To be clear, I'm don't like the Microsoft has a proprietary Marketplace, but a company openly violating the terms of use for their own profit is a bit much in my opinion.
> Cursor allegedly has been flouting Microsoft terms-of-service rules for some time now by setting up a reverse proxy to mask its network requests to the endpoints used by the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace. This allows Cursor users to install VS Code extensions from Microsoft's market. Other VS Code forks tend to point to Open VSX, an alternative extension marketplace.
Terms of service often contain illegal provisions. I teach kids to flout them too. One of the biggest sins in school is kids learn to follow rules uncritically.
There are specific protections allowed when the goal is to maintain / break compatibility. If Microsoft locks competitors out, competitors are quite often permitted to pick the lock.
I can't comment on this situation since I don't know the details, but it's very likely this is fully legal.
See Oracle / Java API lawsuit, garage door opener suit, etc. To see where the lines sit.
cursor also hijacks the 'code' alias to start vscode from the cli, which I use a lot. It's extremely annoying to have cursor start instead and unnncessarily difficult to get rid of. I removed cursor because of this.
I'm pretty sure that was an option when installing, I remember unchecking it and 'code' still launches vscode for me. Curious how it's difficult to remove, I'd expect something like rm `which code` to do it. Unless they add the alias to your shell or something?
maybe they changed some things last I used it, which was maybe six months ago. I've tried cursor twice and had the same issue each time. I saw the dialogue you were talking about and specifically selected to not override the code extension and it happened again anyway. Maybe there was something left over from the previous install, I don't know.
I was using windows and wsl, and they were adding scripts to my profile directory (code.cmd) which then took precedence over vscode, from what I remember. Tracking that down required googling to discover other people who were having the same issue. If this is what I have to do when I first start using a product, it just leaves a bad impression. Additionally it seems that it will hijack the 'code' alias in WSL if you select this option or not, which is where I primarily use it. And then when cursor updates, it seems it will again attempt to overwrite this alias.
Maybe it works great for other people and they never encounter this issue. Maybe it seems like a petty thing. For me it seems it's implemented to attempt to 'force convert' some vscode users to use cursor all the time, and maybe that works and it's a success from a business perspective. But I won't use it again.
Ouch, that does sound painful. I've only ever used it on Linux and Mac which work similar enough that if it did override it, it would be a mild annoyance at best.
I don't know windows + wsl enough that I'm sure I would've been caught out by that and pissed off as well.
But why should we care? It's obvious Cursor's IDE is VSCode, I cannot think of a single reason why I should be against executing whatever the hell I want on my computer. It's not Cursor doing this, it's me doing this using Cursor.
> The way copyright and other rights to your IP you claim to have work in practice, is you need to enforce those claims or loose the rights.
Generally only applies to trademarks, not copyrights. In most English speaking countries copyright is a proprietary right and you don't lose it if you don't actively enforce it. But there could be time limits to a plaintiff bringing a civil case to court (usually a couple years).
Another way copyright has worked for decades is qBittorrent for instance, is not responsible for infringements by users. Along with massive carve-outs for Microsoft and the gang to avoid that responsibility too, on GitHub and YouTube and many other websites.
The Cursor founders (technically the company is called Anysphere, Inc) are all young MIT grads. What they needed is a 40-year-old with a degree from Fitchburg State who could say "Woah, don't do that! It's not worth the long-term risk!"
Either you don't get caught and can move faster, or you get caught and the penalty is usually small and a long way down the line, by which time your company will have either folded or grown enough to pay without difficulty.
That's the play when your adversary is regulation--the government moves slowly, court cases move even slower, and you can grease the wheels politically.
That is not the scenario here. Cursor is being hunted by an extremely motivated corporate competitor. Cursor has been leeching the gorilla's blood and the gorilla finally noticed. Microsoft doesn't (necessarily) need the law here. They have it if they need it, but they can kill Cursor without needing to sue them. The disastrous outcome isn't a penalty--it's a critical mass of users switching to Copilot because they can't use their Microsoft extensions in Cursor any more. Cutting off the extensions on the same day that their Cursor clone went live was effectively a declaration of war from Microsoft.
It's possible but I think this is a bit of a non-issue for cursor. Microsoft extensions are pretty good but are not irreplacable, and in the meantime cursor has grown astronomically fast and has grabbed a ton of "AI Coding" mindshare. I think the gamble has already paid off for them: if they have to play nice with licensing and develop their own solutions to replace MS proprietary extensions, they now have the scale to do that. GH Copilot was first in the game but now has the reputation of the poor man's cursor.
Agent mode in Copilot. It all went down on April 4th: the rollout of agent mode to all users, and the sudden enforcement of the license in their C++ extension.
Or, hear me out, Microsoft decides you’d make excellent additions its House of Faces For IDE/Compiler Competitors and your face is on the wall before you know what happened.
exactly! laws are for old geezers who went to State, not young superstars with fancy degrees. MIT negotiated diplomatic immunity for its graduates, after all. that's why Sam Bankman-Fried got acquitted when FTX went under.
It's what is motivating Microsoft to prevent what Cursor is doing.
All cursor is doing is saying this blob of crap is compatible with their fork and letting you run it. This is akin to browsers supporting extensions from other browsers, and many other scenarios.
What Microsoft is doing is trying to prevent VSCode from becoming spontaneously obsolete because coding with Cursor a) removes you from VSCode and b) does it better.
Am I the only person using tmux+vim+cscope+bash+gcc as a development environment? I do not see the need for these GUIs. I also can develop software from just about anywhere as I only need to SSH into a machine with these things (+git) installed. There are no hostile license terms either.
That said, if you must use a GUI based development environment, I know of people happily using netbeans. I am not sure why anyone would use Microsoft’s tools for this.
Now, I get why you made the quip, but I for one keep both of those out of the business I run for this exact reason: I do not trust MICROS~1 in the medium to long term.
I also present the CEO and board with other arguments, like moral ones about involvement in atrocities and tyranny, legal ones regarding things like data protection, market related ones such as the likelihood of a future showdown between the EU and US.
But the risk that MICROS~1 fucks us over directly is even easier for them to understand, because they have been using Windows and Office for decades and are quite queasy about 10 going EOL and what the next set of annoyances in document management will be that they'll have to suffer under. It's something they have immediate experience of and didn't like.
A year from now it's probable we'll only have a couple of Windows machines left, because some of our customers use software that doesn't run under Wine and tries to block execution under both debuggers and container environments.
I don't like to be seen as defending Microsoft, they definitely have their share of faults, but as far as business goes, I think Microsoft is the least likely company to screw you over as a (business) customer.
Microsoft has kept old software working pretty much unchanged for the last 20 years. I know, I still have software built on early Windows 95/NT4 that works fine on Windows 11...and with some registry tweaks Windows 11 will run on a computer from 2005 without too many issues (sure, 3rd party security software and js-heavy web pages will be slow but that is not directly MS fault).
Windows 10 EOL in 2025 is only for consumer level stuff, you can get Windows 10 support for enterprise for another 2 years at least and some versions even up to 2029, so again, if you are a business, you are taken care of (if you are "cheaping" you way with Windows Home and Pro in business then you kind of get what you pay for, I am sure you as a business don't give away free products/services for years on end). And you can keep using your Windows 10 after EOL, not like they lock you out, they just don't support you...just like you don't repair stuff for free after warranty end.
Compare that to any other tech company that churns through HW and SW much faster and much more severely where old HW and SW no longer works or cannot connect to the internet or use the latest browser so you cannot connect to the latest HTTPS servers. Even open source software breaks compatibilty with older versions much more oftern than Microsoft, but since that is "free" people just shrug it off.
Microsoft's primary business is software running on Microsoft platforms. In the past that was Windows, nowadays it's also Azure.
That famous "developers developers developers" video with Steve Ballmer was a prime example of that corporate ethos.
For most other giant companies in tech, either the primary business is selling a product (and killing competitors) or giving products away as loss leaders and making bank on advertisement
We're building the business, i.e. setting the foundations we expect to stand on for decades to come. Enterprise license that might be possible to extend into the medium term isn't good enough for our long term commitments and the time to adapt to an alternative family of operating systems is now.
As for stability, if you learned GUI Ubuntu twenty years ago you'll be right at home in contemporary Debian systems, while someone hopping from XP or Server 2000 into 10 or 11 would be quite confused for quite some time. Xenial (2016), Bionic (2018) and Fossa (2020) will likely get twenty years of security updates each, into the beginning of the 2030s.
I think something similar holds for the SoftMaker office suite. If you learned TextMaker twenty years ago I believe you'll be less annoyed by their 2024 release than if you learned Office 2003 and get dropped into the 365 style applications. Personally I'd use something else entirely, likely doing a roundtrip through LaTeX or straight PostScript under the hood, but it will be interesting to evaluate some MICROS~1 Office alternatives in my organisation and see what, if anything, sticks.
Eh MS wasn’t going to just let VSCode derivatives soak up all the AI gold rush money, these companies knew the risks. I wonder what it’s going to mean for projects like Zig, a migration of VSCode refugees could crank things up to 11 pretty quick.
It took them five years to actually take action on enforcing their ToS. It's not as much of a rug pull as it's the result of their competitors blatantly ignoring the license on proprietary code from a proprietary code giant.
Unless the developers of the IDEs hit by this never actually read the ToS, of course, which would only make them less reliable as an IDE provider.
Yep. Was a Microsoft dev from 1992 until 2017. Won’t touch them now because I spent my entire career rewriting rug pulls. It paid off a mortgage and fed me well but it was a bad outcome for my orgs and customers.
