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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest risk for those companies (see GitPod who had multiple blog posts about it) is that the good parts of VSC really are closed source or not MIT-licensed so you can't use things like share or extensions and many others.

I think cloud vendors like gitlab and others should actually work on rewriting or maintaining a different fork or write an entirely different web editor altogether.

VSC is not a piece of competitor-friendly software and most importantly it does not support mobile browsers so imho all these companies are locking themselves in the past as the need for mobile and tablet editing (even if limited) is going to keep rising and they are not offering it.

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VSCodium, aka VSCode without the Microsoft proprietary bits, uses https://open-vsx.org/ as the extension registry. The hard problem is convincing devs to cross-publish

I have published some extensions with about 300k users in total. So far, I've only had two people ask me to publish on open-vsx. I did make one attempt, but something broke in the signup procedure, and it took 3 weeks for someone from support to come back to me with a fix, so I had moved on.

If more people were asking for it, I would try again, but the time spent per user to set up a pipeline for each extension just doesn't make sense at the moment. I'd rather spend those nights adding features for the existing mainline users. Cynical perhaps, but there's no reward for making extensions, so there's a limited amount of time I can spend on it.

I have a few extensions, notably an update to subtle-brackets, which I cross-published. It's relatively painless - Eclipse running Open VSX is clunky, but no more clunky and UX-weird than the marketplace (which holy shit, talk about terrible UX). The issue is that VSCodium has holes, and not all extensions will run correctly.

I'd like to see a hard fork for VSCodium, where the community could make UX/DX upgrades that VSCode's Microsoft-employed gatekeepers have summarily shut down time and time again (see: issues on the find/replace dialogs)

VSC does have reasonable support for tablet editing, there was a big push to make it fully compatible with Safari on the iPad when Codespaces was first in beta. You’re right about mobile though, it’s a nightmare.

Do people do that much code editing on their phone, though?

People don't really optimize for 0.001% of use cases.

deadlines are for real...

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