Microsoft doing Microsoft things, even with all those fresh coats of "open source" paint they bathe themselves in the last decade they really can't change their DNA.
Expect the amount of f*ckery to increase as the AI realities set in but the number has to go up either way.
It reminds me of the good old days of Visual Studio + .NET + SQL Server where they played these games too.
"Just" some Copilot integration (in the form of chat or smart suggestions) is just the start.
The next major Windows 11 update coming in 2026 will have full agentic AI with full control over your (your?) PC. And it will hard require a pretty recent processor with Neural Processor Unit to make it work (so a lot more e-waste is coming).
I've heard Github makes more money from copilot than everything else combined. You can think what you want about the strategy, but it's hard to ignore that.
I’m not sure why people are surprised. If you watch Nadella interviews, he tells you what he thinks and where he wants to take the company.
He touts AI, services, agentic copilot, and all the other stuff customers are railing against.
Some Windows manager got crucified on X recently for an enthusiastic tweet about turning Windows into an agentic OS. People called for this persons firing. But, this was straight out of Nadella’s playbook.
It’s funny, I never connected my G5 to the network or accepted any of the optional T&Cs, so there’s now numerous places in the UI that say “accept terms to see personalised content”.
Just to be clear, they are NOT deactivating IntelliSense which suggests classes and functions.
This is an AI inline code suggestion tool using local LLMs.
Not great but may or may not impact your workflow. I love using agents, but Intellijs inline code suggestions (also based on a local LLMs) are usually useless to me.
If anyone is considering moving editors, I was recently in the same boat and I can’t recommend enough lazyvim + the ebook “lazyvim for ambitious developers”.
This gets you a fully featured vscode-like baseline (navigation, language integration, integrated terminal, the whole thing).
I had tried many times to switch to vim/emacs and the initial barrier to get a workable system always kept me from pushing forward. With this I was able to make neovim my daily driver at work after just a couple weekends playing with it.
I felt the same way about vim. I never had the patience to get started and configure everything to get the full benefits.
I just switched over to Omarchy for my personal OS and I know that it comes with a pre-configured neovim (using lazyvim) setup that looks like a fully-fledged IDE.
I personally have been using Helix as my editor at home and work. The fact that everything generally works on download is what got me using it.
I think some of the big features of VSCode are the extensions and, equivalently, the nice debug support. I just started using VSCode about a week ago thanks to moving to a project that uses scons as its primary supported build tool, and I've learned to hate scons and love VSCode over that time. The completely manual tasks/launch/etc stuff is kind of weird at first, but then becomes amazing and far more convenient, after you get used to it. And the 'debugger' (kind of weird to frame it that way as its extension based, like everything) is amazing - extremely fast, great visualizations, and so on.
I can't help you much, as currently I happen to use ruby at work and native debugging is enough - you can drop into an interactive console at a breaking point adding a single line, with no tooling.
And sadly it is also not accessible to screen readers. VS Code for all its flaws is really, really good for screen reader accessibility. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it's not only one of the most accessible code editors we have, but one of the most accessible electron apps overall. So losing it to this Microsoft stuff would be a huge deal to anyone who relies on screen reader or accessibility tools. :(
The reason I didn't explore Zed is their for profit model.
There might be awesome people and work behind it now, but I've already been burned enough times by rug pulls and shittyfication. I don't want to be planning another move 5 years from now.
>What people often defines as workable system is replicating their old editors instead of learning the current one. Like adding a file tree on the side
Well, kinda. I define a workable system as a system I, personally, can work with straight away, with a minimum loss of productivity. It is not at all meant as a judgement on how good plain vim/emacs are.
This workability indeed might require temporally replicating old habits while I learn the new ones, which lazyvim does. Vscode-like file trees, global search, or integrated terminal, for example.
It's also about discoverability, like the helpers shown through which-key. And the guarantee that a set of default plugins play well with each other, so that I can leave toying with the config for whenever I have the time.
Some people might think this is a crutch for properly learning the tool, but this is not my experience. I'm much more likely to get comfortable with vim and learn further if I can be in it 8 hours a day from the start. At first I used the integrated terminal to run git commands, now I invoke lazygit, which I love. At first I used the file tree to navigate, now I have custom commands to bring a file and its test suite side to side on a keypress. This gradual curve is what I was missing earlier.
Learning an entirely new editor is a barrier. Documentation or not, that's brand new muscle memory you have to develop alongside the actual task of coding.
I get that using vim typically includes obsessive forms of efficiency, but some people just want to focus on coding in a way that's comfortable to them. Sometimes that means having a side panel.
How about switching from VS Code to VS Codium? Same experience without the microsoft telemetry. I suppose Copilot won't be included due to licensing constraints.
