Ditch VSCode Spyware For VSCodium

[@oxtx9885]

I work for a huge defense contractor. We aren't allowed to install VScode on our machines directly. Instead we have to unzip this bizarre looking archive from our security team and launch VScode with an included batch file that spends a few seconds in CMD with the text: "Disabling Phone Home Features". I don't know who on our IT team made it but I always found it funny.

[@cx3622]

Which team do you work as?

[@kuolettavaVids]

@@cx3622 Not today, China.

[@markm0000]

That's funny. All while this is happening on a Windows instance with a wide open connection to Microsoft servers. When the product is free, all of our data is the cost.

[@Ultrajamz]

You are still using windows though?

[@insanitycubed8832]

Holy fuck, MIC up in this bitch using neutralized malware, I'm dying! Hopefully not literally, no drone strikes please... if you can even aim that shit with Windows lol, what do you use google maps for that now? Hope that thing doesn't land at one of its advertisers en route

[@milutinke]

Pro tip: make nvim look like Vs Code, your normie cooworkers won't notice

[@ilearncode7365]

Does it have the same extension community? I like VSCuck because there is an extension for 98 percent of things I have looked for

[@milutinke]

@@ilearncode7365 There are plugins, it's pretty extendable. I suggest you search for: Effective Nvim: Instant Ide It's a good video. And about how to add all the stuff VS Code has.

[@doooofus]

@dontbesurprised. the only clip i am looking for is pronograph1c webms of hot b0obz, can you get me that? then make like an egg and SCRAM (ble)!

[@nac9880]

@don't be surprised this is not your mama's videotape last night with The Boys™

[@demin-e]

@@ilearncode7365 simply write yourself

[@rodeffs]

YES! Was waiting for a video like this as it appears that virtually no one knows about VSCodium, even professional programmers which is a huge shame. Thanks for spreading awareness, keep up the good work!

[@WaylandYT]

VSCodium evangelist checking in! I point developers especially novices to it whenever possible, and am very happy to see more content creators spreading the good word. Be aware though the extensions can still implement their own tracking so download them with care.

[@lucaslopes1260]

Some of them prefer vscode to vscodium because of the icon. fr

[@dovedozen]

I know, right! I started using it a little while ago as an alternative to Atom (rip lol), but I had to dig a bit before I even discovered it as an option. You love to see some promotion happening.

[@itsawill9268]

I swear VScodium still sends the telemetry

[@rodeffs]

@@itsawill9268 swearing is not a proof. Good thing that it is open-source so we can be sure that it, in fact, does not send telemetry

[@markm0000]

I code in Notepad like a psychopath.

[@thingsiplay]

Through Wine?

[@markm0000]

@au nom de Dieu When I was taking basic coding classes in college I did most of my projects in Notepad. I liked the mental challenge of memorizing syntax and good commenting made it easy to follow along. I later dropped out of the IT industry entirely because the office life is just not for me. I still keep up with what's going on, but I'm happier doing what I do outside in fresh air.

[@mytech6779]

I use Kwrite. It has color themes, syntax highlighting, and a nifty drag-and-drop highlighted-sections feature but otherwise a basic notepad editor. Terminal to compile and run.

[@markm0000]

@@thingsiplay I have a offline Win 98 VM with a ton of nostalgic software. I used shared folder option to mount my user folder as a drive and everything works as it should.

[@ent2220]

I too code in a text editor and when I use Vscodium I have the IDE part of it disabled. I don't need it trying to tell me what's wrong and what isn't because I know better than it does.

[@seanld444]

There was a time when VS Code was utterly necessary for getting full "IDE" capabilities for many different languages in the same editor. But Microsoft rolled an absolute 20 with their LSP idea, and after it proliferated to other editors, it made basically any editor with an LSP client capable of being a very decent IDE. Thanks to LSP, I never leave Emacs. As long as someone wants to develop a good LSP server for VS Code (because everyone uses it), I get to reap the benefits as well. So can anyone using Vim, Neovim, Kate, etc. One of the very few things Microsoft's done that I can call based.

[@aravindpallippara1577]

Yep, putting the onus on making and and maintaining an lsp from the language itself freed up a lot of duplicated effort from creating individual text prediction from editors themselves

[@bittersweet4074]

Meh it's so slow, you'll need like gaming pc and browser closed to run it smoothly.

[@freesoftwareextremist8119]

In my experience, LSP is much slower than the classic editor integrated solutions we tend to had before. I do not understand why, maybe most servers are simply slow as hell. SLIME/sly for lisp in emacs is very fast and that also uses an external process and a network protocol.

[@VivekYadav-ds8oz]

@@bittersweet4074 That's quite an exaggeration. While I'm planning to switch to neovim soon and gonna practice vim keystrokes on VSCode first, none of the reason for it is because VSCode has been slow. I have a decent middle-range laptop with Ryzen 5600H and a dedicated GPU, with 8 gigs of RAM and I mostly code in Rust. The LSP work that rust-analyzer does is heavy, and despite that I don't feel any sluggish-ness.

