VScode is the epitome of the EEE strategy. The core product is open-source, but it’s filled to the brim with tracking and the official extensions have DRM. Yes, there’s DRM on your python LSP.
Anyone who gives a shit should look for alternatives right away. The problem is just that there aren’t any that are as easy to set up.
Not hate in my case, but I don’t like ms and it’s because of the shit they have done in 90s and 2000s. Their current support of linux is not something I trust.
My baby actually. Look, MS is a powerful company and they’re making a lot of desperate strategic purchases as their main business corrodes. Their brand is more based on gaming. Their infrastructure? The cloud and github. They’ve got the butter and they’re looking for bread to slap it across.
Well, this seems inevitable. But on the other hand, Github is really unique in the business and labor market too.
Huge and important companies depend on it for hosting code.
These same companies depend on open source projects.
These same companies depend on programmers posting to their Github to share examples of their skills with the world, being potential employees.
Now if you can enshittify Github in a way that doesn’t fuck with how important people use it too much, it will be after changes to how the tech hiring environment works - worldwide.
Have you tried compiling neovim for your own personal use? There are a bunch of possible issues that can arise, like lack of enough space or required dependencies, but if you miss neovim it might be worth trying
Neovim user here. Granted it takes some time to setup properly but it’s really fast with navigating through files, lsp functions and doing a search in thousands of files.
For me personally I am most productive in Neovim. But if you can’t be arsed to fiddle around with config files to get things set up it’s probably not worth the effort.
Knowing vim is pretty essential for working on servers. My usual setup is ssh + tmux + vim. I suppose you could substitute nano for vim if it’s installed.
Do you use tmux on your main computer, especially if you’re using a WM? I can’t imagine the need for tmux with tiling window managers if you have workspaces and can partition windows how you like.
Not the GP but I also use tmux (or screen in a pinch) for almost any SSH session, if only as insurance against dropped connections. I occasionally use it for local terminals if there is a chance I might want a command to outlive the current graphical session or migrate to SSH later.
Occasionally it’s nice to be able to control the session from the command line, e.g. splitting a window from a script. I’ve also noticed that wrapping a program in tmux can avoid slowdowns when a command generates a lot of output, depending on the terminal emulator. Some emulators will try to render every update even if it means blocking the output from the program for the GUI to catch up, rather than just updating the state of the terminal in memory and rendering the latest version.
I would definitely use tmux on my servers, but I’m wondering about why I’d use it for the desktop. Your use-case of needing commands/output beyond the need of a graphical interface is interesting (would like to know a couple of examples), I should probably consider that.
I can do the splitting with a window manager though, wouldn’t need tmux for that. I agree with the program GUI part.
Examples of local commands I might run in tmux could include anything long-running which is started from the command line. A virtual machine (qemu), perhaps, or a video encode (ffmpeg). Then if I need to log out or restart my GUI session for any reason—or something goes wrong with the session manager—it won’t take the long-running process with it. While the same could be done with nohup or systemd-run, using tmux allows me to interact with the process after it’s started.
I also have systems which are accessed both locally and remotely, so sometimes (not often) I’ll start a program on a local terminal through tmux so I can later interact with it through SSH without resorting to x11vnc.
I’m in my 6th semester and use neovim so no it’s not mostly around for people who got used to it back in the day. A lot of my fellow students use it as well. It’s the only editor I use because you can use it to edit a single file as well as a whole project and everything is always how I want it to be. Also once you get used to it I guarantee you, you will wonder how people navigate code only using mouse and the arrow keys. It is just a beauty to quickly copy a code block or change a word with 3 keystrokes.
I’ve been using VIM for 7 years or so, at this point. I’ve configured it the way I like.
The point of using it is that there is simply no other text editor which lets you edit text in such a manner. Granted, the keyword shortcuts can seem strange and obtuse in the beginning, but get used to it and you wouldn’t want to use anything else anymore. I’m using the VIM extension in VSCode right now and dearly miss my .vimrc which I configured so carefully on my Linux machine.
Just the matter of taste. For some users who want to get to code quickly, they use VSCode without the hassle. For some power users who want to have extreme extensibility, they use Emacs/Vim.
