[HN Gopher] I'm switching from VS Code to VS Codium
___________________________________________________________________
I'm switching from VS Code to VS Codium
Author : rukshn
Score : 212 points
Date : 2022-06-12 11:13 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ruky.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (ruky.me)
| sottero wrote:
| Putting a lot of faith in this: "These extensions are uploaded by
| the official developers or by the community."
| Havoc wrote:
| Alas without ssh remote that's a complete non starter for me
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| I find sshfs more versatile. Works in vscodium and allows you
| to use native file browsers and other external tools on the
| same connection.
| sharken wrote:
| I originally read it as a different editor entirely than VS Code.
|
| The slight startup delay for VS Code vs. for example Notepad++ is
| quite annoying. I wish there was software as cool as VS Code, but
| with ultra low startup time.
| d12bb wrote:
| Neovim?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Is this attributed to VS Code's use of Electron?
|
| I'm curious if VS Code's design makes it practical to replace
| Electron with another framework. E.g., Qt, GTK, simpler HTML,
| or whatever's most idiomatic for Win64 GUIs these days.
| bitwize wrote:
| Sublime Text?
| [deleted]
| Asraelite wrote:
| The last time I tried Codium, not being able to use Remote
| Development was a showstopper. Has the situation improved since
| then?
| lelandfe wrote:
| No, and don't expect it or Live Share to ever land[0]. None of
| the "Remote" extensions are FOSS, and they restrict usage to
| "validly licensed" copies of VS Code[1] - plus the server side
| code for it is closed source. So getting it into Codium would
| require a clean room implementation, essentially.
|
| [0] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/wiki/Extensions-
| Compati...]
|
| [1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-vscode-
| remote....
| xaberus wrote:
| The extension API proposals and RPC protocol are open sourced
| and the server code is just an electron-less version of the
| regular VSCode extension host (hence, remote extension host,
| REH). This is all part of the VSCode OSS release. What the
| proprietary extensions provide is integration. For example,
| the SSH variant automatically installs and launches an REH
| instance on the remote host and sets up port forwarding. If
| you are willing to start the instance and to forward ports
| yourself, you can use the tiny extension I wrote [1,2] (See
| the README how to enable the necessary extension proposals.).
| It allows you to connect to a local port you configure in the
| config. It is based on an example extension (vscode-test-
| resolver) in the OSS release that is used to test this
| functionality [3].
|
| Microsoft is not really hiding any of this, so I am a little
| surprised, that nobody wrote a similar extension so far...
|
| [1] https://open-vsx.org/extension/xaberus/remote-oss [2]
| https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-oss [3] https://gith
| ub.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/main/extensions/vsc...
| lelandfe wrote:
| Nice work! The Remote Development license I linked earlier
| specifically excludes one from "reverse engineer[ing]" the
| code - which appears also to apply "to any Microsoft
| services... for the software".
|
| IANAL, but I'd definitely be nervous to touch this stuff
| with a 10ft pole.
| q-big wrote:
| > So getting it into Codium would require a clean room
| implementation, essentially
|
| ... if you want to go the legal route. ;-)
| linuxdaemon wrote:
| As a person who administers servers I absolutely HATE that
| vscode does this.
|
| I don't know much about the specifics of remote deployment, but
| I feel like having vscode do this is just the wrong approach. I
| would say it probably needs to be some other CI/CD pipeline or
| something outside of the editor.
|
| The problems I have is that every user gets like 1.5G of node
| junk stuffed in their home directory to support this. VScode
| spawns processes as the user that can't be controlled that can
| just kill servers (This is one bug I found, but there are
| issues with this that go much farther back than 2 years ago,
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-
| release/issues/26...)
|
| There doesn't seem to be any way to control this on the server
| side, so if I have users with the ability to write to their
| home directory, I cannot stop them from pushing this and
| potentially killing an instance.
| mattl wrote:
| (Proprietary is spelled propriety in a few places.)
|
| I'm surprised VS Codium is so well packaged..
| sampo wrote:
| And principle is spelled principal in one place.
|
| I wonder if principle/principal
| border/boarder could have/could of
| their/they're its/it's
|
| will just become accepted alternative English spellings in
| time?
| tempodox wrote:
| Excepting "could of" the spellings per se are all correct,
| they just _mean something different_ than their alternative.
| How do you read text when you don 't know what the words mean
| any more?
| mrunkel wrote:
| Given that principle and principal are two different things,
| I hope not.
| tasuki wrote:
| The whole article is full of typos and misspellings. Doesn't
| appear to be particularly insightful either...
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > I was increasingly getting upset about their extension
| marketplace, where there is an increased number of extensions
| starting to sell pro versions of the extensions we used for free.
|
| I'm not familiar with any particularly egregious examples, but I
| don't find "developer wants to sell software" all that
| outrageous.
| 0x008 wrote:
| Gitlens is the most popular example, I guess?
| codeflo wrote:
| It's a real problem. GitLens[0] comes to mind, which used to be
| a decent free extension, but now gives me flashbacks to the
| shareware nag screens of old.
|
| I'm also not against selling software on principle. Downgrading
| a free piece of software into a demo with an auto-update feels
| shady, however.
|
| [0]
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=eamodio....
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| can you elaborate?
|
| "I made something people seem to like, hopefully it can help
| feed my family" sounds more like a wonderful success story
| rather than shady (depending on target audience of course but
| that's the part I'd like to understand better rather than
| make assumptions)
| misnome wrote:
| I have been using GitLens for years, and didn't even know
| they had a paid version. Where have they been "Nagging" that
| I've just never seen?
| dschuessler wrote:
| Right next to your terminal should be a tab called
| "Gitlens: Visual File History". I do not want to argue
| whether its contents qualify as nagging but it might be
| what OP is referring to.
| brianzelip wrote:
| Flashbacks?
|
| > Does this affect existing features? > > No, the
| introduction of GitLens+ has no impact on existing GitLens
| features, so you won't lose access to any of the GitLens
| features you know and love. In fact, we are heavily investing
| in enhancing and expanding the GitLens feature set. Creating
| an account simply gives you access to a subset of new
| features that will enable you to get even more out of Git in
| VS Code!
|
| I haven't used it and only heard of it last week, but the
| extension's page you linked to seems decent enough for me to
| try it out.
| codeflo wrote:
| I'm sure the thing you quoted is technically true, the
| existing features are still there somewhere. But it's not a
| great experience if some of the most prominent buttons in
| the VS Code UI now open the GitKraken account page. YMMV; I
| personally found this very "in your face" and unusable.
| brnt wrote:
| Intrseting that the Gitlens code repo is under the gitkraken
| org. Guess they took them over?
| pizza234 wrote:
| > I was increasingly getting upset about their extension
| marketplace, where there is an increased number of extensions
| starting to sell pro versions of the extensions we used for free.
|
| This is actually great news. Some extensions, especially language
| ones, are very poor, and paying for them (if someone makes a
| commercial version) is the only way to guarantee a good
| development experience. Ruby is an example, and switching to
| IntelliJ is not smooth for people used to VSC.
| coldtea wrote:
| > I was increasingly getting upset about their extension
| marketplace, where there is an increased number of extensions
| starting to sell pro versions of the extensions we used for
| free.
|
| So, "I'm a professional developer, but I don't like other
| programmers getting paid for their extensions (that I do,
| nonetheless, find valuable, and want to use)"?
| yunohn wrote:
| I love this developer dissonance where they work at companies
| selling software, but refuse to pay for others' software.
|
| Truly a sight to behold!
| coldtea wrote:
| It makes sense for an artist creating underground work, and
| not getting paid for it (e.g. actually illegal graphitti
| artist, or some avant guarde type that works a different
| day job and doesn't want to "sell out" to galleries) to be
| against the commercialization of art.
|
| But for programmers living off programming? Less so.
| [deleted]
| devwastaken wrote:
| Paying for software does not have a relationship with quality.
| Imagine if GCC had a "pro" version that was necessary to
| compile certain code. That would be devastating to those
| learning and thousands of devs that came before would be
| spinning in their graves.
|
| The reason we do open source and free software is to make life
| easier for everyone, including your job. It standardizes
| practices and prevents mudball codebases comprised of black box
| libraries and tools.
|
| Not to mention that selling of extensions is like selling of
| game mods. There's tons of stolen code.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Paying for software does not have a relationship with
| quality._
|
| I'm taking "paying for software" here to mean "commercial" vs
| "open source", or "incoming money oriented" vs "community
| building oriented" development.
|
| Since, of course, you can also pay for open source, and there
| are free editions of proprietary commercial software, and
| foss can be sponsored by a big company who pays for 99% of
| the developer time through selling something else - so a
| distinction based on "paying" alone is not useful.
|
| So, does open source/free vs proprietary/commercial make any
| difference with regards to quality?
|
| It might not make in abstract, across the whole market, but
| in certain aspects and markets it does.
|
| No open source DAW (audio/midi editor) or NLE (video editor)
| is even close to commercial ones, for example.
|
| If you plotted features, maturity, stability, performance,
| etc. for foss and commercial versions of this types of
| product, you'd see a clear clustering of proprietary
| commercial software where you pay a lot for and free foss
| ones.
|
| The same is true for many pro fields.
| indrora wrote:
| Calling GCC a "good" compiler is going a bit far, imo. LLVM
| has become the dominant compiler framework (and thus clang,
| clang++, golang, etc use it) because of corporate interests.
|
| GCC as it's constructed is a horrible framework. The way you
| port GCC to a new platform (say, a weird ARM variant) is to
| _fork it hard and mangle multiple parts of the internals_ ,
| then carefully feed it back. It's a mess. Nobody should be
| forced to port GCC.
|
| The reason LLVM is good is because it has a corporate back
| (Apple, Google, IBM, ARM, Intel, Synopsys, NVIDIA, AMD, etc:
| https://foundation.llvm.org/docs/sponsors/) and it has a lot
| of work put into it to make extensible (which GCC isn't by
| design) and as a result have a clean interface for usage.
|
| On the other side of this argument, paid extensions (and paid
| code in general) exists because at one point or another we
| live in a society run on capitalism. Unfortunately, that
| means that money has to come from somewhere to make bread hit
| the table. For a lot of open source, that money comes from
| one of two places:
|
| * Corporations (people doing work on open source projects
| under the auspices of their company)
|
| * Donations (people saying "this open source is good enough I
| want to make it continue happening").
|
| One is sustained by maintaining the tools you use. The other
| is sustained by grace.
| car_analogy wrote:
| > For a lot of open source, that money comes from one of
| two places:
|
| You missed a third place: government funding. Ironic, given
| that LLVM itself started as a University of Illinois
| research project. Private interests love taking credit for
| publicly-funded research:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastra
| z...
| dnissley wrote:
| I think you're forgetting that the people who work on GCC are
| usually paid to do so, and their work is funded by people
| buying software built with GCC.
| car_analogy wrote:
| > The reason we do open source and free software is to make
| life easier for everyone, including your job. It standardizes
| practices and prevents mudball codebases comprised of black
| box libraries and tools.
|
| No, it is to maintain _control_. If you grow to depend on
| non-free software, you are at the mercy of its authors. Any
| benefits to quality are incidental.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It definitely has a relationship with quality in a fair
| number of domains. Find me free CAD software as good as
| SOLIDWORKS, or free maths software as good as MATLAB &
| Mathematica, or free EDA software as good as Altium or
| Vivado.
|
| There are loads of domains where none of the free options are
| very good.
| esrh wrote:
| You might be right in cad and eda, but there's surely a
| case to be made that python libs(numpy, sympy), sage, r,
| octave could be better that matlab or mathematica.
| aDfbrtVt wrote:
| I agree with you for the most part, I write this while
| running Matlab simulations in the background. Having tried
| to reach similar levels of productivity with Julia or
| Python, I find the FOSS environments always fall short in
| the tooling environment. Not to mention the importance of
| documentation.
|
| However, I can't help but take exception to Vivado and
| SOLIDWORKS being good software... While powerful, they are
| both incredibly buggy and prone to crashing if you so much
| as look at them wrong.
| cycomanic wrote:
| The only use case I can think where matlab beats Python
| or Julia is when one has a lot of legacy code. It's funny
| that you mention documentation, the amount of
| documentation found around Python is typically much
| better than matlab. Matlab toolboxes are really hit and
| miss, some are very good, but there are some really
| crappy ones. If you actually need to include more
| traditional programming features matlab becomes a hot
| mess. Looking at matlab GUI code gives me nightmares for
| weeks....
| aDfbrtVt wrote:
| I would not wish Matlab GUI programming on my worst
| enemy. I disagree with your assertion that documentation
| for Python is typically much better. Take a randomly
| chosen function I regularly use: "pwelch"
|
| https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scip
| y.s...
|
| https://www.mathworks.com/help/signal/ref/pwelch.html
|
| Maybe my bias is showing, but I find the Matlab
| documentation to be superior. However, that is nothing
| compared the quality of the IDE which is critical when
| doing scientific compute. When I was re-evaluating our
| simulation environment at work, we looked at PyCharm. The
| plotting capabilities alone made it easy to stick with
| Matlab, even at the orders of magnitude higher cost.
