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Comment by fbdab103 | Hacker News Reader

I am becoming increasingly concerned with my reliance upon VSCode. With Microsoft's increasingly visible dark-pattern shenanigans, it feels inevitable that eventually the other shoe is going to drop.

A few design decisions of the platform seemed designed to make it difficult to go elsewhere, and Microsoft keeps changing default plugins away from the fully open source versions to the Microsoft quasi-kinda-pinky-swear-open source variety. Which deprives the open source versions of mind share and development resources.

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I very, very reluctantly switched from Eclipse to VS Code a couple years ago, because certain Eclipse plugins I relied on were no longer maintained. VS is pretty good, but I've never been comfortable with its place in the MS ecosystem, and I worry too about it turning to free-to-pay junk down the line. At least with Eclipse you really could just download and run years-old versions if you wanted to keep your particular plug-ins and favorite setup working.

These editors are as much the sum of the plugins and the community around it, not simply the editor itself. Otherwise Vim/Emacs wouldn't have survived as long. Microsoft probably knows it has to play it safe.

As much as there are a few bigger name commercial/close sourced ones the average dev is using 20 other niche ones run by volunteers.

There was a decent critique from a couple years ago on this, not sure how relevant it still is: https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ (HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32657709 ) (Aug 2022)

OK, now I'm really glad that Visual Studio Code was one of those "eh, pass" things for me (like GNOME) and I stuck it out with Emacs all this time.

Microsoft's play appears to be soup-to-nuts control over every aspect of web developers' work -- from finding a job (linkedin) to source control (github) to libraries and dependency management (npm). Visual Studio Code fits neatly within this play. Windows may have lost web devs' hearts and minds in the 2000s-2010s, but Microsoft has pivoted to where they don't need Windows in order to capture the developers.

Wait till Pluton takes hold in a few years, and you need a Microsoft account just to get to the bootloader.

You think? I've always wondered why they bought those things.

I really really hate LinkedIn by the way. But it was like that before the takeover. Nothing really changed for better or for worse.

I've been using the Cursor editor recently. Unfortunately it's based on VS Code, is closed source, and is tightly coupled with Microsoft/OpenAI. But the full AI integration blows everything else I've used out of the water. I feel significantly more productive with it than any other editor.

I think in the coming years as LLMs become more powerful, the productivity gap between using AI to code and not using it will only increase. It will become difficult to justify not using AI, despite the privacy concerns. I really hope that open source alternatives can keep up and provide viable alternatives to editors like Cursor.

Cursor is amazing, and you can now use Claude as the backing AI instead of OpenAI, if you so wish.

I really would suggest not using Cursor, unless you're working purely on open source stuff you don't care about sharing. All of your code goes via Cursor's servers, even using your own LLM API key.

https://www.cursor.com/privacy

I’m ready to switch over to fleet for my ML/data science work load once they support plugins (so I can use Ruff) and Jupyter notebooks (the notebooks are mainly for debugging).

For now, you may want to use VSCodium [1], which is a variant of VSCode which doesn't ship any non-free components (and also doesn't include Microsoft telemetry and such).

[1]: https://vscodium.com/

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/index....

> Even though we do not pass the telemetry build flags (and go out of our way to cripple the baked-in telemetry), Microsoft will still track usage by default.

What is meant by "usage"?

I don't find vscode sticky at all.

Now cursor, they have something no one else has and sadly it's a codium fork.

I mean, what's holding you back from using neovim? Great plugins, same LSPs, anything that's missing you can code up yourself in Lua, works over ssh... what are you really gaining by using VSCode?

a gui

Sure, but how concretely does that hold you back? Not saying I can’t imagine any possibilities, but guis aren’t universally better for editing text. In fact I usually find the gui is what is holding me back, since I end up needing access over ssh/mosh or easier access to a terminal, and tools such as tmux provide much better (imo) ergonomics than I get with terminal-in-ide especially with the ability to zoom one split to fullscreen.

I honestly don't remember the last time I used a terminal to edit files. I don't really miss vim that much since I still use vim shortcuts in VSCode. I briefly tried Emacs but a lot of the major modes for languages I used were too buggy and those were distracting me too much for it to be my daily driver (maybe I have ADHD, dunno)

For what its worth, VSCode also works over SSH. There's a collection of plugins for working remotely or in containers.

The main thing that drew me to VSCode originally was pretty good support for fonts and ligatures. And I think I also like some of the QoL plugins I use. The config is just JSON, and it's pretty easily tweakable to how I like it.