It’s kinda like using chromium instead of chrome, isn’t it? Don’t use either; use firefox.
No idea what the editor equivalent would be though… Emacs or vim maybe? Next to noone uses it, but it has so much more potential, if only it where widely adopted.
There really isn’t for free, at least as far as I am aware. You are probably right that Emacs can come somewhat close with the right packages and setup, but VSCode extensions just makes everything so much quicker and easier. JetBrains is also similarly good, but it’s obviously not FOSS, and I guess it would be considered a full IDE not a text editor.
Yes but no, I meant in society overall. In my group of friends some use vim but weirdly even some rhel-admins stuck with nano. I’ve yet to meet someone using emacs irl, but i haven’t been looking either :P
Hmm im sorry to hear it. The main reason i love C# so much is because VS2022 is just amazing. Ive been trying other languages on different IDEs the past years but nothing feels nearly as smooth to work with as VS2022 with C#. Sad part is, for other languages, VSCode does feel the most comfortable. I want to like JetBrains IDEs but there’s a little too much jank for my liking. Even though I cant even drag out tabs on VSCode, its still the least annoying.
So you want debugger integrated in vs codium then no, i was talking about standalone debugger but it would be cool if there would be a way to integrate both of these software together.
Give it a try, it does show code and you can put breakpoint and step through it. It looks like Visual Studio(not the electron version which is VS code).
This reminds me of when my dad holds an ideological belief about something based on politicians he doesn’t like who support it.
“Climate change isn’t real because Al Gore…”
“Supply Side Jesus isn’t valid because Al Franken…”
“Affirmative Action is racist because Al Sharpton…”
Actually now that I think about it, maybe he just doesn’t like people named Al…🤔
But anyway, if it’s open source, and the source is sufficiently audited by third parties, and I’m able to compile and run it myself, and running it doesn’t have undesired behavior (telemetry etc) then I don’t care who wrote it, because it does exactly what I need it to.
Unfortunately VSCode is not an open-source product, it’s only based on an open-source product. It’s the difference between Chrome and Chromium. VSCode does have telemetry. VSCode is licensed under Microsoft’s proprietary license.
I don’t use vscode, I was just explaining that my requirements for using an open source product for my personal uses are independent of who wrote the code. I’m never going to say “I won’t use X source code just because Y wrote it”, that’s just silly. If I have the code, and it does what I would want it to do if I wrote it myself, and it doesn’t do anything I don’t want it to do, then I don’t care where it came from.
Yes, and I was adding that it is not enough for the product to be open source if the ecosystem surrounding it (e.g. extensions) still drives you to use proprietary software
You use whatever works best for you. Microsoft Lens, on Android, is still unmatched for scanning, correcting perspective, and cleaning up whiteboards. No OSS tool comes close - and, believe me, I tried to use others (or, other; I think OpenScan is the only thing that attempts something similar). It would be foolish to not use a tool that you like using and doesn’t have any hidden consequences, merely because of on opinion.
I don’t think VSCode is particularly good, myself, but the point remains: it’s free, I haven’t heard anything about it surreptitiously sending info to MS, and if it works for people, then great.
I think the proprietary version MS distributes does send telemetry data to them but I personally just use VSCodium, which is based on the open source VS Code version.
Probably. I have no doubt that Lens (the aforementioned tool I used to use) does. In the career I had, I had to give up the telemetry, because I had to use Lens. There is literally no practical alternative. Sometimes, you just have to pay that cost. Heck, I’d have bought a telemetry-free alternative from someone else if it worked as well, and if anyone offered one. Which they don’t.
I’m beating that dead horse because it baffles me everytime I think about it that, in a veritable app ocean of calculator, chat, and everything else, Lens is apparently unique.
Is Lens just an app to scan documents using only your phone camera or does it something else that makes it so useful? I sometimes need to scan stuff like that too but haven’t find something good that’s open source.
