To be clear, I'm don't like the Microsoft has a proprietary Marketplace, but a company openly violating the terms of use for their own profit is a bit much in my opinion.
> Cursor allegedly has been flouting Microsoft terms-of-service rules for some time now by setting up a reverse proxy to mask its network requests to the endpoints used by the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace. This allows Cursor users to install VS Code extensions from Microsoft's market. Other VS Code forks tend to point to Open VSX, an alternative extension marketplace.
cursor also hijacks the 'code' alias to start vscode from the cli, which I use a lot. It's extremely annoying to have cursor start instead and unnncessarily difficult to get rid of. I removed cursor because of this.
But why should we care? It's obvious Cursor's IDE is VSCode, I cannot think of a single reason why I should be against executing whatever the hell I want on my computer. It's not Cursor doing this, it's me doing this using Cursor.
> The way copyright and other rights to your IP you claim to have work in practice, is you need to enforce those claims or loose the rights.
Generally only applies to trademarks, not copyrights. In most English speaking countries copyright is a proprietary right and you don't lose it if you don't actively enforce it. But there could be time limits to a plaintiff bringing a civil case to court (usually a couple years).
Another way copyright has worked for decades is qBittorrent for instance, is not responsible for infringements by users. Along with massive carve-outs for Microsoft and the gang to avoid that responsibility too, on GitHub and YouTube and many other websites.
The Cursor founders (technically the company is called Anysphere, Inc) are all young MIT grads. What they needed is a 40-year-old with a degree from Fitchburg State who could say "Woah, don't do that! It's not worth the long-term risk!"
Either you don't get caught and can move faster, or you get caught and the penalty is usually small and a long way down the line, by which time your company will have either folded or grown enough to pay without difficulty.
That's the play when your adversary is regulation--the government moves slowly, court cases move even slower, and you can grease the wheels politically.
That is not the scenario here. Cursor is being hunted by an extremely motivated corporate competitor. Cursor has been leeching the gorilla's blood and the gorilla finally noticed. Microsoft doesn't (necessarily) need the law here. They have it if they need it, but they can kill Cursor without needing to sue them. The disastrous outcome isn't a penalty--it's a critical mass of users switching to Copilot because they can't use their Microsoft extensions in Cursor any more. Cutting off the extensions on the same day that their Cursor clone went live was effectively a declaration of war from Microsoft.
It's possible but I think this is a bit of a non-issue for cursor. Microsoft extensions are pretty good but are not irreplacable, and in the meantime cursor has grown astronomically fast and has grabbed a ton of "AI Coding" mindshare. I think the gamble has already paid off for them: if they have to play nice with licensing and develop their own solutions to replace MS proprietary extensions, they now have the scale to do that. GH Copilot was first in the game but now has the reputation of the poor man's cursor.
Agent mode in Copilot. It all went down on April 4th: the rollout of agent mode to all users, and the sudden enforcement of the license in their C++ extension.
Or, hear me out, Microsoft decides you’d make excellent additions its House of Faces For IDE/Compiler Competitors and your face is on the wall before you know what happened.
exactly! laws are for old geezers who went to State, not young superstars with fancy degrees. MIT negotiated diplomatic immunity for its graduates, after all. that's why Sam Bankman-Fried got acquitted when FTX went under.
It's what is motivating Microsoft to prevent what Cursor is doing.
All cursor is doing is saying this blob of crap is compatible with their fork and letting you run it. This is akin to browsers supporting extensions from other browsers, and many other scenarios.
What Microsoft is doing is trying to prevent VSCode from becoming spontaneously obsolete because coding with Cursor a) removes you from VSCode and b) does it better.
Now, I get why you made the quip, but I for one keep both of those out of the business I run for this exact reason: I do not trust MICROS~1 in the medium to long term.
I also present the CEO and board with other arguments, like moral ones about involvement in atrocities and tyranny, legal ones regarding things like data protection, market related ones such as the likelihood of a future showdown between the EU and US.
But the risk that MICROS~1 fucks us over directly is even easier for them to understand, because they have been using Windows and Office for decades and are quite queasy about 10 going EOL and what the next set of annoyances in document management will be that they'll have to suffer under. It's something they have immediate experience of and didn't like.
A year from now it's probable we'll only have a couple of Windows machines left, because some of our customers use software that doesn't run under Wine and tries to block execution under both debuggers and container environments.
Eh MS wasn’t going to just let VSCode derivatives soak up all the AI gold rush money, these companies knew the risks. I wonder what it’s going to mean for projects like Zig, a migration of VSCode refugees could crank things up to 11 pretty quick.
Yep. Was a Microsoft dev from 1992 until 2017. Won’t touch them now because I spent my entire career rewriting rug pulls. It paid off a mortgage and fed me well but it was a bad outcome for my orgs and customers.
If anyone remembers WCF/AppFabric/WWF and Silverlight, that was the last stack I rewrote someone out of the shit on.
There was a lot of hype and momentum around Silverlight back in the day, until their wasn't. You got a cross-platform (Mac/Windows) WPF-like UI and C# programming environment, which was powerful.
I had the fortune to be involved developing the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming software. Under the hood, it was a small web browser shell (using Mono on Mac and WPF on Windows) around a Silverlight Out-of-Browser app. Anything beyond the permissions of the Silverlight app (e.g. bluetooth/USB comms) was an RPC from Silverlight to the shell.
After completing the Mac/Windows app, LEGO wanted to deliver a similar experience on iPad. There was no Silverlight there, and it was clear there never would be. But we were able to leverage Xamarin stuff to reuse most of the same codebase, just with an iOS UI on top.
I started my career rewriting a product using Microsoft's DNA business server with Java and never looked back. I'm shocked this keeps happening, honestly. I guess I'm a "never again" sort but surprised there's not more companies refusing to deal with Microsoft.
