cursor also hijacks the 'code' alias to start vscode from the cli, which I use a lot. It's extremely annoying to have cursor start instead and unnncessarily difficult to get rid of. I removed cursor because of this.

Yeah, I've noticed this using cursor. I was surprised that the extension marketplace seemed... identical to VS Code.

The Cursor founders (technically the company is called Anysphere, Inc) are all young MIT grads. What they needed is a 40-year-old with a degree from Fitchburg State who could say "Woah, don't do that! It's not worth the long-term risk!"

lol, Microsoft has been doing this kind of thing for a while...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Antitrust

Lucky no-one is reliant on niche tools like NPM or GitHub, otherwise they'd be feeling mightily insecure right now.

I don't see how it can be a rug pull when in this case it was clearly against the terms of use?

Not to quibble, but VSCode (and GitHub for that matter) are part of my tooling, not part of any of my stacks.

To me the former is tolerable, the latter is not.

Don't build castles in other people's kingdoms, apparently a lesson that keeps being relearnt.

It took them five years to actually take action on enforcing their ToS. It's not as much of a rug pull as it's the result of their competitors blatantly ignoring the license on proprietary code from a proprietary code giant.

Unless the developers of the IDEs hit by this never actually read the ToS, of course, which would only make them less reliable as an IDE provider.

It's hard not to rely on Microsoft.

Open source project hosted on GitHub, for the network effect.

Use Rust which also rely on GitHub for crates.io

Yep. Was a Microsoft dev from 1992 until 2017. Won’t touch them now because I spent my entire career rewriting rug pulls. It paid off a mortgage and fed me well but it was a bad outcome for my orgs and customers.

If anyone remembers WCF/AppFabric/WWF and Silverlight, that was the last stack I rewrote someone out of the shit on.

Anything that’s not gpl-licensed is going to pull the rug from under your feet, people should have learned this by now.

Also, if you do open source contributions, never ever agree to assign copyright to the project: doing so means the project owners can relicense the code base, even towards proprietary license.

Then they will gaslight you.

Yes, even on medium sized code bases (few 100K lines), the Microsoft C++ extension gets extremely slow. Clangd is a much better option.

I've had the opposite experience with weird C++ projects from some customers that use external toolchains. For some reason even creating the compile_commands.json file with Bear doesn't work, while the proprietary Intellisense extension works out of the box without any configuration.

Not just faster, I have never been able to get jump to declaration/definition/references to work reliably without clangd.

Lldb and rr (midas) have vscode extensions

Zed is nice but I still prefer vs codes configuration scheme. Was working on a web/frontend project a while ago and had honestly a very hard time to set up Zed to do everything from formatting to linting and syntax highlighting correctly. Meanwhile in vscode I had to install 3 extensions, enable them for the workspace and they were already aware of each other and seamlessly worked together.

I also think it's a mixed opportunity not to allow for something like Lua or a Lisp to configure Zed in. It's very promising but I'm not willing to switch just yet.

I actually worked on VSCode (Python support specifically) at Microsoft in the past, and seeing this kind of thing frustrates me to no end.

The worst part is all the VSCode is still promoted to developers as open source, even though official extensions increasingly aren't, with bits and pieces gradually replaced with closed code. It's not that closed source is necessarily bad, but when F/OSS popularity is milked for marketing purposes while stuff like this happens, it just feels very wrong. If you want to be closed source for reasons, fine, but be honest and upfront about it.

Even better: Theia.

It supports most vscode extensions right out of the box.

https://theia-ide.org/

I’ve just installed Zed based on your recommendation and I’m already impressed.

It’s fast, the interface is distraction free and it already has support for all the languages I use regularly. Even Terraform support, which is notoriously hard to get right, is better than the current “best” in VSCode.

Thanks for the recommendation

Does Zed have a comparable C++ extension?

zed is veerrrry good. i really appreciate the clean ui compared to vscode and its ilk. don’t love the pricing they just announced though. i don’t mind paying for my tools, but it not being unlimited scares me off slightly.

Reminds when I excited to see Azure Data Studio adding Postgres support, but it was actually a binary extension with no ability to fix or change anything and no way for other useful databases to extend and use the functionality; they had spent all the time and effort to make sure nobody could do something like it but them.

Weird, ADS is dead and nobody spent any time on it, I wonder why.

So how do you get intellisense and debug C++ in Zed?

Still using VSCode, but you kind of know that's it's going to go sour eventually. It is Microsoft. :/

I figure e.g. emacs will always be there when that happens.

All I need is a Github Copilot clone and a good code search feature.

Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.

Oh and the ssh remote extension.

They are reselling an editor they did not make with a small extension that uses AI models they do not make.

I don't think they'll survive very long as it seems that they don't actually have that many things that differentiate them. And there is a lot of competition.

Apparently VSCode doesn't allow extensions to do the same amount of integration as the Cursor people want...

They wouldn’t take off if they weren’t a vscode fork. They may die a heroic death now having kickstarted the proper AI IDE. (Copilot was first and it was… nice? then it sucked so bad everyone jumped ship, remember? MS needed that kick in the balls.)

Eh, I mean it's a fork. They can keep updating their fork forever. Reality is they want complete control over the product, and VS Code doesn't expose everything in the extension API.

What's the problem for people who just use VSCode, exactly? The software still does what people want for free, which is what 99% of VS Code users use the software for anyway. People who care about open source-ness have their own extensions to replace their proprietary C++ tooling, or they can use an open source alternative like Eclipse.

I remember when basic features that come for free in VS Code cost thousands of dollars per developer, back when "update" meant "buy the new version (again)". I swear, people forgot how good they have it.

The change that made the Microsoft addon incompatible with VS Code forks happened four years ago.

Man, it is just a code editor.