Lens is, among other things, a camera app that recognizes whiteboards, auto-crops to the whiteboard, and auto-corrects the perspective. It can also clean the image, removing smudges and dry-erase dirt, and do basic color adjustment and B/W conversion. It’s designed specifically for whiteboards, but works on documents. And then, when the image is cleaned, it makes sharing via email directly from the app particularly easy - sure, it only removes 2 or 3 clicks, but it does streamline the process.
It’s pretty amazing at what it does. When you’re in a tight space and have to take a picture of a whiteboard at some absurdly acute angle, it works miracles. I’ve never had it not impress a coworker who’s never seen it do its thing.
I don’t know who MS acquired to get it, but it’s simply a fantastic program with no competition.
I don’t like using proprietary software but this does sound really useful. In school I take my notes on a laptop but oftentimes I need to take pictures of sheets or the whiteboard to put it in my notes, which always looks really bad. I might check this out for that purpose. I tried to find something open source that could do this but haven’t found anything either.
I agree with being pragmatic, but the opinion of hating Microsoft isn’t unfounded. There are pragmatic reasons to avoid building up and entrenching yourself in tooling that doesn’t respect you as a user or is controlled by companies that has interests that don’t align with yours.
I didn’t say iy was wrong to hate Microsoft. I said that it’s silly to ignore the best tool on only principle. You might not want it because it costs money, or collects telemetry, or because you want to avoid vendor lock-in; these are all reasons that have a grounded cost, even if the yool is best in class. But just because you don’t like the company itself?
If MS took VS Code away tomorrow, devs would switch to something else. That’s a cost I’m not willing to pay, but if they are… eh. If Microsoft took Lens away, well, we’re fucked, because the OSS community has not offered any solution that works better than just taking a picture and cleaning it up in GIMP.
My bigger problem is many swear on FLOSS, but using Apple is OK. Go to a FLOSS conference and there are Macs everywhere.
It’s undeniable that Microsoft has had positive influences on the opensource world with language servers, debug adapter protocol, an inbrowser editor that is seemingly embedded in any website with a code editor, cross-platform C# (maybe that’s a curse though, I dunno), linux contributions, and probably more I’m not aware of. Apple… I dunno. Vendor lock-in and more electronic trash?
I think Apple is supposedly meant to be more respectful of privacy, which to be fair I haven’t heard of much scandal around user data from apple, they have other issues though
Apple isn’t okay. Apple is forced onto developers. The general population using Apple products requires developers to use Macs. And, last time I checked, it’s a lot easier carrying around one laptop than two. It also doesn’t hurt that Apple products aren’t exactly the quality of off-brand Chinese laptops.
I hope EU slaps Apple hard for abusing their market position in this. I’ve seen it happen in several companies I’ve worked in. Developers prefer Linux, but it’s the only machine you can build for all target platforms, so… macbooks it is.
Plenty of developers prefer Macs to anything else.
Of course. They are pretty great battery wise. UX and OS is however inconsistent, buggy and frustrating. I had expected “annoying design decisions”, but not wrong and buggy ones.
The general population using Apple products requires developers to use Macs
They are 20% of the laptop/desktop owners? 25%? A dev is most likely going to be writing backend software to run on a linux platform on some server somewhere or write a web application (for the browser or electron). How many devs are actually going to be writing mac-native applications?
I mean if it’s the choice between Fisher-Price Linux in a decently good looking package or Windows in whatever (maybe entirely useless spec) machine your employer offers, it’s probably better to get the Mac for a lot of people.
I guess it’s mostly because Mac and Windows are just easier to run for most organizations, and IME as someone who’s never worked at a software company, IT teams don’t have any interest in admin’ing Linux for a small handful of users.
Probably those IT teams are just ignorant. Kerberos has been around since 1988. Fat and thin clients ran on Unix back in the 80s, there Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) exist for for linux and so do Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), opensource Preboot eXecution Environments (PXE) have existed since at least 1984 so you can install linux on a bunch of devices in your LAN with the configuration you want, it’s possible to setup update policies and a bunch of other things if you like as they can be grabbed from a server, you have remote desktop solutions, and so on and so forth.