Due to experiences like that I refused to buy volume licenses from them, too. Sometime later I got an audit demand for which I had a reply ready.
Anything that’s not gpl-licensed is going to pull the rug from under your feet, people should have learned this by now.
Also, if you do open source contributions, never ever agree to assign copyright to the project: doing so means the project owners can relicense the code base, even towards proprietary license.
I think project governance matters more than license, and the BSDs are great examples.
Having said that, I’ve soured on the GPL. V3 more-or-less bans companies from selling you hardware that runs free software, but lets Google, Meta, etc use the software to expand their cloud-based monopolies where surveillance capitalism and enshittification have won out.
AGPL or BSL seem much better if you want free as in freedom. BSD and Apache at least don’t force your software off of machines that end users control.
Yes, BSL is not open (TM) or free (TM) or whatever. It’s still better IMHO, since it at least has some path to revenue for the developers.
The intellisense from clangd is much better and faster than the Microsoft C++ extension, if you can set up a compile_commands.json. Although debugging still relies on the Microsoft extension. Although I don't think it's going to be hard to create an extension just for debugging (if it does not already exist?)
I've had the opposite experience with weird C++ projects from some customers that use external toolchains. For some reason even creating the compile_commands.json file with Bear doesn't work, while the proprietary Intellisense extension works out of the box without any configuration.
And this is why I'm using Zed today. I'm deadly serious. I was a huge proponent of VSCode at first but I've soured on it, and now I don't want my workflow to depend on it in any way.
Awesome software, but I don't trust the upstream org further than I must.
Zed uses tree-sitter and LSP; most popular languages do not require extensions, and extensions for niche languages are shockingly easy to write. Literally 100-300 lines of Rust boilerplate and around 300 lines of config boilerplate, with minimal maintenance/upkeep.
zed is veerrrry good. i really appreciate the clean ui compared to vscode and its ilk. don’t love the pricing they just announced though. i don’t mind paying for my tools, but it not being unlimited scares me off slightly.
I think it's totally fair for them to charge for an optional feature that requires a cloud service. And if you don't like their pricing you can use a different provider, including self-hosted ones.
Agreed, but at least that's an optional feature you can choose to pay for if you want to. And if that changes, I'll drop it and head back to a Free editor.
Reminds when I excited to see Azure Data Studio adding Postgres support, but it was actually a binary extension with no ability to fix or change anything and no way for other useful databases to extend and use the functionality; they had spent all the time and effort to make sure nobody could do something like it but them.
Weird, ADS is dead and nobody spent any time on it, I wonder why.
Debugging isn't in yet, but is actively being worked on and planned for public release before 1.0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065, there's an active channel in their Discord discussing the development of the feature.
I second all this. I'm using Zed today, but I was using Emacs for 20 years, then Sublime/VSCode/etc. for a few, and now Zed. If it disappears, I'm going right back to Emacs without a moment's hesitation.
It’s gotten way more ergonomic, BTW. Even if you treat it as a toolkit to build your own editor, the building blocks are much nicer than they were back then.
Thing is, I don't want to build my editor, I want to live the dream of Xerox PARC workstations, and that is what IDEs are for.
I had to make Emacs my go to editor in UNIX, because in those days there were hardly any alternatives, IDEs only started to be taken seriously on UNIX around 2000.
Even James Gosling, one of influencial people in the Emacs history says its time is now passed and he rather use Netbeans,
I'm something of a vim fanatic because Emacs was sluggish, but these days have to admit that the multicore support turned out fine and the difference isn't that big anymore.
I spent 25 years using emacs before vscode (1997 to 2022-ish). I didn't go deep, I mostly just enjoyed the core parts of emacs + ccmode. I don't enjoy LISP but I still enjoy emacs, if that makes any sense.
MS made some very real and very usable innovations. Emacs hackers/maintainers would be wise to copy them, like I'm sure Microsoft copied things from emacs.
It's a bit like the UI aspect of the browser wars. Everyone wins when good things are cloned and then iteratively improved upon.
vscode does three things extremely well: defaults, defaults and defaults. The most important ‘you just need M-x do-whatever after installing the whatever-doer package’ is supported out of the box (no details on purpose, try running emacs or vim without any config and compare to a clean fresh install of vscode).
This is one of the reasons why I switched to CLion for C++ work, and the fact that VS Code and its derivatives was a pain to configure for C++.
I also use PHPStorm for web dev work and we use MS DevOps at work and that extension is unstable, causes IDE errors for me and I will not use MS products just for this one irksome bug. I prefer PHPStorm for my work, because working with PHP in VS Code has never been a great experience for me. I just want my tools to work, I fight with code, I don't want to fight with my tools as well.
I love Cursor deeply but choosing to be a VSCode fork instead of a VSCode extension was a fatal choice. In the long term I think they either have to retool as an extension or they will go out of business. You can only publicly flout Microsoft's licenses for so long while making a competitor to one of their AAA products.
They wouldn’t take off if they weren’t a vscode fork. They may die a heroic death now having kickstarted the proper AI IDE. (Copilot was first and it was… nice? then it sucked so bad everyone jumped ship, remember? MS needed that kick in the balls.)
Eh, I mean it's a fork. They can keep updating their fork forever. Reality is they want complete control over the product, and VS Code doesn't expose everything in the extension API.
Sure, but they depend on a bunch of Microsoft proprietary extensions (that they can't fork) that ban usage in VSCode forks, and they knew this when they made the choice. This was an inevitable outcome from Microsoft's side. I'm sure they want to remain in business more than they want complete control over the product.
Do you guys ever feel tired of 'sounding the alarm'?
I feel like I've been doing that for years on a wide range of topics, but every time it's like you're talking to cult members.
How do you break through to people? People say things like "you're overthinking it", "that's never going to happen", "I don't care because I like using VSCode and not alternatives".
Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
Tech bubble remains tech bubble, when common, non-tech people are much more screwed, yet nothing is being done except saying "lol, just install Linux".
I think the problem with "sounding the alarm" is that it's not a tsunami that will immediately wipe out everything, it's more of a slow flood. The business strategy is boiling the frog.
I just use the OSS vs code builds at home. (Work uses vscode).
Ever since I got remote mode working, I haven’t noticed any missing functionality I care about. (I also haven’t tried installing extensions for the pile of commercial services work uses, and that I wouldn’t pay for anyway.)
Edit: Since cursor now has near infinite VC money, perhaps they should fund a few open source devs to work on those forks. Why should they get a free ride?
It's tradeoffs all the way down. VSCode remains one of the best intro editors, because it's free, has next to zero learning curve, and a robust extension ecosystem. I mean, what even is the argument here? That it's not completely open in every possible way? Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?
> Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?
Me, personally? No, because they're honest about it. I use BBEdit and Nova frequently on my Mac. Those are as closed source as it gets. They never pretend otherwise, though. You pay your money and you know what you're getting. VSCode tries really hard to appear to be open source, as long as you're willing to ignore the million places where they aren't. (Python devs: are you using PyLance? I'm talking to you.)
And ironically, those closed editors seem to play more nicely with the ecosystem as a whole. Neither BBEdit nor Nova have ever tried to talk me into installing closed plugins, and the same plugins that work with them work great in Emacs and Zed.
If I go to one bar that charged $5 per beer, and another that gives free beer but makes you rent single-use mugs for $5, even though the end price is identical, the rental bar's going to annoy me horrendously. Just admit what it is and let people judge on their own merits.
Meh. If it does eventually go away, it wouldn't be the first time I've switched editors. Which turns out to not actually be all that hard to do.
> Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
What collective problem, that someone might have to unexpectedly burn a weekend writing a new editor? That {emacs|vim} isn't popular enough? That people might have to go install openjdk in order to start using eclipse?
I think ultimately we're mostly just not as clever as we think we are, which I think unfortunately we must accept.
Where this has become increasingly problematic is rampant materialism and corporatism.
If the only real motivator in town, especially for the powerful, is material gain then there is nothing to constrain wanton greed. This becomes even more pronounced with corporations because their overtly stated purpose is not but greed, so even if the individual actors have some transcend moral compass they will be in conflict to their programmed imperative to "do their job".
Currently many of the powerful are materialistic and materialism can bring worldly power. Other political paradigms may come to the fore but as it takes a form and gravity it will likely come into some dialectic conflict with the prevailing materialistic status quo. That may be a peaceful resolution, but I'd not be certain of that.
At least I know one alternative that is on bar (even better according to some people) for the C++ MS extension. What I am worried more about is the Jupyter Notebook MS extensions. I cannot find a suitable alternative and sometimes I am not being able to use it on windsurf/VSCodium (manually installing vsix). I am surprised by that taking into consideration how Jupyter notebooks relevance in data science and ML.
I use cursor primarily because of the great tab autocomplete model, but I've always thought it was a bit scummy they blatantly violate the VS Code licensing. Windsurf ships a special version of the pyright extension for this reason. Why doesn't cursor have to play by the rules too?
I don't understand the problem. It sounds like the C/C++ extension was proprietary. This sort of thing can always happen when you rely on proprietary software. Make an open source C/C++ extension and you wouldn't have this problem.
Yes, that is what I thought, too. (It would be a good idea to have a open source C/C++ extension anyways, whether or not the proprietary extension stops working with non-Microsoft code.) (Maybe there is such extension; I don't know; I don't use VS Code and VS Codium etc.)
neovim is a truly beautiful piece of software that is impossible to undersell. It has made vim into a full feature complete IDE for every language finally with a good editor :P
100%. I switched to it to get true color themes support in the terminal which vim didn't have at the time, but I stayed with it because of all the extensibility for features like above.
Imagine Debian banning Debian forks downloading from their repos…
If Microsoft are going to call VS Code “open source”, then the marketplace should not be selective on clients. If so, it’s not Open Source, it’s Sparkling Virtue Signalling!
The hilarious part is that old fart C++ programmers (like me) have been the ones most leery of VS Code. Microsoft’s gonna Microsoft, ‘specially with compilers.
Well, VisualStudio for one. If you’re targeting Windows, you should consider it. VS Code feels slow to me in a way VS doesn’t.
I spent most of the past ~fifteen years working in Sublime and just switched between that and the terminal for build and test—not fancy, but then, C++ coding isn’t a speedrun. Sublime is clean, fast, and portable.
However, dev tooling has advanced so much now that I started learning and using neovim last year so I could take advantage of good syntax highlighting, LSP, and CoPilot. I don’t get enough daily reps to be good at core vi yet (I am a team manager so most of my time is spent asking questions of devs prefixed with “This is a really dumb question, but”) but despite all the techbros who’ve flocked to it I think neovim is pretty good technology and responsive. You can get the tooling features but control UI/UX; for me, I want as much code on the screen as possible, and I especially resent widgets that eat into vertical space. I started with one of the off-the-shelf all-in-one init.lua configs off github, but it was too complicated and I quickly broke things. What’s worked better is going through a video series on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHTeCSVAFNY&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN...) and building up the init.lua I want from scratch. As noted, I’m not great with it, especially the normal vim motions, but I’ve learned to get around, it’s fast, I can see my code without a million distracting widgets, and I get the benefit of clangd and CoPilot.
I have almost the exact same opinion. In that I hate distracting widgets and things that eat vertical space. I spent about a week getting nvim setup. I write code all day. I still have VSCode day to day because I'm so used to it/fast with it (I use vim motions within it).
But to me the appeal of nvim is being able to fully remove everything I dislike.
