Awesome software, but I don't trust the upstream org further than I must.
I figure e.g. emacs will always be there when that happens.
All I need is a Github Copilot clone and a good code search feature.
Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.
Oh and the ssh remote extension.
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.
MS made some very real and very usable innovations. Emacs hackers/maintainers would be wise to copy them, like I'm sure Microsoft copied things from emacs.
It's a bit like the UI aspect of the browser wars. Everyone wins when good things are cloned and then iteratively improved upon.
Generalizing it: Having smart people who really understand UX helps a lot with minimizing those months of pain before the payoff.
And "Mastering Emacs" is brilliant.
I had to make Emacs my go to editor in UNIX, because in those days there were hardly any alternatives, IDEs only started to be taken seriously on UNIX around 2000.
Even James Gosling, one of influencial people in the Emacs history says its time is now passed and he rather use Netbeans,
https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/tree/sources/...
So the answer to DVRC's ("Adopter of orphaned technologies") question on June 3, 2023, is yes, finally!
HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166642
DonHopkins on June 2, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs
UniPress Emacs for NeWS in 1988: Scriptable GUI, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring tool for HyperTIES browser.
Emacs served as an IDE with tabbed window and pie menus, for interactively editing, viewing, and navigating HyperTIES markup language documents, graphics, and interactive PostScript "applets".
HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...
>HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.)
Emacs provides the pie menus you see popped up in the illustration (Articulate, Edit, New (Storyboard, Link, Picture, Target), Define) that control the HyperTIES browser from the custom text editing mode of HyperTIES storyboards (like web pages), which the HyperTIES browser (in the background, which emacs controls in a sub-process) formats and displays. HyperTIES also uses pie menus for navigation and in interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript.
DVRC on June 3, 2023 [–]
Do any version of UniPress Emacs (that support the NeWS driver) or NeMacs survive?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989423
I wrote the following description of how NeWS relates to modern web browsers and "AJAX" in the NeWS article on Wikipedia, and I also worked on TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) at Sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
>NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:
>- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.
>- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.
>- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.
[...]
HyperTIES Emacs Authoring Tool MockLisp code (Yet Another HyperTIES Implementation, This Time In Emacs):
http://donhopkins.com/home/ties/yahtittie.ml
https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/
HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
Who knows, maybe I'll have closed the circle in a year and gone back to Emacs full time, where I started off in the editor wars a quarter of a century ago.
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?
VSCode was/is often touted as open source and Microsoft are using it to present themselves as community loving until MS sees an opportunity to extract some money/hinder the competition.
In comparison, Jetbrains is transparent with their offerings and what you get. There is in my opinion a clear difference in how they operate and how they are perceived.
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.
In short: Corporate politics and the Cursor team taking the path of least resistance.
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.
"""
Zed's language support is built on two main technologies:
#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg){kind=link}
Tree-sitter: This handles syntax highlighting and structure-based features like the outline panel.
Language Server Protocol (LSP): This provides semantic features such as code completion and diagnostics.
"""
Note this is _not_ how VSC's C++ Intellisense works. The VSC C++ plugin uses proprietary features of MSVC, it doesn't use LSP.
Weird, ADS is dead and nobody spent any time on it, I wonder why.
It’s fast, the interface is distraction free and it already has support for all the languages I use regularly. Even Terraform support, which is notoriously hard to get right, is better than the current “best” in VSCode.
Thanks for the recommendation
The worst part is all the VSCode is still promoted to developers as open source, even though official extensions increasingly aren't, with bits and pieces gradually replaced with closed code. It's not that closed source is necessarily bad, but when F/OSS popularity is milked for marketing purposes while stuff like this happens, it just feels very wrong. If you want to be closed source for reasons, fine, but be honest and upfront about it.
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.)
It supports most vscode extensions right out of the box.
I also think it's a mixed opportunity not to allow for something like Lua or a Lisp to configure Zed in. It's very promising but I'm not willing to switch just yet.
> Cursor allegedly has been flouting Microsoft terms-of-service rules for some time now by setting up a reverse proxy to mask its network requests to the endpoints used by the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace. This allows Cursor users to install VS Code extensions from Microsoft's market. Other VS Code forks tend to point to Open VSX, an alternative extension marketplace.
From MS point of view it’s Cursor doing it to them.
The way copyright and other rights to your IP you claim to have work in practice, is you need to enforce those claims or loose the rights.