[@watynecc3309]

I'm using kate with vim input and lsp it work soo great

[@ChimeraGilbert]

Thanks for this video - I had never heard of VSCodium. I kind of just blindly assumed that VSCode was completely open source and that if I disabled telemetry I'd be safe. The hoops we have to jump through for some damn privacy

[@FobosLee]

Exactly! For the first time i thought Microsoft did something great…

[@thripnixe]

​@@FobosLee Yes they are in the end its all based on vscode

[@96ethanh]

I tend to agree with most of the Mental Outlaw videos, but can't fully agree on this one. I'm a professional software engineer and have used many different editors throughout the years. There's a reason VS Code is so popular: it's super modular, easy to use, customizable, intuitive, works with all languages, and has enough features to almost be an IDE while still maintaining that lightweight/simple feel. While I agree that electron apps are bloated, it's something I'm absolutely willing to put up with if it makes my daily life easier. The team has taken a lot of effort to reduce the typical electron bloat, too. NOW, all that said, I am absolutely checking out VSCodium!

[@2bitnerd]

Couldn't agree more.

[@mumuchi9594]

Ahh if you r bound then just use fiddler to block microsoft servers or any proxy

[@jongeduard]

I don't believe VS Code is so bloated at all. The problem with Electron is that every small app uses the same entire Chromium engine over and over again. And to make it worse, a lot of those Electron apps are very poorly designed. But VS Code is a large, very well designed application (it loads and unloads extensions very efficiently for example), which is a lot more well suited to be running on Chromium, because in the end, webbrowser engines are basically VMs that do an amazing job of automatic memory management. This might mean that the engine preallocates relatively much memory from the system at certain times. But it manages it and releases it when it needs to as well (garbage collection). It's a lot better than Visual Studio to be honest, which is slow as hell, especially with large projects.

[@ilikehiking]

Perhaps I didn't watch the same video as you did, but nowhere did you actually disagree with what he said.

[@jongeduard]

@@ilikehiking I guess his point is that he does not share the overall slightly disliking attitude by the videomaker towards VS Code and Microsoft. Agreeing or disagreeing is probably a too strong word here.

[@murtadha96]

1. VSCodium doesn't have an M1 binary. 2. Microsoft extensions (the most important out of all extensions for VSCode) are not available for VSCodium. So no Python development, no Java development...etc etc etc. And the alternatives in Open VSX are a joke in comparison (all due respect to the developers ofc, but you just can't compare the two). This is to be expected, as the Python extension alone has a large team behind it. 3. People who say these extensions are not important are clearly either not developers or have no idea what they're talking about. The claim "99 percent of VSCode users can switch to VSCodium" is very delusional if I'm frank. 4. The remote extensions are in fact incredibly useful. 5. No one really forced any one to use VSCode. People are using it because it's simply superior in many respects. 6. You can turn off the telemetry in settings, and that is respected also by all the Microsoft plugins. 7. No one has developed an IDE like VSCode because no one can fund such a project. I know people like to think that a donation here and there can sustain a project of that size and magnitude... spoiler alert, it doesn't.

[@Vladymyr96]

Finally a good comment, Mental Outlaw is not even a developer - he will shill anything.

[@noahscarbrough3224]

I enjoy using VSCode so much, I often forget it is a Microsoft product.

[@murtadha96]

@@Vladymyr96 Exacly. I just like to know who those 99% of people are, exactly? Those editing only YAML and Markdown files? The ONLY real alternative you have to VSCode (feature-wise) is JetBrains IDEs which are both paid and close source.

[@ameliekk]

@@Vladymyr96 this whole video screams "I have never worked in a corporate setting"

[@ent2220]

@@ameliekk Actually, some of us are psychos and will go against the flow even in a corporate setting and even it required a major risk, extra work etc. In my case it's due to my sheer arrogance and narcissism, and otherwise natural instinct to go against the flow

[@lovebaranus9800]

Something worth mentioning and that a lot of people here clearly don't know about, is that you can replace the vsx market with the official vscode market, and you will have all your extensions working, since the editor is still vscode. The only exeptions i believe are 2 extensions which have the extremely hostile behaviour of disabling themselves when not working on vscode itself, they were relatively small though. Outside of those every other thing works It's also worth mentioning that the reason why this is not a default is because is a legal hole in the vscode TOS, and therefore if they use it by default they run the risk of getting shutdown.

[@lucrativelepton]

This needs to be higher up

[@alexmarcoe8150]

Can you provide explanation on how to do that? This video made me switch and I’ve just been downloading the packages and adding them to the extensions folder and changing my JSON to make them work. Switching the stores sounds way easier.

[@zbdfhg]

Perfect timing for this. This semester, our professor introduced us to VSCode and I was looking for an upgrade to the Notepad++ that I've been using for the longest time

[@BurgerKingHarkinian]

Use neovim

[@justadude8716]

Bro notepad++ is comfy!