Tech bubble remains tech bubble, when common, non-tech people are much more screwed, yet nothing is being done except saying "lol, just install Linux".

That's what "word to the wise" means -- you can't tell most people __anything__.

The opening of Proverbs has:

1:5. Let the wise hear and increase in learning[...]

I just use the OSS vs code builds at home. (Work uses vscode).

Ever since I got remote mode working, I haven’t noticed any missing functionality I care about. (I also haven’t tried installing extensions for the pile of commercial services work uses, and that I wouldn’t pay for anyway.)

Edit: Since cursor now has near infinite VC money, perhaps they should fund a few open source devs to work on those forks. Why should they get a free ride?

It's tradeoffs all the way down. VSCode remains one of the best intro editors, because it's free, has next to zero learning curve, and a robust extension ecosystem. I mean, what even is the argument here? That it's not completely open in every possible way? Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?

I think the problem with "sounding the alarm" is that it's not a tsunami that will immediately wipe out everything, it's more of a slow flood. The business strategy is boiling the frog.

I’ve just lost all hope and have rock bottom expectations. Probably not the healthiest coping mechanism.

Meh. If it does eventually go away, it wouldn't be the first time I've switched editors. Which turns out to not actually be all that hard to do.

> Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?

What collective problem, that someone might have to unexpectedly burn a weekend writing a new editor? That {emacs|vim} isn't popular enough? That people might have to go install openjdk in order to start using eclipse?

I think ultimately we're mostly just not as clever as we think we are, which I think unfortunately we must accept.

Where this has become increasingly problematic is rampant materialism and corporatism.

If the only real motivator in town, especially for the powerful, is material gain then there is nothing to constrain wanton greed. This becomes even more pronounced with corporations because their overtly stated purpose is not but greed, so even if the individual actors have some transcend moral compass they will be in conflict to their programmed imperative to "do their job".

Currently many of the powerful are materialistic and materialism can bring worldly power. Other political paradigms may come to the fore but as it takes a form and gravity it will likely come into some dialectic conflict with the prevailing materialistic status quo. That may be a peaceful resolution, but I'd not be certain of that.

And when it turns out you were right the whole time they will pretend no one saw it coming and blame you for the problem.

You just have to let go of things you have no real influence over.

If Microsoft is gonna keep trying to enshitty their apps with unmasked for AI pop-ups that will always come back and even go so far to throw ads in at an OS level: yes, I will feel at least a bit entitled to some "free work" for taking hours of my time.

I sure do wish my industry didn't need windows. I'd happily go to Linux and never look back.

It's one thing for it to not be open source.

It's another thing for its license to explicitly prohibit its use with any other IDE, even if it's API-compatible, even if it's literally exactly VSCode recompiled with another name.

And it's yet another thing to proactively insert checks for that.

I did give CLion a try when looking for an editor, but last I checked CLion required you to use CMake. Also, JetBrains has it all split up between different IDEs. I need on e that supports C, C++, Python, Cython, Makefile, TypeScript, SCSS, XHTML, Shellscript, JSON and XML in the same program. I also need a program that can do CMake and C, and a program that can do C# (including project management, building, tests etc), Batch script, PowerShell, Shellscript, Cake and YAML, preferably with the same UI. And it needs to work on Linux. VSCode is the only one I've found that can handle that.

I can also second the usage PHPStorm over VSCode for PHP work. On a team of 10 PHP devs we have just one that prefers VSCode.

> This is one of the reasons why I switched to CLion for C++ work

So jetbrains allows everyone to use their marketplace and their plugins outside their ides?

I can download the jetbrains php extension add it to my own shell and not pay for it?

>It sounds like the C/C++ extension was proprietary

The extension itself it MIT licensed (so could be hosted on the open VSIX store, if it wasn't down because the Eclipse project is suffering from server issues right now). In theory any fork can patch out the check and re-release the extension.

However, the extension packages some binaries that are proprietary, and have been since about four years ago. People could re-implement those and re-release an open version of the extension, but you can't just (legally) take the proprietary binaries and ship them if you don't have the license.

Open alternatives actually exist, but their quality and ease of configuration depends on your use case. In large projects the proprietary extension seems to be worse from what I've read.

Yes, that is what I thought, too. (It would be a good idea to have a open source C/C++ extension anyways, whether or not the proprietary extension stops working with non-Microsoft code.) (Maybe there is such extension; I don't know; I don't use VS Code and VS Codium etc.)

Neovim is a godsend, I would be in despair without it.

neovim is a truly beautiful piece of software that is impossible to undersell. It has made vim into a full feature complete IDE for every language finally with a good editor :P

No VS Codium is just a alternative build of Visual Studio Code.

> This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration.

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

"Don't be paranoid", they said.

"That's ancient history", they said.

"Lucy will hold the football this time for sure", they said.

What do you prefer to VSCode? Just started a job where I’ll be working in C++ and looking for alternatives

You missed that the ‚binary‘ vsix file has a different license: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-vscode.cpptool...

(The license like that existed before cursor, it was basically the reason for vscodium)

(Source is https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod... the license link at the bottom)

The same problem with the c# extension, which has had an even bigger shitstorm since some parts of the extension need a ms account and depending on the company needs to be paid

I guess it's the "additional binaries" which are not included.. but that's a guess, we need someone to confirm.

I don't see why they'd need to make the marketplace fully open for their client to be open source. Fedora packages a Flatpak client that downloads proprietary software, but that doesn't make Fedora Sparkling Virtue Signalling.

Hell, Debian's repository now also include proprietary code (https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003) so binary BLOBs are perfectly capable of doing distro checks and refusing to run on forks.

The C/C++ extension isn't open source though, and that's where the "doesn't work on forks" DRM is implemented. At least the clangd extension is open source and is a viable alternative.