If anyone remembers WCF/AppFabric/WWF and Silverlight, that was the last stack I rewrote someone out of the shit on.
There was a lot of hype and momentum around Silverlight back in the day, until their wasn't. You got a cross-platform (Mac/Windows) WPF-like UI and C# programming environment, which was powerful.
I had the fortune to be involved developing the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming software. Under the hood, it was a small web browser shell (using Mono on Mac and WPF on Windows) around a Silverlight Out-of-Browser app. Anything beyond the permissions of the Silverlight app (e.g. bluetooth/USB comms) was an RPC from Silverlight to the shell.
After completing the Mac/Windows app, LEGO wanted to deliver a similar experience on iPad. There was no Silverlight there, and it was clear there never would be. But we were able to leverage Xamarin stuff to reuse most of the same codebase, just with an iOS UI on top.
By chance, do you happen to know if the Mindstorms NXT (the old one, before EV3) software was based on the same toolkit? I always wondered what UI framework it used, it had an unusual look.
Funnily enough, those ancient WPF, WinForms, and even MFC apps still compile and work fine. The rug pull only became the standard operating procedure at a certain point.
I started my career rewriting a product using Microsoft's DNA business server with Java and never looked back. I'm shocked this keeps happening, honestly. I guess I'm a "never again" sort but surprised there's not more companies refusing to deal with Microsoft.
Due to experiences like that I refused to buy volume licenses from them, too. Sometime later I got an audit demand for which I had a reply ready.
An Enterprise customer of Microsoft agrees to be audited by MS. In exchange they pay a certain amount for effectively “unlimited use” of the appropriate software. In the past this meant volume license keys that would always activate; wouldn’t count how many devices, etc.
And MS audit would check that what you reported was what you had. And could result in big increases in contract pricing.
Now that everything is cloud this and 365 that I don’t know how much it applies anymore - everything is dynamic and traceable.
Famously in the early 2000s it was a huge issue for “medium” businesses who had used enterprise-style licensing. Tiny and small businesses just bought normal computers and software and would often escape notice.
I think he refers to Microsoft auditing a business' licence compliance. Have you aquired the correct amount of licenses for all the instances you are running and accessing. Microsoft licensing is so insanely complex that even if you ask 2 MS sales reps what licenses you need to cover a certain scenario, you will get a different answer each time. This is also why an audit almost 100% results in finding non-compliance.
Anything that’s not gpl-licensed is going to pull the rug from under your feet, people should have learned this by now.
Also, if you do open source contributions, never ever agree to assign copyright to the project: doing so means the project owners can relicense the code base, even towards proprietary license.
I think project governance matters more than license, and the BSDs are great examples.
Having said that, I’ve soured on the GPL. V3 more-or-less bans companies from selling you hardware that runs free software, but lets Google, Meta, etc use the software to expand their cloud-based monopolies where surveillance capitalism and enshittification have won out.
AGPL or BSL seem much better if you want free as in freedom. BSD and Apache at least don’t force your software off of machines that end users control.
Yes, BSL is not open (TM) or free (TM) or whatever. It’s still better IMHO, since it at least has some path to revenue for the developers.
The intellisense from clangd is much better and faster than the Microsoft C++ extension, if you can set up a compile_commands.json. Although debugging still relies on the Microsoft extension. Although I don't think it's going to be hard to create an extension just for debugging (if it does not already exist?)
I've had the opposite experience with weird C++ projects from some customers that use external toolchains. For some reason even creating the compile_commands.json file with Bear doesn't work, while the proprietary Intellisense extension works out of the box without any configuration.
And this is why I'm using Zed today. I'm deadly serious. I was a huge proponent of VSCode at first but I've soured on it, and now I don't want my workflow to depend on it in any way.
Awesome software, but I don't trust the upstream org further than I must.
I actually worked on VSCode (Python support specifically) at Microsoft in the past, and seeing this kind of thing frustrates me to no end.
The worst part is all the VSCode is still promoted to developers as open source, even though official extensions increasingly aren't, with bits and pieces gradually replaced with closed code. It's not that closed source is necessarily bad, but when F/OSS popularity is milked for marketing purposes while stuff like this happens, it just feels very wrong. If you want to be closed source for reasons, fine, but be honest and upfront about it.
Zed is nice but I still prefer vs codes configuration scheme. Was working on a web/frontend project a while ago and had honestly a very hard time to set up Zed to do everything from formatting to linting and syntax highlighting correctly. Meanwhile in vscode I had to install 3 extensions, enable them for the workspace and they were already aware of each other and seamlessly worked together.
I also think it's a mixed opportunity not to allow for something like Lua or a Lisp to configure Zed in. It's very promising but I'm not willing to switch just yet.
I’ve just installed Zed based on your recommendation and I’m already impressed.
It’s fast, the interface is distraction free and it already has support for all the languages I use regularly. Even Terraform support, which is notoriously hard to get right, is better than the current “best” in VSCode.
Zed uses tree-sitter and LSP; most popular languages do not require extensions, and extensions for niche languages are shockingly easy to write. Literally 100-300 lines of Rust boilerplate and around 300 lines of config boilerplate, with minimal maintenance/upkeep.
zed is veerrrry good. i really appreciate the clean ui compared to vscode and its ilk. don’t love the pricing they just announced though. i don’t mind paying for my tools, but it not being unlimited scares me off slightly.
I think it's totally fair for them to charge for an optional feature that requires a cloud service. And if you don't like their pricing you can use a different provider, including self-hosted ones.
Agreed, but at least that's an optional feature you can choose to pay for if you want to. And if that changes, I'll drop it and head back to a Free editor.
Reminds when I excited to see Azure Data Studio adding Postgres support, but it was actually a binary extension with no ability to fix or change anything and no way for other useful databases to extend and use the functionality; they had spent all the time and effort to make sure nobody could do something like it but them.
Weird, ADS is dead and nobody spent any time on it, I wonder why.
Debugging isn't in yet, but is actively being worked on and planned for public release before 1.0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065, there's an active channel in their Discord discussing the development of the feature.
That first link doesn’t really explain anything about syntax/autocomplete. It’s just about config options per language (formatted, linter, lsp) but I guess I was expecting something else?
Zed's language support is built on two main technologies:
Tree-sitter: This handles syntax highlighting and structure-based features like the outline panel.
Language Server Protocol (LSP): This provides semantic features such as code completion and diagnostics.
These components work together to provide Zed's language capabilities.
"""
Note this is _not_ how VSC's C++ Intellisense works. The VSC C++ plugin uses proprietary features of MSVC, it doesn't use LSP.
I think a lot of people don't have a problem with commercial software, but rather with the disingenuous behavior that some companies display.
VSCode was/is often touted as open source and Microsoft are using it to present themselves as community loving until MS sees an opportunity to extract some money/hinder the competition.
In comparison, Jetbrains is transparent with their offerings and what you get. There is in my opinion a clear difference in how they operate and how they are perceived.
I second all this. I'm using Zed today, but I was using Emacs for 20 years, then Sublime/VSCode/etc. for a few, and now Zed. If it disappears, I'm going right back to Emacs without a moment's hesitation.
It’s gotten way more ergonomic, BTW. Even if you treat it as a toolkit to build your own editor, the building blocks are much nicer than they were back then.
Thing is, I don't want to build my editor, I want to live the dream of Xerox PARC workstations, and that is what IDEs are for.
I had to make Emacs my go to editor in UNIX, because in those days there were hardly any alternatives, IDEs only started to be taken seriously on UNIX around 2000.
Even James Gosling, one of influencial people in the Emacs history says its time is now passed and he rather use Netbeans,
Speaking of old obsolete versions of Gosling Emacs, Lars Brinkhoff just posted this source code for UniPress Emacs 2.20 he got from from Hans Hübner! That's the version we called NeMACS, with support for NeWS (Gosling's PostScript based window system), tabbed windows and pie menus, etc:
DonHopkins on June 2, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs
UniPress Emacs for NeWS in 1988: Scriptable GUI, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring tool for HyperTIES browser.
Emacs served as an IDE with tabbed window and pie menus, for interactively editing, viewing, and navigating HyperTIES markup language documents, graphics, and interactive PostScript "applets".
HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system
>HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.)
Emacs provides the pie menus you see popped up in the illustration (Articulate, Edit, New (Storyboard, Link, Picture, Target), Define) that control the HyperTIES browser from the custom text editing mode of HyperTIES storyboards (like web pages), which the HyperTIES browser (in the background, which emacs controls in a sub-process) formats and displays. HyperTIES also uses pie menus for navigation and in interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript.
DVRC on June 3, 2023 [–]
Do any version of UniPress Emacs (that support the NeWS driver) or NeMacs survive?
I wrote the following description of how NeWS relates to modern web browsers and "AJAX" in the NeWS article on Wikipedia, and I also worked on TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) at Sun:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
>NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:
>- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.
>- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.
>- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.
[...]
HyperTIES Emacs Authoring Tool MockLisp code (Yet Another HyperTIES Implementation, This Time In Emacs):
I'm something of a vim fanatic because Emacs was sluggish, but these days have to admit that the multicore support turned out fine and the difference isn't that big anymore.
Uh, not only that. I recently updated from emacs 29 to emacs 30 where native compilation is enabled by default and it’s much much faster. Like, noticeably faster.
Ah, nice. Definitely time for me to carve out a few hours and try it out again, then.
