Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code
jamf.com
jamf.com
As called out elsewhere, workspace trust is literally the protection here which is being circumvented. You're warned when you open a folder whether you trust the origin/authors with pretty strong wording. Sure you may find this annoying, but it's literally a security warning in a giant modal that forces you to chose.
Even if automatic tasks were disabled by default, you'd still be vulnerable if you trust the workspace. VS Code is an IDE and the core and extensions can execute code based on files within the folder in order to provide rich features like autocomplete, compilation, run tests, agentic coding, etc.
Before workspace trust existed, we started noticing many extensions and core features having their own version of workspace trust warnings popping up. Workspace trust unified this into a single in your face experience. It's perfectly fine to not trust the folder, you'll just enter restricted mode that will protect you and certain things will be degraded like language servers may not run, you don't be able to debug (executes code in vscode/launch.json), etc.
Ultimately we're shipping developer tool that can do powerful things like automating project compilation or dependency install when you open a folder. This attack vector capitalizes on neglectful developers that ignore a scary looking security warning. It certainly happens in practice, but workspace trust is pretty critical to the trust model of VS Code and is also an important part to improve the UX around it as we annoy you a _single_ time when you open the folder, not several times from various components using a JIT notification approach. I recall many discussions happening around the exact wording of the warning, it's a difficult to communicate concept in the small amount of words that it needs to use.
My recommendation is to use the check box to trust the parent or configure trusted folders. I personally have all my safe git clones in a dev/ folder which I configured to trust, but I also have a playground/ folder where I put random projects that I don't know much about and decide at the time I open something.
Your recommendation makes sense as a strategy to follow ahead of time, before you're in that flow state. But now you're relying on people to have known about the question beforehand, and have this strategy worked out ahead of time.
If you're going to rely on this so heavily, maybe you should make that strategy more official, and surface it to users ahead of time - maybe in some kind of security configuration wizard or something. Relying on them to interrupt flow and work it out is asking too much when it's a security question that doesn't have obvious implications.
Maybe I'm too close to it, but the first sentence gives a very clear outline of the risk to me; Trusting this folder means code within it may be executed automatically.
> I don't have a comprehensive picture of all the implications, all I'm thinking is "I need to open this file and twiddle some text in it".
I'm curious what would stop you from opening it in restricted mode? Is it because it says browse and not edit under the button?
> Your recommendation makes sense as a strategy to follow ahead of time, before you're in that flow state.
You get the warning up front when you open a folder though, isn't this before you're in a flow state hacking away on the code?
But as you point out elsewhere, what constitutes code is very context dependent. And the user isn't necessarily going to be sufficiently expert on how Code interacts with the environment to evaluate that context.
> I'm curious what would stop you from opening it in restricted mode?
Even after years of using Code, I don't know the precise definition of "restricted mode". Maybe I ought to, but learning that isn't at the top of my list of priorities.
> You get the warning up front when you open a folder though, isn't this before you're in a flow state hacking away on the code?
NO! Not even close! And maybe this is at the heart of why we're not understanding each other.
My goal is not to run an editor and change some characters, not at all. It's so far down the stack that I'm scarcely aware of it at all, consciously. My goal is to, e.g., find and fix the bug that the Product Manager is threatening to kill me over. In order to do that I'm opening log files in weird locations (because they were set up by some junior teammate or something), and then opening some code I've never seen before because it's legacy stuff 5 years old that nobody has looked at since; I don't even have a full picture of all languages and technologies that might be in use in this folder. But I do know for sure that I need to be able to make what edits may turn out to be necessary half an hour from now once I've skimmed over the contents of this file and its siblings, so I can't predict for sure whether whatever the heck "restricted mode" will do to me will interfere with those edits.
I'm pretty sure that the above paragraph represents exactly what's going on in the user's mind for a typical usage of Code.
In light of this vulnerability, the team may want to revisit some of these assumptions made.
I guarantee the majority of people see a giant modal covering what they're trying to do and just do whatever gets rid of it - ie: the titlebar that says 'Trust this workspace?' and hit the big blue "Yes" button to quickly just get to work.
With AI and agents, there are now a lot of non-dev "casual" users using VS code because they saw something on a Youtube video too that have no clue what dangers they could face just by opening a new project.
Almost noone is going to read some general warning about how it "may" execute code. At the very least, scan the project folder and mention what will be executed (if it contains anything).
With AI the warning needs to appear somewhere, the user would ignore it when opening the folder, or ignore the warning when engaging with agent mode.
I’m not sure this is possible or non-misleading at the time of granting trust because adding or updating extensions, or changing any content in the folder after trust is granted, can change what will be executed.
To give some perspective: VS Code isn't my primary IDE, it's more like my browsing IDE. I use it to skim a repo or make minor edits, without waiting for IntelliJ to index the world and initialize an obscene number of plugins I apparently have installed by default. Think—fixing a broken build. If I'm only tweaking or reinstalling dependencies because the package-lock file got corrupted and that's totally not something that happened this week, I don't need all the bells and whistles. Actually I want less because restarting the TypeScript service multiple times is painful, even on a high end Mac.
Anyway enough about IntelliJ. This post has some good discussions and I sincerely hope that you (well, and Microsoft) take this feedback seriously and do something about it. I imagine that's hard, as opposed to say <improving some metric collected by telemetry and fed into a dashboard somewhere>, but this is what matters. Remember what Steve Ballmer said about UAC? I don't know if he said anything, but if it didn't work then it's not going to work now.
Have you tried it? It breaks a lot of things that I would not have expected from the dialog. It’s basically regressing to a slightly more advanced notepad.exe with better grepping facilities in some combinations of syntax and plugins.
