vscodium VS theia

For the folks who need their IDE but w/o the slop and constant notifications, there is very good public fork called VSCodium: https://vscodium.com/

Not only is it free of MS "telemetry" nonsense, it is also way quieter to use, no bullshit popups for updates etc.

If you want AI to review your pull requests and generate tests, you want Qodo. If you want a telemetry-free code editor, you want VSCodium. And if you want both, you can install the Qodo extension inside VSCodium and use them together.

> It would only work if there's a sizeable, technically-inclined userbase of the project so that someone is likely to have audited the code.

Not really. There's a long history of seemingly credible closed-source codebases turning out to have concealed malicious functionality, such as smart TVs spying on user activity, or the 'dieselgate' scandal, or the Sony rootkit. This kind of thing is extremely rare in Free and Open Source software. The creators don't want to run the risk of someone stumbling across the plain-as-day source code of malicious functionality. Open source software also generally makes it easy to remove malicious functionality, or even to create an ongoing fork project for this purpose. (The VSCodium project does this, roughly speaking. [0])

Firefox's telemetry is one of the more high-profile examples of unwanted behaviour in Free and Open Source software, and that probably doesn't even really count as malware.

> If you're malicious, you can still release malicious software with an open-source cover (ideally without the source including the malicious part - but even then, you can coast just fine until someone comes along and actually checks said source).

I already acknowledged this is possible, you don't need to spell it out. Again I don't have hard numbers, but it seems to me this is quite rare compared to malicious closed-source software of the 'ordinary' kind.

A good example of this was SourceForge injecting adware into binaries. [1]

> Remember that the xz-utils backdoor was only discovered because they fucked up and caused a slowdown and not due to an unprompted audit.

Right, that was a supply chain attack. They seem to be increasingly common, unfortunately.

[0] https://vscodium.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Installer_with_adw...

VSCodium is the open source "clean" build of VS Code without all the Microsoft telemetry and under MIT license.

https://vscodium.com/

If you're a C/C++ programmer like me, then you're gonna need Microsoft C/C++ Extension in order for vscode to debug and help you write your code. Since the version 1.24.5, which was released April 3, 2025, this extension is blocked on non-Microsoft products, meaning it's no longer available/installable on vscodium (or any other fork of vscode). It's get more interesting if I tell you that people tried forking this extension (which is opensource) and removing the check, but they found out that this extensions consists of opensource TypeScript code, and a few proprietary closed-source files (Read more here)!

If you're interested in contributing to the project, check out the VSCodium GitHub repository.

And Eclipse Foundation maintains VSCode-compatible editor designed to be a framework for other IDEs: https://theia-ide.org/

IMO sounds like natural foundation for Cursor

There's also the Eclipse VScode-look-alike-reimplementation called TheiaIDE

https://theia-ide.org/

It was rough a few years ago, but nowadays it's pretty nice. TI rebuilt their Code Composer Studio using Theia so it does have some larger users.

It's VSCode-with-an-Eclipse-feel to it - which might or might not be your cup of tea, but it's an alternative.

100% this. It would be one thing if the only LSPs you could build came from Microsoft, but that’s just not true. It’s just that developing LSPs isn’t free.

Cursor, Windsurf, etc. are building multi-billion dollar businesses off the backs of the work that the VS Code team has done. And that’s totally fine! What’s not fine, is trying to have access to the whole ecosystem of first party extensions that aren’t MIT licensed.

I agree there should be more resilient extension repos, but this is one of the problems Eclipse Theia [0] has tried to take on, but most projects just fork the core VS Code experience and slot in OpenVSX rather than doing the hard, expensive work of building their own extension marketplaces or LSPs. And you know what, for a community or OSS fork, I think that’s fair. I think when you raise hundreds of millions in funding, you can build your own LSPs and start to maintain your own infra for extensions. And if you’ve got enough buy-in, you can probably convince developers to submit directly to your marketplace too.

And it isn’t even a rug pull, per se. The first changes to the license on some of the 1P VS Code extensions probably happened in late 2018 or early 2019, with remote share. The LSPs may have changed later. If anything, the Code team was probably too lax about letting the commercial forks use their resources wholesale against the license terms for as long as they did.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft and then at GitHub with things that touched VS Code. I now work at Google, who uses VS Code (well Monaco) inside some of our editors/products, but I don’t work on any of those.

[0]: https://theia-ide.org/

Big corporations are not monoliths, despite them having an overall singular personality. I believe that vscode was a sincere attempt, at least in the beginning. While based on electron which was originally developed for Atom, vscode was always much more performant than atom.

But when it did gain a lot of developer attention, MS's true nature took hold and gradually converted it into the walled garden we see today. It was more subtle in the beginning - a few useful extensions were proprietary and wouldn't work on non-MS builds of vscode. It was like a gentle nudge to the developers to migrate to their opaque proprietary builds. Of course, we have seen that before, haven't we?

As an aside, if you like vscode but hate the manipulation, you should give the Eclipse Theia editor [1] a try. It's an almost complete reimplementation of vscode and is compatible with the extensions from OpenVSX. I believe that they have fairer alternatives for collaborative editing, etc. At least, they will spare you the manipulation.

[1] https://theia-ide.org/

> Following DeepSeek's disruption of the LLM landscape, the Eclipse Foundation bets that collaborative, open source AI tooling can outmaneuver billion-dollar proprietary competitors.

Maybe! Eclipse Theia was a pretty great web capable editor when I gave it a spin in ~2018.

The main thing I've wanted has been collaboration. Looks like there's been some real progress on that front, as of this past fall. Definitely like the idea of multiparty IDEs, and if AI can come play in that mix that will would be interesting! Feels like AI has been a pretty solo you & the machine experience.

https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/issues/2842

MS is a bit weird. After realizing that most competent developers had left the MS ecosystem, they went for a Zeitenwende. But they did only for 90%.

I wonder to what extent this halfheartedness should be ascribed to the MS org chart or to reasoning like "we should prevent a competent competitor to run away with our tools".

In the mean time, there is a capable replacement named Theia [0] with none of the strings attached. We as a whole would do best to move to that one. [1]

___

0. https://theia-ide.org/#theiaide

1. That is to say: for vscode kind of experience. Native IDE's are unbeatable imho.

As someone who has recently tried to refactor our app atop of VSCode (treating it like a platform), we got burned by the UI design decisions that are not straightforward to overcome, let alone maintain. The closed-source MS marketplace did not help either towards our OSS goals.

However, I found Theia (https://theia-ide.org) on HN (like a bunch of other cool things; this is one way I justify the time I spend/sink on this site) and find it a much better fit for our OSS goals (foundation owned, open-source marketplace) with full mod-ability while being compatible to VSCode extensions API (in theory). I recommend you look into it for your app.

You should give Theia Ide [1] a try. It's plugin-compatible with VSCode, same user experience. It's slower to start and takes more memory but on my 3 y.o. intel Mac it is definitely snappier than VScode.

[1] https://theia-ide.org/