[@Groobl]

On Windows, just stick with Notepad++

[@v01d_r34l1ty]

@@Groobl I genuinely can’t believe people still recommend Notepad++. Don’t get me wrong, it was great for its time, but it is in no shape or form something to recommend in 2023.

[@logc1921]

GNU nano is the best editor.

[@Iog]

I had a professor in my first year of CS who is a massive VIM user, and well, thanks to him I got into NeoVIM and dot files at the time. And honestly, best editor. There are definitely some things I wish that would be easier to utilize and all, but seriously an incredible way to code from terminal environment. Also, cool that you mentioned NIX!

[@ernestoditerribile]

I like NIX too. Still more of a Nano user here, then a vi(m) user.

[@felixpuscasu5625]

Would you mind sharing your nevim config / other dotfiles? Im on my path to creating my neovim setup but would love to see what other people did too.

[@Iog]

@@felixpuscasu5625 I would link my GitHub but for sort-of paranoid reasons I'd like to keep myself anonymous. But when I started out I basically took massive inspiration from this NeoVIM setup. Great for beginners to get off the ground running. kzbin.info/www/bejne/fIiViWR5jdeIZ9k

[@kondo-ii]

I used vim before and I liked it, but I still using Joe's text editor, it's simple and gets work done.

[@Handlebrake2]

​@@ernestoditerribile how come?

[@rakeau]

Not a dev in any way but this also seems like it could be a good stepping stone to help people who've never ventured into alternatives to make that first step in transitioning.

[@bravefastrabbit770]

Transitioning...? To what, a frankenstein Rust-dev? 👹

[@rakeau]

@@bravefastrabbit770 Just to a different IDE or whatever is all I meant

[@roxymigurdia1]

no thanks. ill turn the telemetry off but who actually cares lmao

[@amogoose2971]

@@roxymigurdia1 alot of people cares bro, including me, him, mental outlaw, alot people care about privacy. unlike you who doesnt care about your data getting stolen by microbloat

[@w花b]

@@roxymigurdia1 You don't. That's it. The others do their business.

[@JodyBruchon]

I petition to rename VSCode to "VSCopium"

[@thetower8553]

YES

[@thomas.thomas]

Petition to name it VSCock

[@1rez378]

I have vscode AND visual studio open right now, even though telemetry is off. Lower ram usage is especially worth trying out the replacement.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Both are closed source, how do you KNOW telemetry is off?

[@1rez378]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 Of course I don't know. I'm speaking about what the settings show me.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@1rez378 So there are settings that say, for example, "Allow Microsoft to trash my privacy"?

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@cat-le1hf You didn't watch the video, did you? VSCode contains proprietary code. I don't use Arch (Gentoo is far superior) but I assume AUR code is usually Open Source - but I have no interest either way.

[@tumescent]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 “gentoo is far superior” funny satire

[@steveh7922]

I lack the gamer precision to click around a gui like vscode but it's really good to see this open source alternative

VSCode is very keyboard-driven and encourages you to type commands into command lines.

[@arandomperson5309]

Just downloaded this today on my Kali Linux vm (just starting out with that sorta stuff), what a coincidence that ur vid on this comes out today!

[@Adam_Lyskawa]

Nobody forced me to use VS and VSCode. I started to use them because of the features. And price, VS Code is free, VS Community Edition is also free for Open Source projects. Also because of speed - I also use Eclipse, that is REALLY slow. And speaking about the bloat - my PC is like 6 years old and even when it was new, it was not near the high-end specs. I have 16GB of RAM that is pretty standard today (6 years ago it was a lot). It uses my RAM. It works. I also tested it on some low RAM virtual machines and well, it was still usable, but then... I agree, on 4GB RAM machine VS Code is too slow. For the price - most IDEs will be slower. "Light" text editors will be way faster, but lacking features. Fast and powerful IDEs will be expensive. Unless you're the top of 1337, the telemetry won't hurt you, then again, if you're the top 1337, you can afford the most expensive IDE there is and probably a high-end PC too.

[@StatenIslandTony1974]

I agree. I am a hobbyist programmer in C# and have used VS Code for a few years on a Lenovo dual-core laptop with 8GB of RAM. I haven't found it to be as sluggish as many people say. And as far as telemetry is concerned, I think we all should know by now that whenever some is "free" it means that *you* are the product. Which is fine, in my opinion. As long as personally identifiable information is not be exfiltrated, I really don't care about the telemetry.

[@botondhetyey159]

​@@StatenIslandTony1974 "if something is free you are the product", bruh, you ever heard of open source software?

[@simeonovs4443]

if you use eclipse and not intellij the joke is on you my man

[@Garwinium]

"Regardless of your operating system you can get it in a sane way" Me who uses TempleOS: 👁️👄👁️

[@xxslaysminecraftxx1094]

great video, just because something is open source people often forget that it can still have spyware like chromium, firefox vscode snd much more

[@mar-tin702]

Firefox has spyware?!!

[@qgysugfq3935]

lmao, my professor is actually forcing us to use VIM. not complaining but it is interesting and i'm enjoying learning about this old school text editor.