No VS Codium is just a alternative build of Visual Studio Code.
> This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration.
I thought it was similar to the Chromium/Chrome situation. The naming implied that. But I don't use it and don't follow it that closely. Thanks for the clarification.
Why anyone uses anything from Microsoft is beyond me... It's always been clear that VSCode is a trojan horse for MS' EEE strategy. So just don't use MS stuff. Neovim is great, it has great C++ tools. What's the saying? Fool me once...
The same problem with the c# extension, which has had an even bigger shitstorm since some parts of the extension need a ms account and depending on the company needs to be paid
People on this site will never ever learn that if a company (especially a profitable one) invests into something and then gives it away for free, there must be some kind of strings attached.
Shitty move (as expected from Microsoft) but I don't see the bigger issue. The beauty of open source is that you can always roll back to a version that did work. Of course continued developement and support from there on is your problem, but Microsoft never owed that to you anyways. Cursor, Codium and all the other VS Code forks have unlimited VC funding and are worth tens of billions of dollars combined. They can afford to contribute back to the ecosystem.
The C/C++ extension isn't open source though, and that's where the "doesn't work on forks" DRM is implemented. At least the clangd extension is open source and is a viable alternative.
But what happens when you anger the wizards? Some guy gets 4 two liter bottles of Mt Dew, and in a weekend comes up with a better plugin, and open sources it. Look it up on Monday. I just went from VSCode 1.52 to 1.99, and it's not pretty, but... Can someone convince copilot to rat out it's owners and write out a extension that runs cLisp? And all the emacs code runs in VSCode? ( I am saying this so facietously... ).
To be clear, I'm don't like the Microsoft has a proprietary Marketplace, but a company openly violating the terms of use for their own profit is a bit much in my opinion.
> Cursor allegedly has been flouting Microsoft terms-of-service rules for some time now by setting up a reverse proxy to mask its network requests to the endpoints used by the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace. This allows Cursor users to install VS Code extensions from Microsoft's market. Other VS Code forks tend to point to Open VSX, an alternative extension marketplace.
cursor also hijacks the 'code' alias to start vscode from the cli, which I use a lot. It's extremely annoying to have cursor start instead and unnncessarily difficult to get rid of. I removed cursor because of this.
Yeah, I've noticed this using cursor. I was surprised that the extension marketplace seemed... identical to VS Code.
But why should we care? It's obvious Cursor's IDE is VSCode, I cannot think of a single reason why I should be against executing whatever the hell I want on my computer. It's not Cursor doing this, it's me doing this using Cursor.
That’s not how companies see it.
From MS point of view it’s Cursor doing it to them.
The way copyright and other rights to your IP you claim to have work in practice, is you need to enforce those claims or loose the rights.
> The way copyright and other rights to your IP you claim to have work in practice, is you need to enforce those claims or loose the rights.
Generally only applies to trademarks, not copyrights. In most English speaking countries copyright is a proprietary right and you don't lose it if you don't actively enforce it. But there could be time limits to a plaintiff bringing a civil case to court (usually a couple years).
Another way copyright has worked for decades is qBittorrent for instance, is not responsible for infringements by users. Along with massive carve-outs for Microsoft and the gang to avoid that responsibility too, on GitHub and YouTube and many other websites.
The Cursor founders (technically the company is called Anysphere, Inc) are all young MIT grads. What they needed is a 40-year-old with a degree from Fitchburg State who could say "Woah, don't do that! It's not worth the long-term risk!"
Grow fast, raise a few billions, deal with the lawsuit in a few years.
Grow fast, raise a few billions, deal with the lawsuit in a few years when you're big enough to buy lobbyists in Washingon DC.
I have lost the hope. Money is always the measure of ethics.
It is worth the long term risk.
Either you don't get caught and can move faster, or you get caught and the penalty is usually small and a long way down the line, by which time your company will have either folded or grown enough to pay without difficulty.
That's the play when your adversary is regulation--the government moves slowly, court cases move even slower, and you can grease the wheels politically.
That is not the scenario here. Cursor is being hunted by an extremely motivated corporate competitor. Cursor has been leeching the gorilla's blood and the gorilla finally noticed. Microsoft doesn't (necessarily) need the law here. They have it if they need it, but they can kill Cursor without needing to sue them. The disastrous outcome isn't a penalty--it's a critical mass of users switching to Copilot because they can't use their Microsoft extensions in Cursor any more. Cutting off the extensions on the same day that their Cursor clone went live was effectively a declaration of war from Microsoft.
It's possible but I think this is a bit of a non-issue for cursor. Microsoft extensions are pretty good but are not irreplacable, and in the meantime cursor has grown astronomically fast and has grabbed a ton of "AI Coding" mindshare. I think the gamble has already paid off for them: if they have to play nice with licensing and develop their own solutions to replace MS proprietary extensions, they now have the scale to do that. GH Copilot was first in the game but now has the reputation of the poor man's cursor.
I don't know anyone that even knows Cursor exists, outside HN readership bubble.
What cursor clone?
Agent mode in Copilot. It all went down on April 4th: the rollout of agent mode to all users, and the sudden enforcement of the license in their C++ extension.
Or, hear me out, Microsoft decides you’d make excellent additions its House of Faces For IDE/Compiler Competitors and your face is on the wall before you know what happened.
Exactly. What were they expecting would happen? They are breaking the tos while competing with Microsoft.
The amount of Boston in this comment is amazing. And 100% true
exactly! laws are for old geezers who went to State, not young superstars with fancy degrees. MIT negotiated diplomatic immunity for its graduates, after all. that's why Sam Bankman-Fried got acquitted when FTX went under.
lol, Microsoft has been doing this kind of thing for a while...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Antitrust
While its fair to claim Microsoft has legal issues, I'm not sure what similarity you are drawing to what Cursor is doing.