|
| N.B. This is my experience in an Optical Communications
| R&D environment.
| rnd420_69 wrote:
| reminds me when Bethesda tried to introduce paid mods on Steam.
| I was greatly excited about that for the reasons you state.
|
| But the gaming community being physically or mentally at an age
| of 14 prevented that with quite an outreach.
|
| Would've thought someone with enough braincells to learn
| programming would look at this differently, but there you have
| it.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Your argument falls flat when faced with rich history of
| modding and hacking. So many incredible creations were labors
| of love. Plenty of them eventually became commercial
| products.
| have_faith wrote:
| Wasn't that mostly about Bethesda/Steam trying to capture the
| mod market and skim a percentage off of every transaction?
| Probably taking a page out of the iOS playbook.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Theft. That's the reason. People could upload others mods to
| be paid. Or they would use assets they were not allowed to
| sell. The cost of litigating this is far too high, therefore
| a system that allows the theft cannot be regulated civilly.
| Meaning the system should not exist.
|
| Mods work better in an open and free environment that lacks
| monetary incentives.
| xeromal wrote:
| We can't figure out how to protect content creators so they
| should just do work for free seems like a cop out to me.
| chexum wrote:
| Are you trying to repeat Bill Gates's Open Letter TO Hobbyists?
|
| You're still missing "Most directly, the thing you do is
| theft."
|
| I think the past 46 years have proved, that free software
| works, no matter how many Bills want (or will) get rich off the
| industry. If there were no hobbyists either literally stealing
| software, or indirectly "stealing" it, because it's free, there
| would be no industry to profit from.
| fithisux wrote:
| Did it two weeks ago.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Their main argument is "no telemetry" (or sometimes "no cemetery
| tracking"...), but VS Code has a setting to disable telemetry
| [0], and I would trust that it's really disabled if you set it so
| (why would they lie about something quite trivial to check with
| Wireshark or such?)
|
| > I'm sure there is a small performance gain because you don't
| have telemetry running in the background sending data to
| Microsoft.
|
| Have you profiled it? Have you compared VSCodium and VSCode with
| telemetry off?
|
| [0]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry
| hedora wrote:
| If Windows, Office, LinkedIn, GitHub, Skype and Chat are any
| indication, the telemetry situation will worsen severely over
| time.
| premun wrote:
| I agree but also - a controversial opinion - I am pretty sure
| Microsoft collects the kind of telemetry to learn about user
| behavior and improve the IDE, and not to collect private
| information for some kind of other gain. I am sure that whoever
| develops Codium will eventually get into a dead-end at some
| point because they won't have any telemetry connected to the
| product usage. Other piece is that Codium might inherently
| actually thrive because of some product decisions based on the
| telemetry Microsoft has so so it's not a fair fight.
|
| Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft employee and this is my opinion
| only but I say this because I know what it's like to work on
| apps used by tens of millions of people and I can tell you that
| you're dead in the water when you have no idea how people use
| your product. And no, at this scale, controlled user testing is
| not sufficient. I've worked on countless Microsoft products
| over the years from Office through Skype to Teams. I've also
| been personally adding some telemetry into these but ALWAYS to
| be data driven when making product decisions such as "which
| button should we display here", "did we improve
| latency/stability/discoverability/.." and "which new feature
| will be actually useful".
|
| Now.. I don't know VS Code 100% but I did see some internal
| talks, have access to some telemetry (didn't browse it much)
| and I can say that the team is full of good intentions. They
| just deal with difficult UX problems. I've also worked at
| Google and I think it's much different when your
| product/business is using/selling data about customers as
| compared to creating tools for developers. You are after a very
| different type of data in essence and I think the actual
| privacy is not contended here.
|
| I am sure people will spin this the usual way "big company big
| bad" and "you never know what they will try to collect next"
| but in that case, I can only suggest you get a job in one of
| these companies and see how you will develop anything without
| real data to back your decisions and assumptions about the real
| world.
| Xunjin wrote:
| Shameless plug: I would love your "good words/faith" about me
| so I could get hired by Microsoft :P
| digisign wrote:
| This doesn't jibe with history. Or the present for that
| matter, see sibiling to your comment by btdmaster. Uses of
| data always expand, never contract.
|
| It doesn't matter that most or even 99% of the data is
| harmless, or that the data is useful, these companies are
| simply not trustworthy. The fact that no one asks permission
| up front (opt-in) tells you all you need to know.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| > I am sure that whoever develops Codium will eventually get
| into a dead-end at some point because they won't have any
| telemetry connected to the product usage.
|
| Note that VSCodium is not a fork; it's just a build of the
| open-source VSCode parts with telemetry patched out and a few
| other minor changes.
| shaan7 wrote:
| I am really curious but do not have the time to check this
| myself: is the vscode telemetry part of the open core bit?
| The reason I ask this is because I agree with your points and
| I usually allow telemetry for FOSS programs (for example
| [1]).
|
| If the telemetry code is open and people can verify that
| there isn't any identifiable data that is being collected, I
| don't see any issue with leaving it on in vscode too.
|
| [1] https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/what-we-can-learn-
| fro...
| elashri wrote:
| Some of the telemetry is not added until when later when
| VSCode get bundled with it and some proprietary stuff and
| signed for distribution. This is where VSCodium do the
| stuff. they take the same source code, apply some patches
| and build the program with open-vsx open source marketplace
| and they call it a day.
|
| All of this actually happens and piped using github action
| found on the repository. You can have a look there.
| btdmaster wrote:
| Is the telemetry data in KDE publicly available?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The open-vsx.org loads Google Analytics (via GTM) for
| telemetry, without any prompts or consent, with no way to opt
| out of it AFAICT.
| btdmaster wrote:
| VS Codium has tried, and not succeeded, to disable all
| telemetry[0][1]. This is with direct access to and patches to
| source code and all the knobs set to off.
|
| If the direction of upstream is diametrically opposed to
| downstream, it is nearly impossible to prevent these issues.
|
| [0] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/623
|
| [1] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/631
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Neither of those issues describe any telemetry, unless you
| define "telemetry" as "uses any internet connectivity that's
| not even to Microsoft's servers".
| btdmaster wrote:
| Is the default npm registry not operated by Microsoft?
| GitHub definitely is, and that was one of the pings.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| It's probably some feature; "runs npm when I navigate its
| sources (js and ts files)" almost certainly is.
|
| There are basically no details at all other than "I saw
| it did something with the network, _therefore_ telemetry!
| "
| cageface wrote:
| If you're really that concerned about using propriety software
| why not help build the emacs or vim ecosystem instead?
| azemetre wrote:
| As someone who has been using vim for 5 years and neovim for 2
| years, what sort of learning material (books, videos) would you
| recommend to learn about vim internals and subsequently neovim
| internals?
|
| I would love to contribute but I'm mostly a webdev, but I'd
| love to take a year or so to learn and hopefully contribute
| throughout the rest of my life. It's just so hard to start or
| learn.
|
| The material doesn't even have to be directly related to vim,
| I'd like to learn more about how and why text editors work and
| some of the common concerns when building one.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Depends what you want to do.
|
| The editor itself is in C; I don't think there's any
| "learning materials" available for the (Neo)Vim internals
| specifically, so you just gotta learn C. Overall, it's not
| that hard IMO: I'm not a very experienced C programmer, and I
| managed to get some patches into Vim. Neovim also uses Lua in
| various parts for its internals, but I'm not very familiar
| with Neovim.
|
| If you want to work on things like language support (syntax
| files, some completions) then most of that is in VimScript;
| "Learn VimScript the hard way" is a good place to get
| started.
| curun1r wrote:
| It will require you to venture into C land, but I found the
| walkthrough of the code for the kilo editor [0] to be very
| informative. It'll hit on a number of the basic concerns that
| a console-based editor needs to solve. Any vi/emacs impl will
| obviously be a lot more complex, but a simpler starting point
| is better for learning.
|
| [0] https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/
| Karsteski wrote:
| Because some people don't necessarily want to tinker with emacs
| or vim for days just to get their perfect setup going
| cageface wrote:
| Convenience or freedom. Pick one.
| otikik wrote:
| > for days
|
| Ha!
|
| :wq
| sn41 wrote:
| days? Surely, you jest, dear Sir. Proud emacs user for 21
| years, still have to get some overlay function going just the
| way I like it. One of these days, I am going to get it just
| right.
| joe8756438 wrote:
| Joking aside, I think that's one of the great things about
| emacs: years will go by and i won't touch my config. Then a
| new project or something will inspire me to get back into
| it. But since switching about a decade ago, i've never had
| the itch to move to a different "editor"
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I don't understand that reasoning.
|
| Wouldn't an editor ecosystem based on Codium be as open-source
| as Emacs' and Vim's?
|
| Are you referring to some difference in their specific
| licenses?
| kklimonda wrote:
| My argument, based on this thread alone, would be that Codium
| will always be... held back by its roots in open core
| project, with some amazing features (like remote editing) or
| plugins being unavailable. Codium developers do not "own"
| their core platform (they can't really fork it without
| breaking plugins), and they don't have much (if any) say in
| the future direction of it. Given that it's not unreasonable
| to think that VS Code is not really that open, and a more
| desirable outcome would be for developers to support more
| open alternatives.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Thanks for explaining that. I hadn't considered the moat
| effect caused by defaulting to a plugin store that allows
| closed-source packages.
|
| That said, it sounds like people _are_ maintaining an
| equivalent store for Codium [0], and are populating it with
| most of the packages found in Microsoft 's repo. I'd think
| addresses most of the concerns about that particular form
| of moating.
|
| > with some amazing features (like remote editing) or
| plugins being unavailable
|
| The remote-editing package is definitely a sticking point
| for me. Is there some reason to believe that an open-source
| equivalent is out of reach?
|
| I'm speaking from a place of ignorance on this, but I'd
| expect _someone_ out there to want to do the work of
| writing that OSS package. Particularly if they preferred
| Codium over Vim /Emacs for other reasons.
| Mochsner wrote:
| It's almost like chromium versus firefox.
| troutwine wrote:
| > with no cemetery tracking
|
| FYI, if the author is here, I think you may have meant
| "telemetry" instead of "cemetery".
| arunc wrote:
| I tried VS Codium early this year and went back to VS Code as
| clangd extension didn't work. Microsoft's C++ extension works
| great. I'll be interested to know if anyone has got clangd setup
| working on Windows.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Luckily, contrary to what the Microsoft hoard will tell you,
| there are countless respectful alternatives that were around
| before and will be around long after Microsoft turns it into some
| kind of pay to win thing with achievements.
| stinos wrote:
| I want to believe this, but my experience with VSCode generally
| goes like this: I find a bug in a tool I rely on or want to
| make a PR with some feature I think could be generally useful.
| Turns out the tool uses a language I've not used before, or
| requires me to test for multiple platforms, or something. In
| any case I have to start from scratch. So I just lookup 'how to
| X in VSCode' and/or open VSCode, go to Extensions. Follow some
| simple instructions, get what's needed and a couple minutes
| later I'm developing. And fairly decent step-by-step debugging
| + watch windows and whatnot. And debugging remotely on another
| platform. And sometimes VS Code then also offered to install
| the complete toolset needed on that platform.
|
| Now, maybe I've just been lucky, or toolsets just got better
| overall, or maybe I've missed something, but when I did this 20
| years ago there was a good chance I was looking at a non-
| trivial amount of research, finding tools, fiddling with config
| files, text-based debugging at best sometimes or hideous IDEs,
| etc. So alternatives exist, one can call them respectful, but
| turns out for a couple of usecases that's besides the point:
| the experience for one-off 'let me just quickly try this in
| whatever is the cool language of the day' is, as far as I'm
| aware, simply unsurpassed. And that's the strength for me. Not
| sure if I'd be paying for that, but right now it's just what it
| is.
| mangamadaiyan wrote:
| Nitpick: s/hoard/horde/g
| fartcannon wrote:
| Merci beaucoup
| jo-m wrote:
| Nitpick: g flag not necessary here ;)
| jasmaa wrote:
| Curious what the s in the front is for? Looks like regex
| but I've never seen this syntax specifically before.
|
| Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
| aendruk wrote:
| $ man sed
| gnubison wrote:
| $ man ed # :)
| buf wrote:
| I started using vim 13 years ago. Editors come. Editors go. Vim
| remains.
| garbanz0 wrote:
| 90% of the time, I'm writing code that vim wouldn't help with,
| and that 10% never seems to make up for the investment cost of
| learning it, especially because I'd probably forget the
| commands between uses. However I do respect vim users.
| lytedev wrote:
| I'm curious now. What code are you editing that vim could not
| help with, what tools do you use that do help with this code,
| and why?
