[bogwog]

For context, Open VSX is run by the Eclipse foundation, which also develops the Eclipse Theia editor, which is basically a clone of VS Code (not a fork, like VS Codium).

The Open VSX registry is open source (https://github.com/eclipse/openvsx) and self-hostable, although I have no experience with that. I assume it's possible to host your own instance with the extensions you want instead of relying on the free public instance.

Personally I'm more of a Sublime guy, but people looking for an open VSC alternative should consider Theia over VSC forks. It seems like the smarter long term investment if you want to get out from Microsoft's control.

[bobajeff]

Even though I've heard of Theia Editor before I don't think I've ever seriously looked at it until now. It honestly looks like a good alternative to vscode. (It basically looks like a straight up clone, which is good for me) I'll definitely give it a try.

[TiredOfLife]

Theia is based on Microsoft Monaco editor. Its a fork with a different ui

[Macha]

I think if it was a distro like VSCodium, you could call it a fork. But Monaco is a small piece of VS Code. It's a text widget. A _nice_ text widget, but you can play with bare Monaco here:

https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/playground.html

You could shove this widget alone into electron and call the result a text editor, and I mean, Notepad was basically this for the windows text entry component for years, but it's a long way away from VS Code, or from Theia.