[@somerandomguywastaken]

There's no reason for me to use Vim, but it's the only one I use. The speed you can open and edit files while using terminal is crazy. Once Ur in terminal, you don't have to touch your mouse and it's just speeeed.

[@BurgerKingHarkinian]

Based professor, not gonna lie

[@qgysugfq3935]

@@somerandomguywastaken so true. I’ve been messing with Linux/VMs for a while now and I’m glad I have bc this class requires writing/compiling/testing our C code in Ubuntu VMs.

[@Sl33pySage]

Thank you for this! Taking a Python course online and they suggested vscode. Totally had no idea

[@nuclearsummer7796]

Thanks Outlaw! I was using vscode for my rust programming, now I got vscodium, heck even the extensions I use are here!

[@novictim]

Impressive cause theres much good essential stuff for c++ like the debugger it doesnt have

[@nuclearsummer7796]

@@novictim I just use the CodeLLDB extension to run my debugger, works great

[@mar-tin702]

​@@novictim maybe he uses it to write novels

[@redherringoffshoot2341]

glad to be introduced to this, as I’m getting teaching myself how to code

[@imsamuka928]

I have been using VSCodium since i learned about it (~2 years). Sometimes it's a bother and the extension-market stops working, but never missed VSCode at all

[@imsamuka928]

@@1618yt well, it depends on which platform you are... I'm on arch, so i just did "yay -Sy vscodium-bin vscodium-marketplace" and done

[@___Sunflower]

This is really convenient I was planning on installing Visual Studio code on my Linux Mint PC but I've been holding off because it's made by Microsoft and was trying to find an alternative coding application, but today I finally decided it must be okay since it "open source" but clearly I was wrong.

[@luigiramirez29]

Good timing, I just started a harvard python course yesterday and I was already getting used to VSCode. I will now switch while I still can! Thank you my lord and Savior!

[@stage6fan475]

Thanks for keeping us informed about issues like this. You must put in a lot of work. Thanks for the effort.

[@vxer]

Vscode is well optimized for an electron app. I think you were being facetious about the amount of ram used by vscode.

[@kopuz.co.uk.]

have you tried using it on a low spec laptop? its awful

[@sempiternal_futility]

@@kopuz.co.uk. indeed it is, on my personal experience at least

[@hhvhhvcz]

same here same here, VS Code eats half gig to a gig at worst and with large codebase opened, any other IDE/editor was worse if i don't count notepad++

[@tripledeluxeguy]

@kopuz VSCode RAM usage is like 600MB with an entire folder open - I’ve never seen it larger than 3GB and I have had nearly that much open in file size alone. As long as you have 6GB of RAM VSCode should work for any OS including some of the most horrid Linux conglomerations I can think of. And as far as low end laptops go, 6GB is low spec, anything lower is effectively under spec as windows alone is ~4GB unless you’re using enterprise or Vista.

[@thecomputerengineerchannel1897]

When I was a kid back in early 2010s, Microsoft was everywhere in the form of windows XP and 7, now its everywhere in the form of VSCode

[@mysterious_czrs]

Such shame that vscodium is missing C/C++ and platformio otherwise I would be switching already. Embedded development is hard to do without using proprietary software, because setting up toolchains yourself can be such a pain and sometimes there is no open toolchain (Microchip lol).

[@salsamancer]

Every embedded vendor I've worked with usually ships a variant of Eclipse as their "IDE"

[@mysterious_czrs]

@@salsamancer That's true but Microchip is not like that I mean mabe Mplab is based on eclipse but their compiler, debuger and tools for programming the MCU's are all close source so you can't set up your own workflow you have to use Mplab. There are some MCU families that have open toolchains STM32 and AVR for example

[@DMSBrian24]

​@@salsamancer that's just criminal

[@unodragon2294]

I could download c/c++ from the market place with svix (if I spelled correctly) option to download it

[@natural-selection-69]

you can use clangd

[@echo991]

Just wanted to let you know that this video caused a chain reaction that led me to switch from VSCode to Neovim > Installs VSCodium > Hears you say you use Vim plugin > Curious > Installs Vim plugin > Even more curious > Watches Vim tutorial > 5 days pass > Using neovim as my new text editor

[@ElderSnake90]

Seriously once you get muscle memory with (Neo)Vim, you can't use anything else.

[@daniel-kun6443]

I’m curious about what you do for a living? Never really thought about it but now that you mention an IDE and say you actually prefer a text editor, would you write production in vim? Which is my favorite text editor btw, but I use code (as opposed to vscode) for college stuff

[@firejelly]

Thanks for this. Never heard of the alternative to VSCode. I run it on Mac for python. Will definitely give VSCodium a try because I despise Microsoft’s practices.

[@v0xl]

vscod(e/ium) is not as bloated as you think, it uses like 400mb, and Rust-analyzer language server uses multiple gigabytes of ram sometimes with extremely big projects. So it doesn't really matter.

[@Ornithopter470]

Somehow still less bloated than Docker.

