My point about VSC is that brands itself as "open source" when Microsoft clearly intends for it to have a proprietary, tightly controlled ecosystem. It's not just RMS-unapproved, it's practically a lie. You can use it as a FOSS editor, but only if you are willing to accept a vastly subpar experience. Oh, and they've started cracking down on people using their proprietary VSC plugins in derived editors, too.

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.

> is Microsoft also expected to create the mirror clone?

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.

> Pretty sure RMS would argue linux is less "open source" than emacs too.

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.

It's even worse. VSCode used to be more open source originally, back when it was enthusiastically adopted. And then, gradually, official extensions started replacing parts with closed blobs with onerous licensing terms. C# and Python extensions have both suffered from this. Although the C++ one was never fully open, if I remember correctly.

I was gonna write this. Package management with distributed mirrors for both speed + redundancy are a solved problem in the Linux world. Ship trusted signing keys and even the shadiest mirror becomes verifiable.

Even though I've heard of Theia Editor before I don't think I've ever seriously looked at it until now. It honestly looks like a good alternative to vscode. (It basically looks like a straight up clone, which is good for me) I'll definitely give it a try.

Theia is based on Microsoft Monaco editor. Its a fork with a different ui

https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ ; I'll just leave this here.

Nowadays there are good alternatives to some of the proprietary Microsoft extensions, I use the basedpyright extension on VSCodium and prefer it to Microsoft's proprietary Pylance. I've also heard good things about the clangd extension as an alternative to the C/C++ extension.

I've yet to see any immense success based on the open source part of android.

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.

I would immediately jump ship if I could buy a phone that supports a truly free OS. Instead, I'm stuck with an option between a reasonably-secure, but completely locked-down phone (both hardware and software) with an exorbitant life-long cost and semi-locked-down phones with a pseudo-FOSS OS, whose main business is to my leak personal data for a dozen companies. Honestly, the only reason why Android (and iOS) reign unchallenged is because of their iron grip over the hardware ecosystem.

Like have a working keyboard?

> Yes, an open source project that creates immense value, but fails to fulfill some purist fantasy.

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!?

Can you please elaborate? Would love to hear more.

How do you run Cline on it

Note they say that most extensions are compatible, and those not listed as compatible might still be.

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...

I have to somewhat defend Eclipse as the Java platform too. Twenty years ago people had hardly any RAM in their machines, and Eclipse definitely suffered for that, because without RAM you run into lots of disk i/o.

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.

I in some sense empathize with you, in that Eclipse have a minor branding problem, a major discoverability problem for all of their projects of subprojects of projects to track the projects. That said, Eclipse the editor was all in on building a platform[1] upon which other people could build their own editors. It was quite popular before Electron arrived and sucked all the oxygen out of the rich text delivery space

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...>

Genuinely curious, how did Microsoft "shoved it down everybody's throats"? And weren't Jetbrains, Eclipse, Vim, Emacs dominant enough(especially Jetbrains) to have done so before Microsoft?

> (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.

Theia is not a fork of vscode (even though it looks like it). It uses VSCode's code editor (Monoco) and is written from the ground up. Presumably allowing it to support extensions, that for example, vscode does not.

However, its early days.

> 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 work for free or 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 the products.

Couple of years ago, I think openvsx faced funding crunch and on the verge of the shutdown a dedicated working group was formed (including big names like Google, Salesforce etc) to support it.

Not sure if this outage and its long duration is due to some technical difficulty or an indication of something worse.

it's kind of wild -- none of the multimillion dollar VSCode forks (Cursor, windsurf) are working properly at the moment. It seems open-vsx is quite a vulnerable single point of failure. Searching extensions gives a 503.

What I find nice about these terminal IDE's is that I can just deploy my config to my servers I access over ssh and it's the same experience as locally

With editors like vim, neovim, emacs, it's way easier to get the lay of the land first (tutorial, play around with the default config,..) and then list out what you need.

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)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA2WjJbmmoM