Generally only applies to trademarks, not copyrights. In most English speaking countries copyright is a proprietary right and you don't lose it if you don't actively enforce it. But there could be time limits to a plaintiff bringing a civil case to court (usually a couple years).
Would be happy to have counterexamples.
That isn't what people mean by "losing" the rights.
For example somewhere on the planet somebody is running a pirated copy of Windows 10. But it would be misleading to post a headline saying "Microsoft LOSES copyright over Windows 10!!!".
Oh the Disney corporation had to sue the village primary school because their play used a trademarked name for a folk tale everybody knows about... it's not that they are monsters who care only about money and power, they were forced to secure undisclosed damages and make children cry by some principle of law which definitely exists. Mmm sure.
The last time I pointed this out on HN somebody responded with LLM generated nonsense "citing" non-existent US legal cases which they argued somehow prove I'm wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43509544
It's hard to know whether it's worse if "ranger_danger" did this on purpose and thought it's OK, or whether they didn't realise how the LLM works and thought this list was real.
I don't think I disagree with you generally, but it must be recognized that trademarks are different from copyrights in that there is a mechanism where if you don't assert your rights in the trademarks you could lose them.
And, like what the sibling comment said, I'm not going to engage with you on unnamed posts where unnamed people cited some LLM to argue against you...
It would impact users if things escalate and gets more hostile between the two and starts impacting features (like regressions in extension availability)
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.
That is not the scenario here. Cursor is being hunted by an extremely motivated corporate competitor. Cursor has been leeching the gorilla's blood and the gorilla finally noticed. Microsoft doesn't (necessarily) need the law here. They have it if they need it, but they can kill Cursor without needing to sue them. The disastrous outcome isn't a penalty--it's a critical mass of users switching to Copilot because they can't use their Microsoft extensions in Cursor any more. Cutting off the extensions on the same day that their Cursor clone went live was effectively a declaration of war from Microsoft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Antitrust
All cursor is doing is saying this blob of crap is compatible with their fork and letting you run it. This is akin to browsers supporting extensions from other browsers, and many other scenarios.
What Microsoft is doing is trying to prevent VSCode from becoming spontaneously obsolete because coding with Cursor a) removes you from VSCode and b) does it better.
I was using windows and wsl, and they were adding scripts to my profile directory (code.cmd) which then took precedence over vscode, from what I remember. Tracking that down required googling to discover other people who were having the same issue. If this is what I have to do when I first start using a product, it just leaves a bad impression. Additionally it seems that it will hijack the 'code' alias in WSL if you select this option or not, which is where I primarily use it. And then when cursor updates, it seems it will again attempt to overwrite this alias.
I'm not the only one who encounters this issue https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/2654 https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/2566 https://forum.cursor.com/t/do-not-hijack-code-shortcut/60671 https://namvu.net/2025/01/cursor-stole-your-code-command-her...
Maybe it works great for other people and they never encounter this issue. Maybe it seems like a petty thing. For me it seems it's implemented to attempt to 'force convert' some vscode users to use cursor all the time, and maybe that works and it's a success from a business perspective. But I won't use it again.
I don't know windows + wsl enough that I'm sure I would've been caught out by that and pissed off as well.
There are specific protections allowed when the goal is to maintain / break compatibility. If Microsoft locks competitors out, competitors are quite often permitted to pick the lock.
I can't comment on this situation since I don't know the details, but it's very likely this is fully legal.
See Oracle / Java API lawsuit, garage door opener suit, etc. To see where the lines sit.
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.
The "C/C++" extension github repository is 4MB. Probably the download size for the extension itself is a fraction of that, but I won't bother measuring. It was downloaded 400 times over the last minute (there is a live counter on the extension page [0]).
[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...
That's a 25MB/s or 200Mb/s bandwidth, for one of the most popular extensions. Multiply by the top 10 extensions and you get the bandwidth of an average home optic fiber connection...
Also, if you do open source contributions, never ever agree to assign copyright to the project: doing so means the project owners can relicense the code base, even towards proprietary license.
Half of the initial mac os x kernel was ripped off freebsd, giving pretty much nothing back.
Afaik netapp is also basing their system on bsd.
Sony uses freebsd as the OS for their playstation.
And many more, giving essentially nothing back.
I’d be shocked if netapp hard forked bsd and doesn’t upstream fixes.
That is open source.
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...
I think project governance matters more than license, and the BSDs are great examples.