How does the extension model work with MS? I did a similar move to chromium and eventually had to move to firefox when they pulled the plug on ad blockers.
I had tried many times to switch to vim/emacs and the initial barrier
to get a workable system always kept me from pushing forward.
For me Helix gets enough right out of the box I find myself reaching for it far more than I ever did with vi or Emacs. They're working on plugin support but I've not felt the need to investigate it at all.
Is there a good solution to managing "workspace", especially handling multi-folder workspace? I have a project where code lives in giant monorepo, and the files I edit don't have the same root (more precisely, the root is too large to open in the editor). I haven't found a good solution outside VSCode yet.
I suggest the opposite and not starting with all the plugins and instead try to learn the vim way of doing things. Being too locked in to the old ways could prevent discovering all the great things vim can do.
The examples you mention already exist.
- navigation: plenty of native navigation in neovim, does lazy add anything specific?
- language integration: lsp, requires config sure but git clone isn't much work.
- integrated terminal: just run `:term`
Learning to think in vim means unlearning a lot of old habits. Today I only use fzf.vim, nvim-lspconfig and a theme, not even a plugin manager (I will migrate to the native one that's in nightly when it reaches stable though). Pretty much vanilla Neovim. I'm considering trying nvim-dap to get better debugger support but so far I'm fine with :termdebug for the languages it supports (c/go/rust just works).
When I find something I want vim to do I start with a keybinding, then a function, and maybe if it's complex add a plugin. Adding half of the available plugins just because creates an unnecessary attack vector you now have to keep an eye on.
I do get the benefit of not depending on plugins, really. Long term my current config could rot (abandoned projects, moving dependencies, etc), while a simple config is stable. But I'm happy removing dependencies one at a time.
For example, <leader> ft toggles a terminal in a bottom split. This is familiar enough that I knew I could rely on it whenever needed.
Could I have used :term and manually set splits each time? or learn tmux? or use ctrl+z and fg to move back and forth ? Sure, but that's extra cognitive load.
Maybe I want to focus first on becoming fluid with regex for search and replace, or improving the flow for running unit tests, or get used to using macros as a replacement for multicursor. There's a lot of gaps to cover, each small enough that it's "just do X" for a veteran, but enough when added up that I would much rather pay the cost gradually.
ITT: gross overreaction, as usual. IntelliCode is NOT IntelliSense. They're obviously not removing traditional autocomplete.
They're replacing an EXTENSION, so it has basically nothing to do with VSCode itself. If they developed an "IntelliCode for Vim" plugin, they would also replace "IntelliCode for Vim" with Copilot.
I refuse to use VS Code on principle. It has captured a staggering percentage of software development, across many software disciplines. Somehow ARM/Keil has been persuaded to go all-in on VS Code and will deprecate their "legacy" IDE, which will cause trouble for any hold-out embedded firmware developers.
> It has captured a staggering percentage of software development
In hindsight it's obvious why: it was the only free editor that has a product mindset and a product team behind. Microsoft put heavy hitters on it, some of their best engineers, treated it as some companies treat their core products.
Other IDEs/editors are mostly open source with no real direction and resources, or are proprietary expensive software.
It's unfortunate but to compete with VS Code you need a lot.
I'm so happy I made the jump to NeoVim 6 months ago.
I finally got good RTL support with iTerm, language server stuff works great, and best of all, navigating and selecting things SYNTACTICALLY with nvim-treesitter-textobjects is life-changing.
I wonder if this will also impact VSCodium. I use it specifically to avoid a lot of the crap that Microsoft is trying to do while still being able to use the editor and plugins.
They have not released 1.107 yet, doing a quick scan I am not seeing anything on the VSCodium github.
Intellicode being (officially) deprecated will impact VSCodium, yes. I too am more concerned about copilot being further “needed” or required in my VSCode fork. It’s already the biggest pain in the butt I’ve ever had to deal with in the context of VSCodium. I am not excited for the future.
I didn’t think it was even possible to install proprietary microsoft extensions in VSCodium, how is that related to the version of the editor and how would it affect VSCodium?
Probably targeted at enterprise customers forcing them embrace co-pilot with big pockets. Bad move for individual users as this will only drive them to alternatives, instead of shelling out money.
Unfortunately, people often resist change and prefer to stick with what they know. Maybe a small percentage of people will look for alternatives but it'd be a drop in the ocean.
If anyone else would be generous enough to offer a free IDE with free AI code completion, they could give VS Code a run for its money, but as far as I know this hasn't happened yet? Zed for instance is available for free, very AI-centric, and you can use it with any of the popular LLMs, but you still have to pay for the LLM...
