HN Reader

I noticed this the other day when I installed VSCodium on my new Windows box. I had a functional setup for one day, then the next day I couldn't install a language extension I direly needed.

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.

This is why I've been learning neovim for the past couple weeks - the vscode reliance on Remote SSH extension felt like lock in

Basically we've seen this movie before -look at the trajectory OSX took. As far as I know, it's not really possible to build a useable pure darwin installable OS. Puredarwin itself is stuck in whatever was released in 2018 or earlier.

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.

Remember vs code is designed to fracture and the forks are an integral part of that. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

There is not much to see on a server that is down, so let me share some free advice instead.

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.

2. link: https://theia-ide.org/#theiaidedownload

Worth noting that you can configure VSCodium to use Microsoft's extension repo, and you can even trick extensions into thinking VSCodium is VSCode. It just can't be distributed that way out of the box for legal reasons.

https://github.com/lapce/lapce is an interesting contender in this space

Looking forward to the post-mortem of this outage.

#hugops

I happened to be poking around in their issues to see if there were mirrors and observed that in addition to the linked status page on this thread, the underlying Eclipse Foundation has their own (multiple) status tracking channels

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"

I'm partial to running Code - OSS and patching it with the aur/code-features and aur/code-marketplace.

Lots of vim/emacs mentions so I feel obliged to mention Helix (https://helix-editor.com/). Used neovim for _years_, tried Helix for a few weeks and never looked back

Now it's as good a time as ever to try out Lazy Vim. Came to it from Lunar Vim and it just works.

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.

I'm sure some (many?) will disagree with me but:

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.