Having said that, I’ve soured on the GPL. V3 more-or-less bans companies from selling you hardware that runs free software, but lets Google, Meta, etc use the software to expand their cloud-based monopolies where surveillance capitalism and enshittification have won out.
AGPL or BSL seem much better if you want free as in freedom. BSD and Apache at least don’t force your software off of machines that end users control.
Yes, BSL is not open (TM) or free (TM) or whatever. It’s still better IMHO, since it at least has some path to revenue for the developers.
To me the former is tolerable, the latter is not.
If anyone remembers WCF/AppFabric/WWF and Silverlight, that was the last stack I rewrote someone out of the shit on.
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."
https://www.npifinancial.com/smartspend-bulletins/the-anatom...
And MS audit would check that what you reported was what you had. And could result in big increases in contract pricing.
Now that everything is cloud this and 365 that I don’t know how much it applies anymore - everything is dynamic and traceable.
Famously in the early 2000s it was a huge issue for “medium” businesses who had used enterprise-style licensing. Tiny and small businesses just bought normal computers and software and would often escape notice.
AFAIK it was mainly a scare tactic to pressure companies into compliance and mostly just involved scary looking letters from a Microsoft-hired law firm.
Business would have an "IT guy" who "saved money" - and they'd get a letter saying "let us audit you or we're taking you to court for copyright violations" and they'd scramble and agree to the audit.
Of course, the proper response was the legal version of "bite me" but since many of them were in violation, they acquiesced.
I never had it happen to anyone I was involved with or knew, but the stories were certainly flying around Slashdot (it was going to be the proximate trigger of the Year of Linux on the Desktop, don't you know).
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.
Too bad “every app is just a website” took over because of the cross-platform issues.
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.
As for stability, if you learned GUI Ubuntu twenty years ago you'll be right at home in contemporary Debian systems, while someone hopping from XP or Server 2000 into 10 or 11 would be quite confused for quite some time. Xenial (2016), Bionic (2018) and Fossa (2020) will likely get twenty years of security updates each, into the beginning of the 2030s.
I think something similar holds for the SoftMaker office suite. If you learned TextMaker twenty years ago I believe you'll be less annoyed by their 2024 release than if you learned Office 2003 and get dropped into the 365 style applications. Personally I'd use something else entirely, likely doing a roundtrip through LaTeX or straight PostScript under the hood, but it will be interesting to evaluate some MICROS~1 Office alternatives in my organisation and see what, if anything, sticks.
That famous "developers developers developers" video with Steve Ballmer was a prime example of that corporate ethos.
For most other giant companies in tech, either the primary business is selling a product (and killing competitors) or giving products away as loss leaders and making bank on advertisement
Open source project hosted on GitHub, for the network effect.
Use Rust which also rely on GitHub for crates.io
Hardly anything is given for free in this life, it has to be earned.
You need an OS, you need compiler, you need some libraries.
Unless you write all that by yourself you always build in somebodies kingdom.
Many of these "building castles in other people kingdoms" projects, tend to use free tier WebAPIs, forked projects, reversed engineered protocols, and then folks get entitled when the owners pull the carpet.
Unless the developers of the IDEs hit by this never actually read the ToS, of course, which would only make them less reliable as an IDE provider.
"That's ancient history", they said.
"Lucy will hold the football this time for sure", they said.
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.
But to me the appeal of nvim is being able to fully remove everything I dislike.
I feel like I've been doing that for years on a wide range of topics, but every time it's like you're talking to cult members.
How do you break through to people? People say things like "you're overthinking it", "that's never going to happen", "I don't care because I like using VSCode and not alternatives".
Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
Where this has become increasingly problematic is rampant materialism and corporatism.
If the only real motivator in town, especially for the powerful, is material gain then there is nothing to constrain wanton greed. This becomes even more pronounced with corporations because their overtly stated purpose is not but greed, so even if the individual actors have some transcend moral compass they will be in conflict to their programmed imperative to "do their job".
Currently many of the powerful are materialistic and materialism can bring worldly power. Other political paradigms may come to the fore but as it takes a form and gravity it will likely come into some dialectic conflict with the prevailing materialistic status quo. That may be a peaceful resolution, but I'd not be certain of that.
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.
You just have to let go of things you have no real influence over.
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.
> Is it individualism? That they only consider their own narrow short-term interests, and have become blind to collective problems?