In the past, editors could give me syntax highlighting without opening me to vulnerabilities.
Perhaps you have some settings you can adjust in your install to get that working?
Check the docs on this page: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editing/workspaces/worksp...
loss of syntax highlighting and to a lesser extent the neovim plugin. maybe having some kind of more granular permission system or a whitelist is the answer here.
opening a folder in vscode shouldn't be dangerous.
You're not "opening a folder" though, you're opening a codebase in an IDE, with all the integrations and automations that implies, including running code.
As a developer it's important to understand the context in which you're operating.
If you just want to "open a folder" and browse the contents, that's literally what Restricted mode is for. What you're asking to do is already there.
I checkout all code projects into ~/projects. I don't recall ever seeing a trust/restricted dialogue box. But, I'm guessing, at some point in the distant past, I whitelisted that folder and everything under it.
I've only just now, reading through this thread, realized how problematic that is. :o/
A better strategy would be:
- (seccomp) sandbox by default
- dry run, observe accessed files and remember them
- display dialog, saying: hey this plugin accesses your profile folder with the passwords.kdbx in it? You wanna allow it?
In an optimum world this would be provided by the operating system, which should have a better trust model for executing programs that are essentially from untrustable sources. The days where you exactly know what kind of programs are stored in your folders are long gone, but for whatever reason no operating system has adapted to that.
And before anyone says the tech isn't there yet: It is, actually, it's called eBPF and XDP.
At some point the dev has to take responsibility.
You allow developers to download and run arbitrary packages? Where I came from, that went out years ago. We keep "shrinkwrap" servers providing blessed versions of libraries. To test new versions, and to evaluate new packages, there's a highly-locked-down lab environment.
Both of those things are extremely bad in any work environment and I would never hire someone displaying either of those traits.
Because right now you are triggering the cookie banner reflex where a user just instinctively dismisses any warnings, because they want to get on with their work / prevent having their flow state broken.
There should also probably be some more context in the warning text on what a malicious repo could do, because clearly people don't understand why are you are asking if you trust the authors.
And while you're at it, maybe add some "virus scanner" that can read through the repo and flag malicious looking tasks & scripts to warn the user. This would be "AI" based so surely someone could even get a job promotion out of this for leading the initiative :)
It was a long time ago this was added (maybe 5 years?), but I think the reasoning there was that since our code competency is editing code, opening it should make that work well. The expectation is that most users should trust almost all their windows, it's an edge case for most developers to open and browse unfamiliar codebases that could contain such attacks. It also affects not just code editing but things like workspace settings so the editor could work radically different when you trust it.
You make a good point about the cookie banner reflex, but you don't need to use accept all on those either.
Trust in code operates on a spectrum, not a binary. Different code bases have vastly different threat profiles, and this approach does close to nothing to accomodate for that.
In addition, code bases change over time, and full auditing is near impossible. Even if you manually audit the code, most code is constantly changing. You can pull an update from git, and the audited repo you trusted can be no longer trustworthy.
An up front binary and persistent, trust or don't trust model isn't a particularly good match match for either user behavior or the potential threats most users will face.
Also the two buttons have the subtexts of either "Browse folder in restricted mode" or "Trust folder and enable all features", that is quite steering and sounds almost like you cannot even edit code in the restricted mode.
"If you don't trust the authors of these files, we recommend to continue in restricted mode" also doesn't sound that criticial, does it?
I think with AI we quickly progress to level where it needs to essentially run in nice lil isolated sandbox with underlying project (and definitely everything else around it) being entirely read only (in form on overlay FS or some similar solution), let it work in the sandbox and then have user only accept the result at end of the session in form of a separate process that applies the AI changes as set of commits (NOT commiting direct file changes back as then malicious code could say mess stuff up in .git dir like adding hooks). That way at very worst you're some commit reverts out in main repo.
I can see the exact message you're referring to in the linked article. It says "Code provides features that *may* automatically execute files in this folder." It keeps things ambiguous and comes off as one of the hundreds of legal CYA pop-ups that you see throughout your day. Its not clear that "Yes, I trust the authors" means "Go ahead and start executing shell scripts". Its also not clear what exactly the difference is between the two choices regarding how usable the IDE is if you say no.
My hope has always been, but I know there are plenty of people that don't do this, is to think "huh, that sounds scary, maybe I should not trust it or understand more", not blinding say they trust.
[0]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editing/workspaces/worksp...
First, @Tyriar thanks for being a part of this conversation. I know you don't have to, and I want to let you know I get that you are choosing to contribute, and I personally appreciate it.
The reality is that VS Code ships in a way that is perfect for attackers to use tasks files to compromise developers:
1. You have to click "trust this code" on every repo you open, which is just noise and desensitizes the user to the real underlying security threat. What VS Code should do is warn you when there is a tasks file, especially if there is a "command" parameter in that tasks file.
2. You can add parameters like these to tasks files to disable some of the notification features so devs never see the notifications you are talking about: "presentation": { "reveal": "never", "echo": false, "focus": false, "close": true, "panel": "dedicated", "showReuseMessage": false}
3. Regardless of Microsofts observations that opening other people's code is risky, I want to remind you that all of us open other peoples code all day long, so it seems a little duplicitous to say "you'd still be vulnerable if you trust the workspace". I mean, that's kind of our jobs. Your "Workspaces" abstraction is great on paper, especially for project based workflows, but that's not the only way that most of us use VS Code. The issue here is that Microsoft created a new feature (tasks files) that executes things when I open code in VS Code. This is new, and separate from the intrinsic risk of opening other people's code. To ignore that fact to me seems like you are running away from the responsibility to address what you've created.
