There is a direct cost to Microsoft that these companies are pushing on them. Specifically around bandwidth.

Microsoft does not need to provide access for downloading plugins from their servers to anyone else.

I get Microsoft is a Megacorp, but I don't think too highly of all these ai startups either.

Either you don't get caught and can move faster, or you get caught and the penalty is usually small and a long way down the line, by which time your company will have either folded or grown enough to pay without difficulty.

I did completely move away from GitHub (which is by now named "ShitHub" in some circles) the moment that Microsoft enforced 2FA on my account.

Yes, perhaps 2FA is a good idea for many scenarios, but if some company forces it upon me, I won't have any tolerance to be willing to be their customer/user anymore.

See [1] for a different perspective on this topic.

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And yes, I agree with you that is a great idea for a next step to at least strongly reduce (or even cut) your dependence on NPM wherever possible.

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[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72512276/how-to-disable-...

I also present the CEO and board with other arguments, like moral ones about involvement in atrocities and tyranny, legal ones regarding things like data protection, market related ones such as the likelihood of a future showdown between the EU and US.

But the risk that MICROS~1 fucks us over directly is even easier for them to understand, because they have been using Windows and Office for decades and are quite queasy about 10 going EOL and what the next set of annoyances in document management will be that they'll have to suffer under. It's something they have immediate experience of and didn't like.

A year from now it's probable we'll only have a couple of Windows machines left, because some of our customers use software that doesn't run under Wine and tries to block execution under both debuggers and container environments.

I had the fortune to be involved developing the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming software. Under the hood, it was a small web browser shell (using Mono on Mac and WPF on Windows) around a Silverlight Out-of-Browser app. Anything beyond the permissions of the Silverlight app (e.g. bluetooth/USB comms) was an RPC from Silverlight to the shell.

After completing the Mac/Windows app, LEGO wanted to deliver a similar experience on iPad. There was no Silverlight there, and it was clear there never would be. But we were able to leverage Xamarin stuff to reuse most of the same codebase, just with an iOS UI on top.

Due to experiences like that I refused to buy volume licenses from them, too. Sometime later I got an audit demand for which I had a reply ready.

"lol, no."

SharePoint Server Subscription Edition still uses those techs today.

> Use Rust which also rely on GitHub for crates.io

It is a very good idea to get rid of both as far and soon as possible. And, as I wrote at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43793095 in some circles it already became very fashionable to call GitHub "ShitHub" and somewhat look down upon open-source projects that have their central repository on GitHub (i.e. are willing to enslave themselves to Microsoft for some stupid "network effect").

After all MS is completely okay with their AI darling reading ToS-protected stuff.

Sad to see it go in such a predictable direction.

AOSP used to be the complete Android system, more or less. And when you bought a Nexus device from Google, that's what you got. But they progressively abandoned the stock apps to replace them by their proprietary counterparts, or ones tied to their online services.

Then, they replaced their Nexus line of phones with the Pixel line. Pixels are full of proprietary technology, and their last move was to make Android development private.

The issue with VS Code is that it opened the door to many other editors, which, in a sense, drive people away from the Microsoft ecosystem. The combination of VSCode, GitHub, and TypeScript is ideal for MS: they win by attracting companies to GitHub services (which also offer code spaces based on VSCode); they also win by attracting users to Copilot, which helps them improve their tools. Creating an editor like VS Code is expensive; they are not paying the core developers because they prefer to give away money. They do it because it's part of their business strategy. You don't pay for VS Code; companies that subscribe to GitHub services do. A VS Code fork circumvents that strategy.

Yes, you're right about that.

Basically, it boils down to "use CMake with Ninja/Makefile" (even if you don't strictly have to, you could write a script that creates the json yourself, for example). When cross-compiling, you may also have to whitelist compiler paths.

Add -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON as command-line arg during the config step, or add the equivalent "set" call to your CMakeLists.txt, restart clangd (ctrl+p, restart clangd), and you're good to go.

