Live data from Hacker News

OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours

status.open-vsx.org

41–50 of 158 posts

Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours

#41
post #12

I 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…

I feel that you're conflating few concepts, hackability, "open source", single point of failure architectures. Yes, VSC is less hackable than emacs, but I don't think it's necessarily the same thing. VSC (and others like it) are going for a more streamlined "App Store" experience, while emacs is going for a more DIY/hackable style editor. You can always fetching the VSIX file and sideload it is if the "store" is down…

My point about VSC is that brands itself as "open source" when Microsoft clearly intends for it to have a proprietary, tightly controlled ecosystem. It's not just RMS-unapproved, it's practically a lie. You can use it as a FOSS editor, but only if you are willing to accept a vastly subpar experience. Oh, and they've started cracking down on people using their proprietary VSC plugins in derived editors, too.

I expected it to be a little less convenient to leave Microsoft's beaten path. I did not expect it to be a massive waste of time. This is what I meant by futile. Not only is it apparently very brittle, it's missing large swaths of VSC's ecosystem. Hell, I don't even know if the extension I wanted is available on OpenVSX because it's still down!

If Microsoft hadn't openwashed their product, I wouldn't care nearly as much.

Besides, Emacs still provides a streamlined system for managing packages on top of being hackable. It even makes installing and upgrading packages straight from a Git repo easy. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too.

Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours

#43
post #9

I'm sure some (many?) will disagree with me but: VSCode is Android. Or rather, VSCode's source is AOSP and the marketplace, plugins, etc are Google Play Services. I say that with maximum derision.

as someone who has reversed the Google Play Services API, its utterly evil and you are correct that its about as far from open source as you can get

Can you please elaborate? Would love to hear more.

Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours

#45

Now 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.

Trying out emacs again after vsvode broke remote ssh for no apparent reason (other than their insane decision to install the whole text editor remotely). Tramps in emacs has some quirks (need to make connection timeouts faster somehow) but it just works.

What I find nice about these terminal IDE's is that I can just deploy my config to my servers I access over ssh and it's the same experience as locally

Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours

#46
Basically we've seen this movie before -look at the trajectory OSX took. As far as I know, it's not really possible to build a useable pure darwin installable OS. Puredarwin itself is stuck in whatever was released in 2018 or earlier.

Like Darwin, there may be an 'open' skeleton that vscode hangs upon, but all of the things that make it useful and attractive are being increasingly pulled behind paywalls.

I'm pretty sure most of us saw this coming a mile away. I've played a little with VS Code here and there but never put a lot of time into it because I'd rather invest my time in things I know will be here in 2035 -like vim/neovim.

Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours

#47
post #12

I 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…

It’s plenty open source — that is why all these forks exist!

VS Code itself does not work without various propriety stuff, but that is a different thing. A large number of open-source projects work that way. If you don’t like the proprietary stuff, the recourse is to fork it, modify it, and implement the remaining stuff yourself.

Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours

#48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that you're conflating few concepts, hackability, "open source", single point of failure architectures. Yes, VSC is less hackable than emacs, but I don't think it's necessarily the same thing. VSC (and others like it) are going for a more streamlined "App Store" experience, while emacs is going for a more DIY/hackable style editor. You can always fetching the VSIX file and sideload it is if the "store" is down…

My point about VSC is that brands itself as "open source" when Microsoft clearly intends for it to have a proprietary, tightly controlled ecosystem. It's not just RMS-unapproved, it's practically a lie. You can use it as a FOSS editor, but only if you are willing to accept a vastly subpar experience. Oh, and they've started cracking down on people using their proprietary VSC plugins in derived editors, too. I expecte…

Exactly this.

For me, the C/C++ language pack stopped working overnight with Cursor. This was clearly because of commercial concerns about derivative IDEs fairly and squarely gaining traction over the original product. But it broke my workflow a couple hours before a meeting.

I use neovim with LSPs and this is unimaginable in my world. I have started using IDEs only because the productivity gains from better LLM integration are undeniable. Sure I moved to clangd in Cursor and it was all fine, but the IDE actively pushes you to install Microsoft extensions, that can be yanked off whenever some Msft PM decides "oh we didn't actually want our competitors to be making money".

LLVM/GCC/Neovim/Apache projects are open-source. Anything that is "open-source until it is not" is not open source, and this perfectly describes VSCode today.

Re: OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours

#49

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.

Thanks, haven't tried it yet, but just found the relevant configuration settings described in the docs [0] and more detail on Stack Overflow [1].

[0] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/prepare_vsc...

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44057402/using-extension...

Post reply on HN