Who knows, maybe I'll have closed the circle in a year and gone back to Emacs full time, where I started off in the editor wars a quarter of a century ago.
I spent 25 years using emacs before vscode (1997 to 2022-ish). I didn't go deep, I mostly just enjoyed the core parts of emacs + ccmode. I don't enjoy LISP but I still enjoy emacs, if that makes any sense.
MS made some very real and very usable innovations. Emacs hackers/maintainers would be wise to copy them, like I'm sure Microsoft copied things from emacs.
It's a bit like the UI aspect of the browser wars. Everyone wins when good things are cloned and then iteratively improved upon.
vscode does three things extremely well: defaults, defaults and defaults. The most important ‘you just need M-x do-whatever after installing the whatever-doer package’ is supported out of the box (no details on purpose, try running emacs or vim without any config and compare to a clean fresh install of vscode).
I love Cursor deeply but choosing to be a VSCode fork instead of a VSCode extension was a fatal choice. In the long term I think they either have to retool as an extension or they will go out of business. You can only publicly flout Microsoft's licenses for so long while making a competitor to one of their AAA products.
They are reselling an editor they did not make with a small extension that uses AI models they do not make.
I don't think they'll survive very long as it seems that they don't actually have that many things that differentiate them. And there is a lot of competition.
They wouldn’t take off if they weren’t a vscode fork. They may die a heroic death now having kickstarted the proper AI IDE. (Copilot was first and it was… nice? then it sucked so bad everyone jumped ship, remember? MS needed that kick in the balls.)
Eh, I mean it's a fork. They can keep updating their fork forever. Reality is they want complete control over the product, and VS Code doesn't expose everything in the extension API.
Sure, but they depend on a bunch of Microsoft proprietary extensions (that they can't fork) that ban usage in VSCode forks, and they knew this when they made the choice. This was an inevitable outcome from Microsoft's side. I'm sure they want to remain in business more than they want complete control over the product.
> they depend on a bunch of Microsoft proprietary extensions
Microsoft still holds the crown when it comes to C# debugging, but for most proprietary MS extensions there are free, open source alternatives. They may not be as polished as the ones Microsoft actually pays people to maintain, but I don't see why Cursor would actually depend on any of the proprietary ones if you're not using it for C# dev (and even there competitors like Jetbrains have figured out a way to make it work).
Do you guys ever feel tired of 'sounding the alarm'?
I feel like I've been doing that for years on a wide range of topics, but every time it's like you're talking to cult members.
How do you break through to people? People say things like "you're overthinking it", "that's never going to happen", "I don't care because I like using VSCode and not alternatives".
Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
What's the problem for people who just use VSCode, exactly? The software still does what people want for free, which is what 99% of VS Code users use the software for anyway. People who care about open source-ness have their own extensions to replace their proprietary C++ tooling, or they can use an open source alternative like Eclipse.
I remember when basic features that come for free in VS Code cost thousands of dollars per developer, back when "update" meant "buy the new version (again)". I swear, people forgot how good they have it.
The change that made the Microsoft addon incompatible with VS Code forks happened four years ago.
For people who see VS Code as just a decent gratis text editor, there's no problem.
For people who care, to some degree, about using an open source tool, for whom the marketing that VS Code is open source played a role in their choice of using it, it should matter. And it matters that other projects (think Platform IO and more) choose VS Code as a platform to build on top of, and they get away with it because "it's open source".
Then people should stop caring about open source, care about free software instead, and do not forget that it is free-as-in-freedom, so they should still pay for their tools.
Otherwise keep hoping that your corporate or VC funded SaaS "disruptor" master will continue to be nice to you
Tech bubble remains tech bubble, when common, non-tech people are much more screwed, yet nothing is being done except saying "lol, just install Linux".
I just use the OSS vs code builds at home. (Work uses vscode).
Ever since I got remote mode working, I haven’t noticed any missing functionality I care about. (I also haven’t tried installing extensions for the pile of commercial services work uses, and that I wouldn’t pay for anyway.)
Edit: Since cursor now has near infinite VC money, perhaps they should fund a few open source devs to work on those forks. Why should they get a free ride?
It's tradeoffs all the way down. VSCode remains one of the best intro editors, because it's free, has next to zero learning curve, and a robust extension ecosystem. I mean, what even is the argument here? That it's not completely open in every possible way? Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?
> Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?
Me, personally? No, because they're honest about it. I use BBEdit and Nova frequently on my Mac. Those are as closed source as it gets. They never pretend otherwise, though. You pay your money and you know what you're getting. VSCode tries really hard to appear to be open source, as long as you're willing to ignore the million places where they aren't. (Python devs: are you using PyLance? I'm talking to you.)
And ironically, those closed editors seem to play more nicely with the ecosystem as a whole. Neither BBEdit nor Nova have ever tried to talk me into installing closed plugins, and the same plugins that work with them work great in Emacs and Zed.
If I go to one bar that charged $5 per beer, and another that gives free beer but makes you rent single-use mugs for $5, even though the end price is identical, the rental bar's going to annoy me horrendously. Just admit what it is and let people judge on their own merits.
I think the problem with "sounding the alarm" is that it's not a tsunami that will immediately wipe out everything, it's more of a slow flood. The business strategy is boiling the frog.
Meh. If it does eventually go away, it wouldn't be the first time I've switched editors. Which turns out to not actually be all that hard to do.
> Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
What collective problem, that someone might have to unexpectedly burn a weekend writing a new editor? That {emacs|vim} isn't popular enough? That people might have to go install openjdk in order to start using eclipse?
I think ultimately we're mostly just not as clever as we think we are, which I think unfortunately we must accept.
Where this has become increasingly problematic is rampant materialism and corporatism.
If the only real motivator in town, especially for the powerful, is material gain then there is nothing to constrain wanton greed. This becomes even more pronounced with corporations because their overtly stated purpose is not but greed, so even if the individual actors have some transcend moral compass they will be in conflict to their programmed imperative to "do their job".
Currently many of the powerful are materialistic and materialism can bring worldly power. Other political paradigms may come to the fore but as it takes a form and gravity it will likely come into some dialectic conflict with the prevailing materialistic status quo. That may be a peaceful resolution, but I'd not be certain of that.
Good to see some of these neural network people actually pay for their real infractions. Granted, this time it was a banal competitor action, but still nice. Just because a license isn't enforced, doesn't make it safe to violate.
It's another thing for its license to explicitly prohibit its use with any other IDE, even if it's API-compatible, even if it's literally exactly VSCode recompiled with another name.
And it's yet another thing to proactively insert checks for that.
This is one of the reasons why I switched to CLion for C++ work, and the fact that VS Code and its derivatives was a pain to configure for C++.
I also use PHPStorm for web dev work and we use MS DevOps at work and that extension is unstable, causes IDE errors for me and I will not use MS products just for this one irksome bug. I prefer PHPStorm for my work, because working with PHP in VS Code has never been a great experience for me. I just want my tools to work, I fight with code, I don't want to fight with my tools as well.
I did give CLion a try when looking for an editor, but last I checked CLion required you to use CMake. Also, JetBrains has it all split up between different IDEs. I need on e that supports C, C++, Python, Cython, Makefile, TypeScript, SCSS, XHTML, Shellscript, JSON and XML in the same program. I also need a program that can do CMake and C, and a program that can do C# (including project management, building, tests etc), Batch script, PowerShell, Shellscript, Cake and YAML, preferably with the same UI. And it needs to work on Linux. VSCode is the only one I've found that can handle that.
I don't like MS, either. BUT, let's be clear. No one is to obligated to work for free on OSS, not even big companies like MS. They have the right to constraint them to work on their own platforms. If you don't like it, you should fork the previous unconstrained versions or develop your own C/C++ add-on rather than complaining that MS stopped supporting your favorite extension.
"It's not illegal for them to do this bad thing" is such a common defense of companies doing bad things, as if it was the legality and not the ethics that was being discussed. I don't get it.
If Microsoft is gonna keep trying to enshitty their apps with unmasked for AI pop-ups that will always come back and even go so far to throw ads in at an OS level: yes, I will feel at least a bit entitled to some "free work" for taking hours of my time.
I sure do wish my industry didn't need windows. I'd happily go to Linux and never look back.
At least I know one alternative that is on bar (even better according to some people) for the C++ MS extension. What I am worried more about is the Jupyter Notebook MS extensions. I cannot find a suitable alternative and sometimes I am not being able to use it on windsurf/VSCodium (manually installing vsix). I am surprised by that taking into consideration how Jupyter notebooks relevance in data science and ML.
I don't understand the problem. It sounds like the C/C++ extension was proprietary. This sort of thing can always happen when you rely on proprietary software. Make an open source C/C++ extension and you wouldn't have this problem.
>It sounds like the C/C++ extension was proprietary
The extension itself it MIT licensed (so could be hosted on the open VSIX store, if it wasn't down because the Eclipse project is suffering from server issues right now). In theory any fork can patch out the check and re-release the extension.
However, the extension packages some binaries that are proprietary, and have been since about four years ago. People could re-implement those and re-release an open version of the extension, but you can't just (legally) take the proprietary binaries and ship them if you don't have the license.
Open alternatives actually exist, but their quality and ease of configuration depends on your use case. In large projects the proprietary extension seems to be worse from what I've read.