I use both but really don't see it. There are so many scenarios I've come across which jetbrains products do "out of the box" that vscode require plugins which usually don't install with sensible defaults. Just debugging rust for example is a night and day difference between vscode and rust rover.
I've been using Zed for about a month and I'm very happy with performance the features. It guides you to setup only what you need, that was a problem with VSCode that would collect random plugins through time. I work regularly with Go, React, TypeScript, and I don't miss VSCode.
I don’t really get the issue, I didn’t even know Microsoft published another AI suggestion extension, definitely cool that it used a local model but it does make sense for them to just roll it into Copilot.
IntelliCode was first released in 2018, well before the current AI landscape. The issue here is taking a free, functioning capability and arbitrarily disabling it in favour of a paid product. Microsoft is currently "updating" its internal adoption goals for the AI features it keeps shoving down consumers throats, but I'm sure that pumping the numbers by removing features is surely just coincidental and not desperate at all.
Great there are other true open-source tools to be used zed, nvim.
I also noticed that copilot nowadays is forcing you to upgrade to their with following text:
"You've reached your monthly code completion limit. Upgrade your plan to Copilot Pro (30-day Free Trial) or wait until 2025-12-19 for your limit to reset to continue coding with GitHub Copilot"
Was using it actually like smarter auto-completion. But paying for that, hell no.
> Great there are other true open-source tools to be used zed, nvim
without going into the actual qualities of the editor, they simply lack extension support, for now.
In the embedded space, many manufacturers have switched - or are switching - to a suite of VSCode plugins and gradually discontinued the previous tools. Which is great on one hand: they don't have to keep supporting heavily modified IDEs from 10 or 20 years ago and they can better integrate with the rest of the ecosystem of plugins, scripts automation and such. LSP has been a good thing.
The problem is that you are now at the mercy of microsoft not fucking up with the environment at every other release. To put it simply, we are screwed. And i tried for so long not to use it because i knew this day would come, but it's just so much better.
And no, i will not just use a text editor and a makefile. I want an IDE. IDEs are good, when they seamlessly integrate with tools.
I had a scare combined with an insight last week. I was looking for documentation on power BI - specifically the M language. I found the Microsoft documentation but found it to be much more sparse than I hadremembered It only had the function names and the argument names and almost no explanation.
I thought "what a perfect way for Microsoft to force copilot upon us". They can make it necessary by being the only "documentation" of their software.
Had a shower thought about how much I am starting to dislike vscode now that every minor version just loads on unwanted copilot cruft instead of adding actual features. Grabbed nvim that night.
VS Code feels like nothing but bloat. Sublime Text is still my go-to, as I'm not very well-versed in Neovim yet. I'm also really digging the new C/Lua-based Lite XL - https://lite-xl.com. One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn Neovim properly.
Try Zed. Open-source (GPL+Apache), reliable, fast, not bloated at all, decently configurable, amazing remote-host support, Vim mode, AI stuff totally optional, extensions/lang-servers available for many languages, and... well overall I find it very neat and polished!
(I'm not associated with Zed, just a happy user looking to share the goodness.)
If you follow the link in the articla you can see that this is, specifically, Intellicode for C#. This is not the standard language server protocol stuff, which continues to exist just fine.
can anyone recomend a alternative that is easy to install and also offers syntax highlighting? i have read about lazyvim and neovim, but both have extensive install requirments as i have read
If you really only care about syntax highlighting then nearly any code editor will do. Even nano supports it, it’s just disabled by default.
If you want something powerful yet easy to pick up, you might want to look at e.g. Zed (GUI IDE), Sublime Text (GUI editor), or Micro (TUI editor). If you don’t mind a learning curve, Vim/Neovim and Emacs are excellent choices. But there’s a lot of other options out there, like Gedit, Kate, BBEdit, Notepad++, etc. depending on your platform of choice.
I've been having a very good time with Zed. Great vim motion support, and fast to the point where using VSCode feels like driving a semi truck by comparison.
For TUI, Helix has a lovely out-of-the-box experience. What little config there is (two TOML files) is relatively easy to grasp. The main barrier you'll face is setting up your LSPs, which need to be installed manually. (Luckily, there's `uvx -q` for Python LSPs.)
For GUI, Zed is also really nice, has a great Vim mode, and auto-installs anything you might need. It loses a couple of points to VS Code on account of not being arbitrarily extensible, although that can also be seen as a plus, as it prevents extensions from randomly slowing everything down.
I’ve been using Zed [1] for some time now. They are also pretty AI focused so it may only be a matter of time, but so far I’ve been able to disable all of the AI interactions.
Kate is such a refreshing change. Super responsive and fast under Asahi. It's the best dev environment I've worked with in a very long time.