It's what is motivating Microsoft to prevent what Cursor is doing.
All cursor is doing is saying this blob of crap is compatible with their fork and letting you run it. This is akin to browsers supporting extensions from other browsers, and many other scenarios.
What Microsoft is doing is trying to prevent VSCode from becoming spontaneously obsolete because coding with Cursor a) removes you from VSCode and b) does it better.
Look, if you willingly have any piece of your stack relying on Microsoft you have to be ready for the rug pull. They WILL fuck you, it's guaranteed.
Lucky no-one is reliant on niche tools like NPM or GitHub, otherwise they'd be feeling mightily insecure right now.
Or ChatGPT… maybe not their development but that is who runs it.
Now, I get why you made the quip, but I for one keep both of those out of the business I run for this exact reason: I do not trust MICROS~1 in the medium to long term.
I also present the CEO and board with other arguments, like moral ones about involvement in atrocities and tyranny, legal ones regarding things like data protection, market related ones such as the likelihood of a future showdown between the EU and US.
But the risk that MICROS~1 fucks us over directly is even easier for them to understand, because they have been using Windows and Office for decades and are quite queasy about 10 going EOL and what the next set of annoyances in document management will be that they'll have to suffer under. It's something they have immediate experience of and didn't like.
A year from now it's probable we'll only have a couple of Windows machines left, because some of our customers use software that doesn't run under Wine and tries to block execution under both debuggers and container environments.
Not to quibble, but VSCode (and GitHub for that matter) are part of my tooling, not part of any of my stacks.
To me the former is tolerable, the latter is not.
I think they are talking about products like Cursor.
Ah, that’s a painful situation.
Eh MS wasn’t going to just let VSCode derivatives soak up all the AI gold rush money, these companies knew the risks. I wonder what it’s going to mean for projects like Zig, a migration of VSCode refugees could crank things up to 11 pretty quick.
Zed don't have many extensions like VSCode.
How do VSCode refugees impact a project like Zig?
I would bet they meant the editor “Zed”.
[dead]
I don't see how it can be a rug pull when in this case it was clearly against the terms of use?
It's hard not to rely on Microsoft.
Open source project hosted on GitHub, for the network effect.
Use Rust which also rely on GitHub for crates.io
Yep. Was a Microsoft dev from 1992 until 2017. Won’t touch them now because I spent my entire career rewriting rug pulls. It paid off a mortgage and fed me well but it was a bad outcome for my orgs and customers.
If anyone remembers WCF/AppFabric/WWF and Silverlight, that was the last stack I rewrote someone out of the shit on.
There was a lot of hype and momentum around Silverlight back in the day, until their wasn't. You got a cross-platform (Mac/Windows) WPF-like UI and C# programming environment, which was powerful.
I had the fortune to be involved developing the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming software. Under the hood, it was a small web browser shell (using Mono on Mac and WPF on Windows) around a Silverlight Out-of-Browser app. Anything beyond the permissions of the Silverlight app (e.g. bluetooth/USB comms) was an RPC from Silverlight to the shell.
After completing the Mac/Windows app, LEGO wanted to deliver a similar experience on iPad. There was no Silverlight there, and it was clear there never would be. But we were able to leverage Xamarin stuff to reuse most of the same codebase, just with an iOS UI on top.
I started my career rewriting a product using Microsoft's DNA business server with Java and never looked back. I'm shocked this keeps happening, honestly. I guess I'm a "never again" sort but surprised there's not more companies refusing to deal with Microsoft.
Due to experiences like that I refused to buy volume licenses from them, too. Sometime later I got an audit demand for which I had a reply ready.
"lol, no."
Sorry if I'm being dense, but what is an "audit demand?" (Looked it up and couldn't find anything obviously relevant.)
I’m still dealing with the long goodbye of a silverlight app which now must be somehow ported.
Then they will gaslight you.
Anything that’s not gpl-licensed is going to pull the rug from under your feet, people should have learned this by now.
Also, if you do open source contributions, never ever agree to assign copyright to the project: doing so means the project owners can relicense the code base, even towards proprietary license.
FreeBSD must be pulling a very long con, then.
Yeah.
I think project governance matters more than license, and the BSDs are great examples.
Having said that, I’ve soured on the GPL. V3 more-or-less bans companies from selling you hardware that runs free software, but lets Google, Meta, etc use the software to expand their cloud-based monopolies where surveillance capitalism and enshittification have won out.
AGPL or BSL seem much better if you want free as in freedom. BSD and Apache at least don’t force your software off of machines that end users control.
Yes, BSL is not open (TM) or free (TM) or whatever. It’s still better IMHO, since it at least has some path to revenue for the developers.
Uh, yes?
Half of the initial mac os x kernel was ripped off freebsd, giving pretty much nothing back.
Afaik netapp is also basing their system on bsd.
Sony uses freebsd as the OS for their playstation.
And many more, giving essentially nothing back.
> Half of the initial mac os x kernel was ripped off freebsd, giving pretty much nothing back.
That is open source.
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
Regarding apple: They support cups and clang, and stuff like swift and webkit. Also, the darwin kernel is open source.
I’d be shocked if netapp hard forked bsd and doesn’t upstream fixes.
They support the version of cups that nobody uses anymore, except themselves.
Absolutely. I signed one copyright assignment, ever, with the FSF. I trust them enough to do that, but they're just about the only ones.
They don't require it anymore.
Better yet.
The intellisense from clangd is much better and faster than the Microsoft C++ extension, if you can set up a compile_commands.json. Although debugging still relies on the Microsoft extension. Although I don't think it's going to be hard to create an extension just for debugging (if it does not already exist?)
I've had the opposite experience with weird C++ projects from some customers that use external toolchains. For some reason even creating the compile_commands.json file with Bear doesn't work, while the proprietary Intellisense extension works out of the box without any configuration.