The only real thing missing IINM is Mobile Device Management (MDM) where a user can get a mobile device delivered to them, they login and enter a URL + credentials into their MDM solution, and the device pulls configuration information from a remote server to setup and manage the device. The device never has to enter the premises of the enterprise and employees can be anywhere in the world and be provisioned. There are workarounds, but nothing enterprisey has been made yet, which is probably due to the lack of Linux at work. A chicken and egg problem.
But well… you might be right. Non-linux sysadmins probably think it’s not possible and just hand out windows or mac.
But well… you might be right. Non-linux sysadmins probably think it’s not possible and just hand out windows or mac.
I mean even if you were totally knowledgeable about it (Imo, as a non-IT person) it seems like it’s a hard sell in terms of effort/value unless it’s totally necessary esp if there’s an established user base for Mac/windows.
Sure it’s cross platform, but it lacks feature parity with the Windows version. And the development experience is lacking on Linux. It’s not even that they haven’t brought everything over, it’s that they’ve even removed features, like hot-reload, from Linux.
Do you think Microsoft removed features from their language because they hate Linux? Or do you think maybe the way syscalls and the filesystem work are different in Linux and that makes hot reload a bit of an engineering problem?
We can never know, but I’m guessing Microsoft didn’t port their language to Linux just to shoot themselves in the foot. On the other hand, it is Microsoft.
Apple does have some open source contributions. One example is CUPS, which was made by Apple and is now used by most modern Linux distros for managing printers. If you want more examples you’ll have to ask someone who actually likes Apple, I’m sure they can think of more.
Not everything Apple is bad but iMessage is an active annoyance and so is their walled garden approach. It’s a bit like looking at someone you hate and talking about how that one time they brought a pie to the pot luck at work.
There’s also Webkit, which a few foss browsers (ie gnome web, and whatever kde’s browser is called) use instead of Chromium or Gecko, and Swift, a c++ based language that I haven’t personally seen used much outside of iOS development.
It’s quite common knowledge, Microsoft does horrible operating systems but great dev tools. Visual Studio (not vscode) was amazing to develop software.
And thanks god we don’t have to deal with Eclipse anymore.
The real question would be why the open source community cannot create a better dev tool that’s not outmatched by a glorified text editor.
I hate vscode. I hate that gitlab emulated that shit in its webIDE. I code all day and I’m astonished people have pleasant thoughts about it as I sit and wait for that ugly crud to load.
“Better than eclipse” isn’t the same as “good”
Free software made a better editor in the '80s. Go learn.
No it’s not that steaming shite vi nor its feotid ilk.
I don’t use VSCode for the exact reason. I used VSCodium but switched to Neovim. I see this problem more with GitHub (also owned by Microsoft). I was not able to get off GitHub yet, but I’m planning to switch to Codeberg probably. I heard that GitLab is also closed source?
Gitlab is open source, but some features are only available in their Enterprise Edition. As the name suggests, unless you are looking for an alternative for a large company, the open source “Community” Edition is enough for all your needs.
I am also facing the same issue with Github and switching to codeberg. My first hurdle is clouflare pages not sourcing codeberg for website source, only giving options for github and gitlab
I use neovim for the vast majority of the programming I do but I do still have VSCode installed. Maybe I should just delete it? I opened it after I saw this post and there was a whole bunch of extension updates just sitting there.
Kinda wish GNOME builder was a bit better at being a general purpose editor. That’s just because I’m a bit of a GNOME/GTK pervert though and I would love to use a sexy looking app for dev work.
I also quite like the light touch feel you get from code, I can use it for any language and am not going to have to navigate through hundreds of language specific features I don’t need unless I install them myself
Kate might do similar but I can’t imagine the extension pool is big enough to compete and I think at that point I’d just use a commandline editor instead
Some are, the intellij java community edition is even open source. The paid ones are not too expensive, I pay around 200€ yearly for the all products pack and that’s definitely worth it for a professional developer. If you are a student or open source developer, you can apply for free versions also.
IntelliJ and PyCharm are the only JetBrains IDEs with community editions. If you want to use CLion for example, you’ll either have to be a student or you have to pay.
Is it though? Considering the amount of time you spent in it and the potential productivity increase it might give you I’d consider it very fairly priced.
