publish-extensions VS emfy

The biggest caveat would be to be aware of the default connexion to an alternative extension store, https://open-vsx.org, instead of Microsoft's own store, which does not have all the extensions the official store has. But that's less and less an issue, thanks to projects such as https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions. In the worst case, I just manually `git clone`d the desired extension in my local extension folder. Nothing to complain about otherwise

Hey folks, Geoff here from Gitpod. Very please to see there continues to be interest in open (and FOSS) software development tooling. VSCodium uses the OpenVSX registry (which Gitpod folks created) because the VS Market place is proprietary and can only be connected to from offical Visual Studio branded products.

If you can't find an extension when using VSCodium then please send a pull-request to this repository https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions with the identifier and that will help grow the ecosystem of open tooling.

ICMYI - We blogged more about this over at https://www.gitpod.io/blog/openvscode-server-launch, https://www.gitpod.io/blog/cloud-ide-history and https://www.gitpod.io/blog/open-vsx.

Create a pull request to this repository to have the @open-vsx service account publish the extensions for you. It appears that they run a batch job to keep them up-to-date.

Geoff here from Gitpod. Solid write up and overview here. Some minor clarifications and helpful pointers!

There’s a community WIP pull request open right now to add Gitea support.

The visual studio marketplace is proprietary (by design) and as such we created OpenVSX for the open source ecosystem then gifted it to the eclipse foundation. If you see something not in OpenVSX send the pull request here https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions

And, finally, Open source communities are eligible for complimentary plan upgrades to unlimited hours. https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-for-opensource

Send a PR to https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions

> One goal of Open VSX is to have extension maintainers publish their extensions according to the documentation. However, you may be missing specific extensions that have not been published by their maintainers: either they are not willing to do it, or they haven't found time to do it, or simply they haven't heard about Open VSX yet. Though the preferred solution for such a situation is to convince the maintainers to start publishing themselves, you can add the extensions here to have them published by our CI workflow.

👋🧡 Geoff from Gitpod here. Thanks for your support. OpenVSX was created by Gitpod/TypeFox and gifted to the Eclipse Foundation to resolve the problem that the Visual Studio Marketplace is proprietary. Extensions can be configured to automatically be published via sending a pull-request to https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions

The auto-publishing of the extension is failing, due to a misconfiguration of versions in it's package.json.

My third point addresses the FLOSS extensions not yet available on Open VSX. These can usually be added fairly easily via open-vsx/publish-extensions, or by asking the extension author to publish to Open VSX themselves. I believe this mindset is the only way in which FLOSS distributions of VS Code can ever be a viable alternative to Visual Studio Code.

Vanilla. A good starting point for you is probably Emfy - https://github.com/susam/emfy

I recommend Susam Pal's attempt to make Emacs more approachable for beginners: https://github.com/susam/emfy. He provides a line-by-line explanation of a simple config file.

That is true. But it’s pretty overwhelming for a lot of folks. I was a spacemacs user. I tried to rebuild what I liked about it. It was a lot, and I didn’t quite get it there.

I finally found a good compromise though. I started over with this confing: https://github.com/susam/emfy

From there, I only needed a handful of packages and a few dozen lines of config to get to an editor that was comfy.

I struggled to make the change. I think I tried half a dozen times to go from (neo)vim to Emacs and it never stuck. My problem was that I kept reaching for spacemacs and Doom Emacs, etc., right out of the gate, and I would be mystified by Emacs itself and Emacs Lisp as a result.

Two things helped get me into Emacs full-time (and this is after > 15 years of using vim):

1. I went step-by-step through Susam's Emfy Emacs config [0]. That helped me understand some of the basics at a foundational level. I extended that base configuration a little bit and became comfortable with the environment.

2. I then went step-by-step through the entire "Emacs from Scratch" playlist that System Crafters put out [1]. I pushed my personal configuration pretty far with that over the course of 2-3 months.

I eventually moved to Doom Emacs and married in pieces of my own configuration. That's been my daily driver for months now.

[0]: https://github.com/susam/emfy

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7...

Just have a weekend learning Emacs + Lisp and make your own opinion. This configuration (https://github.com/susam/emfy) is a great start. If you like it - use it, if you don't - throw it away.

Rather than one of the fat and opinionated "distros" (doom, spacemacs) I like emacs for you. It will set you up with a minimal config that you can learn from and add to as you go.