What is Reddit's opinion of
VSCodium?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
➔ VSCodium website
By popularity on Reddit, this Service is:
68 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I don't identify as a msft shill, but I also don't _hate_ them (at least not any _more_ so than $OTHER_TECH_COMPANY). VSCode is *the* supported IDE for Julia and has the backing of the Julia devs so it is really is the best option hands down (at least in my opinion).
Vim likely won't ever stack up to vscode in terms of integrated debugging, intellisense and code navigation, and other quality-of-life / nice-to-have features because from what I have seen, the Julia devs are focusing on adding these features to VSCode and not other editors (vim).
If you're willing to entertain a compromise, you can try VSCodium. This is an open fork of Msft's VSCode (which is open source and licensed under MIT) with msft telemetry disabled. You can take a look here: https://vscodium.com/
>ship with tons of telemetry like Powershell and VScode do
VScodium - https://vscodium.com/
I know it's not a complete solution to all the Microsoft-things, but anyway a good start.
They're already doing that with Visual Studio Code as well. You can compile it yourself and distribute it as Free Software, but the Microsoft developed plugins will only work with the closed-source version that also has Microsoft's EULA.
Here more details related to that bait-and-switch:
>All it did was make me wonder if I was being spied on, having a MS product on my system.
Sadly with VS Codium I was missing many extensions and it didn't work very well for me. I guess I will have to trust in Telemetry Level set to "off" in VS Code is going to do something.
VSCoders (looking at you, u/CalcProgrammer1 and u/pnutjam), have you tried VSCodium?
From what I understand it's exactly the same, but without the 'Microsoft customization' (whatever that means). I'm not a FLOSS/FOSS purist, so it doesn't really matter that much to me - just wondering how it compares to the 'official' product. A few of my Windows-only friends swear by VSCode, so I might give that a shot :)
The word you're looking for is an "editor". I hear that VSCode is a good editor for beginners (though I don't have any personal experience with it). You can learn how to install it on Ubuntu here.
I do know that VSCode has its own Haskell plugin, which should work well.
"When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license."
VSCodium. Not stock VSCode, which is a Microsoft product with telemetry built in. VSCodium is basically VSCode with the tracking stripped out. It's open source under the MIT License.
I honestly don't get all the hate here - I wouldn't use it myself (I tried it for a while but wasn't too fond of it, nvim pulled me back in), but I think this represents some good stuff happening. Microsoft released a consumer application officially on linux, which I don't think they've done before (does C# count?) which I think is pretty big, and could pave the way to more stuff. I don't think every big company should start supporting linux-based OS's (nor do I want them too), but if MS starts supporting linux with more of their applications (i.e. maybe official VSC will lead to official office a la macOS) that'd only be a good thing in my eyes. For example then the odd time I need excel/outlook/powerpoint (I love Libreoffice and use it daily, but sometimes I do need MS office work with something from work/university) I wouldn't have to worry about having my windows box handy. I still distrust MS in general, but they've been doing some good stuff lately and I'm curious to see where their apparent love for opensource goes. And of course, if you're paranoid about telemetry (like your's truly) vscodium exists and it's great!
​
TL;DR - I think the act of MS releasing official software on linux is a good thing, even though I won't use it myself
VSCodium lists an "unofficial" Flatpak at the bottom of their website. Any reason you'd prefer to not go with that? https://vscodium.com/#install
Additionally, they give instructions on how to add a repo and install through Apt.
This probably isn't the place for editor wars - but FWIW, there are settings to disable the telemetry, as well as independent Open Source builds of the VS Code sources.
That being said, feel free to take the idea and reimplement it in Emacs lisp, if that's your jam.
A full IDE will be helpful, you don't need all the tools at first but as you grow and learn them having them there instead of having to switch to a new tool will be helpful.
See what the professor uses for the class, but in a vacume i'd recommend that you go with the IntelliJ education bundle, it's free and powerful!
If for some reason you end up going with VSCode, use VSCdium, same code base but opensource and less telemetry / privacy invasion.
Pretty good on the whole. I'd say Atom is as much an IDE as VS Code is, so they should be in the same section. Notepad++ might also get a mention, and .NET people like to use the full Visual Studio for Python (for some reason).
