With the push from a friend, I tried neovim with the requisite LS plugins and I'm never going back. It's lightning fast and has feature parity (at least the ones I use) with VS Code.
Its a bit of a bitch to setup, but there are preconfigured solutions out there (NVChad, LunarVim, AstroVim) if you want to skip all that bullshit and just get coding...
Definitely recommend giving it a go!
Helix is another one to watch. Not quite at Neovim’s level and may need some reprogramming of the vim muscle memory but definitely promising!
In addition, a lot of the good language plugins are proprietary, like PyLance and the C# plugin.
Your complaint is with the binary that Microsoft ships, not with the codebase.
A mantra that was famously internally coined at Microsoft[0], and was found during anti-monopoly proceedings.
As such they will always be looked at skeptically when adding proprietary things to open source things.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
The classic formula was "embracing" an established standard, making proprietary extensions to that standard, then using the adoption of those proprietary extensions to extinguish the original standard's market share.
In this case, Microsoft didn't embrace an existing code base or standard, they made one and open sourced it. What would the analagous "extinction" bere here? That they eventually stop releasing updates to VSCode as open source?
While I agree that there is good reason to doubt Microsoft's intention to be a good steward of an open source project, this seems less like another iteration of that playbook and more like what a lot of "open source" for-profit companies do where they have an open core but keep many features proprietary so they can't be easily forked.
Look at Android and how it is almost impossible to de-Google it for a live demonstration.
(I don't think there is a market for developer tools, though.)
I do think that the VSCode model is much more similar to the Android model (though Android is a more extreme version of the model) than either is to the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" model.
And this is not much different from the things they did this with back in the day. Used to, you wouldn't target open source, as much as you would student audience. The battle used to be more over what corporate workforces would want and use. The open source development scene changed that a bit. Though, it is kind of... interesting to consider how many tools and ideas have been lost in that process.
I assume you mean "non-free" as in speech, not beer, since VSCode is free. Hasn't that "critical mass" been the case since day one? I can't imagine that VSCodium built binaries have ever had more than a tiny fraction of the user-base of VSCode? Thus I don't see how "Extinquish" plays a role here.
I still think it makes more sense to think of the strategy as more akin to the FOSS-washing / freemium models used by many companies.
And it is very similar to the freemium models used by many companies. Apologies if I made that sound like a disagreement. I think the point was more that Microsoft doing it is part of their old game plan. Random companies acting in other means is a bit of a non-sequitur. That said, I think it is common idea that many other companies have tried to extinguish competition in their "free" market? That is, many companies do what they can to make it easy for hobbyists and such to use things for free, but as soon as you are in a company, they try to milk the company for fees.
This is a big one. A lot of the value of VSCode comes from its plugins, and M$ doesn't allow VSCodium to access them.
On the one hand sure I wish Microsoft open sourced more, at the same time what they already open sourced is a fantastic foundation for building upon.
Instead of having to write an open source IDE from scratch we can leverage this one and then implement a few plugins for popular languages.
Shout out to CodeLite.