringing back home. ™
The CEO even said the quiet part out loud in one of the commercials in the early 90s, roughly "we'll buy American products, unless they're lesser quality or more expensive" and trailed off, and the editors back then weren't as tuned in to corpo-speak or something.
Of course the countries with more lax environmental regulations and worker protections will have a cheaper product; the entire thing was a sham from the beginning.
Its a tool they use to encourage adoption of their developer tools and get people to spend more money in Azure, not a philosophical stance.
I’m not sure how this could actually work without a centralized repo.
If I’m going to use VSCode I’ll just use it, I don’t need to play with forks, etc
VSCode is Android. Or rather, VSCode's source is AOSP and the marketplace, plugins, etc are Google Play Services.
I say that with maximum derision.
Yes, an open source project that creates immense value, but fails to fulfill some purist fantasy.
Its value and main goal is to suffocate any initiative on mobile space, call it immense if you will, but I concede it certainly works.
Yes, a purist fantasy of an open source project that functions without closed source proprietary blobs.
Oh, the horror! Won't somebody think of the children!?
Google, on the other hand, pretended to be the FOSS crusader while setting themselves up for a ton of vendor lock-in that would not only have gotten 90s MS convicted on antitrust, but Bill Gates crucified on the National Mall.
Visit Eclipse Theia in the mean time when you are serious about de-risking from VSCode. I think VSCodium is doing an uphill battle here, while Microsoft can't help them self being a sales company first. In Theia, everything is open and free of spyware. MS is under no obligation to provide an OSS editor, but playing tricks after luring people in is not nice.
EDIT:
1. Eclipse Theia is a different platform than Eclipse the Java IDE.
* On each start, Ada & SPARK extension pops up a dialog that I have to close by clicking 12 times (I counted it) on its "Cancel" button.
* I can't permanently remove items from the left sidebar. It looks like Theia is unable to persist some things between runs.
* The IDE notifies me about bad tasks.json config and proposes to open it to fix, but the "Open" button doesn't do anything.
* Open VSX extensions do not update automatically. [1] I have to manually switch their versions to the newer ones.
* Just now I've manually updated Ada & SPARK extension. Not only was I presented with several options with exactly the same version (perhaps each was meant for different CPU arch or operating system?), but after choosing the first one and reloading editor as the IDE asked me to, the extension disappeared completely.
None of these happen with VSCodium, or with VS Code of course.
> Please note that a few parts of the VS Code extension API are only stubbed in Theia. Extensions will be installable, but some features might not work as expected.
Also, I thought Theia was a cloud IDE, and it seems like I was mostly right in that 2/3rds of their offering is (localhost:3000 & docker) but they also now apparently bundle it in Electron which I haven't tried
The API surface covers almost 100% that of vscode, I only see some AI integration API's that are stubbed, and that is because Theia has their own vision here and doesn't want to depend on MS.
The complete API compatibility list is here, the stubbed API's are not core imho:
https://eclipse-theia.github.io/vscode-theia-comparator/stat...
- The build system is finicky and can easily take hours to figure/fix.
- The error-reporting is severely lacking. You can be lost why something internal isn't working and go on a rabbit-trail with your favorite AI-copilot, etc.
- Documentation is lacking. You have to dive into the platform code to actually figure things out.
- This can be seen positively but there are quite a few new things being introduced regularly (especially AI-related) which, for a platform, isn't always ideal.
Eclipse the IDE also sat on their laurels and got their lunch eaten by JetBrains on the functionality front and VSCode on the extensible platform front
1: <https://wiki.eclipse.org/Rich_Client_Platform/> or <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_(software)#Rich_client...>
The JRE was born in a time of scarce cpu power and low RAM capacities. It has put tremendous optimization pressure on the project. I develop on .net nowadays, but I have the utmost respect of what they pulled off.
I dare you to install an Eclipse product these days. It will run circles around any Electron offering, while offering real parsers (not treesitter), and reliable code intelligence across vast source projects.
Microsoft is partly to blame, but people have been warning about this over and over and over ad nauseam and people still choose to use VSCode. You couldn't even get people to not use the proprietary extensions for C/C++, Python and remote development.