If you're doing terminal emulators, would it also make sense to compare common shells? bash vs fish vs zsh etc?
The VS Code binaries you linked to aren't open source. They use clever terminology to trick you into thinking they're open source. Open source version available here: https://vscodium.com/
There's also the open source version available at vscodium.
The binaries that Microsoft ship are compiled with non-free additions and telemetry which aren't present in their open source code release.
O VSCode também é open source: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode
O binário que a Microsoft distribui não é porque traz umas cenas de telemetria, mas podes sacar o binário sem isso: https://vscodium.com
Integra perfeitamente com o Github. Essa comparação não faz muito sentido, tendo em conta que o GitHub é da Microsoft.
Não te sei dizer porque é que o VSCode é mais rápido, mas esse foi o principal motivo que levou muita gente a abandonar o Atom há uns anos atrás.
> I'm concerned about privacy
You really don't need to be.
> if something isn't totally open source
VSCode is open source. If you don't trust the binaries that Microsoft releases, build it from source yourself or use VSCodium.
The community edition of PyCharm is also open source.
Nice guide but personally I prefer to use https://vscodium.com/ because it doesn't have telemetry, and has a better license (visual studio code is already open-source but the binaries provided by Microsoft have a proprietary license)
Yeah I don't mind using it either, its a great tool.
Also people seem to forget that Vs Code's source code is open source. If you want a fully open source build without having to do it manually there is even vscodium now.
Atom or VSCode — have you used multi-cursor?
Such a tiny joy! :)
Very useful when playing with code initially before you’ve made it super clean and need to change references, etc.
VSCode has a nice quick overview of useful shortcuts when you start it up.
(I used to use Atom too and miss its adorable tentacles self, but Atom was bought by VSCode’s owners (Microsoft) and more and more dev work is just focused on VSCode now - including Julia’s main IDE integrators as I understand.)
Note: you can also get VSCodium if you want an open source only version of VSCode.
Check out https://vscodium.com/ VSCodium is not a fork of vscode. It's the actual open source got, compiled so you don't have Microsoft's telemetry. (Microsoft adds telemetry in downstream in vscode)
Also, remember that linux is not windows, and that things will be different. I found that my troubles lay in the first one and a half week of understanding the differences, but it was a lot smoother after that
Distros:
Pop_OS! is a very complete distro, but is a memory hog (pop.system76.com)
Debian can be configured however you want (debian.org)
Ubuntu is good for learning in a VM but dont use it daily (just google ubuntu)
​
IDEs
https://vscodium.com is good, but is commonly confused with the Visual Studio code
Spyder3 is good but only for python
atom.io is the best one I know because It has support for lots of languages and github integration
​
Linux tips:
If something breaks, try everything and anything to fix it!! Also linux does not take up much hdd space so you will have space for games also. Use a window manager instead of a DE once you learn linux, and take a look around r/unixporn because a lot of people put their dotfiles. Hope this helped!
Visual Studio Code does include tracking no matter if run on Linux, macOS or Windows despite being open source (which leads to forks like VSCodium)
Microsoft will absolutely find a way
SOLVED
How to prevent different installations of Portable VSCode (also Codium I guess) from grouping by the Windows Taskbar:
- Open directory {vscode_installation_dir}/resources/app
- Edit the file product.json with a text editor (VSCode/Notepad.exe/Notepad++ or whatever)
- Locate the key win32AppUserModelId
- Change its value to what you want it to be, and save the file:
​
"win32AppUserModelId": "Microsoft.VisualStudioCode.ForJupyter"
​
Now, if you run the executable, this modified copy of VSCode should remain separate from other VSCodes in the Windows Taskbar.
(if somebody happen to know how to change the VSCode icon, or (even better) its hue, please share your knowledge)
- the level of paranoia is ridiculus
- the site of project https://vscodium.com/ is kinda pretending that this is some new standalone editor, there's like one paragraph that tell this is fork (or more like copy) of VS Code.
It's not really the license, it's that extra non-open sourced bits are included in the builds you download.
> Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.
From the VSCodium Project, the last bit about "contains telemetry/tracking". It's not about what is included, it's about the fact that items are included which are not open source.