[@Grigorii-j7z]

I work in the close network, no Internet access. I can confirm that when you disable telemetry in VS Code or VS Studio it only makes a couple requests to update endpoints. It's not so hard to verify. But telemetry is fully enabled by default, ofcourse.

[@gfrewqpoiu]

Sadly C# is not the only gimped language in the open source build, Python also has a worse experience than with the closed source build. Why? Because Microsoft decided to make their language server for Python (Pylance) closed source with a license and DRM so that it only works with the offical closed source builds. Sure, you can install your own, but it won't support Intellisense etc.

[@soggybaguette8457]

I learned vim in class a couple weeks ago and it changed my life, it’s so nice

[@mar-tin702]

Nice for what ? Learning to type on your keyboard

[@draco-amercon]

It'd be interesting to run vs code in a virtual machine and have Wireshark listen to the network traffic coming out of that virtual system.

[@Synthetic_geth]

Pls do it

[@helloward9759]

This video glows. I just heard about and was looking at vscodium's page when this showed up in my feed.

[@alephcake]

Virgin Windows Vscode users vs Still Virgin Linux OSS - Code users

[@7heMech]

I'll make sure to check it out, cause I am indeed pretty much addicted to vscode, thanks!

[@NoelJasik]

Personally, i tried VScodium, but a good chunk of extensions i use, don't work on it, some i could kinda get to run in a hacky way, but it made the editor too unstable, there's a good reason for it being popular, although it might not be the best performance wise, it's a well made editor, that can be customized to anything And to be honest, i think electron gets too much smack, yeah it's not lightweight, but being able to run the editor on anything, and have it run 1:1 is great if you work across diffrent system often, also the performance is not that bad, my 13 year old laptop runs vscode pretty fine actually, although i only really tested it for lightweight frontend with codespaces, so i am making it way easier for it I don't really like microsoft, but shit it's a good tool, that does the job well, highly customizable and very simple yet powerfull, tbh i think it's a common choice amongst schools, cuz it's just easier to teach, like as a teacher i wouldn't either waste time on explaining and teaching vim commands to kids that don't yet understand what variables and functions are, higher barrier of entry would discourage them, ofcourse there are exceptions, but that's not exactly how you teach a whole class, it's dumb to restric to vscode, especially if the students knows his shit, but on the other hand if somone doesn't know their shit and than i have to spend 10 minutes teaching him how to build a file, i would be annoyed aswell, but well i was never really restriced to using a specifc IDE, although i would need to bring that in myself on a pendrive or something Tbh for me (not others) vscodium ain't exactly a solution, unless i can bring in all the same extensions that vscode normally has, i'd say more of a solution here would be neoVim, i should probably check that out some day

[@electroteque]

thanks for the tip. I like VSCode. I had no idea it had opt out telemetry ? I never saw it asking about it. Sublime text is what used high cpu. VSCodium is the same. installed and loaded fine.

[@Samuelinox-th3ww]

In our school we (for now) aren't allowed to use an ide at all. We instead use a command line interface to code with little to no help at all.

[@thomasdtrain]

Real programming is done on pen and paper

[@fluff9657]

Damn at least we get to use notepad

[@nekoill]

This one is for Kenny specifically: have you used Wayland? If you did, mind making a video on it? I've recently switched to it because I was tired of Xorg breaking all the time and it's been pretty good all things considered, but there's a couple caveats like some software just not really working at all (grub customizer being one such case, but there's more), and even that aside I only trust you to give a good advice in pretty much any regard when it comes to Linux Whatever the case, thank you for what you've already done, this channel has been absolutely priceless for me and I'm pretty sure countless others, you're just the best 😽

[@incremental_failure]

Been using VSCodium for years now. It's clearly better but the extension space isn't the same as VSCode. Pylance for example won't work on VSCodium but I ditched it for Pyright (also MS of course...), very happy with it. I stopped using Jedi because Jedi still doesn't support match statements in Python and it had massive CPU usage.

[@matyasmarkkovacs8336]

You can enable the VSCode marketplace in Codium, so you can use all VSCode extensions.

[@incremental_failure]

@@matyasmarkkovacs8336 I couldn't get it to work and it's not straightforward. From what I read, I'm not the only one.

[@gayusschwulius8490]

@@incremental_failure There have been massive changes to compatibility recently, so chances are your experience wouldn't be the same anymore today.

[@constantinknab]

thanks so much this was very useful and the remote environment issue has been fixed, love it!

[@aceplay100]

honestly should have switched earlier, always felt wrong to have my only snap app be vscode when I knew the arch AUR VSCodium existed, thanks for reminding me.

[@zoenagy9458]

love this channel!

[@InfiniteDesign91]

Visual Studio was popular because, it had very decent performance. It was much faster than Atom for example, which is a similar editor. VSCode has tons of plugins, and it works on linux as well. I currently know no good alternative for javascript development. Maybe notepad++?