Because of the above points we are quickly seeing VS Code tasks file become the number one way that developers are being compromised by nation state actors (typically North Korea/Lazarus).
Just search github and you'll see what I mean: https://github.com/search?q=path%3Atasks.json+vercel.app&ref...
There are dozens and dozens of bad guys using this technique right now. Microsoft needs to step up. End of story.
My main hesitation here was that really it's just a false sense of security though. Tasks is just one of the things this enables, and in the core codebase we are unable to determine what exactly it enables as extensions could do all sorts of things. At a certain point, it's really on the user to not dismiss the giant modal security warning that describes the core risk in the first sentence and say they trust things they don't actually trust.
I've also created these follow ups based on this thread:
- Revise workspace trust wording "Browse" https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/289898 - Don't ask to enable workspace trust in system folders and temp directories https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/289899
You're relying the wrong people, and at the wrong time, for this to be very effective.
Which code? Its own Code (which the user already trusts anyway), or code from the workspace (automatically)? My expectation with a language-server is that it never code from the workspace in a way which could result in a side effect outside the server gaining understanding about the code. So this makes little sense?
This is the main problem with that dialog: It’s completely unclear to me, as a user, what will and will not happen if I trust a workspace.
I treat the selection as meaning that I’m going to have nothing more than a basic text editor if I don’t trust the workspace. That’s fine for some situations, but eventually I want to do something with the code. Then my only options are to trust everything and open the possibility of something (?) bad happening, or not do any work at all. There’s no visibility into what’s happening, no indication of what might happen, just a vague warning that I’m now on my own with no guardrails or visibility. Good luck.
However I did not know about tasks.json (I don't use VSC) and when I googled it I found the example at https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/task-prov... and that is about running rake (Ruby.) So this is a little worse than installing malicious packages: the trigger is opening a malicious repository from the editor. Is this a common practice? If it is, it means two things: 1) the developer did not take an explicit choice of installing and running code, so even the possibility of an attack is unexpected and 2) it affects users of any language, even the ones that have secured package installation or have no installation of packages from remote.
mjdv : > it wasn't clear to me that just opening and trusting a directory
andy_ppp : >obviously I wasn’t explicit enough in explaining I’m talking about code execution simply by opening a directory.
Understandably, there's a disconnect in the mental model of what "opening a folder" can mean in VSCode.
In 99% of other software, folders and directories are purely navigation and/or organization and then you must go the extra step of clicking on a particular file (e.g. ".exe", ".py", ".sh") to do something dangerous.
Furthermore, in classic Visual Studio, solutions+projects are files such as ".sln" and ".vcsproj" or a "CMakeLists.txt" file.
In contrast, VSCode projects can be the folders. Folders are not just purely navigation. So "VSCode opening a folder" can act like "MS Excel opening a .xlsm file" that might have a (dangerous) macro in it. Inside the VSCode folder may have a "tasks.json" with dangerous commands in it.
Once the mental model groks the idea that a "folder" can have a special semantic meaning of "project+tasks" in VSCode, the warning messages saying "Do you trust this folder?" make more sense.
VSCode uses "folders" instead of a top-level "file" as a semantic unit because it's more flexible for multiple languages.
To re-emphasize, Windows File Explorer or macOS Finder "opening a folder" do not run "tasks.json" so it is not the same behavior as VSCode opening a folder.
Word and Excel “MACROS” used to be THE main vector for kiddie viruses. Come on M$ … billions of dollars and you’re still loading up non-interactive code execution in all your documents that people expect to be POD (Plain Old Data)?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/protect-yourself-...
Is it so much to ask for your software to AT LEAST warn peole when it’s about to take a destructive action, and keep asking until the user allows that class of thing non-interactivlely ONLY FOR THAT SIGNED SOFTWARE?
Apple does other software things really badly with their millions of dollars, but they get Privacy RIGHT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPogdNafgic
1) This loud warning is easy to ignore, despite how loud it is
2) This loud warning is easy to disable, which many desire to do because it is very loud
3) This loud warning is easy to build bad habits (instead of marking safe parent folders, continually clicking Allow and training yourself to only click Allow)
4) Restricted Mode sounds "too restricted" to be useful (though it isn't too restrictive and is very useful)
5) Restricted Mode is also loud to remind you that you are in it, so many users think it is too loud and never want to be in it (despite it being very useful)
We want to load code in Turing complete languages. We want complex build tools and test harnesses to load "just so", and those too are generally Turing complete and configured and written in Turing complete languages. Parsing code in a Turing complete language takes another Turing complete language, generally. (Most languages are self-hosted so parsing the code is an action in that same language.)
One of the most dangerous actions we know of is an ancient and inescapable "bug" in all Turing complete work: the Halting Problem. We cannot mathematically prove any program will complete nor when it will complete, without running it and waiting for it to complete, if it completes. Infinite loops are both the power granted to us by our tools and the potential downfall of them all, our responsibility to deal with them is in our hands and math can't help us enough.
Loading code is a dangerous action. VS Code is doing the right thing in how it is handling it. It's not the best user experience and clearly not enough users understand the dangers inherent in "do you really want to run all your extensions in this folder?" in precisely the same way that people better understand "Do you want this application to have access to your precise location?" is a threat (that apps do take advantage; in both cases).
Some instructions are benign, eg to add two numbers or even divide by zero
Other instructions call APIs of the OS
It is at these times that the user should be prompted interactively whether they want the action to be done, with full details of what the scope is, and keep asking every time until the user checks a box that says “continue allowing this action on this scope to THIS program”.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editing/workspaces/worksp...