Yes, that is what I thought, too. (It would be a good idea to have a open source C/C++ extension anyways, whether or not the proprietary extension stops working with non-Microsoft code.) (Maybe there is such extension; I don't know; I don't use VS Code and VS Codium etc.)
neovim is a truly beautiful piece of software that is impossible to undersell. It has made vim into a full feature complete IDE for every language finally with a good editor :P
100%. I switched to it to get true color themes support in the terminal which vim didn't have at the time, but I stayed with it because of all the extensibility for features like above.
I use cursor primarily because of the great tab autocomplete model, but I've always thought it was a bit scummy they blatantly violate the VS Code licensing. Windsurf ships a special version of the pyright extension for this reason. Why doesn't cursor have to play by the rules too?
No VS Codium is just a alternative build of Visual Studio Code.
> This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration.
I thought it was similar to the Chromium/Chrome situation. The naming implied that. But I don't use it and don't follow it that closely. Thanks for the clarification.
The hilarious part is that old fart C++ programmers (like me) have been the ones most leery of VS Code. Microsoft’s gonna Microsoft, ‘specially with compilers.
Well, VisualStudio for one. If you’re targeting Windows, you should consider it. VS Code feels slow to me in a way VS doesn’t.
I spent most of the past ~fifteen years working in Sublime and just switched between that and the terminal for build and test—not fancy, but then, C++ coding isn’t a speedrun. Sublime is clean, fast, and portable.
However, dev tooling has advanced so much now that I started learning and using neovim last year so I could take advantage of good syntax highlighting, LSP, and CoPilot. I don’t get enough daily reps to be good at core vi yet (I am a team manager so most of my time is spent asking questions of devs prefixed with “This is a really dumb question, but”) but despite all the techbros who’ve flocked to it I think neovim is pretty good technology and responsive. You can get the tooling features but control UI/UX; for me, I want as much code on the screen as possible, and I especially resent widgets that eat into vertical space. I started with one of the off-the-shelf all-in-one init.lua configs off github, but it was too complicated and I quickly broke things. What’s worked better is going through a video series on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHTeCSVAFNY&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN...) and building up the init.lua I want from scratch. As noted, I’m not great with it, especially the normal vim motions, but I’ve learned to get around, it’s fast, I can see my code without a million distracting widgets, and I get the benefit of clangd and CoPilot.
I have almost the exact same opinion. In that I hate distracting widgets and things that eat vertical space. I spent about a week getting nvim setup. I write code all day. I still have VSCode day to day because I'm so used to it/fast with it (I use vim motions within it).
But to me the appeal of nvim is being able to fully remove everything I dislike.
The same problem with the c# extension, which has had an even bigger shitstorm since some parts of the extension need a ms account and depending on the company needs to be paid
Why anyone uses anything from Microsoft is beyond me... It's always been clear that VSCode is a trojan horse for MS' EEE strategy. So just don't use MS stuff. Neovim is great, it has great C++ tools. What's the saying? Fool me once...
People on this site will never ever learn that if a company (especially a profitable one) invests into something and then gives it away for free, there must be some kind of strings attached.
Imagine Debian banning Debian forks downloading from their repos…
If Microsoft are going to call VS Code “open source”, then the marketplace should not be selective on clients. If so, it’s not Open Source, it’s Sparkling Virtue Signalling!
I don't see why they'd need to make the marketplace fully open for their client to be open source. Fedora packages a Flatpak client that downloads proprietary software, but that doesn't make Fedora Sparkling Virtue Signalling.
Hell, Debian's repository now also include proprietary code (https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003) so binary BLOBs are perfectly capable of doing distro checks and refusing to run on forks.
Shitty move (as expected from Microsoft) but I don't see the bigger issue. The beauty of open source is that you can always roll back to a version that did work. Of course continued developement and support from there on is your problem, but Microsoft never owed that to you anyways. Cursor, Codium and all the other VS Code forks have unlimited VC funding and are worth tens of billions of dollars combined. They can afford to contribute back to the ecosystem.
The C/C++ extension isn't open source though, and that's where the "doesn't work on forks" DRM is implemented. At least the clangd extension is open source and is a viable alternative.
But what happens when you anger the wizards? Some guy gets 4 two liter bottles of Mt Dew, and in a weekend comes up with a better plugin, and open sources it. Look it up on Monday. I just went from VSCode 1.52 to 1.99, and it's not pretty, but... Can someone convince copilot to rat out it's owners and write out a extension that runs cLisp? And all the emacs code runs in VSCode? ( I am saying this so facietously... ).
To be clear, I'm don't like the Microsoft has a proprietary Marketplace, but a company openly violating the terms of use for their own profit is a bit much in my opinion.
> Cursor allegedly has been flouting Microsoft terms-of-service rules for some time now by setting up a reverse proxy to mask its network requests to the endpoints used by the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace. This allows Cursor users to install VS Code extensions from Microsoft's market. Other VS Code forks tend to point to Open VSX, an alternative extension marketplace.
Terms of service often contain illegal provisions. I teach kids to flout them too. One of the biggest sins in school is kids learn to follow rules uncritically.
There are specific protections allowed when the goal is to maintain / break compatibility. If Microsoft locks competitors out, competitors are quite often permitted to pick the lock.
I can't comment on this situation since I don't know the details, but it's very likely this is fully legal.
See Oracle / Java API lawsuit, garage door opener suit, etc. To see where the lines sit.
cursor also hijacks the 'code' alias to start vscode from the cli, which I use a lot. It's extremely annoying to have cursor start instead and unnncessarily difficult to get rid of. I removed cursor because of this.
I'm pretty sure that was an option when installing, I remember unchecking it and 'code' still launches vscode for me. Curious how it's difficult to remove, I'd expect something like rm `which code` to do it. Unless they add the alias to your shell or something?
maybe they changed some things last I used it, which was maybe six months ago. I've tried cursor twice and had the same issue each time. I saw the dialogue you were talking about and specifically selected to not override the code extension and it happened again anyway. Maybe there was something left over from the previous install, I don't know.
I was using windows and wsl, and they were adding scripts to my profile directory (code.cmd) which then took precedence over vscode, from what I remember. Tracking that down required googling to discover other people who were having the same issue. If this is what I have to do when I first start using a product, it just leaves a bad impression. Additionally it seems that it will hijack the 'code' alias in WSL if you select this option or not, which is where I primarily use it. And then when cursor updates, it seems it will again attempt to overwrite this alias.
I'm not the only one who encounters this issue https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/2654 https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/2566 https://forum.cursor.com/t/do-not-hijack-code-shortcut/60671 https://namvu.net/2025/01/cursor-stole-your-code-command-her...
Maybe it works great for other people and they never encounter this issue. Maybe it seems like a petty thing. For me it seems it's implemented to attempt to 'force convert' some vscode users to use cursor all the time, and maybe that works and it's a success from a business perspective. But I won't use it again.
Ouch, that does sound painful. I've only ever used it on Linux and Mac which work similar enough that if it did override it, it would be a mild annoyance at best.
I don't know windows + wsl enough that I'm sure I would've been caught out by that and pissed off as well.
"code" is way too generic for a single program to claim exclusive rights to it.
maybe, but their product is basically a reskinned version of that single program, it seems pretty clear they know what they are doing here.
if i remember correctly, on my first start of cursor, it explicitly asked if it was allowed to do this.
Yeah, I've noticed this using cursor. I was surprised that the extension marketplace seemed... identical to VS Code.
But why should we care? It's obvious Cursor's IDE is VSCode, I cannot think of a single reason why I should be against executing whatever the hell I want on my computer. It's not Cursor doing this, it's me doing this using Cursor.
That’s not how companies see it.
From MS point of view it’s Cursor doing it to them.
The way copyright and other rights to your IP you claim to have work in practice, is you need to enforce those claims or loose the rights.
> The way copyright and other rights to your IP you claim to have work in practice, is you need to enforce those claims or loose the rights.
Generally only applies to trademarks, not copyrights. In most English speaking countries copyright is a proprietary right and you don't lose it if you don't actively enforce it. But there could be time limits to a plaintiff bringing a civil case to court (usually a couple years).
No copyright alone afaik stops anyone from abusing said rights unless you tell them to stop.
Would be happy to have counterexamples.
Another way copyright has worked for decades is qBittorrent for instance, is not responsible for infringements by users. Along with massive carve-outs for Microsoft and the gang to avoid that responsibility too, on GitHub and YouTube and many other websites.
The Cursor founders (technically the company is called Anysphere, Inc) are all young MIT grads. What they needed is a 40-year-old with a degree from Fitchburg State who could say "Woah, don't do that! It's not worth the long-term risk!"
It is worth the long term risk.
Either you don't get caught and can move faster, or you get caught and the penalty is usually small and a long way down the line, by which time your company will have either folded or grown enough to pay without difficulty.
That's the play when your adversary is regulation--the government moves slowly, court cases move even slower, and you can grease the wheels politically.
That is not the scenario here. Cursor is being hunted by an extremely motivated corporate competitor. Cursor has been leeching the gorilla's blood and the gorilla finally noticed. Microsoft doesn't (necessarily) need the law here. They have it if they need it, but they can kill Cursor without needing to sue them. The disastrous outcome isn't a penalty--it's a critical mass of users switching to Copilot because they can't use their Microsoft extensions in Cursor any more. Cutting off the extensions on the same day that their Cursor clone went live was effectively a declaration of war from Microsoft.
It's possible but I think this is a bit of a non-issue for cursor. Microsoft extensions are pretty good but are not irreplacable, and in the meantime cursor has grown astronomically fast and has grabbed a ton of "AI Coding" mindshare. I think the gamble has already paid off for them: if they have to play nice with licensing and develop their own solutions to replace MS proprietary extensions, they now have the scale to do that. GH Copilot was first in the game but now has the reputation of the poor man's cursor.