There are minor annoyances when cross-compiling (it using clang -- some compile options are incompatible and need to be removed in global user config, and it not extracting default compiler defines from compilers) but they are very easily worked around

I more or less use this as config: https://gist.github.com/TuxSH/0220d1235dace77f82738c96718011...

IIRC Apple at least has always been fairly clear and consistent with what bits of its software are open and what bits aren't. To my knowledge they haven't been breaking off chunks of Darwin and closing them. (Although if I'm wrong do correct me.)

https://zed.dev/docs/languages/cpp

Minor grievance, sure, but it it not an encouraging sign for their priorities.

[1] https://vscodium.com/

Debugging isn't in yet, but is actively being worked on and planned for public release before 1.0: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/5065, there's an active channel in their Discord discussing the development of the feature.

I actually worked a bunch on the language server logic in Zed trying to get a bunch of it to work on Windows. All I have to say about that is: ugh.

Yep, vscode is more intuitive.

However emacs is mostly the kind of thing you dedicate a couple of months of discomfort and enjoy for the rest of your life. Quite literally.

Spending some money on the “mastering emacs” book (https://www.masteringemacs.org/) is worth imho.

Bonus point: little by little you start enjoying doing more stuff in emacs. It’s a meme, but it’s true.

I'm using https://github.com/copilot-emacs/copilot.el

> good code search feature.

project-find-regexp is a nice start.

> Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.

(global-auto-revert-mode t)

> Oh and the ssh remote extension.

I haven't compared it to Tramp.

or you could just use copilot through copilot.el

> and a good code search feature.

Like through helm or ivy?

> Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.

My emacs does that, and I don't think I did anything special to get it.

> Oh and the ssh remote extension.

like tramp?

For people who care, to some degree, about using an open source tool, for whom the marketing that VS Code is open source played a role in their choice of using it, it should matter. And it matters that other projects (think Platform IO and more) choose VS Code as a platform to build on top of, and they get away with it because "it's open source".

Me, personally? No, because they're honest about it. I use BBEdit and Nova frequently on my Mac. Those are as closed source as it gets. They never pretend otherwise, though. You pay your money and you know what you're getting. VSCode tries really hard to appear to be open source, as long as you're willing to ignore the million places where they aren't. (Python devs: are you using PyLance? I'm talking to you.)

And ironically, those closed editors seem to play more nicely with the ecosystem as a whole. Neither BBEdit nor Nova have ever tried to talk me into installing closed plugins, and the same plugins that work with them work great in Emacs and Zed.

If I go to one bar that charged $5 per beer, and another that gives free beer but makes you rent single-use mugs for $5, even though the end price is identical, the rental bar's going to annoy me horrendously. Just admit what it is and let people judge on their own merits.

And in the same sense regarding VSCode, and the VC fueled takeover of the open source ecosystem; the old guard warned against it, that's why they promoted GPL as critically necessary.

Maybe against the store rules tho, dunno.

I spent most of the past ~fifteen years working in Sublime and just switched between that and the terminal for build and test—not fancy, but then, C++ coding isn’t a speedrun. Sublime is clean, fast, and portable.

However, dev tooling has advanced so much now that I started learning and using neovim last year so I could take advantage of good syntax highlighting, LSP, and CoPilot. I don’t get enough daily reps to be good at core vi yet (I am a team manager so most of my time is spent asking questions of devs prefixed with “This is a really dumb question, but”) but despite all the techbros who’ve flocked to it I think neovim is pretty good technology and responsive. You can get the tooling features but control UI/UX; for me, I want as much code on the screen as possible, and I especially resent widgets that eat into vertical space. I started with one of the off-the-shelf all-in-one init.lua configs off github, but it was too complicated and I quickly broke things. What’s worked better is going through a video series on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHTeCSVAFNY&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN...) and building up the init.lua I want from scratch. As noted, I’m not great with it, especially the normal vim motions, but I’ve learned to get around, it’s fast, I can see my code without a million distracting widgets, and I get the benefit of clangd and CoPilot.