The VS Code binaries you download contains some data and code not open sourced, so even though there is an OS version of VS Code, this is not what you get when you download the precompiled binaries. It sounds small, but being open source is a binary thing, it's either 100% or its not actually open source. 99% open sourced still means the end product is not open source, since that last 1% could be anything, and prevents people from actually sharing the code.
It sounds trivial but unless you can build it yourself, or as a second best verify a reproducable build (Which VS Code does not support); there is no way to know what changes are made, or by how much the binary you made differs from what is shipped to you. This also means if you want to create your own fork you will be missing features, and can be blocked out of services.
VSCode is good for a full blown IDE, but I prefer VSCodium. It's the same program/same code but with the Microsoft telemetry disabled.
From their website:
> "The VSCodium project exists so that you don't have to download+build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft's vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled."
When I want something more lightweight I prefer Geany.
From their website:
> "Geany is a powerful, stable and lightweight programmer's text editor that provides tons of useful features without bogging down your workflow. It runs on Linux, Windows and macOS is translated into over 40 languages, and has built-in support for more than 50 programming languages."
Either of these will work for you, /u/AdviceSeeker897.
Are you looking for a tool to solve this, or are you looking to learn some Python by making something new?
If all you need is a tool, there are plenty. On the command line, there's diff, which is versatile and can be scripted. If you want something graphical, there are a bunch. I like Diffuse which can compare more than two files at a time. Also, most modern text editors, such as VSCodium can diff files.
On the other hand, if you want to do this on your own in Python, the easy way would be to use the difflib library. If you really want to make something from scratch, I think it would be best for you to do a little research on your own. I will say that the naive approach might be to load all the lines of one or both files into memory and then loop through checking for matches, but this might take a long time or too much memory as the file sizes scale up. For a more pythonic solution, look into using a set data type and its associated methods.
You are probably mixing up Visual Studio Code/VSCode with VSCodium which is indeed a VSCode fork with the telemetry/tracking and other Microsoft proprietary stuff removed.
Here is the link to their website for people interested in checking out about that project:
It doesn't matter if you disable it, MS still nabs your IP the first time you load it up and sends it off to Redmond for storage, where it's used along side everything else they track on you. You have to request your data to be removed in writing, because disabling doesn't erase the telemetry they've already collected.
If the product is free, you are the product. And yes, all of those companies do the same thing. They make money by selling ads to you.
If you do want to use VS Code, I highly recommend VSCodium instead.
If you want to use probably the best IDE (VSCode) without telemetry, VSCodium exists.
VSCodium is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code.
Yeah, it is sooooooooo simple that someone forked it for a more "open" solution called VSCodium.
Your whole paragraph is like confusing theory and the reality of what is given to you.
Please downvote me but check this out as a beginning: https://vscodium.com/
Use Visual Studio Codium.
From the project page:
> Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.
Also use Firefox wherever possible, Chromium otherwise.
Non-Microsoft option: https://vscodium.com
VSCode is almost open source. It’s mainly open source code with a little bit extra Microsoft thrown in.
VSCode is just someone compiling the open source binaries for VSCode, minus Microsoft proprietary code and telemetry and making it available.
Regarding VScode, there are alternative versions like VSCodium where some things like telemetry are disabled or removed. However, this also affects some functions such as the synchronisation of settings or the use of the official marketplace.
For anyone interested there is VSCodium which is the MIT-licensed VSCode source packaged without any of Microsoft's limited-licensed extensions (which, as you may consider to be a bonus, includes the omission of Microsoft telemetry). That's what I used before I switched to a native (non-Electron) editor.
I raise you VSCodium: https://vscodium.com/ :)
> Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking. According to this comment from a Visual Studio Code maintainer: > > When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license. > > When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license > > The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled. > > If you want to build from source yourself, head over to Microsoft’s vscode repo and follow their instructions. VSCodium exists to make it easier to get the latest version of MIT-licensed VSCode.
Kinda late, but if you're thinking of switching to VSCode, I'd like to suggest using VSCodium instead. It is an open source build of vscode, and doesn't have any microsoft branding/telemetry/tracking. Exactly the same as VSCode in every other way.
Nice list. However, there are several pieces of software listed that are NOT OSS:
- Chrome is not OSS. The underlying browser engine, Chromium, is though.