No it doesn't because restricted mode without Macros is the default and not framed like something bad or loosing out on all of those nice features,
The Protected view in Office instead tells you "Be careful" and to only activate editing when you need to.
If VS Code is still on the same learning curve, hopefully it speeds up a bit.
In any JetBrains IDE: Settings > Tools > Startup Tasks.
This problem goes back to uh... Windows Vista. Its predecessors made all users an admin, Vista added a security layer so that any more dangerous tasks required you to confirm. But they went overboard and did it for anything like changing your desktop background image, and very quickly people got numb to the notice and just hit 'ok' on everything.
Anyway. In this particular case, VS Code can be more granular and only show a popup when the user tries to run a task saying something like "By permitting this script to run you agree that it can do anything, this can be dangerous, before continuing I'm going to open this file so you can review what it's about to do" or whatever.
- ESLint, the most commonly used linter in the JavaScript ecosystem uses a JavaScript file for configuration (eslint.config.mjs), so if you open a JS project and want your editor to show you warnings from the linter, an extension needs to run that JS
- In Elixir, project configuration is written in code (mix.exs), so if you open an Elixir project and want the language server to provide you with hints (errors, warnings and such), the language server needs to execute that code to get the project configuration. More generally it will probably want to expand macros in the project, which is also code execution.
- For many languages in general, in order to analyze code, editor extensions need to build the project, and this often results in code execution (like through macros or build scripts like build.rs, which I believe rust-analyzer executes)
(It can also be pointed out that a lot of these are granular under the hood. In addition to Restricted Mode as a generally available sandbox, you have all sorts of workspace level controls over tasks.json and the Extensions you have installed and active for that workspace. Not to mention a robust multi-profile system where you can narrow Extensions to specific roles and moods. But most of us tend to want to fall into habits of having a "kitchen sink" profile with everything always available and don't want to think about granular security controls.)
(I think some people are fixating on the specific feature that's mentioned in the article. The reason this pop-up exists is that there are many ways that this code execution could happen. Disabling this one feature doesn't make it safe, and this feature if not present, could still be achieved by abusing other capabilities that exist in the vs code ecosystem)
Bundling running those into the editor seems like the mad part to me, but I've missed the whole VSCode train so probably something I'm missing.
The easiest example is JS testing. Most test harnesses use a JS file for configuration. If you don't know how the harness is configured how do you know you are parsing the right tests?
Most test frameworks in JS use the define/it `define("some test colection", () => it("some test", () => /* …test code… */))` pattern. Tests are built as callbacks to functions.
In theory, sure, you could "just" try to RegEx out the `define("name"` and `it("name"` patterns, but it becomes harder to track nesting than you think it is with just RegEx. Then you realize that because those are code callbacks, no one is stopped from building meta-test suites with things like `for (thing of someTextMatrix) { it(`handles ${thing}`, () => /* …parametric test on thing… */ }`.
The test language used most in JS is JS. It's a lot harder problem than "just parsing" to figure out. In most cases a test harness needs to run the JS files to collect the full information about the test suite. Being JS files they are Turing Complete and open to doing whatever they want. Many times the test harnesses are running in a full Node environment with access to the entire filesystem and more.
Most of that applies to other test harnesses in other languages as well. To get the full suite of possible tests you need to be able to build that language and run it. How much of a sandbox that language has in that case shifts, but often it is still a sandbox with ways to escape. (We've proven that there's an escape Zero Day in the Universal Turing Machine, escapes are in some ways inevitable in any and all Turing Complete languages.)
It is very clear, the first sentence it that it may automatically execute code.
What features? What files? "may"? So will it actually happen or is it just "well it possibly could"?
I've used it to open folders that I personally made and which don't have any tasks or files that get automatically executed, and yet the message pops up anyway.
It's like having an antivirus program that unconditionally flags every file as "this file may contain a virus"
How is code supposed to know? It probably depends on the plugins you installed.
> It's like having an antivirus program that unconditionally flags every file as "this file may contain a virus"
No, it’s like if your OS asks if you want to actually run the program you’re about to before running it the first time. And it gives you the alternative to run it in a sandbox (which is equivalent to what happens when you don’t trust the workspace, then it still opens but in restricted mode)
(They could, with some breaking changes, maybe try to enforce a permissions system for the matrix of addons and folders, where it would ask for permission when an addon does actually try to run something, but this would result in a lot of permission requests for most repos)
People will still inevitably ignore the message and open everything in trusted mode, but it'd be more reasonable to consider that user error.
Then copy-paste my default .dev-container directory and reload.
If you spend enough time in the ecosystem, you'll begin to realise that a select few are very well known for doing this; one in particular made a package for every ANSI terminal colour.
left-pad (and quite a few incidents afterwards) were definitely wakeup calls, and I like to think we've listened in some ways.
Which: They do actually have some container-like sandboxing tech around applications (“iTerm wants to access your downloads folder”).
https://bdash.net.nz/posts/tcc-and-the-platform-sandbox-poli... and https://bdash.net.nz/posts/sandboxing-on-macos/ are good introductory articles.
But not sufficient since it'll still F over whatever code you are working on resulting in a backdoored app getting deployed + infected dev scripts etc bringing interesting times to your teammates, downstream open source project users, your api keys and cloud credentials getting compromised etc.
Though this autorun feature is crazy and should be completely off by default.
Im forced to use vs code (so biased), but everything seems worse than eclipse, plus these repeated security issues from malware laced projects.
Theres been several posts about infected projects by fake recruiters here in the last year or two.
Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.
