> I was increasingly getting upset about their extension marketplace, where there is an increased number of extensions starting to sell pro versions of the extensions we used for free.
This is actually great news. Some extensions, especially language ones, are very poor, and paying for them (if someone makes a commercial version) is the only way to guarantee a good development experience. Ruby is an example, and switching to IntelliJ is not smooth for people used to VSC.
Paying for software does not have a relationship with quality. Imagine if GCC had a "pro" version that was necessary to compile certain code. That would be devastating to those learning and thousands of devs that came before would be spinning in their graves.
The reason we do open source and free software is to make life easier for everyone, including your job. It standardizes practices and prevents mudball codebases comprised of black box libraries and tools.
Not to mention that selling of extensions is like selling of game mods. There's tons of stolen code.
> I was increasingly getting upset about their extension marketplace, where there is an increased number of extensions starting to sell pro versions of the extensions we used for free.
So, "I'm a professional developer, but I don't like other programmers getting paid for their extensions (that I do, nonetheless, find valuable, and want to use)"?
Are you trying to repeat Bill Gates's Open Letter TO Hobbyists?
You're still missing "Most directly, the thing you do is theft."
I think the past 46 years have proved, that free software works, no matter how many Bills want (or will) get rich off the industry. If there were no hobbyists either literally stealing software, or indirectly "stealing" it, because it's free, there would be no industry to profit from.
What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind.
Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. For individual use, most of them are <$100/year.
In years past I saw this same struggle with IntelliJ vs Eclipse or even vim/emacs. The amount of time I saw people spend on tuning, fixing, tinkering, debugging and otherwise modifying their .vim or .emacs files or their various incompatible Eclipse plugins (eg famously there were 2 big big plugins for Eclipse at one point and neither of them completely worked). At least with vim/emacs it works over an SSH connection but Eclipse?
Why are so many resistant so other people earning a living particularly when the payoff (ie time-saved) is so easily quantifiable? And why do people who generally earn so much value their time so little?
Most people don't think of it in terms of freedom, but freedom it is. With proprietary software:
- You don't know when it will disappear or be discontinued. Even your paid-for existing version stops working when the activation servers go down.
- You might be forced into an "upgrade" which breaks something you rely on
- That's not to mention issues like being able to fix bugs yourself, extend it, or understand it. I don't do this often directly, but something like being able to understand a file format my data is in or similar is common
I don't mind paying for things, but things need to be a lot better on other axes before this one becomes the most important.
My experience is that:
- Things I did decades ago are sometimes useful. Nearly 100% of the time, if this was in a proprietary system, it's gone or unusable. My LaTeX files still work.
- Companies switch between growth mode and cash cow mode. When this happens, the cost to me is almost always higher than the initial benefit over free.
- Which is better on other axes goes back-and-forth. An investment I make into a tool now doesn't mean it will be the leading tool in five years.
- Those sorts of long-term considerations are almost always more important than short-term technical stuff.
> but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way
That's just not true.
I have access to the full Jetbrains suite for free, yet I still opt to use Neovim or VS Code/Codium for most languages.
Jetbrains IDEs are great in many ways, but are objectively worse on several metrics:
* slow startup times
* slow initial operations until the JIT is warmed up
* even once warm, you always eventually do something that lags or blocks the UI, maybe barely enough to consciously notice, maybe for several seconds; and it really affects user experience if you care about latency - it drives me crazy each time
* plugins: VS Code has a wide range of great plugins, many more than the Jetbrains ecosystem and especially when it comes to more niche languages or functionality, Vim/emacs but also VS Code are much more extensible in general
* keyboard warriors: the Vim plugin is fine, and you can configure the Jetbrains IDEs to do almost anything with the keyboard, but you need way more arcane knowledge in the form of memorized context-specific bindings, and you always eventually forget something and need to switch back to the mouse. Vim and emacs are just much better there. VS Code is actually also better, because the interactions are significantly more customizable.
* Wayland / tiling WM / input lag: Jetbrains products really suck on tiling window managers like i3 / sway because they use native windows for dialogs. They also don't support Wayland natively, so they run through X server emulation which hurts input lag and brings plenty of bugs like weird dialog behaviour. In general the input lag is quite bad on Linux, it seems to be much better optimized on Mac OS
There are plenty of valid reasons why you wouldn't want to use their IDEs, even if they provide more integration and superior refactoring.
> I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way.
Yeah, no. Don't get me wrong, Jetbrains IDEs are great. But they're not as easy to extend, its proprietary nature makes it hard to debug when writing extensions.
I use neovim primarily, but I've got licenses for a bunch of other editors (Nova, Sublime, used to have IntelliJ). I do sincerely try them, but I keep going back to open source, extensible editors like vim, emacs, vscode... because I invariably need to tweak something in the editor, and doing so in the proprietary editors can be so damn painful.
Now, you do make a solid point though. I guess I probably should donate to neovim. Guess I'll go do that!
> What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind.
We're not resistant to paying, we're resistant to rent-seeking. I would, and have, happily buy a piece of software I use regularly.
