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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

You mean all of Microsoft's direction? Look at how VSCode changelogs have morphed from editing features to 90% AI.

Thank you, this does not get discussed enough on HN. I used to look forward to monthly releases of VSCode and actually read the changelog carefully to see what new features/enhancements I could make use of. These days I just glance and ignore it completely -- almost everything is Copilot, MCP blahblah. Such a disappointment.

You would think with all the AI magic, they would deliver more "core editor" features/enhancement. No, just more Copilot.

Man this reminds me of the early days of Edge where MS actually made a good browser for a few months and then stuffed it full of bloatware, ads, a crypto wallet (!) and now AI (not even GOOD AI features).

Do you really miss stuff in VS Code's core editor? I mean, coming to think about it, VS Code feels "feature complete", I haven't found in other editors features that I thought "wish I had this in VS Code". Not to justify the whole changelog being about Copilot (isn't it supposed to be a separate extension anyway?), but I guess it's either that or going for a while without updates, or really small changes you'd probably not notice

Just look at open issues, sorted by most thumbs up:

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20st...

One that I am interested in is tree sitter syntax highlighting support: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/50140

There are a ton of things that could be done. The fact that you haven't personally needed more features doesn't mean it's "feature complete". Not even close. You just haven't hit those pain points in your workflow.

Also, look at what May 2024 changelog looks like https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_90

vs most recent one https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_103

May I ask how you feel about editors like vim/neovim or emacs or helix? I find that the best editing experience is one you can easily customize to support your needs, for me that is neovim but for you it could be something outside of VS Code?

Also shocked to learn VS Code is using textmate instead of treesitter.

I "learned" vim and used to spend time on setting up a vim environment. But it took way too much time to customize these things. Plus installing plugins is nowhere as easy as with vscode.

These days I just use vim plugin in VSCode and I'm very happy about the setup.

P.S. I am also an experienced VSCode extension developer. You just get much more exposure with a vscode extension compared to vim -- that's where everybody is. And of course it makes sense for me to dogfood the extension.

They probably see Cursor as a threat and are trying hard to keep up and avoid losing market share.

Yes I stopped reading the release nots a while before the big LLM bang.

Now I'm trialing Copilot off and on and I'm actually interested in these AI tool improvements.

Awesome, this is creating an opportunity for a new text editor. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

There is still Emacs, Sublime Text, Brief (oldie but still around), Notepad++,...

The problem are the extensions, I bash Electron all the time, yet I use VSCode almost daily because of certain extensions.

When I get fed up with VSCode, I run Emacs and I feel happy until I start working on something else that can be done a little faster on VSCode because of the available extensions.

I feel like we almost need government intervention to keep GitHub an open commons, but I am a Libertarian and I distrust the government perhaps even more than the tech industry - still an open question for me.

Lock in and control by huge corporations is almost always uniformly bad. I have accepted the message of great books like Privacy is Power, The Tech Coup, and Surveillance Capitalism, and I feel pretty good about just using Google’s Gemini APIs when I need them, and lean as hard as possible on open models running on Ollama and LM Studio. There are also little things you can do like not installing apps and using web apps.

Back to test editors: the Lem Emacs-like editor written in Common Lisp is an interesting project https://github.com/lem-project/lem

GitHub is not, and never has been, an open commons. There has always been a terms of service, and GitHub has been able to remove accounts and repositories at will.

Further, git is made to be decentralized. Having the government take over a business to maintain a centralized source is the peak of absurdity.

yes, re-reading my comment I accept your points.

Just switched to Zed because every vscode release breaks more than fixes.

Zed also turned into ai slob already

I don't object to AI features. I just don't want them to only work on AI features. There are plenty of editor related things that they should still be doing. E.g. the ability to show images in the editor. How neat would that be?

Speaking as an Emacs user: embedded images are cool, but their usefulness is debatable. Makes perfect sense for Emacs given org-mode, Auctex, and because due to Emacs' design it's the only way to include icons and whatnot for non-document purposes, but I doubt it's a useful feature for most code editors outside little error indicator icons and the like.

I can confidently predict that the breakout dev tool in the next few years will have LLM features, but won’t have forgotten stuff like editing features. As Claude Code has already demonstrated, you do t even need an editor for good LLM integration.

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