DEV Community

Cover image for What is VSCodium ? Better than VS code ?
Karthik Baleneni
Karthik Baleneni

Posted on

What is VSCodium ? Better than VS code ?

VSCodium is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code.

Image description

How Different is this from Visual Studio code ?

Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license

Go through GitHub comment made by Visual Studio code maintainer

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-161792005

When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.
When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license

The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you

How do we download VScodium ?

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/releases

Give it a try and Let me know in comments , will post top 10 extensions we can use for VSCodium.

Top comments (9)

Collapse
 
jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy 🎖️ • Edited

An interesting read on the same topic:

Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

I used to think GitHub Codespaces would help popularise Gitpod but now realize it is the other way around. Gitpod is currently permitted to exist in the Visual Studio Code ecosystem to popularise GitHub Codespaces, and Microsoft can step in at any moment to create legal crises that strategically divide the market from a business perspective because, like Apple and their AppStore: it is their ecosystem that they control and they are in absolute control.

favicon ghuntley.com

SublimeText is always my editor of choice though.

Collapse
 
sakko profile image
SaKKo

yes, SublimeText is my first choice as well

Collapse
 
alxwnth profile image
Alex

VSCodium is awesome! I’ve been using it extensively for the last year and never had a single problem that would make me go “I should switch back to VS Code”. Glad to see more people talking about it

Collapse
 
rolfstreefkerk profile image
Rolf Streefkerk

unfortunately it's missing the remote connect tooling that VSCode has, it forced me to go back. My usage pattern is to connect to a VM that has my development setup or a remote server, and then do the programming from there.

Collapse
 
bobbit6k profile image
Roberto Berneri

Ehy Rolf same workflow here :-)

Collapse
 
ingosteinke profile image
Ingo Steinke, web developer

I use Codium, as I don't need Microsoft's extensions to Visual Studio Code. Likewise, I prefer Chromium to Edge or Google Chrome, and I even used AOSP (Android Open Source Project) although I did miss some of Google's add-ons then. But in general, if there is open source, and if we want to support open source, we should use open source (without the closed source extensions that we don't need).

Collapse
 
mrwormhole profile image
Talha Altınel • Edited

you don't need to download vscodium if you are on arch, arch already has free build of vscode before everyone else gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/pac...
archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_6...

Collapse
 
mbarzda profile image
Martynas Barzda

I switched to vscodium a while ago. I had to make trade off and stop working inside Docker containers with Dev Containers extension :) Also, WSL extension for vscodium breaks often and it's downside of using vscodium with a virtual machine :/

Collapse
 
eshimischi profile image
eshimischi

Been using Codium since release day, no issues