A few niggles with the switch, like it seems to assume Git but I'm using Fossil. I also haven't found a decent cheat-sheet for keyboard controls. I got duplicate block and move block working, and really enjoy the column editing, but still using cut for line delete.
I think KWrite is the same engine underneath? at least it feels much akin to Kate. I use it mainly for assembly files, since I was able to hack in an armv8 syntax file and needed a different theme than Kate.
VSCodium has been my go-to. VS Code was great for a bit but (even long before this) it was already suffering from the cancer that is "being a microsoft product" and it was being bloated to death like everything else they ship, but VSCodium seems to keep enough distance to be immune. Will it stay that way? Who's to say. I hope so though.
+1 on VSCodium. It was a 99.99% seamless transition, for me. The only annoyance at all was not having VSCodium added to my context menu, which doesn't even matter if you never "right-click->open folder" to launch. And, obviously, is pretty easy to add back in both windows and linux.
I've often thought, "If AI is so great, how come all these tech companies are shoving AI features down our throats for free, instead of charging real money for them?" I'm actually glad that MS is doing this, and I hope it starts a trend of more companies gating their AI features behind paywalls, and a noticable reduction in the number of popups I encounter badgering me to use AI features that I never asked for.
IntelliCode was first released in 2018, well before the current AI landscape where running each model costs a neighborhood's worth of power. Indeed, it runs using a small local model that costs essentially nothing in comparison to the rest of the machine running it.
In fact, the intent here is exactly the opposite of what you're hoping for (less AI badgering). They're trying to get people to actually use Copilot after recently missing internal adoption goals on all the AI products they're trying to shove down people's throats. The badgering is only going to get worse, and they're going to continue removing functioning, free features to do so. You should not be glad that Microsoft is killing a free lightweight product for a bloated, ecologically harmful and economically wasteful one.
I believe this comment is nuts. How the hell are you justifying the removal of a free and common IDE functionality for something that it's rate limited based on usage? In any other context, this would have been called enshittification...
Copilot is what finally pushed me to use vim seriously. There's not a single thing I miss from VS Code, or Visual Studio, and I'm not even using neovim. Also dropped .NET, which I've used professionally since Framework 1.0, in favor of Go. Don't miss anything from there either.
Not even EF Core? C# pattern matching and switch expressions? Linq? I find these very hard not to miss when working in other langs. C# is a fantastic programming language nowadays.
Microsoft doing Microsoft things, even with all those fresh coats of "open source" paint they bathe themselves in the last decade they really can't change their DNA.
Expect the amount of f*ckery to increase as the AI realities set in but the number has to go up either way.
It reminds me of the good old days of Visual Studio + .NET + SQL Server where they played these games too.
This made me laugh a bit as I remembered people saying “Oh we have Nadella now, things have changed”. Have they? Have they really?
Windows Recall.
VS Code forcing Copilot.
Windows forcing Copilot.
Office forcing Copilot.
Azure forcing Copilot.
GitHub forcing Copilot.
Outlook forcing Copilot.
Edge forcing Copilot.
You folks are insane.
"Just" some Copilot integration (in the form of chat or smart suggestions) is just the start.
The next major Windows 11 update coming in 2026 will have full agentic AI with full control over your (your?) PC. And it will hard require a pretty recent processor with Neural Processor Unit to make it work (so a lot more e-waste is coming).
I fear for the future.
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You forgot that even poor old notepad.exe also got the Copilot treatment.
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I've heard Github makes more money from copilot than everything else combined. You can think what you want about the strategy, but it's hard to ignore that.
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There is not Copilot, only Zuul.
I’m not sure why people are surprised. If you watch Nadella interviews, he tells you what he thinks and where he wants to take the company.
He touts AI, services, agentic copilot, and all the other stuff customers are railing against.
Some Windows manager got crucified on X recently for an enthusiastic tweet about turning Windows into an agentic OS. People called for this persons firing. But, this was straight out of Nadella’s playbook.
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This piece of news follows that of Copilot being added in an "update" to LG TVs with no option to disable or opt out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268844
It's a crime what LG did to webOS. Somehow they turned something great into one of the worst smart TV experiences on the market.
Simple, do not purchase LG TV.
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It’s funny, I never connected my G5 to the network or accepted any of the optional T&Cs, so there’s now numerous places in the UI that say “accept terms to see personalised content”.
Uhhh no? I’m good thanks
Just to be clear, they are NOT deactivating IntelliSense which suggests classes and functions.
This is an AI inline code suggestion tool using local LLMs.
Not great but may or may not impact your workflow. I love using agents, but Intellijs inline code suggestions (also based on a local LLMs) are usually useless to me.
If anyone is considering moving editors, I was recently in the same boat and I can’t recommend enough lazyvim + the ebook “lazyvim for ambitious developers”.
