> The classic IntelliSense with language server for the used language is still free – but without AI support.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualSt...
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.
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.
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 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
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.
I do not even need that. Modal editing is enough to keep me away from all the VI clones. I hate it with a passion.
I have a fully customized Emacs that I use for anything Lispy and it's great for that purpose but everything else is just "ok".
I try to use Zed but since it is a commercial offering it is just a matter of time until it gets entshitified too.
Vscode is/was really good but it seems to get worse and it's Microsoft.... I run out of editors it seems.
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.
How would vim compare?
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...
If you've only ever used this type of debugging, you should really try out a real IDE debugger once. The difference in productivity when you can use your IDE to navigate to, say, the usages of a function and then just press a keyboard shortcut to put a breakpoint on the line with that usage is immense.
Compare this to the native debug support: you have to leave the interactive debugger, move to your editor, find usages, note down the file name and line number, then go back to your interactive debugger and type a manual break command (break my_file.rb:2517 or something). All of that context switching and remembering is replaced by a single keyboard shortcut in Emacs, VS Code, or any other integrated debugger. And no, adding manual breakpoints in your source code is not simpler - what I'm describing works interactively while your code is already running, whereas a breakpoint statement requires you to restart the whole process.
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.
Didnt plan on making it also a TV with internet connection, now I darn sure as hell won't.
Its really sad state of things that the best course of action now for new hardware is to simply use it as it is, never update or plug online since for any chance of any minor issue being fixed there is 100x the risk it will go to shit in substantial ways (I have Samsung q990d - they soundbar literally dying for good after an official update, but that one you had to at least push yourself from phone or via usb).
Not possible with everything, or at least not without substantial hacking for many.
I have a slightly older WebOS LG TV, it has PS5, Switch 2, and FireStick 4K Max and an Onkyo receiver plugged in, and as an OLED TV it's incredible, LG would always be my first choice for picture. Don't care about built-in sound as I use a sound-system.
Right now I'm in the market for another TV at around 65inches and was looking at the 2025 model LG OLED, I likely won't connect it to the internet and will probably just hook up an Apple TV following some discussion in another comment section about how much I hate my Fire TV for being ad-ridden.
Really I wish LG or someone would just make a dumb TV with 4+ HDMI, ARC, perhaps DP and a remote and let us hook up what we want; but it'll never happen.
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.
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.
He touts AI, services, and agentic copilot.
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.
No-one wants this. If they make it a paid-for version, it affects no-one.
You didn't read the article, did you?
"... deactivated the popular IntelliCode extension, which had over 60 million downloads..."
I'm a Microsoft hater, but let's stick to facts here, over 60 million downloads is not "no-one".
> No-one wants this.
So, fun fact about earth: there are lots of people on it, and some of those people aren't you, and some of those people who aren't you actually have desires that are different from yours.
I think it makes the planet a pretty fun and interesting place, but it also does mean generalizing from "I don't want this" (totally fine! Awesome! Makes sense!) to "no one wants this" is usually not very productive.
IntelliCode has 60M downloads and is the 11th most downloaded extension for all of VS Code. Also consider that there's 6 official Python-related extensions above it that could all be rolled into one, and Copilot just above it which (to my knowledge) is installed by default in newer versions of VS Code.
Just because it doesn't affect you personally doesn't mean it affects no one. You aren't in fact the centre of the universe.
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.
> Don't miss anything from there either
They have not released 1.107 yet, doing a quick scan I am not seeing anything on the VSCodium github.
I thought originally it may have been an OSS extension, but it actually seems to have been a proprietary project licensed under the Microsoft Software License, similar to Copilot and such.
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.
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.
https://www.lazyvim.org/installation
Then run `LazyExtras` and you get a prompt that shows things like:
Recommended Languages: (2)
○ lang.docker mason.nvim nvim-lspconfig nvim-treesitter none-ls.nvim nvim-lint
○ lang.toml nvim-lspconfig
[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.
[1] https://zed.dev/
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.
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.
For the terminal, micro is nice if you're used to GUI editors.
Anyway Zed is a good option.
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)
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.
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 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.
(I'm not associated with Zed, just a happy user looking to share the goodness.)
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 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.
Alifatisk•2h ago
mjburgess•2h ago
rob74•2h ago
dijit•2h ago
The annoying thing is removing a perfectly working intellisense default.
If Jetbrains removes their on-device (non-AI) code indexer and suggestion systems then I will no longer be a paying customer for example. Despite being a All Products Pack user for the last... idk, 15 years?
arijun•2h ago
Intellisense, which is an “on-device (non-AI) code indexer and suggestion system,” is still in place.
hagbard_c•2h ago
blibble•1h ago
patience is a virtue
captainbland•1h ago