I don't know anyone that even knows Cursor exists, outside HN readership bubble.
What cursor clone?
Agent mode in Copilot. It all went down on April 4th: the rollout of agent mode to all users, and the sudden enforcement of the license in their C++ extension.
Or, hear me out, Microsoft decides you’d make excellent additions its House of Faces For IDE/Compiler Competitors and your face is on the wall before you know what happened.
Grow fast, raise a few billions, deal with the lawsuit in a few years.
Grow fast, raise a few billions, deal with the lawsuit in a few years when you're big enough to buy lobbyists in Washingon DC.
I have lost the hope. Money is always the measure of ethics.
The amount of Boston in this comment is amazing. And 100% true
Exactly. What were they expecting would happen? They are breaking the tos while competing with Microsoft.
exactly! laws are for old geezers who went to State, not young superstars with fancy degrees. MIT negotiated diplomatic immunity for its graduates, after all. that's why Sam Bankman-Fried got acquitted when FTX went under.
lol, Microsoft has been doing this kind of thing for a while...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Antitrust
While its fair to claim Microsoft has legal issues, I'm not sure what similarity you are drawing to what Cursor is doing.
It's what is motivating Microsoft to prevent what Cursor is doing.
All cursor is doing is saying this blob of crap is compatible with their fork and letting you run it. This is akin to browsers supporting extensions from other browsers, and many other scenarios.
What Microsoft is doing is trying to prevent VSCode from becoming spontaneously obsolete because coding with Cursor a) removes you from VSCode and b) does it better.
Am I the only person using tmux+vim+cscope+bash+gcc as a development environment? I do not see the need for these GUIs. I also can develop software from just about anywhere as I only need to SSH into a machine with these things (+git) installed. There are no hostile license terms either.
That said, if you must use a GUI based development environment, I know of people happily using netbeans. I am not sure why anyone would use Microsoft’s tools for this.
Look, if you willingly have any piece of your stack relying on Microsoft you have to be ready for the rug pull. They WILL fuck you, it's guaranteed.
Lucky no-one is reliant on niche tools like NPM or GitHub, otherwise they'd be feeling mightily insecure right now.
Or ChatGPT… maybe not their development but that is who runs it.
Now, I get why you made the quip, but I for one keep both of those out of the business I run for this exact reason: I do not trust MICROS~1 in the medium to long term.
I also present the CEO and board with other arguments, like moral ones about involvement in atrocities and tyranny, legal ones regarding things like data protection, market related ones such as the likelihood of a future showdown between the EU and US.
But the risk that MICROS~1 fucks us over directly is even easier for them to understand, because they have been using Windows and Office for decades and are quite queasy about 10 going EOL and what the next set of annoyances in document management will be that they'll have to suffer under. It's something they have immediate experience of and didn't like.
A year from now it's probable we'll only have a couple of Windows machines left, because some of our customers use software that doesn't run under Wine and tries to block execution under both debuggers and container environments.
I don't like to be seen as defending Microsoft, they definitely have their share of faults, but as far as business goes, I think Microsoft is the least likely company to screw you over as a (business) customer. Microsoft has kept old software working pretty much unchanged for the last 20 years. I know, I still have software built on early Windows 95/NT4 that works fine on Windows 11...and with some registry tweaks Windows 11 will run on a computer from 2005 without too many issues (sure, 3rd party security software and js-heavy web pages will be slow but that is not directly MS fault). Windows 10 EOL in 2025 is only for consumer level stuff, you can get Windows 10 support for enterprise for another 2 years at least and some versions even up to 2029, so again, if you are a business, you are taken care of (if you are "cheaping" you way with Windows Home and Pro in business then you kind of get what you pay for, I am sure you as a business don't give away free products/services for years on end). And you can keep using your Windows 10 after EOL, not like they lock you out, they just don't support you...just like you don't repair stuff for free after warranty end. Compare that to any other tech company that churns through HW and SW much faster and much more severely where old HW and SW no longer works or cannot connect to the internet or use the latest browser so you cannot connect to the latest HTTPS servers. Even open source software breaks compatibilty with older versions much more oftern than Microsoft, but since that is "free" people just shrug it off.
Microsoft's primary business is software running on Microsoft platforms. In the past that was Windows, nowadays it's also Azure.
That famous "developers developers developers" video with Steve Ballmer was a prime example of that corporate ethos.
For most other giant companies in tech, either the primary business is selling a product (and killing competitors) or giving products away as loss leaders and making bank on advertisement
We're building the business, i.e. setting the foundations we expect to stand on for decades to come. Enterprise license that might be possible to extend into the medium term isn't good enough for our long term commitments and the time to adapt to an alternative family of operating systems is now.
As for stability, if you learned GUI Ubuntu twenty years ago you'll be right at home in contemporary Debian systems, while someone hopping from XP or Server 2000 into 10 or 11 would be quite confused for quite some time. Xenial (2016), Bionic (2018) and Fossa (2020) will likely get twenty years of security updates each, into the beginning of the 2030s.
I think something similar holds for the SoftMaker office suite. If you learned TextMaker twenty years ago I believe you'll be less annoyed by their 2024 release than if you learned Office 2003 and get dropped into the 365 style applications. Personally I'd use something else entirely, likely doing a roundtrip through LaTeX or straight PostScript under the hood, but it will be interesting to evaluate some MICROS~1 Office alternatives in my organisation and see what, if anything, sticks.
I don't see how it can be a rug pull when in this case it was clearly against the terms of use?
Not to quibble, but VSCode (and GitHub for that matter) are part of my tooling, not part of any of my stacks.
To me the former is tolerable, the latter is not.
I think they are talking about products like Cursor.
Ah, that’s a painful situation.
Eh MS wasn’t going to just let VSCode derivatives soak up all the AI gold rush money, these companies knew the risks. I wonder what it’s going to mean for projects like Zig, a migration of VSCode refugees could crank things up to 11 pretty quick.
How do VSCode refugees impact a project like Zig?
I would bet they meant the editor “Zed”.
Zed don't have many extensions like VSCode.
[dead]
Don't build castles in other people's kingdoms, apparently a lesson that keeps being relearnt.
Then it's hard to build anything.
Why should it be easy to start with?
Hardly anything is given for free in this life, it has to be earned.
It took them five years to actually take action on enforcing their ToS. It's not as much of a rug pull as it's the result of their competitors blatantly ignoring the license on proprietary code from a proprietary code giant.
Unless the developers of the IDEs hit by this never actually read the ToS, of course, which would only make them less reliable as an IDE provider.
It's hard not to rely on Microsoft.
Open source project hosted on GitHub, for the network effect.
Use Rust which also rely on GitHub for crates.io
Yep. Was a Microsoft dev from 1992 until 2017. Won’t touch them now because I spent my entire career rewriting rug pulls. It paid off a mortgage and fed me well but it was a bad outcome for my orgs and customers.
If anyone remembers WCF/AppFabric/WWF and Silverlight, that was the last stack I rewrote someone out of the shit on.
There was a lot of hype and momentum around Silverlight back in the day, until their wasn't. You got a cross-platform (Mac/Windows) WPF-like UI and C# programming environment, which was powerful.
I had the fortune to be involved developing the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming software. Under the hood, it was a small web browser shell (using Mono on Mac and WPF on Windows) around a Silverlight Out-of-Browser app. Anything beyond the permissions of the Silverlight app (e.g. bluetooth/USB comms) was an RPC from Silverlight to the shell.
After completing the Mac/Windows app, LEGO wanted to deliver a similar experience on iPad. There was no Silverlight there, and it was clear there never would be. But we were able to leverage Xamarin stuff to reuse most of the same codebase, just with an iOS UI on top.
There was a hot minute (and it was about a minute!) where Silverlight was absolutely phenomenal.
Too bad “every app is just a website” took over because of the cross-platform issues.
By chance, do you happen to know if the Mindstorms NXT (the old one, before EV3) software was based on the same toolkit? I always wondered what UI framework it used, it had an unusual look.
Funnily enough, those ancient WPF, WinForms, and even MFC apps still compile and work fine. The rug pull only became the standard operating procedure at a certain point.
I started my career rewriting a product using Microsoft's DNA business server with Java and never looked back. I'm shocked this keeps happening, honestly. I guess I'm a "never again" sort but surprised there's not more companies refusing to deal with Microsoft.
Due to experiences like that I refused to buy volume licenses from them, too. Sometime later I got an audit demand for which I had a reply ready.
"lol, no."
Sorry if I'm being dense, but what is an "audit demand?" (Looked it up and couldn't find anything obviously relevant.)
An Enterprise customer of Microsoft agrees to be audited by MS. In exchange they pay a certain amount for effectively “unlimited use” of the appropriate software. In the past this meant volume license keys that would always activate; wouldn’t count how many devices, etc.
And MS audit would check that what you reported was what you had. And could result in big increases in contract pricing.
Now that everything is cloud this and 365 that I don’t know how much it applies anymore - everything is dynamic and traceable.
Famously in the early 2000s it was a huge issue for “medium” businesses who had used enterprise-style licensing. Tiny and small businesses just bought normal computers and software and would often escape notice.
I think he refers to Microsoft auditing a business' licence compliance. Have you aquired the correct amount of licenses for all the instances you are running and accessing. Microsoft licensing is so insanely complex that even if you ask 2 MS sales reps what licenses you need to cover a certain scenario, you will get a different answer each time. This is also why an audit almost 100% results in finding non-compliance.
https://www.npifinancial.com/smartspend-bulletins/the-anatom...
