Visual Studio Code VS Geany

For IDE-heavy teams, BYOK (bring your own key) can be interesting, no matter whether you live in WebStorm or VS Code. On the JetBrains side, the JetBrains AI plans and Junie BYOK docs allow it, and most VS Code AI extensions offer the same idea: keep the IDE, connect provider keys, pay the provider.

One can (maybe, probably) disable copilot completely in vscode: chat.disableAIFeatures

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/309947

I am considering pinning whatever the earliest version in which this setting was introduced. I can't think of a single feature VSCode has implemented in the last three years that I couldn't go without. The binary for 121 is like 50% larger than 120.

Option 1: Raw editing in IDE. You open the .md file in VS Code or whatever you use. Syntax highlighting shows you the structure. Maybe you toggle a preview pane. This works for quick edits but becomes painful for anything involving tables, diagrams, or complex formatting.

The Google Cloud Shell- available on every Google Cloud project — comes with a built-in code editor that allows you to browse file directories, view and edit files, with continued access to the Cloud Shell. The Cloud Shell Editor is available by default with every Cloud Shell instance, and is based on Code OSS.

You'll need Python 3.8+ and pip for the quickstart, with venv recommended for isolation. Install the requests library for HTTP calls. VS Code with the Python extension works well as an editor, though PyCharm or Sublime Text work equally well. You'll also need a free Foxit developer account.

Now here's the key point: Antigravity 2.0 is a huge departure from 1.0 in the sense that it is functionally no longer based on Microsoft's VS Code. That means a huge majority of all the personalizations from 1.0 will not carry over to 2.0.

There's a one-line pull request open against microsoft/vscode. It changes the default value of a setting called git.addAICoAuthor from "off" to "all". The PR is titled, with no embellishment, "Enabling ai co author by default." It was opened on April 15, 2026 by cwebster-99, a member of the VS Code team. By the time the HN thread on the PR hit 1,239 points and 646 comments in early May, the practical effect was already shipping: every commit you make in VS Code, regardless of whether you wrote the code yourself or had Copilot write it, gets a Co-authored-by: Copilot trailer in the commit message.

You might want to at least use a code editor with syntax highlighting so that it gets a little easier to read the code. Personally I use Geany but there are many other ones you can use.

right on the main page, there is a screenshot. If you click it, it takes you to more screenshots.

Open https://www.geany.org/ in a web browser like chrome or firefox

Check out Geany. It is free, open source, cross platform, and lightweight. It has support for dozens of coding languages. LINK: https://www.geany.org/

I still enjoy Geany. It is lacking certain features I could do with, but it's joyful to use something that light: https://www.geany.org/

When I installed my IDE I just wanted something lightweight, so I went with Geany. I've been using it for years without trouble.

I would say, try out geany: https://www.geany.org/