- neither is DaVinci Resolve. It is free, yes, but not OSS.
- Kite's engine is not OSS, even though their plugins seem to be.
- Is Client Hyper-V really OSS? Hyper-V is Microsoft's thing and they don't usually open source such things.
- Algodoo is not OSS
- VS Code is a bit strange. (most of) its source code is available, but the "official" packages are created with MS tracking and the license for the official packages is this monstrocity. I recommend using VSCodium instead, which is built from the open codebase of VS Code.
- LightStream does not seem to be open source either.
- Chapter and Verse does not seem to be OSS.
- FireAlpaca does not seem to be OSS.
I wouldn't recommed OpenOffice either - it's pretty much dead, LibreOffice is where development happens.
All in all, nice post, but could have used a bit more research.
Visual Studio Code is open source and available on Linux. There is also a non-telemetry build called Codium.
If you just need an image editor, Gimp is fairly powerful. The hardest part is learning the interface.
If you need some Photoshop specific feature, apparently a lot of recent versions run well in Wine: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=17
Hope that helps!
For anyone interested in an a de-Microsoft-ed version of VSCode, check out VSCodium, https://vscodium.com/ - it's the open source project of VS Code, minus the Microsoft telemetry/tracking.
Here's another pleasant surprise, you can run a free version of VS Code (telemetry disabled).
I installed FractalBoys.pls from the vsix file (download from https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=FractalBoy.pls).
Which package did you used? Flatpak and Snap packages have problems, and not just VSCodium, also VSCode, you need to use native packages without system isolation...
I use codium without any problem on GNU Debian, I invite you to try again.
Distro for programming… ANY. Id advise you use https://vscodium.com and perhaps something like Ubuntu, however you can always try arch and or gentoo which isnt “user friendly”. Pop OS is good though although I do like Fedora.
Read: "Why does this exist" on https://vscodium.com.
vscode and VSCode are not the same program. Microsoft has done this intentionally to be confusing. VSCodium is a binary distribution of the MIT licensed vscode project available on GitHub. VSCode is a proprietary licensed application distributed by Microsoft which takes advantage of the sublicense clause in the MIT license.
Alright, so this post was reported for having nothing to do with Free software. Reading the post a bit more, I'm going to direct users to use VSCodium (VSCode with all the Microsoft stuff stripped away) https://vscodium.com/ and to only install extensions that properly respect users freedoms and wishes.
That being said, if this is an optional dependency as the post states, it should not be installed automatically without the consent of the user. This post is calling attention to an anti-free software action taken by a company.
That's a heavily-commented header file, it seems to contain entire unpacker code, that you just need to include and call it from your program. You may need some tools to be able to look into the matter. Currently I recommend VSCodium, which is VSC without M$ bloat (aside from privacy concerns, on larger projects this amounts to seconds of speedup).
You'll notice that Fedora has their own flatpak repository. If I am understanding correctly, Fedora does this because they feel that flathub is not strict enough about using runtimes correctly, including libraries which should be in runtimes, and configuring permissions correctly.
So one way to be more secure would be to use Fedora repos unless otherwise necessary.
PS - vscodium is vscode without Microsoft telemetry, compiled and packaged in a reproducible way: https://vscodium.com/
PSA: VS Code contains a lot of Microsoft telemetry baked right in, which you cannot find on project's github. If you want a clean build straight from the source without any Microsoft additions, check VS Codium - works exactly the same.
If you can live with the resource usage, VSCodium is a fork of VSCode with all the nonfree bits stripped out.
You'll just need to download and install Ionide manually as a .vsix file, since the extension gallery is one of the main pieces of MS integration that were removed. Unless it's been published to OpenVsx
Because you specifically asked for open source: even though vs code itself is open source (at least the majority of its code base, similar to Google Chrome), many of its extensions are not. As an alternative there is also the vs codium project: https://vscodium.com/. Using this removes the Telemetry from the software.
If you really want to use VSCode, look a the opensource version : https://vscodium.com/
> Literally everything is superior to any other Linux based editors. reading time, search, memory consumption.
What are you comparing VSCode too ? Eclipse ? ;) You never mention what you tried on Linux.
> VSCode can read 3mb javascript less than 1 sec while others take tens of seconds.
