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A thoughtful essay. I find myself frustrated with Sublime Text these days, and as a former (novice) vim user, I’ve been debating if I should go for VSCode like

A thoughtful essay. I find myself frustrated with Sublime Text these days, and as a former (novice) vim user, I’ve been debating if I should go for VSCode like all the young guns these days or commit to Doom Emacs to leverage a solid initial setup and my vim memory and fully embrace libre route, which are a little more aligned with my values (although not to the degree of RMS). I remain oddly indecisive.

emsy 6y ago
I use VSCode with a vim plugin. I’m mostly happy with it. As opposed to Vim, VSCode makes it easy to setup as a general purpose IDE. The downside is that it doesn’t feel as responsive (it’s not terrible, but noticeable) and has a larger memory footprint.
antonvs 6y ago
I'm an old gun (learned to program in Fortran in 1977), and I recommend giving VScode a try. Its barrier to entry is very low, so you don't need to invest a lot of time to find out whether it's going to be productive for you. It's a real usability jump over older IDEs. I've switched from a combo of, mostly, Intellij IDEA and Vim to almost exclusively VScode (for development). I do still use Spacemacs just for org mode. > my vim memory There are vim compatibility plugins for VScode. > fully embrace libre route VScode is open source and MIT licensed, here's the repo: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode https://github.com/microsoft/vscode Someone would need to explain to me what values I'm forgoing in order to use this. Although I should warn that someone I'm likely to have a strong rebuttal.
- nitsky 6y ago
  The default builds of vscode include telemetry and a non-free license. For a truly free build of vscode, you need to use vscodium. See their description: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium#why-does-this-exist https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium#why-does-this-exist. I suspect many developers are unaware of this.
  - opencl 6y ago
    The most important practical detail here is that if you run vscodium, or download and build the vscode repo from microsoft yourself, or use any forks of vscode, you cannot install any of the extensions hosted on microsoft's servers without violating their license terms. There are alternative extension marketplaces such as https://open-vsx.org/ https://open-vsx.org/ but they are missing a lot of the extensions, some of which are proprietary.
    - bobajeff 6y ago
      The vscode marketplace also provides a link to download extensions as a vsix file on every extension page. So if the extension isn't on open-vsx I just download it directly and install it.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - antonvs 6y ago
    That's true, although anyone who cares about truly free software presumably would look into the details to check. You can disable the telemetry: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-disable-telemetry-reporting https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-di... My point was really that it's free and open enough for any practical purpose I'm able to discern. Refusing to use it on the grounds of insufficient openness or freedom seems to me to require an unreasonably absolutist ideological stance on the issue.

emsy 6y ago

I use VSCode with a vim plugin. I’m mostly happy with it. As opposed to Vim, VSCode makes it easy to setup as a general purpose IDE. The downside is that it doesn’t feel as responsive (it’s not terrible, but noticeable) and has a larger memory footprint.

antonvs 6y ago

I'm an old gun (learned to program in Fortran in 1977), and I recommend giving VScode a try. Its barrier to entry is very low, so you don't need to invest a lot of time to find out whether it's going to be productive for you. It's a real usability jump over older IDEs. I've switched from a combo of, mostly, Intellij IDEA and Vim to almost exclusively VScode (for development). I do still use Spacemacs just for org mode. > my vim memory There are vim compatibility plugins for VScode. > fully embrace libre route VScode is open source and MIT licensed, here's the repo: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode https://github.com/microsoft/vscode Someone would need to explain to me what values I'm forgoing in order to use this. Although I should warn that someone I'm likely to have a strong rebuttal.

nitsky 6y ago
The default builds of vscode include telemetry and a non-free license. For a truly free build of vscode, you need to use vscodium. See their description: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium#why-does-this-exist https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium#why-does-this-exist. I suspect many developers are unaware of this.
- opencl 6y ago
  The most important practical detail here is that if you run vscodium, or download and build the vscode repo from microsoft yourself, or use any forks of vscode, you cannot install any of the extensions hosted on microsoft's servers without violating their license terms. There are alternative extension marketplaces such as https://open-vsx.org/ https://open-vsx.org/ but they are missing a lot of the extensions, some of which are proprietary.
  - bobajeff 6y ago
    The vscode marketplace also provides a link to download extensions as a vsix file on every extension page. So if the extension isn't on open-vsx I just download it directly and install it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- antonvs 6y ago
  That's true, although anyone who cares about truly free software presumably would look into the details to check. You can disable the telemetry: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-disable-telemetry-reporting https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq#_how-to-di... My point was really that it's free and open enough for any practical purpose I'm able to discern. Refusing to use it on the grounds of insufficient openness or freedom seems to me to require an unreasonably absolutist ideological stance on the issue.