The problem is that Microsoft dedicates enough resource to development that everybody else looks like a rounding error.
For example, anybody could have produced the Language Server Protocol, but nobody had the critical mass until Microsoft shoved it down everybody's throats.
Until somebody puts a significant amount of money behind an alternative, Microsoft is going to continue to win this battle.
(I was going to also say "or the OSS guys all unify behind a choice" but Hell will freeze over before that happens.)
The editor war is going as strong as ever, emacs vs vim will still be here in 20 years. Compared to 10 years ago, the amount of people using emacs and vim only grew, although VSCode growth was 1000x faster.
However, its early days.
Nowadays you must have a flashy website. You must host everything on a single managed VCS provider, or a programming package ecosystem hoster. You must depend on corporations to give you free things, in exchange for you giving them everything about you (otherwise you must pay out of pocket for everything). You must do what everyone else does.
Maybe it's impossible to go back to a simpler time. But it's not impossible to change the state of things today.
You keep saying _must_. Why _must_ you do what everyone else does? To what end? To get contributors to your project? To get funding? No one is stopping anyone from starting a project on sourceforge.
Maybe Microsoft should've made VSCode source-available. Sure, companies taking Microsoft's free labour would need to develop an IDE of their own (or maybe someone can hack Eclipse to work as a browser project?), but at least Microsoft wouldn't take the heat for not doing enough free work for everyone else.
You're massively misunderstanding the goals of these large companies who provide open source projects, whether it's VSCode, Android, Chrome, or whatever. The goal is always control. Companies at this scale never do free work for the common good.
I don't say this to deride them, I say it as a statement of fact that we all need to be aware of when we choose to use these products.
Anyway. OpenVSX is classic XKCD https://xkcd.com/2347/ territory—run by a small crew of brilliant volunteers, but the entire world depends/freeloads upon them.
Not sure if this outage and its long duration is due to some technical difficulty or an indication of something worse.
I myself have built zsh bindings for helix as that was my main pain point: https://github.com/john-h-k/helix-zsh
As developers, we're spoiled for widespread (e.g.) vim keybindings support in just about any IDE via extensions. When unable to use it in something like Web IDE, it is very frustrating and makes it less useful as a product.
[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2025/04/17/gitlab-17-11-re...
Also, I wonder how hard it would be to teach VSCodium/Theia to pull extensions from OCI because it seems to work great as a distribution mechanism for Homebrew and allows shipping a .vsix from your own GitHub/GitLab account, since both of those offer no-cost OCI image registries scoped to the project
Working with anything is a breeze.
I'm just not too familiar with refactoring tooling and how to configure it, but there's rarely any reason for me to use something more complicated than sed, and in those occasions I can just use ast-grep.
most relevant: https://www.eclipsestatus.io/incident/549796?mp=true
their helpdesk ticket: https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/helpdesk/-/issues/5924...
the issue in their GitHub issue tracking for the site: https://github.com/EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org/issues/3805
the tl;dr seems to be a massive storage failure affecting a bunch of Eclipse services, and just like any storage problem putting all the bytes back is some "please wait"
[0] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/prepare_vsc...
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44057402/using-extension...
My vim config has three things only: LSP, FZF (for anything fuzzy), and Plug (to install the above two). There's also a few niceties, but I could do without them. or vendor them into the main config. But it's not my daily editor, so that's just the base config. Anything I could add on top of that would depend on the projects I would need it for. That's about 200 lines (the lsp config is 1/4 of that)
NB. A nice talk even if it's about vim "How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)"
I think working on out-of-the-box experience is not very attractive for volunteer contributors, so I guess the situation won't change unless we find a way to sponsor that work.
Like Darwin, there may be an 'open' skeleton that vscode hangs upon, but all of the things that make it useful and attractive are being increasingly pulled behind paywalls.
I'm pretty sure most of us saw this coming a mile away. I've played a little with VS Code here and there but never put a lot of time into it because I'd rather invest my time in things I know will be here in 2035 -like vim/neovim.
#hugops
