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Comment by tikkabhuna | Hacker News Reader

Already done: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

I prefer VSCodium builds over proprietary Microsoft ones any day of the week, but:

   > This is not a fork. This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration

There's nothing wrong with that. VSCode will certainly have a lot more development that a fork would ever see. So the best thing to do here is simply build VSCode with all proprietary stuff removed.

The plugins are the real value, and those are built behind the M$ fortress.

Clangd and rust-analyzer plugins aren't made by MS. Python has a couple separate ones, one of which the official Microsoft plugin uses. I think the only language needing a MS plugin is TypeScript, which is a MS language anyway.

This is the correct way to go about it imho. A real hard fork would inevitably fall behind upstream and the project will eventually be abandoned.

Theia[1] is a bit closer to a hard fork. They even try very hard to avoid saying outright they're just a rebranded VS Code, using euphemism such as "Theia embraces many of the design decisions [of VS Code] and even directly supports VS Code extensions."

1. https://theia-ide.org/

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