Is eclipse good now? I used it 15 years ago. It took ages to start. It was a memory hog and it was dog slow besides. My entire team got RAM upgrades on our computers because the default company issued machines (which were quite good at the time) didn't have enough RAM to use eclipse properly.
I can't imagine why it went out of favour...
VS Code, although it is starting to go get a bit bloated, has always been extremely responsive and snappy. Yeah I've had it crash, but I was never surprised that it crashed. (e.g. opening enormous files, running several instances at once with tons of tabs open, long debugging sessions, etc...)
But now I use NeoVim so none of that matters...
Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, each requiring its own process, to see how "fast" it runs, not to mention Electron crap, there is a reason so many Microsoft plugins are actually written in C++ and Rust.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I used to use VS Code on some very large C projects with 16GB of RAM, and my machine would grind to a halt while intellisense was indexing.
Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE.
For years and years I had people telling me how great IntelliJ was, etc. I eventually switched - lo and behold, IntelliJ had just as many quirks (even some of the same) as Eclipse.
They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE.
In eclipse's defence, we were working on a very large java codebase. But that shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. I've never seen a java codebase come in any other size.
I'm running intellij (RustRover) right now, and its sitting on about 4.5gb of ram. That still seems very inefficient to me. But it doesn't sound that bad compared to eclipse.
The thing is, memory in personal computer have plateaued for quite some time. 16GB was not uncommon in 2010. Things are not like the crazy 90s and early 2000s where PC configuration become obsolete in less than two years.
Eclipse, unlike IntelliJ offers "project" view were you have have many "solutions" open at once. Even with multiple Eclipse instances open, it's hard to imagine it consuming so much ram.
Perhaps you had other company-required software running. I was working on relatively largeish codebases and very happy with 8GB of ram until 2018ish.
Regardless, an IDE is more than a text editor, so your claim that RustRover with 4.5GB of ram is inefficient is misguided.
In 2010 it couldn't have been anything later than Win 7; Win 8 was released in 2012.
With the current prices it is still wild mate.
More like Eclipse struggled on the kind of hardware that people could afford as a student.
My main memories of Eclipse (15 years ago at this point) are waiting forever for it to start up, though it was pretty adequate after that.
No, it’s an IDE first. Not a text editor that’s extensible. It has a lot of features built-in, pre-enabled, and configured out of the box.
Yes, it can edit text. But it can do a lot more.
My first IDE was Turbo Pascal 2.0, about 20 years before I used Eclipse, and I used a lot in between (and since). Eclipse was the single most unintuitive, user hostile, clunky, slow, and painful system to use. A few of those problems probably would have been a little bit less noticeable on a ridiculously high-end machine, but not all of them, and other contemporary IDEs worked well-enough on lighter machines. And despite how much I disliked using Eclipse, I liked the idea of Eclipse, and kept it around because it was, for a while, occupying the niche of “extensible open source platform most popular to target for interesting dev tools” (because there weren't really any alternatives that were as open and extensible).
this is a huge assumption and also ignores the fact that if it's not clear to users, it's a bad design.
>Heck, I did jvm6 development with Eclipse on Windows XP with 4GB of ram and was content.
of course :)
I remember when the big VS added jump to file but it was so damn miserably implemented as to be useless.
Having worked at Microsoft for a decade, the most frequent way I navigated a large source tree was dir /s *partialfilename*.*
Then again while I was there, most code bases couldn't even open in Visual Studio. (highly team dependent, I was mostly on older C/C++ code bases.)
Some teams at MS paid for an editor called Source Insight, which indexed your code and could also parse C #defines and other preprocessor macros, which was super unique and powerful. It had an incredibly powerful symbol and fuzzy filename search capabilities, I'd frequently have Source Insight open just so I could find where in a folder structure a file was and then I'd open it up in my preferred editor.
Back when I got my first SSD the largest boost to my dev productivity was not in compile times (large C++ code bases tend to template bound more so than IO bound), it was how fast I could find files in the directory structure.
I'm sure Vi/Emacs users have some magic set of plugins that do all of this for them, but as someone back on Windows back in the 2000s and 2010s, the supported MS tooling was horrible at all this.
Then VS Code comes along with amazing fuzzy file name matching. Holy cow. Sure it is missing 90% of the power of real Visual Studio (being able to have a debugger step from front end web code to your backend and then into stored procedures in SQL, running on a remote machine, that your debugger transparently auth'd to, is something Microsoft had working 20 years ago and would be considered impossible dark magic with today's tooling), but wow can I navigate a project quickly!
Interestingly Java is the only language that I've found vscode support poor, so I keep buying Idea license exclusively for Java projects. For rest of languages that I use (JS/TS, Go, Python, Shell, YAML, XML) I'm using vscode and happy about it.
In recent years vscode starting to get bloated, mostly with AI stuff. But so far I can disable everything AI with a single setting and it works good afterwards. I'd prefer for all AI features to be contained in a separate plugin that I can just not install, but I guess managers these days want to shove AI in everyone's throat.
Another good thing about vscode is that its written with JavaScript and can be launched in browser, so in the future I want to put my development environment in the browser, but so far I didn't do that.
1. It's free
2. A million plug-ins
> I don't use it because it's so dog slow.
You might find it runs better with fewer plugins.
I almost disable all extensions except the ones I use all the time. Then I enable specific ones at workspace level.
Yes, it's annoying. But as an extension author, I know how some badly written extension can significantly slow down the experience, both during startup and editing. I even profiled other people's extensions and submitted feedback.
Maybe VS Code is faster with fewer plugins but it's still "dog slow" to load and run. Only thing I'm "missing" in vim is the bloat
[0] personal I only use a handful but I've played around because why not
I've done a lot of shell-driven development in the 00s though, and I remember it did involve frequently firing up vim instances for editing just a single file. I no longer understand the appeal of that approach. Navigating between files (using fuzzy search or go-to-definition) is just a lot faster and more convenient.