[@Stevenomnom]

Cool, didn't know this existed! Will definitely check it out :)

[@_ipsissimus_]

funny enough, i work for one of the 10 biggest companies in the US as an automation engineer. All my coworkers use vscode, and beg me to download vscode. Im a vim and nano developer. I used to use Atom and realized that i got worse and worse as a developer as i relied more and more on the autocode and extension add features. Now i can code from any computer and submit a PR in time while my coworkers are completely useless unless they can work on their configured workstation.

[@Kas-tle]

An odd criticism... one of the main benefits of VSCode (and one of the few proprietary features) is the remote development extension, so you just host a code server that you can access from anywhere with internet. And since VSCode is a non-admin install, you can basically install it anywhere and your extensions will sync automatically... I too dislike the telemetry but don't really care so much since I'm just going to push to GitHub anyways, so it's not as though they don't already have everything in some way. Microsoft has basically managed to silently take over the entire development pipeline. You can write in VSCode, host it on GitHub, and continuously deploy with GitHub actions. Honestly surprised that a company of the size you work for even gives a choice in the editing tool you use. Google, for example, makes you do everything in their web based IDE. But congrats on managing to escape employer telemetry xD

[@AJ-wf1vh]

fyi vs code has extension sync and through remote ssh you can work from any thin client. Both of these features are proprietary though, sigh. MS is beta testing vscode server which will allow you to connect to a server through your browser and there is an open source third party version already available. Using a state of the art linter, debugger, and autocomplete does not make you a worse developer. But being slower than you could be does. One example I will give you is environment awareness: split view and code tree. Using Vim in a code base with hundreds of source files would be unwieldy. It appears neovim might feature a subset of those, I will give you that. But at that point, you're using VS code in terminal form and you might as well switch to the version using a state of the art renderer (chromium).

[@hand-eye4517]

take the plunge..... let us see you use risc v. You are the one of the main reasons i have hope for the future of programming and computers. People like you are fighting the good fight .

[@GeekMasher]

Neovim all the way! On Arch btw

[@raffandbotnik]

Thanks! I didnt know about it, and I'm a really big opem source fan

[@penguinbloopers]

I was on arch for a while and I like to write C/C++ code in vscode and build with the commandline. Getting vscode to just work, provide linting, intellisense, recognise header files in different directories, include static libraries was nightmarish. Extensions I needed just weren't showing up in the extensions store and I had no idea why. I finally realised the AUR dispatches vscodium (because arch btw) and I simply just had no idea and wasted time.

[@etherweb6796]

I'm using Doom emacs with clangd /clang-tidy - building using the terminal - works well - for headers / auocomplete, etc

[@tumescent]

Sounds like an Arch issue

[@vocassen]

@@tumescent More like an "issue" with VSCodium. It blocks/replaces Microsoft extensions but seemingly provides no replacement for C/C++, so if you want to use that despite everything, you're out of luck. Better off using VS Code or OSS Code and disabling telemetry manually

[@brandongunnarson7483]

That's so exciting! This will make my eventual switch to open source OS that much easier

[@mytech6779]

I can see the appeal of full VS from a useability perspective, ignoring the proprietary windows only aspect, the debugger and memory view are especially well integrated out of the box. VScode on the other hand has been a dog every time I've tried it. I much prefer kwrite/kate, code::blocks, or flavors of VIM. (Never bothered to learn emacs, cost:reward ratio on the learning curve didn't seem right for my simple hobby uses.) Any programming course that starts students in any IDE is a fundamental fail, IDEs are fine after the first half-dozen programs(including some with multiple files and maybe some basic option flags), but not before. I have talked to countless new programmers that don't even understand that source code files are true plain text(not a special proprietary language format) or that an IDE and a compiler are separate things. Most came from Windows or MacOS

[@Kas-tle]

Mostly from windows I'd think. The nice thing about MacOS is it's still Unix based so once you pick up brew you can easily install stuff like maven cli and just have it work... not the case on windows where the cli tools are basically a joke and getting any cli tool to truly work is generally more effort than the task you intended to use it for due to how annoying it is to set things like environmental variables. So I can genuinely see why someone coming from that would think IntelliJ is just the only way to """compile""" a java program. I think whether or not starting with an ide is "bad" depends on the language... with something like JavaScript for example I think an IDE is fine since it's compiled at runtime anyways. Now wether or not JavaScript is a good first language to teach someone is a separate issue haha.

[@mytech6779]

@@Kas-tle Even for interpreted languages students should start with a basic text editor. There really is no learning benefit from the syntax help and automation of an IDE during the "Hello world" phase. Many bad programmers are created because they start with fundamentally poor understanding of the what is going on in the machine. I don't mean details of memory managment or assembly instructions, I mean the high level concepts of text files being parsed and lexed into machine code by another program (compiler/interpreter) or the notion of bootstrapping (again not the fine details of it).

[@KManAbout]

Vscode isn't a full ide anyway but I think you are just wrong here about what and how things should be taught in a class.

[@matroqueta6825]

I was forced to "learn" programming by compiling .c files written on a plain text editor using the terminal (something I've never seen before up until that point) and was NEVER told there was an easier way until I figured that out on my own like a year later. I'm not talking about the 90's either, this took place in 2015. It's a miracle I'm a programmer now. Learning like that was hell, and was not educational at all. IDEs are the way to go especially when students are _just_ starting out.