This gets you a fully featured vscode-like baseline (navigation, language integration, integrated terminal, the whole thing).
I had tried many times to switch to vim/emacs and the initial barrier to get a workable system always kept me from pushing forward. With this I was able to make neovim my daily driver at work after just a couple weekends playing with it.
I felt the same way about vim. I never had the patience to get started and configure everything to get the full benefits.
I just switched over to Omarchy for my personal OS and I know that it comes with a pre-configured neovim (using lazyvim) setup that looks like a fully-fledged IDE.
I personally have been using Helix as my editor at home and work. The fact that everything generally works on download is what got me using it.
I think some of the big features of VSCode are the extensions and, equivalently, the nice debug support. I just started using VSCode about a week ago thanks to moving to a project that uses scons as its primary supported build tool, and I've learned to hate scons and love VSCode over that time. The completely manual tasks/launch/etc stuff is kind of weird at first, but then becomes amazing and far more convenient, after you get used to it. And the 'debugger' (kind of weird to frame it that way as its extension based, like everything) is amazing - extremely fast, great visualizations, and so on.
How would vim compare?
I can't help you much, as currently I happen to use ruby at work and native debugging is enough - you can drop into an interactive console at a breaking point adding a single line, with no tooling.
Here's the chapter on debugging in the book I mentioned if you want to take a look: https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/course/chapter...
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I think many people don't know or underestimate Zed. Native, fast, with extensions, with Vim mode support.
And sadly it is also not accessible to screen readers. VS Code for all its flaws is really, really good for screen reader accessibility. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it's not only one of the most accessible code editors we have, but one of the most accessible electron apps overall. So losing it to this Microsoft stuff would be a huge deal to anyone who relies on screen reader or accessibility tools. :(
The reason I didn't explore Zed is their for profit model.
There might be awesome people and work behind it now, but I've already been burned enough times by rug pulls and shittyfication. I don't want to be planning another move 5 years from now.
Or don't want. I don't want an AI infected editor.
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> I had tried many times to switch to vim/emacs and the initial barrier to get a workable system always kept me from pushing forward
What’s that initial barrier? Both Vim and emacs has great documentation that includes a tutorial, a guide, and a reference.
What people often defines as workable system is replicating their old editors instead of learning the current one. Like adding a file tree on the side
>What people often defines as workable system is replicating their old editors instead of learning the current one. Like adding a file tree on the side
Well, kinda. I define a workable system as a system I, personally, can work with straight away, with a minimum loss of productivity. It is not at all meant as a judgement on how good plain vim/emacs are.
This workability indeed might require temporally replicating old habits while I learn the new ones, which lazyvim does. Vscode-like file trees, global search, or integrated terminal, for example.
It's also about discoverability, like the helpers shown through which-key. And the guarantee that a set of default plugins play well with each other, so that I can leave toying with the config for whenever I have the time.
Some people might think this is a crutch for properly learning the tool, but this is not my experience. I'm much more likely to get comfortable with vim and learn further if I can be in it 8 hours a day from the start. At first I used the integrated terminal to run git commands, now I invoke lazygit, which I love. At first I used the file tree to navigate, now I have custom commands to bring a file and its test suite side to side on a keypress. This gradual curve is what I was missing earlier.
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Learning an entirely new editor is a barrier. Documentation or not, that's brand new muscle memory you have to develop alongside the actual task of coding.
I get that using vim typically includes obsessive forms of efficiency, but some people just want to focus on coding in a way that's comfortable to them. Sometimes that means having a side panel.
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How about switching from VS Code to VS Codium? Same experience without the microsoft telemetry. I suppose Copilot won't be included due to licensing constraints.
How does the extension model work with MS? I did a similar move to chromium and eventually had to move to firefox when they pulled the plug on ad blockers.
For me Helix gets enough right out of the box I find myself reaching for it far more than I ever did with vi or Emacs. They're working on plugin support but I've not felt the need to investigate it at all.
Is there a good solution to managing "workspace", especially handling multi-folder workspace? I have a project where code lives in giant monorepo, and the files I edit don't have the same root (more precisely, the root is too large to open in the editor). I haven't found a good solution outside VSCode yet.
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I suggest the opposite and not starting with all the plugins and instead try to learn the vim way of doing things. Being too locked in to the old ways could prevent discovering all the great things vim can do.
The examples you mention already exist.
- navigation: plenty of native navigation in neovim, does lazy add anything specific?
- language integration: lsp, requires config sure but git clone isn't much work.
- integrated terminal: just run `:term`
Learning to think in vim means unlearning a lot of old habits. Today I only use fzf.vim, nvim-lspconfig and a theme, not even a plugin manager (I will migrate to the native one that's in nightly when it reaches stable though). Pretty much vanilla Neovim. I'm considering trying nvim-dap to get better debugger support but so far I'm fine with :termdebug for the languages it supports (c/go/rust just works).