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I always come back to vim. Sure there are "vim mode" options
| for VS Code, Jetbrains products, Xcode, whatever else, but
| there is a speed and ergonomics to regular old vim that none of
| those bolted-on modes have matched yet. And with some setup you
| can get the same LSP features in vim that you have in VS Code
| today.
| bmitc wrote:
| Features also come but not to Vim.
| sudo_chmod777 wrote:
| This. And actually only up until a while ago did my co-workers
| still think using Vim was just some weird flex. Then a live
| coding session which was not about Vim at all I did somehow
| showcased how fast I was able to be in Vim, now everyone is
| interested in obtaining the superpower.
|
| That being said I'm still extremely grateful for what Microsoft
| has done in standardising things like LSP, DAP, etc. It changed
| the game for Vim, Emacs, Kakoune, not to mention new players
| like Helix.
| sky-kedge0749 wrote:
| Interview with a VIM Enthusiast 2022:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1dtmzqnCU
|
| "You don't really need a career once you know Vim. Vim is your
| career now. What's a career anyway?"
| mangamadaiyan wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| On a tangential note, "Your problem with vim is that you don't
| grok vi" continues to be a favourite read:
| https://gist.github.com/nifl/1178878
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Thank you, I might give vi another go.
|
| Btw, for reading, raw version is better: https://gist.githubu
| sercontent.com/nifl/1178878/raw/2a20bba8...
| miracloblo wrote:
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Yes. Learning Vim has had the best ROI for my time of any other
| tool I've learned over the years (git comes close though). Not
| only is it a great general-purpose editor, but it's available
| on every machine I interact with.
| ultim8k wrote:
| I'm already paying for sublime text and a few other developer
| tools and I wouldn't mind paying for a tool that helps me pay my
| bills.
|
| Also I like that some of these products have a free version that
| makes it accessible to people coming from a poor economic
| background. Everyone deserves an equal opportunity in my opinion.
|
| Now my problem about big tech corps is that they are huge
| bullies. I want my freedom back. Freedom of not being locked in
| an ecosystem. Freedom to choose my tools. Freedom of not being
| tracked. Freedom of everyone to be in the market without being
| copied, acquired or overshadowed by huge companies that
| buy/clone/replace any product or tool with their "free of charge"
| poison. Freedom to stay away of "growth and engagement" bs
| products.
|
| Think of the following. How viable is to live without GMAIL
| nowdays? Do we want vscode to become the GMAIL of code?
| sbuk wrote:
| > How viable is to live without GMAIL nowdays?
|
| Completely. In the corporate world, Microsoft is the dominant
| player, but on premise is still a thing, as are other ESPs.
| Gmail is nowhere near as dominant as people seem to think it
| is. They still transact over SMTP...
| jmyeet wrote:
| What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are
| aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make
| software, are so resistant to paying _anything_ for tools that
| make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind.
|
| Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out
| there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in
| every single way. For individual use, most of them are
| <$100/year.
|
| In years past I saw this same struggle with IntelliJ vs Eclipse
| or even vim/emacs. The amount of time I saw people spend on
| tuning, fixing, tinkering, debugging and otherwise modifying
| their .vim or .emacs files or their various incompatible Eclipse
| plugins (eg famously there were 2 big big plugins for Eclipse at
| one point and neither of them completely worked). At least with
| vim/emacs it works over an SSH connection but Eclipse?
|
| Why are so many resistant so other people earning a living
| particularly when the payoff (ie time-saved) is so easily
| quantifiable? And why do people who generally earn so much value
| their time so little?
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I'm a fan of Jetbrains IDEs (despite having some complaints),
| and use them at work regularly (and because I work in academia,
| I get the enterprise version free of cost). But I think of
| Emacs as a life-long companion-tool, something that I'll be
| able to use, how I like it, until I die, on pretty much any
| operating system, and on pretty much any hardware.
| ekidd wrote:
| > _What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers,
| who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really
| takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for
| tools that make their job easier and faster._
|
| The first time I paid for a fancy IDE, it ran on an Apple IIgs
| in the late 80s. It was the first of many. Unfortunately,
| commerical IDEs and editors go out of business constantly. The
| rare survivors, like BBEdit, tend to be limited to a single OS.
|
| Around 1997, I figured out what I want out of an editor:
|
| - Supports every language and text file format I'll need.
|
| - Runs on every desktop OS.
|
| - Customizable, and scriptable using an industry-standard
| language.
|
| - Will still be around in 20 years.
|
| Emacs met these requirements, and I used it for over 20 years.
| A few years ago, I switched to VS Code.
|
| I don't buy commercial editors because they don't provide the
| key features I want. And I don't trust them to stick around.
| the_duke wrote:
| > but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in
| every single way
|
| That's just not true.
|
| I have access to the full Jetbrains suite for free, yet I still
| opt to use Neovim or VS Code/Codium for most languages.
|
| Jetbrains IDEs are great in many ways, but are objectively
| worse on several metrics:
|
| * slow startup times
|
| * slow initial operations until the JIT is warmed up
|
| * even once warm, you always eventually do something that lags
| or blocks the UI, maybe barely enough to consciously notice,
| maybe for several seconds; and it really affects user
| experience if you care about latency - it drives me crazy each
| time
|
| * plugins: VS Code has a wide range of great plugins, many more
| than the Jetbrains ecosystem and especially when it comes to
| more niche languages or functionality, Vim/emacs but also VS
| Code are much more extensible in general
|
| * keyboard warriors: the Vim plugin is fine, and you can
| configure the Jetbrains IDEs to do almost anything with the
| keyboard, but you need way more arcane knowledge in the form of
| memorized context-specific bindings, and you always eventually
| forget something and need to switch back to the mouse. Vim and
| emacs are just much better there. VS Code is actually also
| better, because the interactions are significantly more
| customizable.
|
| * Wayland / tiling WM / input lag: Jetbrains products really
| suck on tiling window managers like i3 / sway because they use
| native windows for dialogs. They also don't support Wayland
| natively, so they run through X server emulation which hurts
| input lag and brings plenty of bugs like weird dialog
| behaviour. In general the input lag is quite bad on Linux, it
| seems to be much better optimized on Mac OS
|
| There are plenty of valid reasons why you wouldn't want to use
| their IDEs, even if they provide more integration and superior
| refactoring.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| I agree with the rest of your points, but keyboard navigation
| in VSC just blows (or I'm doing something very wrong). It's
| painfully obvious main VSCode developers must be heavy mouse
| users because you just can't do some things there without a
| mouse, or they're really awkward (for example, de-focusing
| the sidebar requires pressing some weird key combo (I think
| it's Ctrl+Shift+E or something like that?), while a simple
| Escape works in IDEA for all similar situations -- de-focus
| the sidebar, de-focus a search result/debugger/whatever pane,
| close the search dialog, basically anything that means "go
| back to editing the code").
|
| I couldn't find a key combo (or any way to configure it) to
| navigate between classes and functions in the same file. I
| find this to be very useful, I must be pressing it hundreds
| of times a day. VSC expects you to focus on the breadcrumb
| pane, arrow up or down to the name of the member you'd like
| to jump to, and press Enter, while in IDEA you just press
| Alt+ArrowUp (or down) and quickly jump between functions in
| the same file.
|
| Same with search results. Do a search in IDEA, press
| Ctrl+Enter, it moves the result list to the search pane.
| Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Arrow(Up|Down) lets you quickly jump
| between them. That's another thing I just can't live without.
| I couldn't find anything like that in VSCode, search is so
| awkward to use I just drop out to the shell and use ripgrep
| directly.
|
| Close to 100% of IDEA/Rider's functionality can be controlled
| through the keyboard, and I think the developers themselves
| are using it heavily, because it's configured out of the box,
| hotkeys are discoverable once you understand the logic behind
| them, and they _make sense_ (unlike in VSCode where hotkeys
| for many important functions are either not assigned at all,
| or are awkward out of the box. For example, who in the hell
| decided to bind "jump to definition" to F12? I'm getting
| flashbacks to how we played Mortal Kombat at the beginning of
| the century where you were expected to quickly press
| difficult key sequences to perform spectacular fighting
| combos.)
| rfoo wrote:
| > I couldn't find a key combo (or any way to configure it)
| to navigate between classes and functions in the same file.
|
| That's an interesting use case, it totally makes sense,
| it's something I don't know I could have, even though I
| rarely use mouse. I'm just used to Ctrl+Shift+O and search
| for member names.
|
| I guess that's the real value of a well-designed IDE. It
| has everything you may find useful and made it
| discoverable. Once you know such thing exists, you can... h
| ttps://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mishkinf
| ...
|
| > who in the hell decided to bind "jump to definition" to
| F12
|
| Well, it's "Visual Studio" Code, and Visual Studio had this
| keybinding for at least 20 years. I understand that it does
| not work for you, but there is a reason.
|
| I grew up using zero Macs, so "go to definition" in my
| brain always map to "F12 as a single key, or gd in normal
| mode in a modal editor". Oh, and F12 is easily reachable on
| an US ANSI 104 keyboard.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Thanks for the pointer, this seems to work. The plugin
| seems to have appeared after I last checked for something
| like that.
|
| Now only to make search at least quarter as good as it is
| in IDEA (it seems to be very underappreciated for such an
| important piece of functionality): jumping between
| results, grouping results by the class/function they
| appear in, filtering by access type
| (declaration/definition/read value/write value), etc etc.
|
| Jump up & down has a different use case compared to
| symbol search (which I too use heavily). If the program
| is well-structured (i.e. functions are of reasonable size
| and things that depend on each other and call each other
| are located nearby), it eases the pain of trying to
| understand how it all ties together, especially for those
| with bad short-term memory like myself.
| dominotw wrote:
| I have jetbrains license but i still use vim almost 80% of
| the time for the reasons you mentioned.
| dxdm wrote:
| I'm using PyCharm in i3 daily, and it works great.
|
| There was a bug around input focus of certain Windows once,
| it had an immediate work around, and Jetbrains fixed the bug
| in a reasonable time frame for the probably pretty small
| percentage of users on i3.
|
| Jetbrains IDEs are not the greatest example for why free
| software is better; they actually a rare example of
| proprietary software working really well.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| That IntelliJ exists at all is a condemnation of how bloated
| and generally ridiculous Java has become. I die a little
| inside every time I use it, but the alternatives for
| developing in a large Java codebase are all worse.
| kingboss wrote:
| filchermcurr wrote:
| My experience with CLion was that it was agonizingly slow
| to do anything. It stuttered scrolling through even a small
| C project. I don't know exactly what it was doing in the
| background, but it constantly had fans running. Long after
| it made sense for it to be indexing.
|
| In fairness, though, this was probably four or five years
| ago. But it sure colored my opinion of the software.
|
| Also this isn't exactly unheard of as you seem to think. It
| even necessitated a support article:
| https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/performance-tuning-
| tips...
|
| But a quick Google search reveals that OP isn't a "zealot"
| making things up. Here, I did some work for you:
|
| https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
| us/community/po...
|
| https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
| us/community/po...
|
| https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
| us/community/po...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/n84wzh/why_do_people_
| s...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21797145
| kingboss wrote:
| Randomly clicked on some of the provided links: One was
| an acknowledged bug that was fixed in .1 version. Another
| one doesn't specify what hardware do they have. Like I
| said, stop using computers from 20 years ago and let the
| indexer do its thing. Since the navigation in Jetbrains
| products is so good it takes a while for the indexer to
| index everything especially in large projects. I was just
| using a macbook air (with Intel 2 cores cpu) with android
| studio with both java and c++ code. Not a huge project
| but it was over 100k of code. It worked just fine. No
| stuttering when scrolling. I don't remember having that
| problem in ANY ide for the past decade, not just
| Jetbrains.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I haven't checked in a couple years, but this mirrors my
| experience very closely.
|
| I pay for good editors just to support the creators. I want
| to pay for the one I use daily. The reality is that vscode is
| the most extensible, performant on average (not in all ways),
| and useful IDE I have.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Most of your pain points are mostly superficial. Yes, it's
| slow to start, but I close my projects rarely enough for that
| not to matter.
|
| Yes, there are possibly more plugins for VS Code, but they
| are largely shit, aren't they?
|
| Yes, LS has made it possible to create rudimentary editing
| capabilities for languages that always lacked them, and that
| is unironically a good thing. But for bigger/established
| languages VS Code provides maybe 10% of functionality that
| Jetbrains IDEs provide.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers,
| [...] are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make
| their job easier and faster. It blows my mind.
|
| What I find truly bizarre is why you bring this up in this
| discussion. The mentionned link is about a developper who
| switch from one proprietary to an open source software, both
| being free as in free beer.
|
| The rest of your post is about being a fanboy of Jetbrains.
| Sure you may like it and are free to do so but I don't see what
| is difficult to understand that other people may have different
| preferences.
|
| > The amount of time I saw people spend on tuning, fixing,
| tinkering, debugging and otherwise modifying their .vim or
| .emacs files
|
| Are you making things up?
|
| I only tinker with my neovim init file whem I want to add a
| plugin, which is adding one vim-plug line and command and don't
| take much more time than adding a plugin for another IDE.
|
| Most people have their preferred settings that they migrate
| from one machine to another. I used an example vim init file
| from someone else and only did a handful of changes that took
| me probably less than 10-15 minutes over as many years.