> starting vscode again takes about a second, and then maybe 10s of seconds of background processing
I don't reboot often and I'm still lazy and will leave projects open often, but honestly, have you considered that your workflow is an adaptation to the wait time?
> Navigating between files (using fuzzy search or go-to-definition) is just a lot faster and more convenient.
> Yet I'm doing the same thing instantly or near instantly.
Does vim somehow allow LSP servers to index faster? Or are you not actually doing the same thing?
Yes, Neovim supports LSP and it is very very fast.
I'm not sure why any of this is surprising. We're talking about the same company who is speeding up their file browser by loading it at boot time rather than actually trying to fix the actual fucking problems. Why is it surprising that everything else they make is slow and bloated as shit (even more as they've shoving AI into everything)
Are you like, for real? How often do you load it up for it to matter in the slightest? Do you not just open the project once at the start of the day and then continue working?
Sorry but for someone used to working in VS proper and projects which take minimum 40 minutes to build, saying that a startup time of a few seconds is a problem is.....just hard to understand.
> How often do you load it
I live in the terminal and opening files with vim is the primary way I interact with them.
> Do you not just open the project once at the start of the day and then continue working?
> projects which take minimum 40 minutes to build
Don't you have partial compiles? Parallel compiling? Upgrade your machine?
But it's not just startup time. I use less RAM, less CPU resources, jumping through tags is instant, working through the debugger is instant, opening new files is instant, fuzzy searching my system is instant. It sounds like the program you're working on and your editor are fighting for resources and I've never faced that problem with vim
We do. Without it it it takes over 3 hours for a full project build. Normally if I change one line of code and hit "run" it takes ~10-15 minutes for the app to start, depending on which file I changed.
>>Upgrade your machine?
It's a 64 core/128 thread core Threadripper workstation with 256GB of ram, so not many upgrade options from that.
It's a huge C++ project, heavily templated, that's kinda normal. My previous 2 projects were also like this.
From a support/IT perspective though, the closer everybody's machine is, the easier the job is.
The last software shop I worked at, we had a default set of tools and configs. It was a known happy path. You were allowed to adventure off of that path, but you were mostly on your own.
No more "works on my computer" issues. The environment is always identical.
Very useful if people are struggling to create reliable repro steps that work for me - I can simply debug in situ on their machine. Also useful if a coworker is struggling to figure something out, and wants a second set of eyes on something that's driving them batty - I can simply do that without needing to ramp up on an unfamiliar toolset. Ever debugged a codegen issue that you couldn't repro, that turned out to be a compiler bug, that you didn't see because you (and the build servers) were on a different version? I have. There are ways to e.g. configure Visual Studio's updater to install the same version for the entire studio, which would've eliminated some of the "works on my machine" dance, but it's a headache. When a coworker shows me a cool non-default thing they've added a key binding for? I'll ask what key(s) they've bound it to if they didn't share it, so we share the same muscle memory.
Having consistent machine and OS and app configurations enables better (lower cost, higher reliability) scripting and tooling solutions in things like repos and infrastructure.
Not unlike consistency in language and compiler choices.
Organizations establish and enforce standards for a reason.
[0]: Vim and Emacs have almost as good or slightly better language support, but I prefer GUIs over TUIs.
Threat model described is not unique to VS Code
Visual Age for Java had some quirkiness being a Smalltalk IDE adapted to Java development (for example, the concept of a file and a hierarchical filesystem itself was definitely a second class citizen in Visual Age) and eclipse kind of rounded those rough edges.
But Eclipse became a victim of late 90s/early 2000s academic driven overengineering with overly complex/bureaucratic stuff like OSGI, and the support for the absurdly bureaucratic java development ecosystem at that time.
I haven't reevaluated that choice in a while, but that plus LSP support (and to a lesser extent ML Auto-complete) are must-haves for me nowadays.
Corporate never seems to get that git is the kind of interface you want between your computer and their servers.
Then when you trash your computer you can just get it back to the state of being able to git.
I think what GP describes is actually a pretty okay solution for orgs that don't want to provider their devs with local admin privileges.
It's not even a competition, to me. I've had to use Visual Studio instead of Rider for work the past year and it's been a very bad experience.
The biggest difference is JetBrains intellisense feels like it's reading my mind, I'll just type a couple characters and hit tab most of the time. Visual studio on the other hand has the worst intellisense I can imagine. It very frequently just messes up what I'm doing - I'll write what I want correctly, hit space and VS will just change it to something entirely different and import a package while it's at it. It's incredibly annoying. And when I actually want to use auto complete, say for example I've declared a variable on the line above and I want to use it, I'll write a couple characters and then without fail the variable I just declared on the line above is like option 6 down the list behind a bunch of crap that doesn't even make sense in the context at all. And as if it wasn't enough that the IDE is crap when it's working correctly, it very frequently craps out and just stops providing syntax highlighting and such in .razor files, or showing errors in files that compile just fine, forcing me to restart it and delete the .vs folder. Like every day.
Personally I think the only people who prefer other products than JB are people who don't know what they're missing. JB is literally just better in pretty much every way. At least the products I've used. I think I'll turn down the next job that asks me to use VS.
VSCode is defacto standard because it’s kinda mediocre but works ok enough for every language and every platform. Microsoft created and popularized LSP so VSCode isn’t a single language IDE.
I use a mixture of code editors. My favorite is probably 10x but it only works with C++. So VSCode is just a reasonably standard unless a different editor is better for a specific use case.
