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.
OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours
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Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours
#22Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours
#23I 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/MEL…
For context, Open VSX is run by the Eclipse foundation, which also develops the Eclipse Theia editor, which is basically a clone of VS Code (not a fork, like VS Codium).
The Open VSX registry is open source (https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx) and self-hostable, although I have no experience with that. I assume it's possible to host your own instance with the extensions you want instead of relying on the free public instance.
Personally I'm more of a Sublime guy, but people looking for an open VSC alternative should consider Theia over VSC forks. It seems like the smarter long term investment if you want to get out from Microsoft's control.
Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the share. Yeah, building upon VSCode (MIT) is a stupid idea. Regarding OpenVSX, it was developed whilst I was at Gitpod and transferred to the Eclipse Foundation. It's been many years now, so my memory might be a little dated as to what came first, but OpenVSX/Gitpod/Thiea/Eclipse origins can all be traced back to https://www.typefox.io/ . Anyway. OpenVSX is classic XKCD https://xkcd.com/2347/ territory—r…
it's kind of wild -- none of the multimillion dollar VSCode forks (Cursor, windsurf) are working properly at the moment. It seems open-vsx is quite a vulnerable single point of failure. Searching extensions gives a 503.
Is that any different from a GitHub/AWS outage?
Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours
#25There 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 aft…
From my experience having attempted to migrate away from VSCodium (in the attempts to de-VSCode) and build atop Theia as a platform, there are few things to consider:
- The build system is finicky and can easily take hours to figure/fix.
- The error-reporting is severely lacking. You can be lost why something internal isn't working and go on a rabbit-trail with your favorite AI-copilot, etc.
- Documentation is lacking. You have to dive into the platform code to actually figure things out.
- This can be seen positively but there are quite a few new things being introduced regularly (especially AI-related) which, for a platform, isn't always ideal.
Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours
#26There 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 aft…
> MS is under no obligation to provide an OSS editor, but playing tricks after luring people in is not nice. Microsoft is partly to blame, but people have been warning about this over and over and over ad nauseam and people still choose to use VSCode. You couldn't even get people to not use the proprietary extensions for C/C++, Python and remote development. The problem is that Microsoft dedicates enough resource to…
> (I was going to also say "or the OSS guys all unify behind a choice" but Hell will freeze over before that happens.)
The editor war is going as strong as ever, emacs vs vim will still be here in 20 years. Compared to 10 years ago, the amount of people using emacs and vim only grew, although VSCode growth was 1000x faster.
Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours
#27There 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 aft…
Why in earth would they stain their efforts with the "eclipse" name. Screenshots look great!
Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours
#28Now 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.
Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours
#29[deleted]
Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's kind of wild -- none of the multimillion dollar VSCode forks (Cursor, windsurf) are working properly at the moment. It seems open-vsx is quite a vulnerable single point of failure. Searching extensions gives a 503.
Is that any different from a GitHub/AWS outage?
Yes - no one is making 7 figures in order to keep OpenVSX online