| saghm wrote:
| > I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the
| Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every
| single way.
|
| I'm not sure if you mean this literally, but I think that's a
| bit of an exaggeration. I mentioned this the other day here
| [1], but for whatever reason, I've been completely unable to
| get Intellij to properly allow me to work on a remote codebase
| for my job. Despite my company giving me access to the Ultimate
| edition, the 2021 version of Intellij just flat out refused to
| connect when I tried to use the ssh plugin, and the 2022
| edition's beta of a new ssh feature worked for about a week
| before somehow getting into a state where it would reconnect
| every 5 seconds or so and scroll me to the top of whatever file
| I was trying to edit. I'm sure there are ways to get it to
| work, but given that VS Code just worked the first time I set
| it up and never really got in my way, I have no motivation to
| spend more than a few minutes trying to get Intellij working
| before just giving up and going back to VS Code.
|
| I think if you see behavior that seems so obviously "wrong" to
| you, it's worth giving people the benefit of the doubt and
| actually trying to see _why_ people do things that way before
| just dismissing them as irrational. I wouldn't be surprised if
| you've actually talked to people who might have experiences
| like this that could explain the discrepancy, but if you start
| the conversation so dismissively, most people aren't going to
| bother trying to share their experiences with you.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31669461
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I love the Jetbrains IDEs and have used them for years and
| they'll pry CLion from my cold dead hands. I pay for a license
| for it. I've tried VSCode many times and always come back to
| CLion.
|
| However.
|
| JetBrains needs to consider rebuilding on something other than
| Java/Swing. The UI is relatively laggy. It fights with many
| window managers on Linux. It feels clunky compared to VS Code,
| from a UI POV.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| You're 100% right.
|
| Developers are no different than other humans. Lazy,
| indifferent, unappreciative, self-absorbed...
|
| Sublime Text is a perfect example.
|
| It's a travesty with as popular as that editor was that
| developers would literally use it for work and for personal
| projects but refuse to pay for what everyone agreed at the time
| was the best tool for those not using IDE's.
|
| It pissed me off to the point that anytime I paired with
| someone and the SublimeText popup showed, I'd ask them to pay
| the $40 or whatever was being asked.
| blip54321 wrote:
| I think most of us value our freedom more.
|
| Most people don't think of it in terms of freedom, but freedom
| it is. With proprietary software:
|
| - You don't know when it will disappear or be discontinued.
| Even your paid-for existing version stops working when the
| activation servers go down.
|
| - You might be forced into an "upgrade" which breaks something
| you rely on
|
| - That's not to mention issues like being able to fix bugs
| yourself, extend it, or understand it. I don't do this often
| directly, but something like being able to understand a file
| format my data is in or similar is common
|
| I don't mind paying for things, but things need to be a lot
| better on other axes before this one becomes the most
| important.
|
| My experience is that:
|
| - Things I did decades ago are sometimes useful. Nearly 100% of
| the time, if this was in a proprietary system, it's gone or
| unusable. My LaTeX files still work.
|
| - Companies switch between growth mode and cash cow mode. When
| this happens, the cost to me is almost always higher than the
| initial benefit over free.
|
| - Which is better on other axes goes back-and-forth. An
| investment I make into a tool now doesn't mean it will be the
| leading tool in five years.
|
| - Those sorts of long-term considerations are almost always
| more important than short-term technical stuff.
| jefftime wrote:
| To piggyback off this, another reason that I think software
| freedom is valuable is community support. Things like LSPs,
| syntax highlighters, and that sort of support doesn't have to
| wait on JetBrains to integrate it into their IDE. I think
| there is real value to the community being able to hack on a
| tool and not being at the whim of a single developer's
| priorities
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Except for core functionality, everything in JetBrains'
| IDEs is written as plugins (grammar checking, themes,
| support for Go/PHP/Ruby/Python/Android/framework of the
| month, the list goes on). You just don't notice it because
| of good integration with the rest of the editor (unlike how
| it's done in Eclipse).
|
| Those can be (and are) developed by anybody. For example,
| IDEA has had absolutely the best Rust story for many years,
| and the Rust plugin became official only recently. It was
| created and developed for years before that by a single
| developer not affiliated with JB (and still blew all other
| editors out of the water).
| drclau wrote:
| You can write and publish your own plugins for JetBrains
| IDEs.
|
| https://plugins.jetbrains.com/
| another_story wrote:
| You can also sell your plugins, but it does feel less
| "good" to be adding value to a commercial product that
| you're not a part of. By that, I mean there is somewhat
| of a sense of community around OSS that you can't
| replicate within a commercial space.
| j1elo wrote:
| _With proprietary software:_
|
| _- You might be forced into an "upgrade" which breaks
| something you rely on_
|
| GNOME devs are laughing at this very hard right now while
| they look at your maximize icon. As of today, half baked
| decisions are still being made and forced to users all
| around.
|
| Like Gnome Terminal, where if you Select All, then Copy, it
| only copies _the currently visible text_ , not the "All" you
| just selected. A conscious decision that was first made to
| work around some memory issue, and was later left as
| permanent behavior _with no resort for users to revert back_
| and _absolutely no way to select and copy all text of a
| terminal_. And it shipped for everybody to enjoy on the
| latest Ubuntu LTS. Nice.
|
| EDIT to mention that indeed it's nice that Ubuntu themselves
| would be in a position where the change could be reverted for
| their users, if they wanted. So that's indeed a very positive
| property of Open Source. Albeit assuming everybody has the
| means, the time, or even the ability to make such changes is
| kind of naive. But _the possibility_ , yeah, it is there
| after all, and that's a good thing.
| akagusu wrote:
| Sorry, but developers don't care about freedom, they just
| want things that are free == gratis == zero cost.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| that's not true. Sure the majority may not care but a
| sizeable and talented core do or we would have nothing but
| proprietary software to use right now.
| neurobashing wrote:
| So do you only work for companies who have 100% open source
| and whose business model or product is a public benefit? Eg,
| "I value my freedom" is a perfectly acceptable position,
| until Mark Zuckerberg starts signing your checks, you know?
| wiseowise wrote:
| Facebook/Meta are huge contributors to open source, so I'm
| not sure what your comment is supposed to mean.
| nightski wrote:
| Their products are proprietary. Honestly open sourcing
| their stuff just nets free labor.
| filoleg wrote:
| Are you trying to claim that something like React/React
| Native/Jest weren't mostly done by Meta, but by the open
| source community, and Meta was just riding the coattails
| of their free work? You count VSCode to be in the same
| category as well (swap Meta for Microsoft instead)?
|
| That's quite a claim, and I dont believe it is
| substantiated.
| nightski wrote:
| No, I'm saying any benefit by open sourcing it vs. just
| keeping it in house (the difference) would be free labor.
| Not the entire project of course!
| refulgentis wrote:
| Devs don't pay for tooling because it might be discontinued
| or have a paid upgrade? That seems short-sighted and perhaps
| an argument in search of a proponent.
| krab wrote:
| The parent post argues that if you invest in learning or
| tweaking open source tools, they're useful to you over a
| longer period of time than the commercial counterparts in
| general. I don't read it as absolute. Just an explanation
| of their preference.
| ta988 wrote:
| - You can keep your editor with Jetbrains even after the
| license expires, you just don't get updates. - They never
| force you into updates. - Many of my LaTeX files from 20
| years ago don't work anymore unless I go back and go use old
| versions. - Your IDE does not modify your source code so your
| source code stays in an interpretable format.
|
| I agree that you loose the ability to modify and adapt your
| editor (beyond plugins but that's still pretty limited
| compared to what you can do with emacs for example)
|
| Using an editor doesn't force you to stay in a relation for
| life. if Jetbrains turns into a cash cow, I can go use any
| editor I want. Outside of muscle memory and preference, I
| have 0 dependency on them.
| rnd420_69 wrote:
| of course you value your freedom over the countless hours of
| voluntary development time someone else put in to develop the
| free tools you use
|
| god what braindead, shit post
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yes, we do value freedom more. It doesn't matter much
| effort it took to develop if the resulting software is user
| hostile and freedom denying. We want to be empowered and
| liberated by software. We don't want to be peasants in your
| digital fiefdom.
| bmitc wrote:
| I feel sentiments like these are straight paranoia. Nothing
| is forever. And I actually don't think I have experienced a
| paid piece of software suddenly changing or disappearing or
| causing headache. Yet, this happens all the time with free,
| open source software. The person developing it stops, it gets
| forked, now there's two versions with one the popular one but
| not developed and a forked one being developed but not
| popular, and the whole thing is difficult to contribute to
| because it's a big ball of mud.
|
| I will absolutely pay for software. What's more likely to
| cause issues? A company getting paid to develop useful
| software or some free, open source software where the
| developers have their own little fiefdom? Issues get closed
| all the time or ignored and then when you push the issue you
| just get told "that's not the way I do it" or "we're all
| volunteers and not paid, contributions welcome". Well yea, I
| would contribute if it wasn't impenetrable and I had
| confidence the contribution would actually be accepted. I
| have successfully contributed to larger projects where these
| things are taken more seriously, but they are the outlier.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > You don't know when it will disappear or be discontinued.
|
| I've been using Visual Studio pretty much every working day
| for over twenty years. I have zero worries that is will
| disappear any time soon. I still think its the best IDE out
| there, and I've never felt that my freedom was being
| compromised by using it.
| nojito wrote:
| Nothing to do with freedom. People are naturally cheap.
|
| Which is why free tiers are so popular.
| tharne wrote:
| > Nothing to do with freedom. People are naturally cheap.
|
| I don't think this is true. Look at bars. I can go to a
| liquor store and buy alcohol at a fraction of what it costs
| in a bar and invite my friends over to drink together. Yet,
| bars which charge a massive markup on the same exact
| alcohol, do not seem to be in danger of going out of
| business.
|
| Or look at coffee. You can buy a bag of Starbucks coffee in
| the grocery store for $10 and it will make many pots of
| coffee, providing a single individual a cup of coffee a day
| for 2 weeks or more. Yet, on any given morning you can spot
| long lines of people eagerly waiting to pay 3 or 4 dollars
| for a single cup of the exact same coffee they could have
| made at home for one tenth the cost, that probably would
| have required less time and effort than going to Starbucks.
| nojito wrote:
| That's paying for convenience which is a different
| behavior.
| nrb wrote:
| When exactly would paying for an IDE extension NOT be
| paying for convenience?
| cowtools wrote:
| What is the convenience?
| SenHeng wrote:
| - you don't have to learn how to make all the variations
| of drinks each of your friends like
|
| - you don't have to stock ingredients for food/drinks you
| may not like or prepare often
|
| - you can't make a din without annoying the neighbours
|
| - you don't have to rent a space just to play loud music
| or dance
|
| - you don't have to make a music selection
|
| - you don't have to invite large numbers of people who
| don't know each other to help make new connections
|
| - you don't have to clean up every time anyone pukes
| cdrini wrote:
| Most of your points also apply to open source software, and
| aren't strict requirements for proprietary software.
|
| - discontinued: Atom just got discontinued. It's open source.
| Photoshop on the other hand has withstood the test of time.
|
| - Audacity's 3.0 update removed a feature I relied on. I
| wasn't forced to update to it, sure, but proprietary software
| doesn't force updates either.
|
| - Being able to fix your own bugs is a great part of open
| source! But not something most professional software
| developers really expect to do for their IDE.
|
| - open source formats are probably more resilient than closed
| source, but I would argue many proprietary formats are also
| pretty resilient. Code is also based on plain text at it's
| core, like latex, so it's always going to be pretty
| resilient.
|
| - you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest time
| in or money in will be the leading tool in five years.
| Hamcha wrote:
| I'll my personal experience as someone who still prefers
| many proprietary softwares over open source (assuming the
| price is fair and the features are much much better):
|
| - Photoshop is a market leader so definitely an exception.
| I personally miss apps like "Made with Mischief" which had
| unique features that I loved that are still not yet
| replicated but have completely disappeared and the only way
| to use them is to find shady places giving out cracked
| versions (even when I have a license).
|
| - If there's enough demand for a feature, you can fork and
| bring it back. Waterfox is a popular example of push-back
| to some of Mozilla decisions (like killing XUL) and is
| still maintained and loved.
|
| - I love thinkering with formats, but unless you rely on
| the reverse engineering community at large picking your
| favorite format apart, you're not gonna get far without a
| lot of background. I use Affinity Photo/Designer, two
| popular alternatives to Photoshop/Illustrator, which use
| their afphoto/afdesign formats and there's no published
| spec about them. If I ever wanted to do a tool that deals
| with them I'd have no starting point.
| tharne wrote:
| > Most of your points also apply to open source software,
| and aren't strict requirements for proprietary software.
|
| Except I can still use discontinued open source software
| like Atom.
|
| Try installing an older version of an app on an old iPhone.
| The app store won't let you. You might be able to jailbreak
| the phone and track down an older version of the app, but
| it's a pain and Apple makes it as difficult as they can for
| you instead of just letting you download the version you
| want from their store.