I’m still dealing with the long goodbye of a silverlight app which now must be somehow ported.
Anything that’s not gpl-licensed is going to pull the rug from under your feet, people should have learned this by now.
Also, if you do open source contributions, never ever agree to assign copyright to the project: doing so means the project owners can relicense the code base, even towards proprietary license.
FreeBSD must be pulling a very long con, then.
Yeah.
I think project governance matters more than license, and the BSDs are great examples.
Having said that, I’ve soured on the GPL. V3 more-or-less bans companies from selling you hardware that runs free software, but lets Google, Meta, etc use the software to expand their cloud-based monopolies where surveillance capitalism and enshittification have won out.
AGPL or BSL seem much better if you want free as in freedom. BSD and Apache at least don’t force your software off of machines that end users control.
Yes, BSL is not open (TM) or free (TM) or whatever. It’s still better IMHO, since it at least has some path to revenue for the developers.
Uh, yes?
Half of the initial mac os x kernel was ripped off freebsd, giving pretty much nothing back.
Afaik netapp is also basing their system on bsd.
Sony uses freebsd as the OS for their playstation.
And many more, giving essentially nothing back.
> Half of the initial mac os x kernel was ripped off freebsd, giving pretty much nothing back.
That is open source.
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
Regarding apple: They support cups and clang, and stuff like swift and webkit. Also, the darwin kernel is open source.
I’d be shocked if netapp hard forked bsd and doesn’t upstream fixes.
They support the version of cups that nobody uses anymore, except themselves.
Absolutely. I signed one copyright assignment, ever, with the FSF. I trust them enough to do that, but they're just about the only ones.
They don't require it anymore.
Better yet.
Then they will gaslight you.
The intellisense from clangd is much better and faster than the Microsoft C++ extension, if you can set up a compile_commands.json. Although debugging still relies on the Microsoft extension. Although I don't think it's going to be hard to create an extension just for debugging (if it does not already exist?)
Yes, even on medium sized code bases (few 100K lines), the Microsoft C++ extension gets extremely slow. Clangd is a much better option.
I've had the opposite experience with weird C++ projects from some customers that use external toolchains. For some reason even creating the compile_commands.json file with Bear doesn't work, while the proprietary Intellisense extension works out of the box without any configuration.
Not just faster, I have never been able to get jump to declaration/definition/references to work reliably without clangd.
Lldb and rr (midas) have vscode extensions
And this is why I'm using Zed today. I'm deadly serious. I was a huge proponent of VSCode at first but I've soured on it, and now I don't want my workflow to depend on it in any way.
Awesome software, but I don't trust the upstream org further than I must.
I actually worked on VSCode (Python support specifically) at Microsoft in the past, and seeing this kind of thing frustrates me to no end.
The worst part is all the VSCode is still promoted to developers as open source, even though official extensions increasingly aren't, with bits and pieces gradually replaced with closed code. It's not that closed source is necessarily bad, but when F/OSS popularity is milked for marketing purposes while stuff like this happens, it just feels very wrong. If you want to be closed source for reasons, fine, but be honest and upfront about it.
Zed is nice but I still prefer vs codes configuration scheme. Was working on a web/frontend project a while ago and had honestly a very hard time to set up Zed to do everything from formatting to linting and syntax highlighting correctly. Meanwhile in vscode I had to install 3 extensions, enable them for the workspace and they were already aware of each other and seamlessly worked together.
I also think it's a mixed opportunity not to allow for something like Lua or a Lisp to configure Zed in. It's very promising but I'm not willing to switch just yet.
I’ve just installed Zed based on your recommendation and I’m already impressed.
It’s fast, the interface is distraction free and it already has support for all the languages I use regularly. Even Terraform support, which is notoriously hard to get right, is better than the current “best” in VSCode.
Thanks for the recommendation
Even better: Theia.
It supports most vscode extensions right out of the box.
https://theia-ide.org/
Does Zed have a comparable C++ extension?
Zed uses tree-sitter and LSP; most popular languages do not require extensions, and extensions for niche languages are shockingly easy to write. Literally 100-300 lines of Rust boilerplate and around 300 lines of config boilerplate, with minimal maintenance/upkeep.
https://zed.dev/docs/languages/cpp
Many words to state that it doesn't.
No idea why they worded it the way they did. But the answer is: yes, Zed has something comparable, using clangd as a C and C++ LSP server.
Many words to explain that it doesn't need one, as you can see by clicking that link.
zed is veerrrry good. i really appreciate the clean ui compared to vscode and its ilk. don’t love the pricing they just announced though. i don’t mind paying for my tools, but it not being unlimited scares me off slightly.
I think it's totally fair for them to charge for an optional feature that requires a cloud service. And if you don't like their pricing you can use a different provider, including self-hosted ones.
Agreed, but at least that's an optional feature you can choose to pay for if you want to. And if that changes, I'll drop it and head back to a Free editor.
Reminds when I excited to see Azure Data Studio adding Postgres support, but it was actually a binary extension with no ability to fix or change anything and no way for other useful databases to extend and use the functionality; they had spent all the time and effort to make sure nobody could do something like it but them.
Weird, ADS is dead and nobody spent any time on it, I wonder why.
So how do you get intellisense and debug C++ in Zed?
clangd is an LSP. You can use it in any editor with LSP support https://clangd.llvm.org/
Why isn't Cursor using this by default then?
I don't think MSVC provides an LSP, so the VSC C++ extension uses proprietary Intellisense features instead. LLVM provides their own extension to use the clangd LSP: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=llvm-vs-...
In short: Corporate politics and the Cursor team taking the path of least resistance.
There's a great doc on exactly how Zed handles syntax and intellisense-style completions: https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-languages
Debugging isn't in yet, but is actively being worked on and planned for public release before 1.0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065, there's an active channel in their Discord discussing the development of the feature.
That first link doesn’t really explain anything about syntax/autocomplete. It’s just about config options per language (formatted, linter, lsp) but I guess I was expecting something else?
It explains it in clear terms:
"""
Zed's language support is built on two main technologies:
These components work together to provide Zed's language capabilities."""
Note this is _not_ how VSC's C++ Intellisense works. The VSC C++ plugin uses proprietary features of MSVC, it doesn't use LSP.
Will they use DAP?
My understanding is that DAP support is merged into their internal builds and is being polished up for a public release.
Zed uses open-source language servers. It just doesn't rely on proprietary extensions.
I actually worked a bunch on the language server logic in Zed trying to get a bunch of it to work on Windows. All I have to say about that is: ugh.
Still using VSCode, but you kind of know that's it's going to go sour eventually. It is Microsoft. :/
I figure e.g. emacs will always be there when that happens.
All I need is a Github Copilot clone and a good code search feature.
Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.
Oh and the ssh remote extension.
> All I need is a Github Copilot clone
I'm using https://github.com/copilot-emacs/copilot.el
> good code search feature.
project-find-regexp is a nice start.
> Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.
(global-auto-revert-mode t)
> Oh and the ssh remote extension.
I haven't compared it to Tramp.
> All I need is a Github Copilot clone
or you could just use copilot through copilot.el
> and a good code search feature.
Like through helm or ivy?
> Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.
My emacs does that, and I don't think I did anything special to get it.
> Oh and the ssh remote extension.
like tramp?
Many of us are perfectly fine with commercial software, we have been into the other side and got tired of the religion.
I think a lot of people don't have a problem with commercial software, but rather with the disingenuous behavior that some companies display.
VSCode was/is often touted as open source and Microsoft are using it to present themselves as community loving until MS sees an opportunity to extract some money/hinder the competition.
In comparison, Jetbrains is transparent with their offerings and what you get. There is in my opinion a clear difference in how they operate and how they are perceived.
You mean transparent like the way they added AI to their products?
Emacs user here, have used vscode in the past.
Yep, vscode is more intuitive.
However emacs is mostly the kind of thing you dedicate a couple of months of discomfort and enjoy for the rest of your life. Quite literally.
Spending some money on the “mastering emacs” book (https://www.masteringemacs.org/) is worth imho.
Bonus point: little by little you start enjoying doing more stuff in emacs. It’s a meme, but it’s true.
I second all this. I'm using Zed today, but I was using Emacs for 20 years, then Sublime/VSCode/etc. for a few, and now Zed. If it disappears, I'm going right back to Emacs without a moment's hesitation.
And "Mastering Emacs" is brilliant.
And with copilot.el you get access to all models, not just some. I'm using Claude
I dedicated my time between 1995 and 2005 as my main UNIX editor, and don't miss installing Emacs.
It’s gotten way more ergonomic, BTW. Even if you treat it as a toolkit to build your own editor, the building blocks are much nicer than they were back then.
Thing is, I don't want to build my editor, I want to live the dream of Xerox PARC workstations, and that is what IDEs are for.
I had to make Emacs my go to editor in UNIX, because in those days there were hardly any alternatives, IDEs only started to be taken seriously on UNIX around 2000.
Even James Gosling, one of influencial people in the Emacs history says its time is now passed and he rather use Netbeans,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Q39MuTvk
Speaking of old obsolete versions of Gosling Emacs, Lars Brinkhoff just posted this source code for UniPress Emacs 2.20 he got from from Hans Hübner! That's the version we called NeMACS, with support for NeWS (Gosling's PostScript based window system), tabbed windows and pie menus, etc:
https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/tree/sources/...