Yes, even on medium sized code bases (few 100K lines), the Microsoft C++ extension gets extremely slow. Clangd is a much better option.
Not just faster, I have never been able to get jump to declaration/definition/references to work reliably without clangd.
Lldb and rr (midas) have vscode extensions
And this is why I'm using Zed today. I'm deadly serious. I was a huge proponent of VSCode at first but I've soured on it, and now I don't want my workflow to depend on it in any way.
Awesome software, but I don't trust the upstream org further than I must.
Does Zed have a comparable C++ extension?
Zed uses tree-sitter and LSP; most popular languages do not require extensions, and extensions for niche languages are shockingly easy to write. Literally 100-300 lines of Rust boilerplate and around 300 lines of config boilerplate, with minimal maintenance/upkeep.
https://zed.dev/docs/languages/cpp
Many words to state that it doesn't.
Many words to explain that it doesn't need one, as you can see by clicking that link.
zed is veerrrry good. i really appreciate the clean ui compared to vscode and its ilk. don’t love the pricing they just announced though. i don’t mind paying for my tools, but it not being unlimited scares me off slightly.
I think it's totally fair for them to charge for an optional feature that requires a cloud service. And if you don't like their pricing you can use a different provider, including self-hosted ones.
Agreed, but at least that's an optional feature you can choose to pay for if you want to. And if that changes, I'll drop it and head back to a Free editor.
Reminds when I excited to see Azure Data Studio adding Postgres support, but it was actually a binary extension with no ability to fix or change anything and no way for other useful databases to extend and use the functionality; they had spent all the time and effort to make sure nobody could do something like it but them.
Weird, ADS is dead and nobody spent any time on it, I wonder why.
So how do you get intellisense and debug C++ in Zed?
clangd is an LSP. You can use it in any editor with LSP support https://clangd.llvm.org/
Why isn't Cursor using this by default then?
I don't think MSVC provides an LSP, so the VSC C++ extension uses proprietary Intellisense features instead. LLVM provides their own extension to use the clangd LSP: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=llvm-vs-...
In short: Corporate politics and the Cursor team taking the path of least resistance.
There's a great doc on exactly how Zed handles syntax and intellisense-style completions: https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-languages
Debugging isn't in yet, but is actively being worked on and planned for public release before 1.0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065, there's an active channel in their Discord discussing the development of the feature.
Will they use DAP?
My understanding is that DAP support is merged into their internal builds and is being polished up for a public release.
Zed uses open-source language servers. It just doesn't rely on proprietary extensions.
I actually worked a bunch on the language server logic in Zed trying to get a bunch of it to work on Windows. All I have to say about that is: ugh.
Still using VSCode, but you kind of know that's it's going to go sour eventually. It is Microsoft. :/
I figure e.g. emacs will always be there when that happens.
All I need is a Github Copilot clone and a good code search feature.
Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.
Oh and the ssh remote extension.
> All I need is a Github Copilot clone
I'm using https://github.com/copilot-emacs/copilot.el
> good code search feature.
project-find-regexp is a nice start.
> Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.
(global-auto-revert-mode t)
> Oh and the ssh remote extension.
I haven't compared it to Tramp.
Many of us are perfectly fine with commercial software, we have been into the other side and got tired of the religion.
> All I need is a Github Copilot clone
or you could just use copilot through copilot.el
> and a good code search feature.
Like through helm or ivy?
> Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.
My emacs does that, and I don't think I did anything special to get it.
> Oh and the ssh remote extension.
like tramp?
Emacs user here, have used vscode in the past.
Yep, vscode is more intuitive.
However emacs is mostly the kind of thing you dedicate a couple of months of discomfort and enjoy for the rest of your life. Quite literally.
Spending some money on the “mastering emacs” book (https://www.masteringemacs.org/) is worth imho.
Bonus point: little by little you start enjoying doing more stuff in emacs. It’s a meme, but it’s true.
I second all this. I'm using Zed today, but I was using Emacs for 20 years, then Sublime/VSCode/etc. for a few, and now Zed. If it disappears, I'm going right back to Emacs without a moment's hesitation.
And "Mastering Emacs" is brilliant.
And with copilot.el you get access to all models, not just some. I'm using Claude
I dedicated my time between 1995 and 2005 as my main UNIX editor, and don't miss installing Emacs.
It’s gotten way more ergonomic, BTW. Even if you treat it as a toolkit to build your own editor, the building blocks are much nicer than they were back then.
Thing is, I don't want to build my editor, I want to live the dream of Xerox PARC workstations, and that is what IDEs are for.
I had to make Emacs my go to editor in UNIX, because in those days there were hardly any alternatives, IDEs only started to be taken seriously on UNIX around 2000.
Even James Gosling, one of influencial people in the Emacs history says its time is now passed and he rather use Netbeans,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Q39MuTvk
I'm something of a vim fanatic because Emacs was sluggish, but these days have to admit that the multicore support turned out fine and the difference isn't that big anymore.
I spent 25 years using emacs before vscode (1997 to 2022-ish). I didn't go deep, I mostly just enjoyed the core parts of emacs + ccmode. I don't enjoy LISP but I still enjoy emacs, if that makes any sense.
MS made some very real and very usable innovations. Emacs hackers/maintainers would be wise to copy them, like I'm sure Microsoft copied things from emacs.
It's a bit like the UI aspect of the browser wars. Everyone wins when good things are cloned and then iteratively improved upon.
What are the ways that VScode is better than Emacs?
vscode does three things extremely well: defaults, defaults and defaults. The most important ‘you just need M-x do-whatever after installing the whatever-doer package’ is supported out of the box (no details on purpose, try running emacs or vim without any config and compare to a clean fresh install of vscode).
I listed my favorites above.
Generalizing it: Having smart people who really understand UX helps a lot with minimizing those months of pain before the payoff.