| mckravchyk wrote:
| > Except I can still use discontinued open source
| software like Atom.
|
| The same thing can be said about desktop proprietary
| software, so long as it does not rely on a cloud service
| to function.
|
| > Try installing an older version of an app on an old
| iPhone. The app store won't let you. You might be able to
| jailbreak the phone and track down an older version of
| the app, but it's a pain and Apple makes it as difficult
| as they can for you instead of just letting you download
| the version you want from their store.
|
| iOS is an extreme situation, but we are talking about
| desktop apps here, desktop OSes don't have these kinds of
| restrictions.
|
| That said, open source have this edge that if it's just
| too obsolete for the dependencies, you can hope someone
| would patch it if it's popular enough. It would be harder
| to patch a proprietary app. That may not matter as much
| in the context of Electron apps as the web platform is
| pretty stable. Not sure about the Java thing Jetbrains
| IDEs are running on though.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > The same thing can be said about desktop proprietary
| software, so long as it does not rely on a cloud service
| to function.
|
| Please, launch 32-bit program on recent versions of Mac
| OS.
| nightski wrote:
| This is why I don't, nor will ever use a Mac. Backwards
| compatibility matters.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > - discontinued: Atom just got discontinued. It's open
| source. Photoshop on the other hand has withstood the test
| of time.
|
| If you like Atom and still want to use it, you can fix
| potential bugs yourself and make it evolve, you can't with
| a proprietary one. You can also fork if project take a
| different direction that you would like. When gnome3 came
| up, some people who preferred the gnome2 desktop metaphor
| started mate and cinnamon, the former forking gnome 2 to
| port it to gtk-3 while the later forked gnome3 to adapt it
| to work more like gnome2.
|
| > - you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest
| time in or money in will be the leading tool in five years.
|
| Nobody has to use the leading tool. My preferred IDE is
| neovim which is kind of a niche project. While they are the
| leaders there is no reason for me to use Visual Studio or
| Visual Studio Code if I am not comfortable on them.
| philistine wrote:
| The original point was how much time and effort is spent
| to save a pittance in the grand scheme of things. You're
| confirming how much effort is spent by rich engineers not
| to pay money. I know there is a principle, but in the end
| it's still so much effort.
| prmoustache wrote:
| There is nowhere mention about money in that article.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > If you like Atom and still want to use it, you can fix
| potential bugs yourself and make it evolve...
|
| If "you" is "a company or sponsored non-profit with
| sufficient development resources to dedicate some to
| taking over and evolving the editor," sure. If "you" is
| _me,_ and I suspect 99.99% of Atom users, this seems like
| a pretty unrealistic ask.
|
| This isn't a criticism of the open source model, to be
| clear, but this has always struck me as one of the weaker
| arguments for it having an advantage over closed source
| models. There are certainly examples of successful forks
| and revivals, but there are also examples of projects
| that never got sufficient uptake to continue when the
| original developer moved on (e.g., the Ted RTF-based word
| processor), and probably many more projects that just
| seem to exist in a kind of limbo state, technically still
| developed but not really seeming to put much effort into
| keeping up with the world -- off the top of my head,
| Unix's JOE and JED editors and the famous native Mac
| editor TextMate, which arguably inspired a raft of later
| editors including Visual Studio Code. And in practice,
| closed source projects that get a sufficient level of
| usage are likely to stick around and keep being
| developed, too. There are always exceptions, but
| _usually_ if something continues to be sufficiently
| popular -- which, in the closed source world, is roughly
| equivalent to "profitable" -- it's going to keep being
| supported.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _If "you" is "a company or sponsored non-profit with
| sufficient development resources to dedicate some to
| taking over and evolving the editor," sure. If "you" is
| me, and I suspect 99.99% of Atom users, this seems like a
| pretty unrealistic ask._
|
| I've used several projects (mostly libraries) that got
| abandoned, and only two I had to adopt and maintain
| myself, and those were pretty low maintenance. If there
| is a community around it, somebody (who isn't you) might
| step up, so you don't have to do it.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > discontinued: Atom just got discontinued. It's open
| source. Photoshop on the other hand has withstood the test
| of time.
|
| But if I want to use Atom I can fork it, or keep the source
| around. It doesn't go away from my environment until _I_
| say it does. And Photoshop has become more and more user
| hostile over time.
|
| > Audacity's 3.0 update removed a feature I relied on. I
| wasn't forced to update to it, sure, but proprietary
| software doesn't force updates either.
|
| It is impossible for libre software to force updates, and
| quite possible for proprietary software to do so. It's part
| of what pushed me away from Windows in the first place, and
| other apps (especially web, but also other stuff) also do
| so.
|
| > Being able to fix your own bugs is a great part of open
| source! But not something most professional software
| developers really expect to do for their IDE.
|
| While it isn't expected, it's definitely a nice-to-have.
|
| > open source formats are probably more resilient than
| closed source, but I would argue many proprietary formats
| are also pretty resilient. Code is also based on plain text
| at it's core, like latex, so it's always going to be pretty
| resilient.
|
| But with libre software, I don't have to wonder. Even if a
| project uses an obtuse, obfuscated binary format I know
| I'll still be able to read it (with a little prep work).
| With code this is less of an issue - as you note - but you
| did mention Photoshop earlier, so I'm assuming we're
| talking about software in general.
|
| > you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest time
| in or money in will be the leading tool in five years.
|
| I don't need it to he leading, I need it to be around and
| functional. Pretty confident Emacs/(n)vim will be here a
| couple decades longer at least. I believe this was GP's
| point - that it's better to worry about what will work best
| in 10 years, not what's standard now.
| mbesto wrote:
| > But if I want to use Atom I can fork it, or keep the
| source around. It doesn't go away from my environment
| until _I_ say it does.
|
| This is _technically_ true, but in 99% of the cases is
| not realistically true. Most developers who use said FOSS
| external dependency do not want to actively maintain it
| themselves.
| varajelle wrote:
| For the atom case, it seems some users are going to
| continue to maintain it: https://github.com/atom-
| community/atom/
| bmitc wrote:
| FOSS supporters always say this as if we live in a
| reality where knowledge and time are infinite. Yes, the
| licenses say you can legally do things, but they are
| hardly ever realistic.
| frazbin wrote:
| Well, you don't do the maintenance yourself, you get some
| bored person to do it-- the important thing is they're
| not on a payroll and the result isn't someone's IP. Right
| now this strategy probably seems insane, because we are
| all so well compensated that the opportunity cost of
| working on OSS for free is massive, but sometimes you get
| 'lucky' and a software downturn frees up some engineering
| hours for further pro bono work on OSS. Pretty sure that
| has happened several times already, might happen again
| soon.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| "It is impossible for libre software to force updates"
|
| This isn't even close to being true
| netr0ute wrote:
| Any evidence to back that up?
| terhechte wrote:
| I think Gnome / GTK is a good example. Famously, the
| Budgie Desktop Environment will have to be rewritten on
| top of Enlightenment because they don't like the GTK 4
| changes. So now they're forced to go to a different
| widget system. [1]
|
| [1] https://joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-
| alternative-...
| ekianjo wrote:
| Its a technical decision. Nobody is forcing them to do
| anything.
| freedomben wrote:
| Your use of "forced" is interesting, because to me that
| doesn't sound like "force" at all, rather a "we don't
| like this thing so we're moving" which is a free choice
| for technical reasons.
|
| Force to me is like what Amazon does with kindles. If it
| connects to the internet, it will update to the latest
| version whether you want it to or not. If you don't
| connect it to the internet, you can't use it.
| lal wrote:
| Sure, that's a good example of something else, but do you
| have any examples of any forced updates?
| hansvm wrote:
| If it did you'd just build a version with the offensive
| code removed?
| imwillofficial wrote:
| If you have the skills. The large majority of humanity
| does not
| wiseowise wrote:
| That's like saying that hardware should be only
| repairable by vendor because majority of humanity doesn't
| have skills to fix it themselves.
| Raymonf wrote:
| That's not even close to what they said.
|
| They said, you can do it "if you have the skills" and
| that "the large majority of humanity does not" have these
| skills.
| wiseowise wrote:
| That's literally what they've said. They imply that
| having ability to change something is useless, because
| only a minority can leverage it.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Ah yes. I have the time and the knowledge to "just"
| remove that code and "just" build that version. When even
| the simplest libraries can't usually be built using the
| instructions the authors leave for them (if they even do
| that)
| wiseowise wrote:
| Maybe you don't, but somebody else does.
| freedomben wrote:
| You don't have to remove the code, you can just pin the
| version you're using and go for quite some time
| (sensitive to security context). Most builds are pretty
| easy to do with 5 minutes of following instructions or
| whatever build tool. I did this exactly thing with termux
| (an app I relied on) when they removed sending sms due to
| a google rule change.
|
| Also, _you_ only have to do it if you 're the only one
| left. Chances are very good that there are others in the
| community that may step up wholly or in part. Sure the
| risk is non-zero, but the point of freedom is that you
| _could_ if it came to that.
| blip54321 wrote:
| > discontinued: Atom just got discontinued. It's open
| source. Photoshop on the other hand has withstood the test
| of time.
|
| Photoshop has not withstood the test of time for me. I did
| a lot of Photoshop a few decades ago. I can't afford >
| $1000 per year for a hobby. My old Photoshop files are
| dead, for all intents and purposes.
|
| I do occasionally use decades-old, unmaintained open-source
| tools to open old files.
|
| > Audacity's 3.0 update removed a feature I relied on. I
| wasn't forced to update to it, sure, but proprietary
| software doesn't force updates either.
|
| Yes, it does. Cloud-based, you have no choice. Installed,
| increasingly, you have no choice either, since activation
| servers get taken down.
|
| > Being able to fix your own bugs is a great part of open
| source! But not something most professional software
| developers really expect to do for their IDE.
|
| It's a check-and-balance. I fix issues maybe in 0.0001% of
| the tools I use, but when I do, it's really important. With
| proprietary, you can work 70 hours per week for five years,
| and invest your blood and soul into a project, and be left
| hanging at the end, because you're reliant on someone else.
|
| With open-source, you bite the bullet, fix it yourself, and
| keep chugging along.
|
| > you'll never have a guarantee that a tool you invest time
| in or money in will be the leading tool in five years.
|
| My experience is that "leading tool" is way oversold. The
| difference between JQuery a decade ago and React today is
| important, but even a huge difference like that won't make-
| or-break a business or a project. Technology is easy. If I
| needed to write my stuff in FORTRAN, I'd be less
| productive, but in the end, I'd learn FORTRAN and get the
| job done.
|
| It's not a reason I'd pick proprietary over open-source.
|
| What is important is all the other stuff. If you've bought
| something from Oracle or Google -- who are famous for this
| -- and they discontinue your product or ramp up licensing
| costings 100x once you've built your infrastructure around
| them, that CAN and WILL break a business (or a personal
| project).
|
| Startups have a short half-life. Big businesses have a
| longer one ("No one got fired for buying IBM"). Open-source
| is eternal.
|
| Legacy is important. If you don't believe me, have a look
| at all the FORTRAN and COBOL code still running on old
| mainframes. If you don't take long-term into account,
| you're unlikely to do anything lasting.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > I can't afford > $1000 per year for a hobby.
|
| In the UK a year's license for Photoshop, Lightroom and
| Bridge is approx PS110.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| That doesn't help him if he doesn't live in the UK
| though?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > I did a lot of Photoshop a few decades ago. I can't
| afford > $1000 per year for a hobby.
|
| Adobe's Photographer Plan, which includes Photoshop and
| Lightroom, is $9.99 a month, $119 a year. Not sure where
| "over a thousand dollars per year" comes from.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| lots of modern proprietary software does require a license
| to to continue to use and cloud version are updated all the
| time without any input at all for you.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Software like Photoshop exist because of software patents
| and lawyers, not because they legitimately make the best
| product. If we stripped their parents and any ability to
| enforce IP we would have an OS replacement tomorrow.
| NaN1352 wrote:
| > For individual use, most of them are <$100/year.
|
| Except as a developer you need one app, then another, and
| another... soon enough you'll be paying 10 x 50$/year.
|
| And paying a sub for software is repugnant to me. I bought
| FontAwesome 5 while it was in KickStarter, it's no longer
| updated (it's now version 6), but at least I can still fully
| use the thousands of icons I paid for.
|
| tldr: way too damn expensive.
| apple4ever wrote:
| Yeah exactly. They are just too expensive. I'm happy to pay
| for things that I believe are worth it, but especially with
| yearly subscriptions I don't see the value equation meeting
| it for these IDEs.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Not fair! Open-source, shareware, public-domain, freeware -
| been touted for decades now. But folks buy into all that and
| suddenly they're 'resistant to other people earning a living'.
|
| Or I interpreted that wrong, and it's supposed to be a
| criticism of open-source? Then I agree. Open-source is a pox on
| responsible and reliable software, cannibalizing good software
| by offering free, bad software.
| pphysch wrote:
| > What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who
| are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to
| make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools
| that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind.