Visual Studio Code—I dunno. It's an editor more than an IDE. It lets Webdev Andys create an empty directory, put an index.ts in there, and get started right away. Yes, WebStorm does the same, but VS Code comes with decent multilanguage support for free. It's like vim or Emacs but crappier and more bloated, but a lot of people don't care about that.
I stopped using it because none of the plugins for the languages I was using at the time (Ruby, Python, Erlang) were either worth a damn, or getting updated to track new language features.
I started using VSCode because IntelliJ-family IDEs will report incomplete search results as complete when they are rebuilding their search indices. To put it another way, they will tell you that a string that definitely appears in the project does not appear, if they haven't gotten around to re-adding the files that contain that string to the search index.
This to me is intolerable behavior. Others find it perfectly acceptable.
Then Visual Studio's Express and later Community SKUs made Visual Studio free for ≈home/hobby use in the same bucket. And they're better at that bucket for my needs. Less mucking with makefiles, the mixed ability to debug mixed C# and C++ callstacks, the fact that it's the same base as my work tools (game consoles have stuff integrating with Visual Studio, GPU vendors have stuff integrating with Visual Studio, the cool 3rd party intellisense game studios like integrates with Visual Studio...)
Eclipse, at least for me, quickly became relegated to increasingly rare moments of Linux development.
But I don't always want a heavyweight IDE and it's plugins and load times and project files. For a long time I just used notepad for quick edits to text files. But that's not great if you're, say, editing a many-file script repository. You still don't want all the dead weight of a heavy weight IDE, but there's a plethora of text editors that give you tabs, and maybe some basic syntax highlighting, and that's all you were going to get anyways. Notepad++, Sublime Text, Kate, ...and Visual Studio Code.
Well, VSC grew some tricks - an extension API for debuggers, spearheading the language server protocol... heck, I eventually even stopped hating the integrated VCS tab! It grew a "lightweight IDE" bucket, and it serves that niche for me well, and that's a useful niche for me.
In doing so, it's admittedly grown away from the "simple text editor" bucket. If you're routinely doing the careful work of auditing possibly malicious repositories before touching a single build task, VSC feels like the wrong tool to me, despite measures such as introducing the concept of untrusted repositories. I've somewhat attempted to shove a round peg into a square hole by using VSC's profiles feature - I now have a "Default" profile for my coding adventures and a "Notes" profile with all the extensions gone for editing my large piles of markdown, and for inspecting code I trust enough to allow on disk, but not enough to autorun anything... but switching editors entirely might be a better use of my time for this niche.
> everything seems worse than eclipse
In general, I believe most people see VSCode as "good enough". Maybe not the best text editor, but it's good enough at everything it does and extensible enough to the point that there's really no point to go for anything else unless you have a really good reason to.
> Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.
Setting up a new machine, I could choose between Eclipse (free, took forever to open, slow, asked me a million questions before it let me start working) or Visual Studio (cost money, incredibly powerful, written in C++ and was really damn fast.)
Some people just want a text editor, whereas eclipse is “an IDE and Platform”.
Eclipse failed because it was slow and janky and had abysmal UX and it only supported Java well.
VSCode succeeded because it has a much more sane UX, it's way less janky, it's highly extensible and language neutral.
Personally I'm kind of lukewarm on VS Code, it's fine, but CLion, Visual Studio Proper, and RustRover are better for me.
I see why people use it though, it's not a bad editor at all.
For Java, I'm all over IntelliJ.
It also runs on the web, which makes it extremely convenient to toss into...web things. It's the code editor for the Google Cloud console, the Lambda web console, the GitHub web editor, and so on.
I'm going to guess that Eclipse doesn't have the same amount of security issues because it's not a popular target. Everyone (relatively speaking) is using VSCode or something based on it.
Sublime was exceptionally popular for web developers throughout the 2010s.
Sublime was maintained by a single person as far as I know.
VS code was pretty much a copy of Sublime but with a much better extensions system and relatively quickly there were some great plugins that made VS code the de-facto editor for web development.
I don’t know how usage of Atom compared to Sublime, but within my friends and colleagues it was only when VS code got good that people started moving away from Sublime.
What I believe also influenced the shift was that at that point in time MS had accumulated a decent amount of developer trust by giving us TypeScript and later on by acquiring GitHub. They appeared to care and have the right vision for open source.
I don't mind VSCodium that much because I can put my tooling on the side (like a good unix fanboy) instead of hoping that jetbrains reimplements every other tool. Ag, grep beat IDE searches any day.
But yeah we have reach a stupid point in the industry where VSCodium asks me to trust a codebase before it will let me edit it.
For what I do, there's no reasonable alternative at the moment.
I'm sure someone will correct me, but it's the only editor that correctly (for some definition of correct) allows remote editing and devcontainers:
[desktop OS] -> ssh -> [dest box]
[desktop OS] -> [devcontainer]
[desktop OS] -> ssh -> [dest box] -> [devcontainer]
[desktop OS] -> ssh (jumphost) -> [dest box] -> [devcontainer]
I won't name and shame other editors (or IDEs), but either they simply can't do that, or their performance is absolutely, shockingly, abysmal.
If you have a jumphost chain, you can configure that in the SSH config.
I don't know what a devcontainer is exactly, but if it's a container in the sense that it runs a Linux development system, I would investigate whether that, too, could easily be set up for access via SSH or mounted locally through some other mechanism.
Running tools remotely isn't the same as remote editing, so you'll have to forgive the misunderstanding.
> You need to run tools on your ssh host as well.
`ssh user@remote tool`. Indeed, the tool you run on the remote host could be a text editor in itself.
> Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.
I don't get the connection, but Java had log4j, i.e. a remote code execution vulnerability.
Dude, Eclipse has been out of favor for well over ten years now due to Jetbrains IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA).
Use case depending sometimes you just need a quick editor, thats why sublime had and probably still has a huge userbase, its fast startup and flexibility. Vim, emacs and derivatives of it are the same story.
I can't imagine ever opening up eclipse to edit a zig/go/js file or project. It's too bloated.
The answer is neovim anyway. That's all anyone needs. /s
I think vim is probably similar, but I've not gotten into it that much.
Contrast that to Eclipse and Visual Studio (not vsCode) and it's clear why the larger IDE's are falling out of favour.
Other than that, it is more fashionable to ship Chrome with applications and JavaScript is hot. /s
Eclipse remains my main Java IDE at work.
Anything else that should be locked down?
So a malicious repo can easily override it... if you say you trust it.
On macOS systems, this results in the execution of a background shell command that uses nohup bash -c in combination with curl -s to retrieve a JavaScript payload remotely
2. Install Vim / Emacs / Sublime / Helix
3. ????
4. Profit
I'm not sure about the other ones, but I know that helix supports language servers by default and it does not have a workspace trust system like vscode, so LSPs can automatically execute code when you enter a directory
https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/9514#issuecomme...
So uninstalling VSCode would be a bit of a step back in that case
Vim had also had its share of execution vulnerabilities over the years.
https://github.com/numirias/security/blob/master/doc/2019-06...
I had searched for it in the search bar at the bottom of the home screen, which opened it in a chrome window. If you tap the share icon on the top right, you get the share.google link. If you tap the three dots and then something like "copy link" you get the actual link.
Who thought this is a good idea and why wasn't it specified in ALL CAPS in that dialog?
Is it even documented anywhere?
Very infrequent vscode user here, beginning to think it's some kind of Eclipse.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editing/workspaces/worksp...
I'm big on user first, if that dialog had sirens blaring, a gif and ten arrows pointing that "THIS MAY EXECUTE CODE" and people still didn't get the idea, I'd say it needs fixing. It can't be said that they didn't try or that they hid it though.
So at the end of the day its still unclear whether it executes code or not? Just say "this WILL execute code" and specify exactly which code it tries to execute by default.
Not "I will execute autorun.inf like an idiot."
And NO. I do not want my IDE to execute code when i open files for editing. I want it to execute code only as part of an explicit step that I initiate.
They're pawning off responsibility without giving people a real choice.
It's like the old permission dialog for Android that was pretty much "do you want to use this app?". Obviously most people just say yes.
There's a reason Google changed that.
To be fair I'm sure Microsoft would switch to a saner permission model if they could but it's kind of too late.
Not the first time. Same with LLMs.
> When the project is opened, Visual Studio Code prompts the user to trust the repository author. If that trust is granted, the application automatically processes the repository’s tasks.json configuration file, which can result in embedded arbitrary commands being executed on the system.
In the screenshot the task is named "node" - so it's a bit like embedding a malicious Makefile target as a backdoor.
Except harder to spot since it's in a obscure .vscode/somethingsomething json file. (And probably you can easily fool GH Copilot to run it)
"runOptions": { "runOn": "folderOpen" }
Is it only for convenience so it already `npm i` or `npm start` without you having to do anything, or are there any other legitimate purposes beyond that?
That I understand, I’m mainly wondering why all that would have to happen automatically by merely opening a folder.
My personal preference may differ here, but for things like running a build or starting a dev server, I usually prefer to trigger them manually, and not have them silently executed only by me browsing through the sources.
Therefore I’m trying to understand whether there are legitimate use-cases for this “auto-run on open folder” feature besides the obvious convenience aspect of saving one or two extra clicks.
I'm wondering if that helps. If I "trust" a remote directory, is there an exploit that can get to my laptop?
There's enough complicated machinery that I'm thinking the answer is likely yes, but perhaps this has been vetted.
> A compromised remote could use the VS Code Remote connection to execute code on your local machine.
They're resource hogs and the attack surface is huge. You're basically betting that automatic code that's run won't find a vulnerability and escape the sandbox from an entire browser.
I have way more trust in Jetbrains IDEs and the JVM as a sandbox vs HTML/CSS/JS.
Still, I'm always impressed at the ingenuity of the people who come up with these attacks and the people who find them.
The alternative is a whitelist approach. Instead of disallowing dangerous features you're enabling only the features you need.
So a build system like Gradle or Maven (same thing really) has a limited set of primitives it is allowing access to. It's not loading, say, the entire JVM and all the Java core libraries and then listing all those you can't use.
You see the difference? If nothing else, the blacklist approach is going to fail when the virtual machine (or whatever) adds a new API call upstream and it's added without intent to the sandbox by simply doing an update where nobody has thought to disable it.
Another way of looking at this is Gradle isn't being compiled into Java bytecode and run in the same environment as the IDE (sandboxed or otherwise). That is inherently riskier.
When I can avoid it, the better.
If you proceed with "Trust Project" you're at your own fault.
Nothing changed post-Vista. It's exactly the same system in Windows 11 doing exactly the same thing. It did, however, get developers to change how they do things.
To be honest, the solution here is probably more dialogs like this, not less. Having one single "Trust everything here but if you don't then nothing will work" box is hardly a good way to go.
By only having an upfront project-wide toggle, VS Code is much worse.
Sigh. It's so Microsoft to just run random stuff.
Of course, in the Linux world, we have "Install with"
curl https://www.hostilecode.com > bashhttps://github.com/zed-industries/zed/compare/v0.220.2...v0....