Warning, though: the older you get, the harder it will be to learn emacs. The best time to learn it is yesterday. The second best is today.
You're almost describing Zed to a T.
vscode find in files is literally ripgrep FYI.
This is one of the reasons why I switched to CLion for C++ work, and the fact that VS Code and its derivatives was a pain to configure for C++.
I also use PHPStorm for web dev work and we use MS DevOps at work and that extension is unstable, causes IDE errors for me and I will not use MS products just for this one irksome bug. I prefer PHPStorm for my work, because working with PHP in VS Code has never been a great experience for me. I just want my tools to work, I fight with code, I don't want to fight with my tools as well.
I can also second the usage PHPStorm over VSCode for PHP work. On a team of 10 PHP devs we have just one that prefers VSCode.
I love Cursor deeply but choosing to be a VSCode fork instead of a VSCode extension was a fatal choice. In the long term I think they either have to retool as an extension or they will go out of business. You can only publicly flout Microsoft's licenses for so long while making a competitor to one of their AAA products.
They wouldn’t take off if they weren’t a vscode fork. They may die a heroic death now having kickstarted the proper AI IDE. (Copilot was first and it was… nice? then it sucked so bad everyone jumped ship, remember? MS needed that kick in the balls.)
Apparently VSCode doesn't allow extensions to do the same amount of integration as the Cursor people want...
Extensions aren't sandboxed... You can literally do anything.
Maybe against the store rules tho, dunno.
Eh, I mean it's a fork. They can keep updating their fork forever. Reality is they want complete control over the product, and VS Code doesn't expose everything in the extension API.
Sure, but they depend on a bunch of Microsoft proprietary extensions (that they can't fork) that ban usage in VSCode forks, and they knew this when they made the choice. This was an inevitable outcome from Microsoft's side. I'm sure they want to remain in business more than they want complete control over the product.
Do you guys ever feel tired of 'sounding the alarm'?
I feel like I've been doing that for years on a wide range of topics, but every time it's like you're talking to cult members.
How do you break through to people? People say things like "you're overthinking it", "that's never going to happen", "I don't care because I like using VSCode and not alternatives".
Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
Man, it is just a code editor.
Tech bubble remains tech bubble, when common, non-tech people are much more screwed, yet nothing is being done except saying "lol, just install Linux".
That's what "word to the wise" means -- you can't tell most people __anything__.
The opening of Proverbs has:
1:5. Let the wise hear and increase in learning[...]
I think the problem with "sounding the alarm" is that it's not a tsunami that will immediately wipe out everything, it's more of a slow flood. The business strategy is boiling the frog.
I just use the OSS vs code builds at home. (Work uses vscode).
Ever since I got remote mode working, I haven’t noticed any missing functionality I care about. (I also haven’t tried installing extensions for the pile of commercial services work uses, and that I wouldn’t pay for anyway.)
Edit: Since cursor now has near infinite VC money, perhaps they should fund a few open source devs to work on those forks. Why should they get a free ride?
It's tradeoffs all the way down. VSCode remains one of the best intro editors, because it's free, has next to zero learning curve, and a robust extension ecosystem. I mean, what even is the argument here? That it's not completely open in every possible way? Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?
> Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?
Me, personally? No, because they're honest about it. I use BBEdit and Nova frequently on my Mac. Those are as closed source as it gets. They never pretend otherwise, though. You pay your money and you know what you're getting. VSCode tries really hard to appear to be open source, as long as you're willing to ignore the million places where they aren't. (Python devs: are you using PyLance? I'm talking to you.)
And ironically, those closed editors seem to play more nicely with the ecosystem as a whole. Neither BBEdit nor Nova have ever tried to talk me into installing closed plugins, and the same plugins that work with them work great in Emacs and Zed.
If I go to one bar that charged $5 per beer, and another that gives free beer but makes you rent single-use mugs for $5, even though the end price is identical, the rental bar's going to annoy me horrendously. Just admit what it is and let people judge on their own merits.
I’ve just lost all hope and have rock bottom expectations. Probably not the healthiest coping mechanism.
Meh. If it does eventually go away, it wouldn't be the first time I've switched editors. Which turns out to not actually be all that hard to do.
> Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
What collective problem, that someone might have to unexpectedly burn a weekend writing a new editor? That {emacs|vim} isn't popular enough? That people might have to go install openjdk in order to start using eclipse?
I think ultimately we're mostly just not as clever as we think we are, which I think unfortunately we must accept.
Where this has become increasingly problematic is rampant materialism and corporatism.
If the only real motivator in town, especially for the powerful, is material gain then there is nothing to constrain wanton greed. This becomes even more pronounced with corporations because their overtly stated purpose is not but greed, so even if the individual actors have some transcend moral compass they will be in conflict to their programmed imperative to "do their job".
Currently many of the powerful are materialistic and materialism can bring worldly power. Other political paradigms may come to the fore but as it takes a form and gravity it will likely come into some dialectic conflict with the prevailing materialistic status quo. That may be a peaceful resolution, but I'd not be certain of that.
And when it turns out you were right the whole time they will pretend no one saw it coming and blame you for the problem.
You just have to let go of things you have no real influence over.
The clangd extension is better anyway, and is open source.
The Microsoft C++ extension is not open source; not sure what people were expecting here.
People not using VSCode on purpose, based on forks, are surprised product owner isn't happy with their license violations.
It is like when the same folks act surprised, after Google does something to their Chrome and Android forks.
Don't want big tech sponsored products?
Pay open source developers, so that they can actually make a living of their work.
At least I know one alternative that is on bar (even better according to some people) for the C++ MS extension. What I am worried more about is the Jupyter Notebook MS extensions. I cannot find a suitable alternative and sometimes I am not being able to use it on windsurf/VSCodium (manually installing vsix). I am surprised by that taking into consideration how Jupyter notebooks relevance in data science and ML.