|
| How long have you worked in software, or any industry? "Pay for
| this thing that will make your job easier" is the Big Lie of
| software. ~Half of the time it becomes "makes your job harder"
| (often imperceptibly without hindsight!) because the product is
| primarily designed to lock-in paying enterprise customers and
| only secondarily to provide them with a productivity-boosting
| service.
|
| It is rational for people working in the industry to be
| skeptical of such claims.
| thebackup wrote:
| I mostly write C++ and I would love to use CLion, but my
| employer won't pay for the license fees, so my choices are
| VSCode or Eclipse.
| kaashif wrote:
| > my employer won't pay for the license fees
|
| If it costs $200 or whatever and would clearly save you more
| than that in time ($200 is a few hours of developer time)
| then surely it's worth it. I guess the problem is that the
| process isn't in place to make buying CLion easy, so there'd
| be a lot of administrative overhead. Or no-one cares about
| maximising productivity. Or it's not clear to them that CLion
| actually is better than alternatives. Or maybe they want all
| developers using the same tools so any process improvements
| are shared.
|
| None of those seem like great reasons tbh, but I did just
| make them up as part of a strawman to lambast your employer.
| illegalmemory wrote:
| I think developers do pay a Lot for hardware tools ( Mac /
| screen / custom keyboard / IOTs they will never play with and
| so on ). They just don't pay much for software tools. Marketing
| / Sales people will not pay that much for hardware but pay a
| lot for software tools.
| [deleted]
| LoveGracePeace wrote:
| Actually Eclipse (and Spring Tool Suite based on Eclipse) works
| great. Being able to simultaneously debug several microservices
| in one Eclipse instance is one amazing feature.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I think that you are looking at it from the wrong perspective.
|
| 1. IDEs that are made primarily for your host operating system
| by who writes the operating system is basically a loss leader
| and is there to tie you to the host os
|
| 2. Emacs / vi / vim (full disclosure I am an Emacs user) are
| generally usable out of the box with no modification. Tinkering
| with your configuration for Emacs is for people who are
| experienced with Emacs and I primarily do it to make the text
| editor I want.
|
| 3. The actual paid solutions seem to be profitable enough for
| people to use but for reasons 1 and 2 will have a disadvantage
| to compete with them.
| squiffsquiff wrote:
| There's also the issue of signing in or applying a licence file
| on a system owned by someone else. In some environments this
| simply isn't allowed.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Actually making the purchase can also be a nightmare.
|
| I'm at an academic research institute, so I haven't hit this
| problem with JetBrains (free licenses--thanks!), but there
| are lots of other products where spending $15 to save an hour
| is a no-brainer, but spending $15 + two hours of arguing with
| purchasing over whether it's a "legitimate business purpose"
| is...also a no brainer.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans
| out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more
| mature in every single way.
|
| - Worse performance
|
| - Worse plugin ecosystem
|
| - No LSP support
|
| Also, their stance on supporting other ecosystems. While I
| completely understand their standpoint as a business, I prefer
| VSCode team's approach to this.
|
| https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/po...
|
| https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/official-support-for-visual...
|
| > Why are so many resistant so other people earning a living
| particularly when the payoff (ie time-saved) is so easily
| quantifiable?
|
| Is it, though?
| douglaswlance wrote:
| Do you use VSC extensions?
|
| People extend the web-based editor to make it easier to build
| web applications and share those tools on the web. Using a web-
| based editor to build web applications is a self-reinforcing,
| positive loop.
|
| I can see why people who aren't building web apps or aren't
| using extensions are confused why so many people prefer VSCode.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| It seems to me that reasonably priced software is quite rare.
| To me and IDE is basically a fancy text editor and I've never
| really found one that really spoke to me (coding is not my
| primary job though), so $100/year seems steep for what looks
| like mostly a text editor to me. (Side note for all the
| vim/emacs wars, I'm quite satisfied with gedit). It also seems
| like the era of buying software is over; now it is a rent that
| you pay and all the other rents I must pay are going up so I'm
| not looking for any other.
|
| So I see the appeal of free software (as in liberty and as in
| beer) - I recently switched a work machine over to pure Debian
| and it's a breath of fresh air. No proprietary container based
| installs, no advertising/telemetry built in, and I can choose a
| desktop environment that I like with some idea that it won't
| randomly move GUI elements around and change things for the
| sake of change because some product manager or UX engineer or
| other needs to make said change to justify their over-inflated
| salary. LXDE still looked like the LXDE I remember and the same
| goes for Cinnamon and MATE.
| [deleted]
| tharne wrote:
| > What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who
| are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to
| make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools
| that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind.
|
| We're not resistant to paying, we're resistant to rent-seeking.
| I would, and have, happily buy a piece of software I use
| regularly.
|
| What I will not do is a pay a monthly fee in perpetuity for a
| piece of software that I cannot truly own, where features I
| need can be removed on a whim and where I am prohibited from
| adding features I want. I also find the massive amount of
| tracking and general disregard for privacy appalling, but
| that's a missive for another day.
|
| The subscription model that's become predominant is a nightmare
| and is increasingly user-hostile. Why is it so surprising that
| a lot of folks don't like it?
|
| So in summary, I will gladly pay for software when:
|
| 1. I can pay up front an actually own it
|
| 2. I can see the source code and modify it
|
| 3. It does not track or otherwise monitor me
|
| None of these things are a big ask.
| nlitened wrote:
| > We're not resistant to paying, we're resistant to rent-
| seeking.
|
| Yet most employers who can afford to pay developers their
| high salaries are rent seekers. That's hypocrisy right there.
| [deleted]
| yunohn wrote:
| > We're not resistant to paying, we're resistant to rent-
| seeking
|
| So by your definition, a stable salary writing software is a
| form of "rent seeking" in open source, but totally acceptable
| as a job?
| joshstrange wrote:
| JetBrains products have a perpetual fallback license so you
| absolutely can pay up front and then never pay again if you
| are ok being on an older version of the software.
|
| Maybe you are the exception but I find that 99.99% of the
| people who use the "it's open source so I can modify it"
| argument never so much as look at the code let alone consider
| making modifications.
|
| JetBrains products have an open-core (IntelliJ [0]) that can
| look at and contribute to if you so desire.
|
| Lastly you say "None of these things are a big ask.", you
| just want the world on a silver platter for no cost, sorry
| but that is a big ask, especially if you care at all about
| the quality of your tools. If you're happy building an IDE
| from the group up using something like vscode and dealing
| with 100's of plugins that do the same thing slightly
| differently then be my guest but most of your arguments fall
| flat IMHO. Providing an excellent product with constant
| updates is not "rent-seeking".
|
| [0] https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| > Maybe you are the exception but I find that 99.99% of the
| people who use the "it's open source so I can modify it"
| argument never so much as look at the code let alone
| consider making modifications.
|
| I like to live in a country with free speech even if I am
| not a journalist. For the same reason, even if I personally
| am not modifying much, I want the software I use to be
| libre. Nothing about price.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
| tharne wrote:
| > Lastly you say "None of these things are a big ask.", you
| just want the world on a silver platter for no cost, sorry
| but that is a big ask,
|
| Silver platter? Lol. Each of these things would require
| *less* effort on the part of software companies, not more.
|
| Upfront payment? It's easier to charge once than to set up
| recurring bill pay.
|
| Open source? You already have the code, just let me see it.
|
| Tracking? Just don't track me. Actually requires the
| company and it's devs to write less code not more.
| Companies managed to successfully sell software for many
| years without tracking and spying on their users
|
| > Providing an excellent product with constant updates is
| not "rent-seeking"
|
| It is when the updates are things I and others do not want,
| or need, and did not ask for. I have an old computer
| running 15 year-old version of MS Office. Not once have I
| have ever had need for one of the newer features for Office
| that MS has rolled out in the last decade and a half. That
| might not be true for everyone, but it's true for me and
| many others.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Do you work in tech? Like writing code? Because I
| honestly can't believe that someone who works in this
| industry could say "Each of these things would require
| _less_ effort on the part of software companies, not
| more. " with a straight face.
|
| > Upfront payment? It's easier to charge once than to set
| up recurring bill pay.
|
| Monthly bill payments on a regular schedule are not hard,
| huge spikes are more difficult to deal with. Also then
| you have feast/famine cycles at your company and hold
| back completed features for a year or more to sell n+1
| version. I'd rather show, in real-time (monthly or
| annually), what I think of the software (as in continuing
| to pay for it if I like it) as well as get new features
| as soon as they are ready instead of waiting for an
| arbitrary point in the future.
|
| > Open source? You already have the code, just let me see
| it.
|
| Again, do you work in tech? This is nowhere near as easy
| as your make it out to be.
|
| > Tracking? Just don't track me. Actually requires the
| company and it's devs to write less code not more.
| Companies managed to successfully sell software for many
| years without tracking and spying on their users
|
| This can encompass a wide range of things and I don't
| personally believe it's all bad, the good companies allow
| you to opt out [0]. None of things IDEA can collect
| bother me and you can disable it easily. There are good
| reasons for wanting this data along with things like
| crash reports. It's to improve the product, see what
| features people are really using, where you should direct
| your efforts, what types of project structures to
| optimize for. Does adding the tracking take more work?
| Yes but we (software developers) wouldn't do it if we
| didn't get value out of the results.
|
| As far as rent-seeking, I guess it's a matter of opinion.
| You can make the argument that you'd rather things just
| never change and limit yourself to dated tools that will
| eventually not be supported or have features you will
| need in the future. Or you can continue to learn and grow
| with the current landscape of tools letting you take
| advantage of new features that might end up being game-
| changing.
|
| [0] https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/settings-usage-
| statistic...
| tharne wrote:
| > Do you work in tech? Like writing code?
|
| Yes and yes.
|
| Perhaps with the exception of showing the source code,
| these things we're discussing are things that used to be
| quite common place, i.e. you could buy and own a piece of
| software with one upfront payment and it didn't track
| you.
|
| I have very hard time believing that things that were the
| norm a short time ago are suddenly now impossible or
| prohibitively difficult.
|
| I can understand a company pursuing things like a
| subscription model and expansive tracking. It's
| potentially more profitable, just like making it very
| hard replace in iPhone batter is more profitable.
| However, it doesn't make it right and is one of reasons a
| lot of developers don't like to pay for modern software.
| Nobody likes being fleeced and developers are in the best
| position to call bullshit on software.
|
| In terms of getting new features. I will (and have) pay
| for a new version of a piece of software a useful feature
| appears. Most new features in subscription based software
| are just fluff designed to justify the ongoing monthly
| charge.
| bbbobbb wrote:
| Are you ignoring the 'perpetual fallback license'? I
| would expect you'd welcome it if it is such a strong
| point for you. You can pay once for JetBrains IDE and
| never ever update (or even access older version) and keep
| using it after that.
| tharne wrote:
| > Are you ignoring the 'perpetual fallback license'?
|
| I'm not ignoring it, I'm just not a JetBrains user for
| reasons outside of cost. I happen to like emacs and
| donate to different parts of the emacs ecosystem.
|
| Most of my development is scripting and writing a lot of
| glue code which doesn't benefit tremendously from an IDE.
| If I found myself working on large enterprise apps or
| doing a lot of java programming, I'd give JetBrains a
| look.
| heurisko wrote:
| I'm a fan of Jetbrains and am now on their discounted
| subscription.
|
| They are quite involved in the development of languages
| too. My suspicion is they have an interest in creating new
| language features, that users will need updated IDEs for!
| joshstrange wrote:
| > My suspicion is they have an interest in creating new
| language features, that users will need updated IDEs for.
|
| Don't throw me in the briar patch?
|
| If they are pushing languages forward so that developers
| can do more or things more efficiently then sign me up
| haha.
| xigoi wrote:
| > Maybe you are the exception but I find that 99.99% of the
| people who use the "it's open source so I can modify it"
| argument never so much as look at the code let alone
| consider making modifications.
|
| It's about having the option. It shouldn't be the case that
| you have to modify your editor's source code, but if it's
| open source, at least you can do that. With a proprietary
| editor, you're screwed.
| joshstrange wrote:
| How are you screwed?
|
| If you don't like something, switch editors. I don't
| understand why some people self-flagellate and don't just
| pick the right tool for the job. I'm very pro-open-source
| but that doesn't mean proprietary software is all evil,
| you'll drive yourself crazy if you take that to its
| logical end.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| > If you don't like something, switch editors. I don't
| understand why some people self-flagellate and don't just
| pick the right tool for the job.
|
| As an emacs user: One does not simply switch editors.
|
| If you can just switch from emacs to vscode, you likely
| were using it at a very surface level.
|
| Put another way one could switch from Java (jetbrains) to
| Scala(emacs), but still be writing Java code.
|
| I think that there are users that treat IDEs and editors
| as a lowest common denominator where switching would be
| easy and others who build workflows on editor-specific
| features.
|
| If you are the former, switching isn't a big deal.
| mbesto wrote:
| > 1. I can pay up front an actually own it
|
| > None of these things are a big ask.