I've heard good things about nvim and zed though, and I'm tempted to try them. But there's a bunch of idiosyncrasies and quirks that you get used to, so switched kinda feels like a chore

Fair enough! Definitely not trying to make anyone change their editor of choice. But I do feel people forget (or maybe never knew) how productive terminal based workflows for editing / compiling / running tests can be once they get used to how their specific IDE exposes those features. I personally can’t think of anything I couldn’t add to terminal workflow except for things like markdown preview or image preview. There are certainly inconveniences like difficulties with copy/paste or mouse based split selection/ scrolling etc that can be worked around in more or less complete and or painful ways. But for the general tasks IDEs are used for i am not aware of anything else a gui really helps with. Hence my question.

>but guis aren’t universally better for editing text.

Many of us use the code editor for a lot more than strictly editing text.

Like what? That after all was my original question.

I'm a die-hard nvim/tmux/mosh user so take this with a grain of salt, but to answer your question, many people use their IDEs as project dashboards. For example (depending on the project/ecosystem):

1. GUI editor (for UI)

2. Debugging (as in standard debugging tools like breakpoints, REPLs, etc)

3. Building the project, and build management

4. A terminal emulator

5. A container orchestrator manager (or as I like to call it, an orchestrator orchestrator)

Personally I think those tools are better separted from the IDE, but there is a real convenience in having them integrated.

It's not the GUI per se that people want, but it's the useful default configuration.

If I'm working on a project I want to see the file tree, I want multiple editor tabs for different files, I want to be able to full text search the project I have open, I want a terminal window to execute commands on, and most importantly I want to be able to switch between these elements without needing to learn a new set of opaque keyboard commands.

VSCode/Codium gives you this out of the box with zero friction so it's no wonder that it's consuming market share like nobody's business.

I wish it wasn't electron and I wish it wasn't Microsoft, but until there's a better alternative that's what I'm using most of the time.

There are plenty of GUIs for Neovim [1].

[1]: https://github.com/topics/neovim-guis

Have you ever tried to daily drive them? They're simply not polished enough for serious work.

Text editors seem to fall into this open source software trap where everyone has to have a pet project so you end up with 700 different text editors that are all like 70-80% done in terms of features.

Actually I have.

I’ve used VimR for years, which provides a macOS-native GUI for Neovim.

Neovim itself is a very polished project.

neovim is quite a step change from normal keyboard and mouse type editors. I agree though, I think it ultimately everyone will be a neovim chad.

> what are you really gaining by using VSCode

The out of the box experience is vastly superior to neovim, you have to configure a lot less stuff.

The default keybindings are not esoteric.

Adding support for a new language is just clicking a button to install the extension, you don't have to configure or install the LSP yourself (or even know what an LSP is).

For me personally, better support for c#/.net.

You can make a nice IDE with neovim and plugins and a GUI but you do have to make it, whereas you just have to install vscode and you are done.

Astronvim[0] is plug and play. Easy to add LSPs (Mason), easy to add syntax highlighting (TreeSitter), and easy to configure (Lua, no JSON).

I can't stand VSCode due to personal preference [1], but I won't fault someone else using it. If configuration is stopping you from using neovim, use Astronvim or another pre built solution.

[0] https://astronvim.com/ [1] my main beef is lack of support for my ingrained Jetbrains shortcuts and the find window being in the sidebar. How anyone can use the search results easily is behind me. I know you can move it, it's just annoying.

I use astronvim and still don't know how to get Purescript to work.

You can just simply ignore that find window and instead use the "Go to Symbol" feature by pressing Ctrl + T to navigate quickly between symbols (variable + function + classes + etc).

> For me personally, better support for c#/.net.

I feel this one. Especially if you want to do anything with razor pages and/or Blazor.

It's still workable. But the experience is far from VS Code and Visual Studio sadly

Lazyvim is pretty plug & play with room to grow.

Zed and helix are good off the shelf alts.

I think the days are pretty far gone for having to really do much work to have a nice nvim setup

As a long time neovim users and promoter, I switched because of community support of plugins. More of them, they are up to date with libraries immediately (important in JS more than other languages), and easier to google solutions.

Also I tried switching to Astrovim so I spent less time maintaining my vim config and it ended up breaking as often as atttempt at switching to Linux distros (regardless of years of experience) so I chose stability.

Honestly it's the learning curve

I love the idea but when I try and use it, my productivity goes through the floor, and I've got work to do

i'm a Python main trying out neovim (using kickstart) and couple of weeks in my journey is a bit frustrating as switching between virtual environments is a hassle, jupyter notebooks aren't quite useful outside the browser and setting up the dap has been a challenge. Setting up a fresh vscode install with all of the plugins 'launch.json's and takes me ~20 minutes at this point. Not giving up on neovim as telescope, treesitter and the no-electron experience are a joy

The seemingly lack of support of jupyter notebooks was the thing that kept me from giving it a honest try. I want the same experience as in the code editor.

Sorry, but neovim or doom Emacs or any other nerd editor configuration that doesn't have table stakes features out of the box is a complete non starter.

As far as I'm concerned, running 100,000 lines of Lua or elisp written by literallywho is no better than downloading random vscode extensions.

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