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Comment by kittikitti | Hacker News Reader

The ethos of VSCode was supposed to be lightweight, something like Notepad++ with a terminal. Developers have lost the plot. Please recommend Visual Studio if you would like a feature-rich SSH agent. I think developer trends have supercharged VSCode and it feels shinier and new with all the extensions but this is an anti-pattern; it defeats the whole purpose.

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I don’t think it was ever intended to be lightweight like Notepad++ given the architectural designs from the outset (LSP, Chromium-base, etc).

It always felt to me more like a desperate attempt by Microsoft to regain the IDE market share as low end FOSS editors started taking over. So MS wanted to appeal to the open source community.

And it worked. Even if the primary build of VSCode which most people run isn’t technically open source.

Not really sure what low end FOSS editors you are referring to? Textmate?. The Monaco editor predated vscode by 4 years and it was an attempt to build a browser-based texteditor as a take at cloud9 which people thought was gonna be the “future of cloud development”. Vscode happened after Atom (which was not low end) made electron apps viable and cloud9 turned out not to be the future. Both were an attempt at SublimeText (which was not FOSS). SublimeText itself was a cross platform alternative for textmate.

The FOSS text editor space was always crowded between vim and emacs. FOSS alternatives would get measured against these 2 behemoths and it was a tall order to compete against. Now FOSS IDEs were a different story.

Java, C#, and C++ had many sophisticated and advanced IDEs, some FOSS some not. However, PHP, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript were quickly gaining huge mindshare and those developers didn’t want to install Visual Studio, Eclipse, NetBeans, or IntelliJ. It’s a tough proposition to tell a Ruby dev to install Java, then install Eclipse, then install an extension, then learn Eclipse nonesense just to edit your Ruby files vs “just open SublimeText and edit your files”. Most of what those developers wanted was just syntax highlighting and basic directory navigation to begin with. Atom/vscode were an attempt at SublimeText alternative. VScode was objectively better than Atom and TypeScript was also objectively better than CoffeeScript.

To me it was about sublime getting a little too popular for web development. MSoft needed an answer and so vscode was born.

I agree. And that’s basically what I was alluding to.

The FOSS languages were taking over and there was less reliance on the traditional IDEs that MS (amongst others) were building.

MS wanted to appear more FOSS friendly so released VSCode.

Oh okay maybe I misunderstood because you said low end FOSS editors. When I think “low end editor” I think something like notepad or gedit.

Yes, fair point. I also meant FOSS languages and how they didn’t require high end IDEs. So I definitely phrased my comment very poorly.

Sorry for the misunderstanding that caused. Though the upside was it did lead to your excellent comment adding the detail it did.

For all practical purposes VSCode is a vessel to sell AI, im using vscodium for now but expect a cycle reset for it this decade (someone makes a new lightweight IDE etc)

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