[@SoulGuitarMetal]

@@mytech6779 It's funny how people who develop technology are so resistant to adopting new technology. We don't start with carriage to learn to drive a car. The maker or model of the car doesn't matter, but a carriage is something else entirely. A basic text editor is not for programming and it will just make the learning process hard and inefficient in an environment you are not even going to use ever again. You should be blaming the teacher or the student for not bother understanding the fundamentals instead of the tool.

[@cherloire7978]

I would love to use VSCodium, but the remote ssh tools don't work because they are proprietary microsoft extensions, and I develop on a remote server. So unfortunately I am stuck with VSCode.

[@kaioh33]

Thank you very much for this! Definitely going to check this out

[@abatall]

I’ve been using it for some time now, very good

[@digitalspecter]

After a short fling with vscode I went back to Doom Emacs.. it's honestly awesome. (org-mode, magit, keyboard driven, pretty easy to customize)

[@CyberWolf755]

The VS Codium docs do give a nudge, nudge, wink, wink on it not being legal to use VS Code official/propriatary repos, but also gives example how to add repos with VS Code's repos. 〜(￣▽￣〜)

[@everyhandletaken]

Why would it be illegal to build from their repo ? I have never heard of that 🤷‍♂️

[@gayusschwulius8490]

@@everyhandletaken It's not illegal in the sense that it's criminal, but it's against their terms of service, so if VSCodium officially implemented it Microsoft could probably sue them for Anti-Competitive behavior.

[@mauriciopalomares9507]

I’m a newbie to programming since I didn’t study this in college. I’ve been learning stuff online and of course they use VScode, but I didn’t known about VSCodium! Downloading right now 😂

[@MrCarlinios]

Another good option could be lapce, build with rust to be native performant, not every language is support, but that's quite a good editor, go try it

[@everyhandletaken]

Wow, looks exactly like VSC at first glance 😯 It says it is pre-alpha,do you know if the intention for this to always be open source, or may end up being a paid product? Looks like there are enough extensions (plugins) there for my needs, definitely going to check it out, thanks!!

[@MrCarlinios]

@@everyhandletaken I can't answer to that confidently. I just know it's open sourced on github so it probably will stay that way unless some company puts a shitton of money. Or maybe big tech could make their own propietary fork of this one. So far it looks quite good for rust and javascript devs

[@everyhandletaken]

@@MrCarlinios let’s make the most of it while we can then anyway 😊 Sounds perfect, thanks for the suggestion!

[@Lonedeer438]

I'm just happy my instructors made us use code::blocks for my c++ class. Tbh the only thing I learned in that class is that I hate programming

[@fercats99]

Sorry, this is a NeoVIM house

[@drgr33nUK]

I was a VSCodium user for a couple of years. It's a decent tool!

[@zuzcus]

Fuck vim. People who boast that they are using it just do it for attention and to look cool. In reality, everyone gives up on it after witnessing all the ridiculous commands. Btw the argument "I prefer vim because it is lightweight, even though I have 128 GB of RAM" is pure comedy.

[@samiurkhan]

Na people use vim because modal editing is productive, it is fast especially for quick edits. I don't think anyone really uses vim to win cool points (in fact it makes you look weird if you care or boast about vim usage or vim elitism). You met some bad seeds or apples that were elitist about vim (trust me I've met them too) but you shouldn't let them define your experience with vim especially since vim works inside vscode (in terminal and in keybindings).

[@nmnxe]

Mental outlaw is starting to become just like me. A hardcore FOSS minimalist, so proud of you man 🥹.

[@raptorjesus3396]

Assuming you work in a company which develops busines software, such as SAP, there is no purpose in switching to a private editor, or even disabling telemetry at work. Because we use Windows 11 for development, which in fact runs basically a keylogger on your system by default. And no proprietary software is not bad and Richard Stallmann is kind of biased. Though I think we need more source available software, i.e. source code available for non commercial use (see BSL license).

[@user-kt0jl90sfwj8cb]

1. You are wrong. Proprietary software is definitely bad. 2. Software under BSD license isn't source available; it's open source.

[@DoubleOhSilver]

True about vim. I can't imagine how I would have to relearn to program without it

[@forgettablePyromaniac]

i am going out of my way rn to say thanks for telling me about this. THIS. Is why I subbed. Slowly making my way over to the FOSS side, and I'm completely oblivious to stuff like this, but you teach me about new stuff every time. been only using it for abour a week, but damn - getting that last blob fom microsoft out of there feels so damn liberating.

[@dothesick]

VSCodium is only a flatpak though, which makes a lot of the package add-ons difficult to use. Anyone got a good tutorial?

[@davorbervida5023]

For arch or arch based distros there is a vscodium and vscodium-bin package

[@dothesick]

@@davorbervida5023 Thanks for the response! Do you have any advice or links for Debian based distros?