So the answer to DVRC's ("Adopter of orphaned technologies") question on June 3, 2023, is yes, finally!
HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166642
DonHopkins on June 2, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs
UniPress Emacs for NeWS in 1988: Scriptable GUI, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring tool for HyperTIES browser.
Emacs served as an IDE with tabbed window and pie menus, for interactively editing, viewing, and navigating HyperTIES markup language documents, graphics, and interactive PostScript "applets".
HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...
>HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.)
Emacs provides the pie menus you see popped up in the illustration (Articulate, Edit, New (Storyboard, Link, Picture, Target), Define) that control the HyperTIES browser from the custom text editing mode of HyperTIES storyboards (like web pages), which the HyperTIES browser (in the background, which emacs controls in a sub-process) formats and displays. HyperTIES also uses pie menus for navigation and in interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript.
DVRC on June 3, 2023 [–]
Do any version of UniPress Emacs (that support the NeWS driver) or NeMacs survive?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989423
I wrote the following description of how NeWS relates to modern web browsers and "AJAX" in the NeWS article on Wikipedia, and I also worked on TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) at Sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
>NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:
>- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.
>- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.
>- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.
[...]
HyperTIES Emacs Authoring Tool MockLisp code (Yet Another HyperTIES Implementation, This Time In Emacs):
http://donhopkins.com/home/ties/yahtittie.ml
https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/
HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
I'm something of a vim fanatic because Emacs was sluggish, but these days have to admit that the multicore support turned out fine and the difference isn't that big anymore.
Uh, not only that. I recently updated from emacs 29 to emacs 30 where native compilation is enabled by default and it’s much much faster. Like, noticeably faster.
Ah, nice. Definitely time for me to carve out a few hours and try it out again, then.
Who knows, maybe I'll have closed the circle in a year and gone back to Emacs full time, where I started off in the editor wars a quarter of a century ago.
I spent 25 years using emacs before vscode (1997 to 2022-ish). I didn't go deep, I mostly just enjoyed the core parts of emacs + ccmode. I don't enjoy LISP but I still enjoy emacs, if that makes any sense.
MS made some very real and very usable innovations. Emacs hackers/maintainers would be wise to copy them, like I'm sure Microsoft copied things from emacs.
It's a bit like the UI aspect of the browser wars. Everyone wins when good things are cloned and then iteratively improved upon.
What are the ways that VScode is better than Emacs?
vscode does three things extremely well: defaults, defaults and defaults. The most important ‘you just need M-x do-whatever after installing the whatever-doer package’ is supported out of the box (no details on purpose, try running emacs or vim without any config and compare to a clean fresh install of vscode).
I listed my favorites above.
Generalizing it: Having smart people who really understand UX helps a lot with minimizing those months of pain before the payoff.
You're almost describing Zed to a T.
vscode find in files is literally ripgrep FYI.
Warning, though: the older you get, the harder it will be to learn emacs. The best time to learn it is yesterday. The second best is today.
I love Cursor deeply but choosing to be a VSCode fork instead of a VSCode extension was a fatal choice. In the long term I think they either have to retool as an extension or they will go out of business. You can only publicly flout Microsoft's licenses for so long while making a competitor to one of their AAA products.
They are reselling an editor they did not make with a small extension that uses AI models they do not make.
I don't think they'll survive very long as it seems that they don't actually have that many things that differentiate them. And there is a lot of competition.
Apparently VSCode doesn't allow extensions to do the same amount of integration as the Cursor people want...
Extensions aren't sandboxed... You can literally do anything.
Maybe against the store rules tho, dunno.
They wouldn’t take off if they weren’t a vscode fork. They may die a heroic death now having kickstarted the proper AI IDE. (Copilot was first and it was… nice? then it sucked so bad everyone jumped ship, remember? MS needed that kick in the balls.)
Eh, I mean it's a fork. They can keep updating their fork forever. Reality is they want complete control over the product, and VS Code doesn't expose everything in the extension API.
Sure, but they depend on a bunch of Microsoft proprietary extensions (that they can't fork) that ban usage in VSCode forks, and they knew this when they made the choice. This was an inevitable outcome from Microsoft's side. I'm sure they want to remain in business more than they want complete control over the product.
> they depend on a bunch of Microsoft proprietary extensions
Microsoft still holds the crown when it comes to C# debugging, but for most proprietary MS extensions there are free, open source alternatives. They may not be as polished as the ones Microsoft actually pays people to maintain, but I don't see why Cursor would actually depend on any of the proprietary ones if you're not using it for C# dev (and even there competitors like Jetbrains have figured out a way to make it work).
And hopefully Cursor can give some funding to the FOSS alternatives
Do you guys ever feel tired of 'sounding the alarm'?
I feel like I've been doing that for years on a wide range of topics, but every time it's like you're talking to cult members.
How do you break through to people? People say things like "you're overthinking it", "that's never going to happen", "I don't care because I like using VSCode and not alternatives".
Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
What's the problem for people who just use VSCode, exactly? The software still does what people want for free, which is what 99% of VS Code users use the software for anyway. People who care about open source-ness have their own extensions to replace their proprietary C++ tooling, or they can use an open source alternative like Eclipse.
I remember when basic features that come for free in VS Code cost thousands of dollars per developer, back when "update" meant "buy the new version (again)". I swear, people forgot how good they have it.
The change that made the Microsoft addon incompatible with VS Code forks happened four years ago.
For people who see VS Code as just a decent gratis text editor, there's no problem.
For people who care, to some degree, about using an open source tool, for whom the marketing that VS Code is open source played a role in their choice of using it, it should matter. And it matters that other projects (think Platform IO and more) choose VS Code as a platform to build on top of, and they get away with it because "it's open source".
Then people should stop caring about open source, care about free software instead, and do not forget that it is free-as-in-freedom, so they should still pay for their tools.
Otherwise keep hoping that your corporate or VC funded SaaS "disruptor" master will continue to be nice to you
Man, it is just a code editor.
Tech bubble remains tech bubble, when common, non-tech people are much more screwed, yet nothing is being done except saying "lol, just install Linux".
That's what "word to the wise" means -- you can't tell most people __anything__.
The opening of Proverbs has:
1:5. Let the wise hear and increase in learning[...]
I just use the OSS vs code builds at home. (Work uses vscode).
Ever since I got remote mode working, I haven’t noticed any missing functionality I care about. (I also haven’t tried installing extensions for the pile of commercial services work uses, and that I wouldn’t pay for anyway.)
Edit: Since cursor now has near infinite VC money, perhaps they should fund a few open source devs to work on those forks. Why should they get a free ride?
It's tradeoffs all the way down. VSCode remains one of the best intro editors, because it's free, has next to zero learning curve, and a robust extension ecosystem. I mean, what even is the argument here? That it's not completely open in every possible way? Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?
> Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?
Me, personally? No, because they're honest about it. I use BBEdit and Nova frequently on my Mac. Those are as closed source as it gets. They never pretend otherwise, though. You pay your money and you know what you're getting. VSCode tries really hard to appear to be open source, as long as you're willing to ignore the million places where they aren't. (Python devs: are you using PyLance? I'm talking to you.)
And ironically, those closed editors seem to play more nicely with the ecosystem as a whole. Neither BBEdit nor Nova have ever tried to talk me into installing closed plugins, and the same plugins that work with them work great in Emacs and Zed.
If I go to one bar that charged $5 per beer, and another that gives free beer but makes you rent single-use mugs for $5, even though the end price is identical, the rental bar's going to annoy me horrendously. Just admit what it is and let people judge on their own merits.
I think the problem with "sounding the alarm" is that it's not a tsunami that will immediately wipe out everything, it's more of a slow flood. The business strategy is boiling the frog.
I’ve just lost all hope and have rock bottom expectations. Probably not the healthiest coping mechanism.
Meh. If it does eventually go away, it wouldn't be the first time I've switched editors. Which turns out to not actually be all that hard to do.
> Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
What collective problem, that someone might have to unexpectedly burn a weekend writing a new editor? That {emacs|vim} isn't popular enough? That people might have to go install openjdk in order to start using eclipse?
I think ultimately we're mostly just not as clever as we think we are, which I think unfortunately we must accept.
Where this has become increasingly problematic is rampant materialism and corporatism.
If the only real motivator in town, especially for the powerful, is material gain then there is nothing to constrain wanton greed. This becomes even more pronounced with corporations because their overtly stated purpose is not but greed, so even if the individual actors have some transcend moral compass they will be in conflict to their programmed imperative to "do their job".
Currently many of the powerful are materialistic and materialism can bring worldly power. Other political paradigms may come to the fore but as it takes a form and gravity it will likely come into some dialectic conflict with the prevailing materialistic status quo. That may be a peaceful resolution, but I'd not be certain of that.
And when it turns out you were right the whole time they will pretend no one saw it coming and blame you for the problem.
You just have to let go of things you have no real influence over.
People not using VSCode on purpose, based on forks, are surprised product owner isn't happy with their license violations.
It is like when the same folks act surprised, after Google does something to their Chrome and Android forks.
Don't want big tech sponsored products?
Pay open source developers, so that they can actually make a living of their work.
Good to see some of these neural network people actually pay for their real infractions. Granted, this time it was a banal competitor action, but still nice. Just because a license isn't enforced, doesn't make it safe to violate.
The clangd extension is better anyway, and is open source.
The Microsoft C++ extension is not open source; not sure what people were expecting here.
It's one thing for it to not be open source.