When I find something I want vim to do I start with a keybinding, then a function, and maybe if it's complex add a plugin. Adding half of the available plugins just because creates an unnecessary attack vector you now have to keep an eye on.
I do get the benefit of not depending on plugins, really. Long term my current config could rot (abandoned projects, moving dependencies, etc), while a simple config is stable. But I'm happy removing dependencies one at a time.
For example, <leader> ft toggles a terminal in a bottom split. This is familiar enough that I knew I could rely on it whenever needed.
Could I have used :term and manually set splits each time? or learn tmux? or use ctrl+z and fg to move back and forth ? Sure, but that's extra cognitive load.
Maybe I want to focus first on becoming fluid with regex for search and replace, or improving the flow for running unit tests, or get used to using macros as a replacement for multicursor. There's a lot of gaps to cover, each small enough that it's "just do X" for a veteran, but enough when added up that I would much rather pay the cost gradually.
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ITT: gross overreaction, as usual. IntelliCode is NOT IntelliSense. They're obviously not removing traditional autocomplete.
They're replacing an EXTENSION, so it has basically nothing to do with VSCode itself. If they developed an "IntelliCode for Vim" plugin, they would also replace "IntelliCode for Vim" with Copilot.
I refuse to use VS Code on principle. It has captured a staggering percentage of software development, across many software disciplines. Somehow ARM/Keil has been persuaded to go all-in on VS Code and will deprecate their "legacy" IDE, which will cause trouble for any hold-out embedded firmware developers.
> It has captured a staggering percentage of software development
In hindsight it's obvious why: it was the only free editor that has a product mindset and a product team behind. Microsoft put heavy hitters on it, some of their best engineers, treated it as some companies treat their core products.
Other IDEs/editors are mostly open source with no real direction and resources, or are proprietary expensive software.
It's unfortunate but to compete with VS Code you need a lot.
I believe their legacy IDE was a fork of Eclipse.
Considering VS Code is a kind of a spiritual successor of Eclipse, especially as it was created by Eric Gamma, this even makes sense in a way.
I'm so happy I made the jump to NeoVim 6 months ago.
I finally got good RTL support with iTerm, language server stuff works great, and best of all, navigating and selecting things SYNTACTICALLY with nvim-treesitter-textobjects is life-changing.
I wonder if this will also impact VSCodium. I use it specifically to avoid a lot of the crap that Microsoft is trying to do while still being able to use the editor and plugins.
They have not released 1.107 yet, doing a quick scan I am not seeing anything on the VSCodium github.
Intellicode being (officially) deprecated will impact VSCodium, yes. I too am more concerned about copilot being further “needed” or required in my VSCode fork. It’s already the biggest pain in the butt I’ve ever had to deal with in the context of VSCodium. I am not excited for the future.
even then using vscodium does not free you from the grasps. vscode by design is designed to fracture - see https://ghuntley.com/fracture
Thanks for the link. This is a great analysis of Microsoft's open source strategy.
I didn’t think it was even possible to install proprietary microsoft extensions in VSCodium, how is that related to the version of the editor and how would it affect VSCodium?
It is not possible to install proprietary Microsoft extensions using the official VSCodium builds without additional, non-default configuration.
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Same boat. I hope they don't downstream nonsense like this.
Probably targeted at enterprise customers forcing them embrace co-pilot with big pockets. Bad move for individual users as this will only drive them to alternatives, instead of shelling out money.
Unfortunately, people often resist change and prefer to stick with what they know. Maybe a small percentage of people will look for alternatives but it'd be a drop in the ocean.
Are we at the extinguish phase now?
Given the number of vs code competitors, I think "extinguish" maybe on the other side this time.
If anyone else would be generous enough to offer a free IDE with free AI code completion, they could give VS Code a run for its money, but as far as I know this hasn't happened yet? Zed for instance is available for free, very AI-centric, and you can use it with any of the popular LLMs, but you still have to pay for the LLM...
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They can try but they no longer have the power to do that.
if they waited another year or so they could have killed off jetbrains
patience is a virtue
I use both but really don't see it. There are so many scenarios I've come across which jetbrains products do "out of the box" that vscode require plugins which usually don't install with sensible defaults. Just debugging rust for example is a night and day difference between vscode and rust rover.
Is IntelliCode the same as Intelisense (the non-AI based suggestions thing)?
It's actually in the third paragrapth of the article:
> The classic IntelliSense with language server for the used language is still free – but without AI support.
No, IntelliCode is an extension:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualSt...
Use Zed. VS Code is dead.