Expensiveness does not have to mean it isn’t priced fairly. Not everyone has the money to drop on tools like it, or is able to get their work to pay for it, even it is worth it.
For some time now I mostly write rust and I’m actually very satisfied with VS Code and rust-analyzer. I tried intelliJ-rust but didn’t find it better. To be fair, I haven’t tried the new jetbrains rust IDE though.
VSCode is a modern emacs. Similar concept, a single editor to do everything via extensions. That’s the selling point. “young people” never had the chance to work with a similar concept, this is why they found it so revolutionary (despite being a concept from the 70s).
I use it because I am forced to use a windows laptop at work, and emacs on windows is a painful experience
The thing is the VS code handles everything (with extensions). If I want to use pandoc, or CSV to markdown table, python linting, Go, whatever, there’s extensions that can handle all of these equally well and consistently, for example format on save.
If I want to use jetbrains then the pycharm for python, intelliJ for Java, Goland for golang… Then there’s licencing depending on whether I’m using a personal licence or corporate laptop, whether I have to get a licence from my employer etc.
For me it’s not so much that it’s so good, but that it works with everything in a consistent and obvious way plus I can install it on any machine I might be using.
The Intellij plugin ecosystem is pretty good. Granted my day job is 80% Java/Kotlin but I also need python and ruby and go and the plug-ins have never let me down. I don’t have pycharm or Ruby Mine or Goland installed.
The license also explicitly lets you use your work license for personal stuff or your personal license for work stuff. The only difference is who pays. You also don’t need a license to use the community edition.
It’s also pretty good at CSV and markdown files. I might be biased because I spend probably 60 hours a week using Intellij but I don’t find any of your points against it to be accurate.
The freemium and constant “are you sure you dont want to pay?” from some intellij plugins is insulting enough that it’s hard to believe any developer would praise it. Presumably this doesnt happen in vscode because it cant happen in vscode, not because people arent shameless enough to do it there.
Ick. At the very least, i’ve seen it a LOT less in VSC. The fact that something as simple as rainbow brackets uses the freemium model in intellij sucks. I mean the fact that it’s not a builtin setting is dumb too but that’s beside the point
Used to be that you had to jump through some hoops to make it work - make your own makefiles and stuff. Now, all the major vendors of MCUs are starting to develop vscode plugins as their “IDE” instead of those horrible ultramodified eclipse installs.
I write small scripts in NeoVim and larger projects in VSCodium because it provides most of what I need and doesn’t consume a lot of resources. It’s a good tool, you can also use forks or alternatives, and i think that’s the spirit of open source, isn’t it?
I also have been trying Kate, works greats and with even better performance.
Right tool for the right job. Like I use VSCode for PowerShell on AWS Windows boxes over SSH, works great. But for Python or Terraform, JetBrains Suite is just better in everyway.
I like VSCode because I can run it in a development container and because its the only FOSS IDE with an extension for IEC 61131-3 ST that I am aware of
I was using Sublime Text for many years. Even after Atom came out I still used ST3. However, ST development is understandably slow compared to VSCode and it is now so far behind that loyalty isn’t enough of a reason to continue using it.
I’ve been using sublime since forever as well; Atom never really felt like a valid alternative because it was so so slow. VSCode still feels kinda slow but not to a degree that gets to be annoying. Still I could never get used to it. It breaks some system keyboard shortcuts that I use heavily (alt + arrow keys for example) and takes forever to parse files (to make a list of all functions in the project for example).
I wish sublime would update more often and have all the cool new things that come to VSCode every other week, but at the end of the day it still works better and doesn’t really lack anything that’s actually useful (except maybe for a few months before st4 came out).
It’s basically one click in VS Code. It’s more clicks in Sublime. 🤷♂️ Turning Sublime to a full blown IDE for a bunch of different programming languages takes work and I’m lazy.
I love Jetbrains. As a company, how they treat their users, the way they do subscription models (subscribe yearly, and if you unsubscribe, keep the license for the version you have still, including the ability to re-download that version), and just the prodding quality overall.
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