[@M2rsh]

Switched to vscodium a few months ago best choice ever

[@S1xZDev]

The only problem I have with VsCodium is that DevContainers Doesn't work on them. So I'm stuck on VsCode, since my team uses them to control our development environment.

[@ciarfah]

Thanks, I needed to know this. Makes VScodium a non-starter for me too. At least for work anyway

[@supercellodude]

I've only come to report: *inhale* ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR but really I use acme, a text editor from the old research OS "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" that was ported to unixes by the "9fans" like Russ Cox (

[@klekaelly]

The problem with the "uses too much RAM" argument: 1. RAM is significantly cheaper than it has been in the past few years 2. VScode's RAM usage is overstated. 3. 16 gb of RAM is arguably the standard these days and will continue to become the norm 4. What's the alternative? You'd rather programs use 2% of the RAM you paid for? Get your money's worth!

[@gregtasi]

If I paid for my ram I'm gonna use my ram!

[@green3593]

@au nom de Dieu unlike you nocoder cnile somebody has to do work

[@monkev1199]

Sure vscodium does consume quite a bit of ram. I've just not had a reason to find anything better yet (I'd end up building my own editor anyways if I needed a replacement). The big thing that vscode based editors have is the plugin ecosystem. rust-analyzer has some vscod(ium) specific behavior that can be useful.

[@green3593]

@au nom de Dieu You won't get rid off soycode via calling everything soy. You need to have a better alternative. You won't ditch your workflow that easily for libre if it's worst for you.

[@BurgerKingHarkinian]

Absolutely garbage-tier take. Just because a lot of people have a lot of RAM (I'd argue 8GB is way more realistic) that does not mean you're supposed to completely waste it. If you want to or need to use VSCode, that's fine but those argument are just weak to put it mildly.

[@mskiptr]

The funniest thing about their EULA is that if you read it carefully, it technically prohibits you from clicking the link to GitHub and looking at the sources. Here's the relevant text: _You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, or _*_otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the software_*_ except and solely to the extent required by third party licensing terms governing use of certain open source components that may be included in the software._ Yes, there's this exception in there. But the thing is, it's a generic "oh, we may have used some LGPL software which allows users to reverse-engineer the proprietary parts for the sake of compatibility and claiming otherwise could be against the law" bit. The MIT license has no such clauses and thus this exception does not apply. This all seems to be an artifact of corporate lawyers being corporate lawyers and just using generic, anti-libre EULAs wherever some software is distributed.

[@Lewdovico]

I use emacs btw

[@ex-xg5hh]

Remote is the best vscode feature out there, I literally use it every single time I open the program

[@malikelate]

Nope we were taught eMacs 👎

[@Mammel248]

I swear your Bill Gates pictures are on point :D

[@salamanetwork]

I am using Kate from KDE, and I am super happy 😊.

[@BigNerdSam]

Thanks for showing me a good IDE for the weekend I start learning Python.

[@asimplenameichose151]

Done weeks ago ... was finally pushed to this by the decision on the part of the VSCode devs to do property mangling at runtime (more or less disabling some popular UI tweaking tools that have no available alternatives in VSCode itself). Codium devs reverted that change. It was easy to switch and I'm glad this issue made me aware of the Codium project.

[@Yuuray]

dang, I had no idea. Thanks!

[@marsandbars]

I'm the heathen using VSCodium on Windows 10. Still, I find it silly that a FOSS app has binaries under a different license from the codebase. For that reason alone, VSCodium is the obvious choice. I should add that it's possible to switch the built-in appstore to the official one if apps are missing that you need.

[@AstralisLupus]

Nice use of Flashgitz! Bravo!

[@Zexyo]

Gonna download it now!

[@0xPanda1]

i use vs code dialy and i never heard of VSCodium thanks for the video

[@dixztube]

Dude your videos have me cracking up.

[@csx9292]

Comparison between VSCodium versus Code OSS? In terms of privacy and features?

[@mitsukaritas]

The virgin vscode vs the chad NeoVIM

[@machinen2]

Really thanks for this video! I'm trying to work on a full open source enviroment and the only thing that it's hard to me to change is my code editor. I started as a C# dev but slowly is migrating to python but I didn't felt comfortable with any code editor that wasn't vs code or visual studio, I hope VSCodium really helps me be truly free from Microsoft Spyware!

[@tobyearth]

Excellent work ✌️

[@streeterville773]

Love your videos

[@SebastianFrasher]

VSCopium In all seriousness I love VSCodium and use it all the time.

[@probablyjohn5589]

Fun fact about ChatGPT code generation: It might break copyright law. If the AI simply takes segments of code and regurgitates them rather than generating code all on its own (which might be what it does, actually), it would violate the licenses of some of the original code (it breaks at least the MIT and BSD licenses, and possibly the GPL too). Github Copilot is technically exempt from this, because anything hosted on Github is not actually under its given license: from what I understand, it's essentially under Github's own in-house license that has the terms of the original but adds in a clause that allows Github to use the code to "improve its services" such as Copilot.

[@Vemu]

What do you think about Jetbrains' IDEs?