It's another thing for its license to explicitly prohibit its use with any other IDE, even if it's API-compatible, even if it's literally exactly VSCode recompiled with another name.
And it's yet another thing to proactively insert checks for that.
This is one of the reasons why I switched to CLion for C++ work, and the fact that VS Code and its derivatives was a pain to configure for C++.
I also use PHPStorm for web dev work and we use MS DevOps at work and that extension is unstable, causes IDE errors for me and I will not use MS products just for this one irksome bug. I prefer PHPStorm for my work, because working with PHP in VS Code has never been a great experience for me. I just want my tools to work, I fight with code, I don't want to fight with my tools as well.
I did give CLion a try when looking for an editor, but last I checked CLion required you to use CMake. Also, JetBrains has it all split up between different IDEs. I need on e that supports C, C++, Python, Cython, Makefile, TypeScript, SCSS, XHTML, Shellscript, JSON and XML in the same program. I also need a program that can do CMake and C, and a program that can do C# (including project management, building, tests etc), Batch script, PowerShell, Shellscript, Cake and YAML, preferably with the same UI. And it needs to work on Linux. VSCode is the only one I've found that can handle that.
I can also second the usage PHPStorm over VSCode for PHP work. On a team of 10 PHP devs we have just one that prefers VSCode.
> This is one of the reasons why I switched to CLion for C++ work
So jetbrains allows everyone to use their marketplace and their plugins outside their ides?
I can download the jetbrains php extension add it to my own shell and not pay for it?
I don't like MS, either. BUT, let's be clear. No one is to obligated to work for free on OSS, not even big companies like MS. They have the right to constraint them to work on their own platforms. If you don't like it, you should fork the previous unconstrained versions or develop your own C/C++ add-on rather than complaining that MS stopped supporting your favorite extension.
"It's not illegal for them to do this bad thing" is such a common defense of companies doing bad things, as if it was the legality and not the ethics that was being discussed. I don't get it.
If Microsoft is gonna keep trying to enshitty their apps with unmasked for AI pop-ups that will always come back and even go so far to throw ads in at an OS level: yes, I will feel at least a bit entitled to some "free work" for taking hours of my time.
I sure do wish my industry didn't need windows. I'd happily go to Linux and never look back.
The Microsoft Intellisense is really bad compared to the open-source one clangd, anyway.
After Pylance, Liveshare, and remote development (which among the others also includes dev containers support) I’m not really that surprised.
At least I know one alternative that is on bar (even better according to some people) for the C++ MS extension. What I am worried more about is the Jupyter Notebook MS extensions. I cannot find a suitable alternative and sometimes I am not being able to use it on windsurf/VSCodium (manually installing vsix). I am surprised by that taking into consideration how Jupyter notebooks relevance in data science and ML.
This is just Microsoft being classic Microsoft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
Abandon VSCodium, Return to Emacs
I don't understand the problem. It sounds like the C/C++ extension was proprietary. This sort of thing can always happen when you rely on proprietary software. Make an open source C/C++ extension and you wouldn't have this problem.
>It sounds like the C/C++ extension was proprietary
The extension itself it MIT licensed (so could be hosted on the open VSIX store, if it wasn't down because the Eclipse project is suffering from server issues right now). In theory any fork can patch out the check and re-release the extension.
However, the extension packages some binaries that are proprietary, and have been since about four years ago. People could re-implement those and re-release an open version of the extension, but you can't just (legally) take the proprietary binaries and ship them if you don't have the license.
Open alternatives actually exist, but their quality and ease of configuration depends on your use case. In large projects the proprietary extension seems to be worse from what I've read.
Yes, that is what I thought, too. (It would be a good idea to have a open source C/C++ extension anyways, whether or not the proprietary extension stops working with non-Microsoft code.) (Maybe there is such extension; I don't know; I don't use VS Code and VS Codium etc.)
clangd, that is the extension. a lot better than the prioprietary trash microsoft pulls onto the store. open source, too.
Glad I'm using Sublime Text.
Didn’t this affect Windsurf also ?
FYI, neovim has LSP and DAP support, as well as a bunch of other editors.
Neovim is a godsend, I would be in despair without it.
I learned a bunch of Lua because of it :)
neovim is a truly beautiful piece of software that is impossible to undersell. It has made vim into a full feature complete IDE for every language finally with a good editor :P
100%. I switched to it to get true color themes support in the terminal which vim didn't have at the time, but I stayed with it because of all the extensibility for features like above.
Is this big deal? Surely with help of AI tools you can implement these extensions in matter of days if not hours. And they will be better.
I use cursor primarily because of the great tab autocomplete model, but I've always thought it was a bit scummy they blatantly violate the VS Code licensing. Windsurf ships a special version of the pyright extension for this reason. Why doesn't cursor have to play by the rules too?
Reminder: https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
> Visual Studio Code (VS Code) no longer works with derivative products such as VS Codium [..]
They seem to have this backward. Visual Studio Code is a derivative product of VS Codium.
No VS Codium is just a alternative build of Visual Studio Code.
> This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
I thought it was similar to the Chromium/Chrome situation. The naming implied that. But I don't use it and don't follow it that closely. Thanks for the clarification.
The hilarious part is that old fart C++ programmers (like me) have been the ones most leery of VS Code. Microsoft’s gonna Microsoft, ‘specially with compilers.
"Don't be paranoid", they said.
"That's ancient history", they said.
"Lucy will hold the football this time for sure", they said.
What do you prefer to VSCode? Just started a job where I’ll be working in C++ and looking for alternatives
Not the parent, but for C++ I like QtCreator.
CLion or Visual Studio.
Well, VisualStudio for one. If you’re targeting Windows, you should consider it. VS Code feels slow to me in a way VS doesn’t.
I spent most of the past ~fifteen years working in Sublime and just switched between that and the terminal for build and test—not fancy, but then, C++ coding isn’t a speedrun. Sublime is clean, fast, and portable.
However, dev tooling has advanced so much now that I started learning and using neovim last year so I could take advantage of good syntax highlighting, LSP, and CoPilot. I don’t get enough daily reps to be good at core vi yet (I am a team manager so most of my time is spent asking questions of devs prefixed with “This is a really dumb question, but”) but despite all the techbros who’ve flocked to it I think neovim is pretty good technology and responsive. You can get the tooling features but control UI/UX; for me, I want as much code on the screen as possible, and I especially resent widgets that eat into vertical space. I started with one of the off-the-shelf all-in-one init.lua configs off github, but it was too complicated and I quickly broke things. What’s worked better is going through a video series on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHTeCSVAFNY&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN...) and building up the init.lua I want from scratch. As noted, I’m not great with it, especially the normal vim motions, but I’ve learned to get around, it’s fast, I can see my code without a million distracting widgets, and I get the benefit of clangd and CoPilot.
I have almost the exact same opinion. In that I hate distracting widgets and things that eat vertical space. I spent about a week getting nvim setup. I write code all day. I still have VSCode day to day because I'm so used to it/fast with it (I use vim motions within it).
But to me the appeal of nvim is being able to fully remove everything I dislike.
How is it not open-source?
It's licensed under MIT + VS Marketplace Terms: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools?tab=License-1-o...
If you fork it and don't use VS Marketplace, it's only MIT. Or am I missing something?
You missed that the ‚binary‘ vsix file has a different license: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-vscode.cpptool...
(The license like that existed before cursor, it was basically the reason for vscodium)
(Source is https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod... the license link at the bottom)
The same problem with the c# extension, which has had an even bigger shitstorm since some parts of the extension need a ms account and depending on the company needs to be paid
Also Python.
I guess it's the "additional binaries" which are not included.. but that's a guess, we need someone to confirm.
Good. Now it's time to learn from this important lesson.
Why anyone uses anything from Microsoft is beyond me... It's always been clear that VSCode is a trojan horse for MS' EEE strategy. So just don't use MS stuff. Neovim is great, it has great C++ tools. What's the saying? Fool me once...
People on this site will never ever learn that if a company (especially a profitable one) invests into something and then gives it away for free, there must be some kind of strings attached.
Imagine Debian banning Debian forks downloading from their repos…
If Microsoft are going to call VS Code “open source”, then the marketplace should not be selective on clients. If so, it’s not Open Source, it’s Sparkling Virtue Signalling!
I don't see why they'd need to make the marketplace fully open for their client to be open source. Fedora packages a Flatpak client that downloads proprietary software, but that doesn't make Fedora Sparkling Virtue Signalling.
Hell, Debian's repository now also include proprietary code (https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003) so binary BLOBs are perfectly capable of doing distro checks and refusing to run on forks.
lol
Shitty move (as expected from Microsoft) but I don't see the bigger issue. The beauty of open source is that you can always roll back to a version that did work. Of course continued developement and support from there on is your problem, but Microsoft never owed that to you anyways. Cursor, Codium and all the other VS Code forks have unlimited VC funding and are worth tens of billions of dollars combined. They can afford to contribute back to the ecosystem.
The C/C++ extension isn't open source though, and that's where the "doesn't work on forks" DRM is implemented. At least the clangd extension is open source and is a viable alternative.
Well if it isn't open source then they should never have been using it in the first place.
But what happens when you anger the wizards? Some guy gets 4 two liter bottles of Mt Dew, and in a weekend comes up with a better plugin, and open sources it. Look it up on Monday. I just went from VSCode 1.52 to 1.99, and it's not pretty, but... Can someone convince copilot to rat out it's owners and write out a extension that runs cLisp? And all the emacs code runs in VSCode? ( I am saying this so facietously... ).