What collective problem, that someone might have to unexpectedly burn a weekend writing a new editor? That {emacs|vim} isn't popular enough? That people might have to go install openjdk in order to start using eclipse?
Ever since I got remote mode working, I haven’t noticed any missing functionality I care about. (I also haven’t tried installing extensions for the pile of commercial services work uses, and that I wouldn’t pay for anyway.)
Edit: Since cursor now has near infinite VC money, perhaps they should fund a few open source devs to work on those forks. Why should they get a free ride?
The opening of Proverbs has:
1:5. Let the wise hear and increase in learning[...]
Tech bubble remains tech bubble, when common, non-tech people are much more screwed, yet nothing is being done except saying "lol, just install Linux".
I remember when basic features that come for free in VS Code cost thousands of dollars per developer, back when "update" meant "buy the new version (again)". I swear, people forgot how good they have it.
The change that made the Microsoft addon incompatible with VS Code forks happened four years ago.
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".
Otherwise keep hoping that your corporate or VC funded SaaS "disruptor" master will continue to be nice to you
Microsoft still holds the crown when it comes to C# debugging, but for most proprietary MS extensions there are free, open source alternatives. They may not be as polished as the ones Microsoft actually pays people to maintain, but I don't see why Cursor would actually depend on any of the proprietary ones if you're not using it for C# dev (and even there competitors like Jetbrains have figured out a way to make it work).
Maybe against the store rules tho, dunno.
I don't think they'll survive very long as it seems that they don't actually have that many things that differentiate them. And there is a lot of competition.
The extension itself it MIT licensed (so could be hosted on the open VSIX store, if it wasn't down because the Eclipse project is suffering from server issues right now). In theory any fork can patch out the check and re-release the extension.
However, the extension packages some binaries that are proprietary, and have been since about four years ago. People could re-implement those and re-release an open version of the extension, but you can't just (legally) take the proprietary binaries and ship them if you don't have the license.
Open alternatives actually exist, but their quality and ease of configuration depends on your use case. In large projects the proprietary extension seems to be worse from what I've read.
The Microsoft C++ extension is not open source; not sure what people were expecting here.
It's another thing for its license to explicitly prohibit its use with any other IDE, even if it's API-compatible, even if it's literally exactly VSCode recompiled with another name.
And it's yet another thing to proactively insert checks for that.
They seem to have this backward. Visual Studio Code is a derivative product of VS Codium.
> This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration.
It's licensed under MIT + VS Marketplace Terms: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools?tab=License-1-o...
If you fork it and don't use VS Marketplace, it's only MIT. Or am I missing something?
(The license like that existed before cursor, it was basically the reason for vscodium)
(Source is https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod... the license link at the bottom)
The same problem with the c# extension, which has had an even bigger shitstorm since some parts of the extension need a ms account and depending on the company needs to be paid
It is like when the same folks act surprised, after Google does something to their Chrome and Android forks.
Don't want big tech sponsored products?
Pay open source developers, so that they can actually make a living of their work.
I also use PHPStorm for web dev work and we use MS DevOps at work and that extension is unstable, causes IDE errors for me and I will not use MS products just for this one irksome bug. I prefer PHPStorm for my work, because working with PHP in VS Code has never been a great experience for me. I just want my tools to work, I fight with code, I don't want to fight with my tools as well.
So jetbrains allows everyone to use their marketplace and their plugins outside their ides?
I can download the jetbrains php extension add it to my own shell and not pay for it?
You switched to CLion because MS does not allow forks of their editor to run MS-developed extensions?
If Microsoft are going to call VS Code “open source”, then the marketplace should not be selective on clients. If so, it’s not Open Source, it’s Sparkling Virtue Signalling!
Hell, Debian's repository now also include proprietary code (https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003) so binary BLOBs are perfectly capable of doing distro checks and refusing to run on forks.
I sure do wish my industry didn't need windows. I'd happily go to Linux and never look back.
As an added bonus, this setup is excellent for pair programming. Just use voice chat via signal or anything else and have the other person connect to the same tmux session over SSH.
That said, if you must use a GUI based development environment, I know of people happily using netbeans. I am not sure why anyone would use Microsoft’s tools for this.
For more "developer" focused professions I bet using tools tailored for their needs suits them better, I recently wrote some C# for some Windows software in Visual Studio in a Windows VM and the ootb experience is pretty good.
You're not the only one, but you're probably a small minority with your DE setup.
3np•14h ago