Why you should use vscodium instead of vscode

If you code at all, there is a very high chance that you have heard of vscode. In fact, it is one of the most popular code editors of all time is Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code is a great editor but there are some bad things about it which can be fixed.

Vscode Telemetry

Because of the nature of it being made by a big tech company, it has telemetry. Vscode telemetry is enabled by default and has to be disabled in the settings. It is not easily found in the default setup and is silently enabled by default. If you care about your privacy, this should be a major red flag instantly.

Vscode binaries from their site aren’t actually FOSS

This may sound confusing but lets explain. While the code for much of the things in vscode is open source, the binaries you download from their site aren’t. This is because they apply some customizations and add some api keys to access microsoft services. For example, the vscode extension store is only allowed to be used by the microsoft vscode build. Building it from source means you can’t use the vscode extension store legally.

How does vscodium solve this

Vscodium is a project which is just vscode but:

Disadvantages of vscodium

One of the major disadvantages of vscodium is that the open vsx store, while having a good amount of extensions, doesn’t have everything that the vscode marketplace does. Unfortunately, many extension developers don’t know about the open vsx store and that means that many extensions simply aren’t available. However, this is changing and very soon you will have very few extensions not available.

Should you use vscodium

If you don’t care about the telemetry nor the closed source nature of the vscode binaries, then it’s probably not for you. You will probably get annoyed at the lack of extensions. But if you care about the code editor being open source and free of telemetry, then take vscodium for a spin.

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