I've been using Zed for about a month and I'm very happy with performance the features. It guides you to setup only what you need, that was a problem with VSCode that would collect random plugins through time. I work regularly with Go, React, TypeScript, and I don't miss VSCode.
I don’t really get the issue, I didn’t even know Microsoft published another AI suggestion extension, definitely cool that it used a local model but it does make sense for them to just roll it into Copilot.
IntelliCode was first released in 2018, well before the current AI landscape. The issue here is taking a free, functioning capability and arbitrarily disabling it in favour of a paid product. Microsoft is currently "updating" its internal adoption goals for the AI features it keeps shoving down consumers throats, but I'm sure that pumping the numbers by removing features is surely just coincidental and not desperate at all.
Great there are other true open-source tools to be used zed, nvim.
I also noticed that copilot nowadays is forcing you to upgrade to their with following text:
"You've reached your monthly code completion limit. Upgrade your plan to Copilot Pro (30-day Free Trial) or wait until 2025-12-19 for your limit to reset to continue coding with GitHub Copilot"
Was using it actually like smarter auto-completion. But paying for that, hell no.
> Great there are other true open-source tools to be used zed, nvim
without going into the actual qualities of the editor, they simply lack extension support, for now.
In the embedded space, many manufacturers have switched - or are switching - to a suite of VSCode plugins and gradually discontinued the previous tools. Which is great on one hand: they don't have to keep supporting heavily modified IDEs from 10 or 20 years ago and they can better integrate with the rest of the ecosystem of plugins, scripts automation and such. LSP has been a good thing.
The problem is that you are now at the mercy of microsoft not fucking up with the environment at every other release. To put it simply, we are screwed. And i tried for so long not to use it because i knew this day would come, but it's just so much better.
And no, i will not just use a text editor and a makefile. I want an IDE. IDEs are good, when they seamlessly integrate with tools.
That's fair point.
Did you try other IDEs? For example from Jetbrains? I'm not using IDEs but actually don't know others besides VSCode/Cursor and Jetbrains
I had a scare combined with an insight last week. I was looking for documentation on power BI - specifically the M language. I found the Microsoft documentation but found it to be much more sparse than I hadremembered It only had the function names and the argument names and almost no explanation.
I thought "what a perfect way for Microsoft to force copilot upon us". They can make it necessary by being the only "documentation" of their software.
Had a shower thought about how much I am starting to dislike vscode now that every minor version just loads on unwanted copilot cruft instead of adding actual features. Grabbed nvim that night.
VS Code feels like nothing but bloat. Sublime Text is still my go-to, as I'm not very well-versed in Neovim yet. I'm also really digging the new C/Lua-based Lite XL - https://lite-xl.com. One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn Neovim properly.
> One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn Neovim properly.
I'm decades in at this point and still learning. Just keep in mind you don't need to know everything before getting a massive benefit out of it.
My top features:
- Fingers do not leave the home row (only good if you are a touch typer, but if you aren't, do it, it is worth it)
- Terminal based (so you can use it over ssh when needed, or pipe data into it during scripting sessions)
- Starts fast
- Navigating and editing with text objects (though this took me a while to work into my workflow)
- Regular expressions w/ ex commands
- Filtering text with cli commands via ex
- Editable macros
If you haven't gone through `vimtutor`, I recommend that as an early step.
Try Zed. Open-source (GPL+Apache), reliable, fast, not bloated at all, decently configurable, amazing remote-host support, Vim mode, AI stuff totally optional, extensions/lang-servers available for many languages, and... well overall I find it very neat and polished!
(I'm not associated with Zed, just a happy user looking to share the goodness.)
If you follow the link in the articla you can see that this is, specifically, Intellicode for C#. This is not the standard language server protocol stuff, which continues to exist just fine.
It's beginning. Microsoft bring Microsoft again.
can anyone recomend a alternative that is easy to install and also offers syntax highlighting? i have read about lazyvim and neovim, but both have extensive install requirments as i have read
If you really only care about syntax highlighting then nearly any code editor will do. Even nano supports it, it’s just disabled by default.
If you want something powerful yet easy to pick up, you might want to look at e.g. Zed (GUI IDE), Sublime Text (GUI editor), or Micro (TUI editor). If you don’t mind a learning curve, Vim/Neovim and Emacs are excellent choices. But there’s a lot of other options out there, like Gedit, Kate, BBEdit, Notepad++, etc. depending on your platform of choice.
LazyVim is about as easy as it gets in the Vim space for a fully-fledged (but customizable) editor.
https://www.lazyvim.org/installation
Then run `LazyExtras` and you get a prompt that shows things like:
Hit x against a couple and you're off to the races.
[lang.docker and lang.toml are examples of things you're selecting, the list after is what is being installed and configured for that thing]
For things like integrating a debugger, or to run your tests directly inline from the editor might require more customisation though.