|
| So let me get this straight. You expect (a) a software
| developer to create a piece of software (b) support in
| perpetuity (i.e. provide bug fixes) and you want to (c) only
| pay them _once_ for that. Think about this for a second,
| especially part b, and explain to me how that should work.
|
| Now you might say "no but what I meant is that every time a
| new release comes out I pay"...so then I, the software
| developer, will just do a new release once a year and charge
| you each year. Does it magically then not become "rent
| seeking" any more?
|
| The other two points are perfectly reasonable.
| 7steps2much wrote:
| > Does it magically then not become "rent seeking" any
| more?
|
| The difference is that i can just stop buying the new stuff
| once the software does everything i need though. That way i
| might miss out on shiny new features, but as long as the
| thing i bought the software for gets done I really don't
| have a need to purchase new versions.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| How long do you expect the version you own to be
| supported though? Security updates? Bug fixes? Feature
| requests?
| 7steps2much wrote:
| I wouldn't expect feature updates at all. In my mind it
| works like this:
|
| New features are adding value. This is something that the
| developers should be paid for! Releasing a new version
| for features is justified.
|
| Security updates/bug fixes on the other hand are "fixing"
| things with their product. In my opinion those should be
| provided because developers should strive to develop good
| products.
|
| But to give you a somewhat more clear answer: I don't
| expect new features. I expect Security and bug updates
| until the next version+a bit of time.
|
| If there is a version released every year i would expect
| Security/bug fixes for at least one year. Two years would
| be the developers be great, three years would have me
| surprised. Anything beyond that would be far more than I
| ever expected.
| rpdillon wrote:
| $100 for a tool that enables my career is completely worth it.
| There are two issues:
|
| * Freedom - my workflow is centered around modifying tools to
| suit my use case. OSI open source makes this easier sometimes.
|
| * Ubiquity - I detest spending time updating license keys,
| figuring out if that key works with the version I downloaded,
| finding out that new-feature isn't available in the version I
| paid for, or wrangling with how many computers my license will
| allow me to run the tool on. If the trappings and enforcement
| of monetization weren't present, I'd spend a lot more money on
| software tools.
|
| Aside: I worked on a team managing build infra at one point,
| and just getting license servers and license files set up so
| that CI could leverage proprietary tools was a major, sustained
| effort. I know personal tooling is more lightweight, but the
| same dynamics are present.
|
| So my investment in tuning Emacs feels to me like an actual
| investment: I've gotten really good at tuning Emacs for various
| uses, and the time I spent on that has made me a more effective
| engineer in some ways. I bring Emacs to every job I work and
| even if I end up using JetBrains for e.g. Android dev, I still
| have Emacs in my pocket for text editing, Magit, org mode,
| dired, and shells/terms. I don't feel the same way about time
| spent managing licenses for proprietary tooling, or even
| learning this particular company's git tooling; I just keep
| using Magit. Maybe others don't feel as strongly that their
| preferred tooling be "everywhere", but I really value it.
| kcb wrote:
| Corporate expense processes are a pita. For critical
| applications like an IDE its not a problem, but for smaller one
| off tools it's usually more effort then it's worth to use paid
| software.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| The thing that bothers me the most about the resistance to pay
| for anything is that you're not spreading the love to your
| fellow devs/creators.
|
| I know HN has grown so this may not be as true as before, but
| we're a community of builders! We should all understand the
| time and effort put into each of these projects. You'll tip a
| delivery person but won't support the people spending thousands
| of hours building the tools that makes your life tangibly
| better?
|
| </rant>
| elashri wrote:
| I think of HN to more of a community of rational people.
| Rational people pay for what they believe would get value to
| their workflow or just support a principle or an idea like
| open source.
|
| I hardly can see any of that applies to Jetbrains products.
| many people here stated (which I agree) that Vscode and
| vim/emacs is better for them technically and for being open
| source.
| bitwize wrote:
| Who's to say we aren't productive with our chosen editors?
|
| I find malarkey like autocomplete to be distracting, so I use
| Emacs with it turned off. Because Emacs can be programmed and
| extended _as it is used_ , it is way more productive to me than
| any "fixed function" IDE -- including Visual Studio Code[0] I
| could _not_ do my job nearly as effectively in Visual Studio
| Code or JetBrains as I do in Emacs.
|
| There is a perspective dependence to what the "best tool for
| the job" is. You are most productive in JetBrains and that is
| fine, but that doesn't make your colleagues less productive in
| their choice of editor.
|
| [0] To extend Visual Studio Code, you have to start a new Node
| TypeScript project that uses VSCode's cumbersome API, compile
| it, test it in an "Extension Host", bundle it in a .vsix and
| then, at long last, you can use it in your regular editor. It's
| clear that Visual Studio Code's designers did not want end
| users programming their editor, let alone programming and using
| it at the same time. As a VSCode end user, the happy path is to
| select from pre-made extensions in Microsoft's extension
| catalog.
| synergy20 wrote:
| I used VScode for 2 years then bought Jetbrains for 3 years,
| now I'm switching back to VScode. I feel vscode is getting
| better plus it is open source.
|
| Does open source matter a lot? maybe. For example, Jetbrains'
| Teamcity is still under investigation for Solarwinds hack which
| is a concern, plus I think a while ago the core developers are
| mostly from Russia at Jetbrains. Those combined with an
| improved vscode made the switch for me. I mainly use vim in
| practice but I do need a GUI IDE once a while.
| davidkunz wrote:
| I'd rather say instead of paying money they should spend time
| to master their tools. I don't see musicians complaining about
| learning their instrument.
| [deleted]
| realusername wrote:
| > Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans
| out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more
| mature in every single way. For individual use, most of them
| are <$100/year.
|
| They just aren't, I would not switch to Jetbrains from VSCode
| even if it was free. It's not a question of pricing and
| Jetbrains themselves started to realise it since they are
| building some VSC clone (forgot the name right now)
| jebronie wrote:
| They just are though, once you realise how much more powerful
| they are. I had a collegue until recently (he was let go),
| who was a staunch VSCode fan that refused to use Jetbrains
| IDEs. His code is terrible and riddled with bugs. Most of
| them were even easily detected by the Jetbrains IDEs. Now I
| have to clean up his shitty projects. He also spend a lot of
| time configuring his shitty VSCode instead of working.
| realusername wrote:
| Oh yeah sure they are powerful, I don't deny that but I
| really hate the UX and the readability. At the end of the
| day, I don't really want to spend time to make it usable
| enough to my liking.
| Volundr wrote:
| I've tried IntelliJ for both Elixir and Clojure. While
| Cursive is ok, I can confidently say that the vscode Elixir
| support is far, far better, and in Cursive vs Cider I'd
| take Cider any day.
|
| Yeah, if your writing Kotlin/Java IntelliJ is a no-brainer,
| but for many of us the situation is much more nuanced.
| ithrow wrote:
| Expecting a IDE to fix someone's terrible code riddle with
| bugs non sequitur. What programming language was this?
| elashri wrote:
| Their new VSC alternative name is fleet and I don't think
| they confirmed it will be free like VSCode though.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Are you refering to free or free? Paying money I don't
| mind, but being non-free would be a big drawback.
| realusername wrote:
| Thanks for the name, I completely forgot about it. I'm
| totally fine paying for it if it's nice, it's just that I
| prefer something similar to VSCode rather than Jetbrains
| IDEs.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| I am fully willing to pay somebody for software. I just also
| want the software to be free (in the FSF sense).
|
| Do I need to pay each time I want one of their updates? Or do I
| need to pay a subscription for support+code update?
|
| I'm 100% game to do that but I want to own what I get and I
| want the freedom to do with it what I want (within reason).
|
| If I want to recompile the software with some change I made,
| port the software to some other hardware, or go dig in the
| source to identify a bug, I want that option. It's that plain
| and simple.
|
| If the license says "no commercial use unless you pay X flat, Y
| subscription, or Z whatever else", that's perfectly fine with
| me. People already use pirated versions of proprietary software
| so if someone wants to use your software without paying they
| are going to do so.
|
| TLDR: I'll pay pretty much whatever you want for the product
| provided I have the means. I just want the freedom to do with
| my software & hardware as I please.
|
| Edit: I wanted to toss into this that if we want more projects
| to be viable open source or free software projects, we need to
| be willing to support the developers. If you have the means,
| sponsor developers even if it's only some pocket change each
| month.
| axkdev wrote:
| I was a jetbrains guy until I discovered the vim/neovim
| ecosystem. Yes, configurling vim takes time but 1.its fun 2. I
| can fine tune it to my specific work flows in ways simply not
| achievable with Idea or any other editor. After configuration
| is finished, the actual time it takes to do my work is
| comparable with a full fledged ide. It's probably even faster,
| considering vim loads faster and also forces you to use the
| keyboard for everything.
| kingboss wrote:
| Imagine being on your deathbed thinking: "Configuring vim was
| so fun. Totally worth it". I sometimes feel that most people
| on this forums are under 24 years of age. So sad to read
| these comments. So much to do, so many interesting things....
| but people enjoy configuring text editors...
| aeze wrote:
| If people enjoy it, why do you think they would regret it
| later? It sounds like you just don't enjoy it, which is ok.
| kingboss wrote:
| A lot of regret actually comes from enjoying something
| and then later realising that it was stupid and a waste
| of time. Time that you would have liked to spend on a
| more useful endeavour.
| aeze wrote:
| A lot of your personal regret might come from that. I
| think it's important to note that there are many people
| who can look back fondly at times they were simply
| enjoying themselves, even if that time was not strictly
| 'useful'.
| kingboss wrote:
| The joyful days of configuring vim. You are trolling me
| at this point.
| chadlavi wrote:
| Personal use is a different question, but if my employer
| doesn't pay for it I'm not buying software to use for their
| benefit. Any a lot of employers go huh, a free one eh? Use
| that.
| ripvanwinkle wrote:
| I posit that the reason is we form a lot of habits and patterns
| when we are younger - like high school students or college
| students where most of us have more time and very little money.
|
| Some of us reassess spending patterns over time (and even there
| some do it more frequently than others).
|
| So you have this spread where a part of the population is still
| very frugal and some part is almost price insensitive and then
| everything in between.
|
| Love to hear what other folks think.
| akagusu wrote:
| It really is bizarre, specially because it doesn't make sense
| in terms of money.
|
| They prefer to spend dozens of hours seeking, testing and
| tweaking free/gratis products (in some cases their hour worth
| more than $100/h), but they don't want to pay $100/year in a
| product that will save them dozens of hours.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I'm not interested in paying to have my computing freedom
| violated. If I pay for software, I don't get software, I get a
| license which is a limited conditional permission to use the
| software, a privilege that can be taken away and also comes
| bundled with a stack of rules and prohibitions nobody really
| cares about.
|
| All proprietary software deserves the git treatment where
| people eventually get fed up with it and replace it with
| superior free software, thereby permanently enriching the
| world. We need to understand the factors that enabled such a
| development and somehow incentivize them.
| II2II wrote:
| I have used modern editors. For the most part they are amazing.
| That being said, I always end up returning to the same old open
| source editor. Much of the reason can be attributed to one
| quality: it has been around for as long as I have been alive
| and it will likely be around long after I am gone. This means
| that I am continually building upon prior skills, rather than
| tossing them out the window each time a new fad comes along or
| a vendor goes out of business. Incidentally, this is also why I
| don't see the payoff from commercial editors as being easily
| quantifiable. They may do a rather good job at reducing the
| learning curve, but they cannot eliminate it.
| legulere wrote:
| Software engineers know that it's creating new software that is
| expensive, not copying it. Why not give copies away for free
| when you satisfied the need that led to the software being
| written? Even microsoft now understands that it makes more
| sense to write software to better sell services than to try to
| sell software directly.
| tempodox wrote:
| I ditched VSCodium for JetBrains Rider and couldn't be happier.
| On the Mac Rider is miles ahead of Visual Studio ( _shuddering
| with revulsion_ ). But no IDE will ever dissuade me from using
| vim. I just use them for different things.
| lukastyrychtr wrote:
| Unfortunately for the paid IDEs, even the accessibility for
| screen readers is much better in VSC.
| ukyrgf wrote:
| Creative Cloud.
| pojzon wrote:
| Jetbrains is a half-good example. A lot of stuff that was
| before opensource was close-sourced by Jetbrains and now their
| support for it is terrible.
|
| I.E. Terraform plugin. Stopped working past 1.0.11 and its half
| a year without an update.
|
| So yea. Ppl ARE willing to pay for stuff that ,,works".
| ttctciyf wrote:
| This doesn't seem to have anything to do with the article or
| its author, who switched not because of cost but because of
| unavoidable telemetry and tracking.
|
| What _I_ find truly bizarre is how many virtual monopoly owning
| companies, rather than concentrate on maximising the financial
| gains available from their enviable dominance of a market
| segment, instead focus on miserablising user experience and
| instrusively degrading their paying customers ' sense of
| ownership and enjoyment in using the software they produce.
| butbutbut123456 wrote:
| > What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who
| are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to
| make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools
| that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind.