Is this big deal? Surely with help of AI tools you can implement these extensions in matter of days if not hours. And they will be better.
This is just Microsoft being classic Microsoft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
I use cursor primarily because of the great tab autocomplete model, but I've always thought it was a bit scummy they blatantly violate the VS Code licensing. Windsurf ships a special version of the pyright extension for this reason. Why doesn't cursor have to play by the rules too?
I don't understand the problem. It sounds like the C/C++ extension was proprietary. This sort of thing can always happen when you rely on proprietary software. Make an open source C/C++ extension and you wouldn't have this problem.
Yes, that is what I thought, too. (It would be a good idea to have a open source C/C++ extension anyways, whether or not the proprietary extension stops working with non-Microsoft code.) (Maybe there is such extension; I don't know; I don't use VS Code and VS Codium etc.)
Glad I'm using Sublime Text.
FYI, neovim has LSP and DAP support, as well as a bunch of other editors.
Neovim is a godsend, I would be in despair without it.
I learned a bunch of Lua because of it :)
neovim is a truly beautiful piece of software that is impossible to undersell. It has made vim into a full feature complete IDE for every language finally with a good editor :P
100%. I switched to it to get true color themes support in the terminal which vim didn't have at the time, but I stayed with it because of all the extensibility for features like above.
Imagine Debian banning Debian forks downloading from their repos…
If Microsoft are going to call VS Code “open source”, then the marketplace should not be selective on clients. If so, it’s not Open Source, it’s Sparkling Virtue Signalling!
The hilarious part is that old fart C++ programmers (like me) have been the ones most leery of VS Code. Microsoft’s gonna Microsoft, ‘specially with compilers.
"Don't be paranoid", they said.
"That's ancient history", they said.
"Lucy will hold the football this time for sure", they said.
What do you prefer to VSCode? Just started a job where I’ll be working in C++ and looking for alternatives
CLion or Visual Studio.
Well, VisualStudio for one. If you’re targeting Windows, you should consider it. VS Code feels slow to me in a way VS doesn’t.
I spent most of the past ~fifteen years working in Sublime and just switched between that and the terminal for build and test—not fancy, but then, C++ coding isn’t a speedrun. Sublime is clean, fast, and portable.
However, dev tooling has advanced so much now that I started learning and using neovim last year so I could take advantage of good syntax highlighting, LSP, and CoPilot. I don’t get enough daily reps to be good at core vi yet (I am a team manager so most of my time is spent asking questions of devs prefixed with “This is a really dumb question, but”) but despite all the techbros who’ve flocked to it I think neovim is pretty good technology and responsive. You can get the tooling features but control UI/UX; for me, I want as much code on the screen as possible, and I especially resent widgets that eat into vertical space. I started with one of the off-the-shelf all-in-one init.lua configs off github, but it was too complicated and I quickly broke things. What’s worked better is going through a video series on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHTeCSVAFNY&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN...) and building up the init.lua I want from scratch. As noted, I’m not great with it, especially the normal vim motions, but I’ve learned to get around, it’s fast, I can see my code without a million distracting widgets, and I get the benefit of clangd and CoPilot.
I have almost the exact same opinion. In that I hate distracting widgets and things that eat vertical space. I spent about a week getting nvim setup. I write code all day. I still have VSCode day to day because I'm so used to it/fast with it (I use vim motions within it).
But to me the appeal of nvim is being able to fully remove everything I dislike.
Reminder: https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
> Visual Studio Code (VS Code) no longer works with derivative products such as VS Codium [..]
They seem to have this backward. Visual Studio Code is a derivative product of VS Codium.
No VS Codium is just a alternative build of Visual Studio Code.
> This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
I thought it was similar to the Chromium/Chrome situation. The naming implied that. But I don't use it and don't follow it that closely. Thanks for the clarification.
Why anyone uses anything from Microsoft is beyond me... It's always been clear that VSCode is a trojan horse for MS' EEE strategy. So just don't use MS stuff. Neovim is great, it has great C++ tools. What's the saying? Fool me once...
How is it not open-source?
It's licensed under MIT + VS Marketplace Terms: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools?tab=License-1-o...
If you fork it and don't use VS Marketplace, it's only MIT. Or am I missing something?
You missed that the ‚binary‘ vsix file has a different license: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-vscode.cpptool...
(The license like that existed before cursor, it was basically the reason for vscodium)
(Source is https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod... the license link at the bottom)
The same problem with the c# extension, which has had an even bigger shitstorm since some parts of the extension need a ms account and depending on the company needs to be paid
I guess it's the "additional binaries" which are not included.. but that's a guess, we need someone to confirm.
Good. Now it's time to learn from this important lesson.
People on this site will never ever learn that if a company (especially a profitable one) invests into something and then gives it away for free, there must be some kind of strings attached.
lol
Shitty move (as expected from Microsoft) but I don't see the bigger issue. The beauty of open source is that you can always roll back to a version that did work. Of course continued developement and support from there on is your problem, but Microsoft never owed that to you anyways. Cursor, Codium and all the other VS Code forks have unlimited VC funding and are worth tens of billions of dollars combined. They can afford to contribute back to the ecosystem.
The C/C++ extension isn't open source though, and that's where the "doesn't work on forks" DRM is implemented. At least the clangd extension is open source and is a viable alternative.
Well if it isn't open source then they should never have been using it in the first place.
But what happens when you anger the wizards? Some guy gets 4 two liter bottles of Mt Dew, and in a weekend comes up with a better plugin, and open sources it. Look it up on Monday. I just went from VSCode 1.52 to 1.99, and it's not pretty, but... Can someone convince copilot to rat out it's owners and write out a extension that runs cLisp? And all the emacs code runs in VSCode? ( I am saying this so facietously... ).