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I'm against VSCode because it's a Microsoft product. I've been working on kernels for several decades and I remember when they tried to kill Linux and ran an en

I'm against VSCode because it's a Microsoft product. I've been working on kernels for several decades and I remember when they tried to kill Linux and ran an entire ad campaign around it. Their entire embrace, extend, extinguish is still alive, and they're only embracing OSS because they lost their end user device battle (because their OS is trash) and had to pivot to cloud where people were already embracing OSS. WSL, running my editor in the cloud and paying for a subscription, having Microsoft control your editor, it's all clearly a dystopia for developers that leads to lock in, paying for things that should be free, and an invasion of privacy that should be avoided at all cost. There are so many editors to choose from. I get that not everyone wants invest in Vim/Emacs, even though you should and it will pay off, and the vast majority of the programmers that are doing great things are using Vim/Emacs (seriously, I have a list of big names and except for some rare exceptions like James Gosling who apparently uses Netbeans, EVERYONE noteworthy uses Vim/Emacs), and it's OSS, and in Vim's case it's also helping a charity. But if you are the person who just can't get there with Vim/Emacs, at least don't give yourself over to Microsoft. Use Sublime, Nova, BB, etc. They're all great editors by small companies making cool stuff and they'll get way more out of your support than Microsoft.

eternityforest 5y ago
It would be cool to have a wiki page of who uses what. Torvalds uses MicroEmacs, but I don't know what Poettering, Taymans, Realthunder, Bellard(I assume he knows a CLI editor though) are up to. No clue what the devs of Obsidian use. Lots of LibreOffice devs seem to use VS Code. And of course, in the JS ecosystem IDEs seem pretty common. Van Rossum uses Vim it seems. But mostly all the devs I respect most don't seem to talk a lot about editor choice. I guess most of them are probably on a CLI editor but ALL? There's gotta be a few that are on IDEs, right? What do the Red Hat people use? Also Sublime/Nova/BB seem to be for Mac and not free. VSCode being free as in beer is a pretty big draw. There isn't all that many alternatives to VS Code that have that level of features unless you want to do some real setup work, and have another customized suite in your life to maintain.
tempodox 5y ago
> I'm against VSCode because it's a Microsoft product. Note that there is also VSCodium [1], an OSS fork of VSCode with the M$ telemetry removed. I'm a heavy vim user but for cross-platform development with .NET SDK or Node.js VSCodium has pretty good support with the huge number of available extensions. If I want to tweak the editor's behavior, it's not harder, or even easier, than with vim. I find writing an extension for VSCodium in JS more approachable than doing the equivalent with vimscript. [1] https://vscodium.com https://vscodium.com
pfraze 5y ago
I get the anti-corporate opinion. I don’t think it totally fits here because VSCode is FOSS, and it offers them a very limited moat; if they tried to push something weird then you can bet on a fork or the myriad of alternatives in the saturated editor market. I work against aggregated market power for my day job, but this isn’t a case that needs fighting IMO. As for the appeal to true hackerdom, I guess I’ll just hope I’m in the minority of great-thing-doers.
- kurisufag 5y ago
  >VSCode is FOSS not really, the Microsoft extension store/repository is the only practical way to install extensions, and the totally open-source fork (VSCodium) is literally unable to install a lot of fairly key extensions because MS is apparently alright with open-sourcing the editor but not the tools they build for it. regardless, I do not want to have to disable telemetry in my text editor -- the idea that it exists in the first place is frankly baffling.

eternityforest 5y ago

It would be cool to have a wiki page of who uses what. Torvalds uses MicroEmacs, but I don't know what Poettering, Taymans, Realthunder, Bellard(I assume he knows a CLI editor though) are up to. No clue what the devs of Obsidian use. Lots of LibreOffice devs seem to use VS Code. And of course, in the JS ecosystem IDEs seem pretty common. Van Rossum uses Vim it seems. But mostly all the devs I respect most don't seem to talk a lot about editor choice. I guess most of them are probably on a CLI editor but ALL? There's gotta be a few that are on IDEs, right? What do the Red Hat people use? Also Sublime/Nova/BB seem to be for Mac and not free. VSCode being free as in beer is a pretty big draw. There isn't all that many alternatives to VS Code that have that level of features unless you want to do some real setup work, and have another customized suite in your life to maintain.

tempodox 5y ago

> I'm against VSCode because it's a Microsoft product. Note that there is also VSCodium [1], an OSS fork of VSCode with the M$ telemetry removed. I'm a heavy vim user but for cross-platform development with .NET SDK or Node.js VSCodium has pretty good support with the huge number of available extensions. If I want to tweak the editor's behavior, it's not harder, or even easier, than with vim. I find writing an extension for VSCodium in JS more approachable than doing the equivalent with vimscript. [1] https://vscodium.com https://vscodium.com

pfraze 5y ago

I get the anti-corporate opinion. I don’t think it totally fits here because VSCode is FOSS, and it offers them a very limited moat; if they tried to push something weird then you can bet on a fork or the myriad of alternatives in the saturated editor market. I work against aggregated market power for my day job, but this isn’t a case that needs fighting IMO. As for the appeal to true hackerdom, I guess I’ll just hope I’m in the minority of great-thing-doers.

kurisufag 5y ago
>VSCode is FOSS not really, the Microsoft extension store/repository is the only practical way to install extensions, and the totally open-source fork (VSCodium) is literally unable to install a lot of fairly key extensions because MS is apparently alright with open-sourcing the editor but not the tools they build for it. regardless, I do not want to have to disable telemetry in my text editor -- the idea that it exists in the first place is frankly baffling.