|
| I agree. I'm always surprised at what technical people aren't
| willing to pay for.
|
| I _think_ I used to be like this though. I used to really enjoy
| playing with my tools and learning about everything. Now that I
| 'm older, I just want to get the job done, then go outside and
| play at the park or something.
| renox wrote:
| Except that Jetbrains IDE being better isn't always true.
|
| At work, our huge C++ project makes CLion _very_ slow..
|
| VSCode MS Intellisense works quite badly but at least it's
| faster (testing the CLang extension is in my TODO list).
| vehemenz wrote:
| This is something I wonder about all the time. I think there a
| number of reasons:
|
| 1. Ideological - probably can't reason with these people
|
| 2. Preference for small tools vs. one monolithic tool - less
| efficient, but I can understand it
|
| 3. Ignorance - Many younger/inexperienced developers never
| learned an IDE, and genuinely do not understand what they are
| missing
|
| 4. Cost - not a concern for most of us, but for minors,
| students, or developers in India, China, and other developing
| countries, this is a huge reason that drives ubiquity of VSCode
|
| 5. Reduced friction/ubiquity - See 4. Basically, people are
| already used to it when they get a well-paying job and in
| theory could use JetBrains IDEs
|
| 6. Performance - See 4 again. Not really an issue unless you're
| on old hardware (especially given that VSCode performs poorly,
| can't handle large files, etc.)
|
| In conclusion, I think there are some legitimate reasons, but
| your larger point still stands.
| alexalx666 wrote:
| Actually, I recently had to switch from CLion to VSC b/c I
| could not figure out how to enable rust-analyzer in the latest
| version of CLion. Also platform.io support is better in VSC. I
| love UX of interllij tho. I should say that I do agree with
| your main point.
| ksec wrote:
| >are so resistant to paying anything
|
| >Take the Jetbrains IDEs
|
| Because most of the modern day software engineers now works on
| Web related technology. And somehow everything on the Web has
| to be free or Open Source.
|
| It is much easier to sell IDE or paid for softwares to embedded
| or system programming developers, or basically any developers
| which doesn't have anything to do with the Web.
| q-big wrote:
| > What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who
| are aware of how much they earn [...] are so resistant to
| paying _anything_ for tools that make their job easier and
| faster. It blows my mind.
|
| The property premise that software engineers earn so much
| clearly holds for the USA (and some other countries), but there
| are a lot of countries where it is not true.
| indymike wrote:
| > Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans
| out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more
| mature in every single way. For individual use, most of them
| are <$100/year.
|
| After a particularly bad tooling week (js supply chain
| problems, plugin problems and more than the usual amount of DB
| changes) Our dev team made the unanimous call to move require
| all developers to use Jetbrains IDEs instead of the mix of
| VSCode, Emacs and whatever else... Our codebase is Python, Go
| and Javascript, and data is stored in Postgres, so we use
| Goland, PyCharm, WebStorm and Datagrip regularly. We also
| started using the awesome Micro editor when we need something
| that can be installed on a remote because it's key bindings are
| identical to JetBrains...
|
| A few thoughts:
|
| 1. We all picked up 2-3 hours per week of time we were spending
| pounding plugins on Emacs and VSCode into shape. There was a
| lot more fiddling going on than we thought.
|
| 2. The debugger in JetBrains IDEs is top notch. Debuggers are
| underrated, and bad debuggers make using print and over-logging
| seem like the best option.
|
| 3. When we want to do something new, (containers, notebooks,
| etc...) it is almost always supported, and there are not 100
| incomplete plugins to sort out (both Emacs and VSCode have this
| issue).
|
| 4. We're doing things the same way, which sometimes really pays
| off. For example, instead of a mix of PostMan, python scripts,
| restclient, and bashified curl for making api requests, we just
| use the client in the IDE... which means we can share them.
|
| 5. Datagrip and the database tools in the IDEs are incredibly
| useful.
|
| Ok, so the payoff: By the end of the second week, we were over
| the learning curve, and the payoff came in the third week: a
| total of 16 hours of developer time not spent on twiddling with
| Emacs, vim, Sublime and VSCode. That time savings paid for the
| subscription for the year.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| > Our dev team made the unanimous call to move require all
| developers to use Jetbrains IDEs
|
| Wow, it'd be time to look for a new job.
|
| I think having a blessed option and understanding of "use
| what you want but don't let it affect deliverables" is best.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| While I've never worked anywhere that enforced the IDE, I
| can see the appeal.
|
| Problems like linting and formatting working differently
| for different developers because they're using different
| tools, not updating settings correctly because their IDE
| uses a different settings file. Junior developers
| struggling to find people to help them because everyone's
| using their own toolchain.
|
| It's not all just about deliverables.
| indymike wrote:
| >Wow, it'd be time to look for a new job.
|
| Everyone on the team agreed. If one person had said no, we
| would not have made the jump.
|
| > I think having a blessed option and understanding of "use
| what you want but don't let it affect deliverables" is
| best.
|
| That's kind of how it worked out for us. We didn't ban
| emacs or vs code, we just all agreed we'd go Jet Brains
| first and mostly... and for the more senior of us (me
| especially), go out of the comfort zone and learn the new
| tool.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Jetbrains does quite a bit of telemetry as well, particularly
| on starter versions. This has made me hesitate, until I get an
| outbound firewall set up.
| roblabla wrote:
| > I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the
| Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every
| single way.
|
| Yeah, no. Don't get me wrong, Jetbrains IDEs are great. But
| they're not as easy to extend, its proprietary nature makes it
| hard to debug when writing extensions.
|
| I use neovim primarily, but I've got licenses for a bunch of
| other editors (Nova, Sublime, used to have IntelliJ). I do
| sincerely try them, but I keep going back to open source,
| extensible editors like vim, emacs, vscode... because I
| invariably need to tweak something in the editor, and doing so
| in the proprietary editors can be so damn painful.
|
| Now, you do make a solid point though. I guess I probably
| should donate to neovim. Guess I'll go do that!
| aidos wrote:
| Yup, it's definitely not a money thing. There's plenty of
| tooling I do pay for, but I _like_ hacking on my editor.
|
| Sure, you need to go deep sometimes to tune things how you
| want, but hey, that's what we do, right?
|
| The important point is that people have different priorities
| and will make different trade offs. For me I like lean, fast
| and hackable. For others it's that they don't want to have to
| understand or configure it. That's totally fine.
| lopatin wrote:
| You're right that it's a totally different mindset. I was
| going to post a comment along the lines of "anytime I need
| to hack my editor, it's a waste of my time". That's where
| IntelliJ shines. It's so mature and functional out of the
| box, that I don't need to hack it. I came from Emacs where,
| once the initial fun of hacking it wore off, it was just a
| drag.
| sureglymop wrote:
| I also like that Microsoft has made it incredibly easy to
| create an extension for VS Code. Most of the functionality
| usually doesn't even require code, just modifying the
| package.json file to add UI elements and such.
| q-big wrote:
| > Yeah, no. Don't get me wrong, Jetbrains IDEs are great. But
| they're not as easy to extend, its proprietary nature makes
| it hard to debug when writing extensions.
|
| IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition is open source under Apache
| License 2.0:
|
| https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community
| f311a wrote:
| This repo contains all the free versions including Pycharm
| devwastaken wrote:
| Don't assume people who code are all silicon valley funny money
| devs. Instead assume they're a moderate income to broke, that's
| a bigger userbase.
| moonchrome wrote:
| I use and pay a subscription for entire jetbrains suite. That
| said - vscode is miles better for JS/TS development IMO. In
| that world I don't want the full fat IDE experience because :
|
| - it's slower - even some basic things like terminal rendering
| feels better/faster in vscode
|
| - ecosystem is developing independently and so fast that IDE
| support can't keep up
|
| - everyone else is using CLI centric workflows so it's
| maintained and tested
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I'll flip the script, why are you so worried about other people
| choosing editors like vim and emacs? Lots of people don't
| struggle. Lots of people don't mind a extra few hours for open
| source solution as it fits their life choices.
| lelanthran wrote:
| I can afford lots of things, doesn't mean I'm going to buy
| them.
|
| What's bizarre about that? The only Bizarre Attitude I see here
| is yours: that there exists a best option and why aren't more
| people taking it?
|
| There's no such thing as a "Best Option".
| manmal wrote:
| To me, IntelliJ IDEs feel clunky, slow, feature bloated, and
| messy. I did pay a couple times for AppCode, but eventually
| stopped doing that. VSCode on the other hand feels lightweight
| and fast. I use it exactly _because_ I value my time.
| ValleZ wrote:
| This is because most developers are not willing to learn even
| basic code completion and refactoring functions in IDE. When
| you write constructors and getters by hand in Intellij Idea,
| chances are you won't pay for that.
| xigoi wrote:
| Vim has auto-completion and snippets. I don't use VSCode, but
| I'm pretty sure it does too. So what's the point of paying
| for them?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| You're really missing an important factor of software
| development which is making things accessible to all walks of
| life. I simply prefer open source because it doesn't exclude
| specific classes of people because of money. Imagine a future
| where only rich people and those from wealthy families get
| access to the good development tools to help them get richer,
| while poor developers and those not from a wealthy family
| struggle to even get access to basic tooling, or have to
| exchange their personal information and rights in exchange.
|
| Fortunately, many people in software are not simply money
| worshipers and envision a future where money isn't the priority
| in building a better world.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I think it's an issue with some tools being "good enough"
| (majority of the free ones) + the feeling where you paid for
| something and it feels meh (or maybe it asks for paid upgrades,
| etc)
|
| I tried Sublime Text once and then never bothered later. There
| wasn't anything that exciting about it that I couldn't do one
| way or another anywhere else.
|
| The barrier to payment is higher if the comparison with a free
| tool is mixed. If there was one big thing the free ones
| couldn't do or they were much worse then there would be a case
| for paying for your tools
| bmitc wrote:
| The reasons to switch don't make sense. Microsoft provides builds
| for virtually every major platform and has extensive remote
| development options. Why is there a requirement to be building it
| from source?
|
| What is collected via telemetry is published, can be inspected
| with tools Microsoft provides or third party tools, and can be
| disabled.
|
| Why are some extensions providing paid versions while keeping the
| free versions around a bad thing?
| wooque wrote:
| I went backwards, from VS Codium to VS Code, because VS Codium
| does not support all extensions, like PyLance or Remote -
| SSH/containers.
|
| I like freedom, but I like getting things done more.
| icelancer wrote:
| I was considering switching and looking into Codium and then
| saw this comment. I'm not going without Remote-SSH or PyLance.
| bityard wrote:
| I just did the same thing literally yesterday for the same
| reason. Disabled telemetry and hoping for the best.
| Sujan wrote:
| It might be worth contacting these extensions' creators. If you
| already have the `.vsix` file for the VSCode marketplace,
| publishing to open-vsix is really super simple (create an
| account once, get a token, add a few lines to your publish
| script, e.g. https://github.com/prisma/language-
| tools/blob/94e4cd612d03ef...). Some just do not know about it.
| cbarrick wrote:
| PyLance and the remote extensions are developed by Microsoft.
| They intentionally do not work with the open source editor.
| Sujan wrote:
| Oh, I did not connect these dots.
|
| Shucks.
| gcoguiec wrote:
| You can use the VSCode extension gallery with VSCodium at your
| own risk[0].
|
| [0]
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#how....
| nsonha wrote:
| lot's of MS extensions are missing but you often find OSS
| alternatives. Most important for me is liveshare. I use
| codetogether.com, it's not remarkable (I got connection drop a
| couple of times) but it does the job with the added bonus that it
| works with IntelliJ too
| no_circuit wrote:
| I can partially understand the desire to switch if there are
| (free) plugins available on VS Codium that is not on VS Code.
| However leaving VS Code because of not trusting Microsoft's off
| switch for telemetry for the IDE and the plugins they provide is
| an unintentionally uninformed decision IMO.
|
| Of all actors, one should probably trust the privacy protections
| and off switch of a BigCo, like Microsoft, since they tend to
| know what would get them in trouble. On the other hand, you may
| not be able to rely on the open source plugin developers to do
| things right and protect your privacy, however, it usually can be
| a problem that can be fixed [1]. Do you read the source code of
| all of your plugins? Open source developers may have good
| intentions, but they may not be following telemetry guidelines or
| best practices.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31371979
| digisign wrote:
| The company that has been caught with its hand in the cookie
| jar...
|
| I don't know, several hundred times?
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| > f [sic] you want to get the full open-source MIT-licensed VS
| Code with no cemetery [sic] tracking
|
| I prevent telemetry tracking by blocking all network access to
| VSC using Little Snitch. Get it set up initially with plugins
| then cut it off. I don't use VSC in ways that require network
| access thereafter.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Vim users out here like:
|
| "Telemetry? What telemetry?" ;)
| garyrob wrote:
| > I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains
| IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way.
|
| I must admit that I used PyCharm for a few years but ended up
| liking VSC more, and now that's my IDE. Just seems lighter and
| more pleasant.
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