Tens of seconds to load only 3Mb ? Then you have a problem on your machine. I can load some log files that are much larger than that without problem using any editors (GUI or CLI).
> Why linux editors can't do this?
Which one ? There are a lot of available editors out there. Some are very customizable and can achieve more than VSCode.
Keep in mind that the MS distributed binary is not Open Source. It's based on the Open Source code but has MS customizations.
You can get binary open source releases of VS Code (VS Code OSS) in https://vscodium.com/
http://gpo.zugaina.org/app-editors/vscodium
http://gpo.zugaina.org/app-editors/vscodium-bin
Have you tried VS Codium? It's basically Visual Studio Code but fully open source without tracking/telemetry.
That's right, it's VS Code and it's awesome, I use it for all development and text editing. There is also an open source distribution of it (since the official Microsoft binaries are proprietary): https://vscodium.com/
It might depend how you installed it. For me, having installed it as codium as a deb package, I have a /home/{username}/.vscode-oss folder. Could well be /home/{username}/.vscode for you
I used to use Atom. But I think they have basically gone into maintenance mode on it to move everyone to VSCode. I have tried out VSCodium, which is what I would recommend because it is fully open source. But the two of them still have a Microsoft stink on them, so that's why I went to emacs.
It's open source, but the official build contains telemetry and other proprietary stuff. There is VSCodium, which is basically build of a VSCode, but without Microsoft's proprietary additions. (Just like ungoogled chromium)
From here: https://vscodium.com/
> When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.
> When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license
So the version of VS Code that has telemetry is actually closed-source according to this. Of course you still have Android, Chromium, Chromium OS and uncountable other open source projects that have telemetry by default.
I just use M$ version on my work laptop but its running MacOS and we use exchange, etc so not using VS Code was kind of a moot point.
This project removes the telemetry from VS Code. I don't really use any plugins or features besides being able to search the entire project folder and debugger for Python but maybe this will meet your needs as well.
If the license is an issue, make sure to get vscodium though.
> Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.
> Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.
> The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.
This is not true. Visual Studio Code does not use the MIT license. The source code to Visual Studio Code (in a repo called vscode) is licensed with the MIT license, but the product that is distributed ("Visual Studio Code") is licensed under Microsoft's license. To quote a Microsoft dev:
>The cool thing about all of this is that you have the choice to use the Visual Studio Code branded product under our license or you can build a version of the tool straight from the vscode repository, under the MIT license.
>Here's how it works. When you build from the vscode repository, you can configure the resulting tool by customizing the product.json file. This file controls things like the Gallery endpoints, “Send-a-Smile” endpoints, telemetry endpoints, logos, names, and more.
>When we build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.
>[...]
>I hope this helps explain why our Microsoft branded Visual Studio Code product has a custom product license while the vscode open source repository has an MIT license.
See more here: https://vscodium.com/
as I mentionned to another user :
>Do you know about VSCodium? It's VSCode without the binary blobs and Microsoft telemetry. Link : https://vscodium.com/
Since it's the freesoftware subreddit and it's about Free/Open Source software, I felt like I should mention it.
Another user ( u/steamport ) mentioned code from the Arch repos :
>Also, if you're using code from the Arch repos, that's built from source too, rather than the MS binaries.
thanks, jacmoe!
I downloaded as you said, and it works :). As a short term solution, this is awesome, but in order to have a cohesiveness I think it would be great to have a package.
About telemetry and tracking, I heard something about VSCODIUM https://vscodium.com/
Get VSCodium or Geany if you want something simple. Use Vim or Emacs if you want something extensible that runs in a CLI.
https://vscodium.com/ (vscodium is a fully open version of vscode without spyware)
MSVS can't even be ported to 64-bit Win32, so I think a port to Linux is clearly out of the question.
But Microsoft developed a similar IDE from scratch called "Visual Studio Code" that runs on Linux. It's an Electron app, but there are worse things.
I would like to suggest VSCode as a free alternative. No tricky free and paid versions. One Free product with great plugins. If the default telemtetry bothers you you can download a clone with all the microsoft telemetry turned off called VSCodium. https://vscodium.com/
With free alternatives such as these along with traditional editors such as Vim and Emacs you have free choices even if you aren't a student and don't want your software open sourced.