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by yjftsjthsd-h 1271 days ago
> But as is, for all intents and purposes, VSCode is open source

... Except that if you use the source to make your own build, you lose the extension ecosystem that is one of VSC's major selling points. It is at best a worked example of tivoization.

2 comments

You can easily just download the extension dist files and dump it in the extensions folder. Most extensions are open source too and VScode is not doing anything special with the extension files. They're mostly just JS. You lose out on the convenience of the marketplace but the open source version exists. If a maintainer doesn't have their extension on there, usually reaching out to them will have them upload it there too or as I mentioned, just clone the repo
The extensions are compatible, aren't they?

    rm -fr ~/.vscode/*
    cp -a ~/.vscode-oss/* ~/.vscode/
    # Run VS Code, download extensions
    cp -a ~/.vscode/* ~/.vscode-oss/
Based on my recollection of migrating to VSCodium, all my extensions continued to work just fine.

I think there's also a hacky way to let VSCodium access the VS Code extension marketplace, but I believe it's an EULA violation.