I've been having a very good time with Zed. Great vim motion support, and fast to the point where using VSCode feels like driving a semi truck by comparison.
https://zed.dev
Yet the UI is terrible. I trashed it because of that -really wanted to give a chance.
For TUI, Helix has a lovely out-of-the-box experience. What little config there is (two TOML files) is relatively easy to grasp. The main barrier you'll face is setting up your LSPs, which need to be installed manually. (Luckily, there's `uvx -q` for Python LSPs.)
For GUI, Zed is also really nice, has a great Vim mode, and auto-installs anything you might need. It loses a couple of points to VS Code on account of not being arbitrarily extensible, although that can also be seen as a plus, as it prevents extensions from randomly slowing everything down.
I’ve been using Zed [1] for some time now. They are also pretty AI focused so it may only be a matter of time, but so far I’ve been able to disable all of the AI interactions.
[1] https://zed.dev/
I'm a Kate zealot, if you're on Linux it's great with some LSP servers. The plugins/extensions are nice. There are also macOS and Windows builds.
For the terminal, micro is nice if you're used to GUI editors.
Kate is such a refreshing change. Super responsive and fast under Asahi. It's the best dev environment I've worked with in a very long time.
A few niggles with the switch, like it seems to assume Git but I'm using Fossil. I also haven't found a decent cheat-sheet for keyboard controls. I got duplicate block and move block working, and really enjoy the column editing, but still using cut for line delete.
I think KWrite is the same engine underneath? at least it feels much akin to Kate. I use it mainly for assembly files, since I was able to hack in an armv8 syntax file and needed a different theme than Kate.
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What do you mean by "extensive install requirements"...
Anyway Zed is a good option.
VSCodium has been my go-to. VS Code was great for a bit but (even long before this) it was already suffering from the cancer that is "being a microsoft product" and it was being bloated to death like everything else they ship, but VSCodium seems to keep enough distance to be immune. Will it stay that way? Who's to say. I hope so though.
+1 on VSCodium. It was a 99.99% seamless transition, for me. The only annoyance at all was not having VSCodium added to my context menu, which doesn't even matter if you never "right-click->open folder" to launch. And, obviously, is pretty easy to add back in both windows and linux.
I've often thought, "If AI is so great, how come all these tech companies are shoving AI features down our throats for free, instead of charging real money for them?" I'm actually glad that MS is doing this, and I hope it starts a trend of more companies gating their AI features behind paywalls, and a noticable reduction in the number of popups I encounter badgering me to use AI features that I never asked for.
IntelliCode was first released in 2018, well before the current AI landscape where running each model costs a neighborhood's worth of power. Indeed, it runs using a small local model that costs essentially nothing in comparison to the rest of the machine running it.
In fact, the intent here is exactly the opposite of what you're hoping for (less AI badgering). They're trying to get people to actually use Copilot after recently missing internal adoption goals on all the AI products they're trying to shove down people's throats. The badgering is only going to get worse, and they're going to continue removing functioning, free features to do so. You should not be glad that Microsoft is killing a free lightweight product for a bloated, ecologically harmful and economically wasteful one.
I believe this comment is nuts. How the hell are you justifying the removal of a free and common IDE functionality for something that it's rate limited based on usage? In any other context, this would have been called enshittification...
And today, kids, we've learned the difference between free as in beer and free as in speech.
M$ giveth, M$ taketh away...
Stop using microsoft products, it's not that hard
Protect yourself by removing dependence on Big Tech ecosystems
They bait you with "free" tools to herd you into walled gardens where you are the product (and customer at the same time, LUL)
It is hard because they keep buying all the popular products
Use products that cannot get bought.
neovim ftw!
Copilot is what finally pushed me to use vim seriously. There's not a single thing I miss from VS Code, or Visual Studio, and I'm not even using neovim. Also dropped .NET, which I've used professionally since Framework 1.0, in favor of Go. Don't miss anything from there either.
Not even EF Core? C# pattern matching and switch expressions? Linq? I find these very hard not to miss when working in other langs. C# is a fantastic programming language nowadays.
EF Core!? Holy cow, no. Stopped using that years ago. Linq is nice, but I don't really miss it.
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Hardly surprising. The AI business model is to charge a haircut on all work, this is just them doing that.
Can anyone clearly and lucidly explain why they think this is a bad thing?
Are you asking why is it bad that MS disables a plugin you're using to shove down your throat a paying alternative?
It's a plugin that I'm not using, don't care about using, and cannot see any conceivable use for.
No-one wants this. If they make it a paid-for version, it affects no-one.
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I thought everyone switched to cursor by now, why do people still use vscode?