What I will not do is a pay a monthly fee in perpetuity for a piece of software that I cannot truly own, where features I need can be removed on a whim and where I am prohibited from adding features I want. I also find the massive amount of tracking and general disregard for privacy appalling, but that's a missive for another day.
The subscription model that's become predominant is a nightmare and is increasingly user-hostile. Why is it so surprising that a lot of folks don't like it?
So in summary, I will gladly pay for software when:
> What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, [...] are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind.
What I find truly bizarre is why you bring this up in this discussion. The mentionned link is about a developper who switch from one proprietary to an open source software, both being free as in free beer.
The rest of your post is about being a fanboy of Jetbrains. Sure you may like it and are free to do so but I don't see what is difficult to understand that other people may have different preferences.
> The amount of time I saw people spend on tuning, fixing, tinkering, debugging and otherwise modifying their .vim or .emacs files
Are you making things up?
I only tinker with my neovim init file whem I want to add a plugin, which is adding one vim-plug line and command and don't take much more time than adding a plugin for another IDE.
Most people have their preferred settings that they migrate from one machine to another. I used an example vim init file from someone else and only did a handful of changes that took me probably less than 10-15 minutes over as many years.
> Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way.
- Worse performance
- Worse plugin ecosystem
- No LSP support
Also, their stance on supporting other ecosystems. While I completely understand their standpoint as a business, I prefer VSCode team's approach to this.
I use and pay a subscription for entire jetbrains suite. That said - vscode is miles better for JS/TS development IMO. In that world I don't want the full fat IDE experience because :
- it's slower - even some basic things like terminal rendering feels better/faster in vscode
- ecosystem is developing independently and so fast that IDE support can't keep up
- everyone else is using CLI centric workflows so it's maintained and tested
> What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster.
The first time I paid for a fancy IDE, it ran on an Apple IIgs in the late 80s. It was the first of many. Unfortunately, commerical IDEs and editors go out of business constantly. The rare survivors, like BBEdit, tend to be limited to a single OS.
Around 1997, I figured out what I want out of an editor:
- Supports every language and text file format I'll need.
- Runs on every desktop OS.
- Customizable, and scriptable using an industry-standard language.
- Will still be around in 20 years.
Emacs met these requirements, and I used it for over 20 years. A few years ago, I switched to VS Code.
I don't buy commercial editors because they don't provide the key features I want. And I don't trust them to stick around.
$100 for a tool that enables my career is completely worth it. There are two issues:
* Freedom - my workflow is centered around modifying tools to suit my use case. OSI open source makes this easier sometimes.
* Ubiquity - I detest spending time updating license keys, figuring out if that key works with the version I downloaded, finding out that new-feature isn't available in the version I paid for, or wrangling with how many computers my license will allow me to run the tool on. If the trappings and enforcement of monetization weren't present, I'd spend a lot more money on software tools.
Aside: I worked on a team managing build infra at one point, and just getting license servers and license files set up so that CI could leverage proprietary tools was a major, sustained effort. I know personal tooling is more lightweight, but the same dynamics are present.
So my investment in tuning Emacs feels to me like an actual investment: I've gotten really good at tuning Emacs for various uses, and the time I spent on that has made me a more effective engineer in some ways. I bring Emacs to every job I work and even if I end up using JetBrains for e.g. Android dev, I still have Emacs in my pocket for text editing, Magit, org mode, dired, and shells/terms. I don't feel the same way about time spent managing licenses for proprietary tooling, or even learning this particular company's git tooling; I just keep using Magit. Maybe others don't feel as strongly that their preferred tooling be "everywhere", but I really value it.
> What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind.
How long have you worked in software, or any industry? "Pay for this thing that will make your job easier" is the Big Lie of software. ~Half of the time it becomes "makes your job harder" (often imperceptibly without hindsight!) because the product is primarily designed to lock-in paying enterprise customers and only secondarily to provide them with a productivity-boosting service.
It is rational for people working in the industry to be skeptical of such claims.
It seems to me that reasonably priced software is quite rare. To me and IDE is basically a fancy text editor and I've never really found one that really spoke to me (coding is not my primary job though), so $100/year seems steep for what looks like mostly a text editor to me. (Side note for all the vim/emacs wars, I'm quite satisfied with gedit). It also seems like the era of buying software is over; now it is a rent that you pay and all the other rents I must pay are going up so I'm not looking for any other.
So I see the appeal of free software (as in liberty and as in beer) - I recently switched a work machine over to pure Debian and it's a breath of fresh air. No proprietary container based installs, no advertising/telemetry built in, and I can choose a desktop environment that I like with some idea that it won't randomly move GUI elements around and change things for the sake of change because some product manager or UX engineer or other needs to make said change to justify their over-inflated salary. LXDE still looked like the LXDE I remember and the same goes for Cinnamon and MATE.
This doesn't seem to have anything to do with the article or its author, who switched not because of cost but because of unavoidable telemetry and tracking.
What I find truly bizarre is how many virtual monopoly owning companies, rather than concentrate on maximising the financial gains available from their enviable dominance of a market segment, instead focus on miserablising user experience and instrusively degrading their paying customers' sense of ownership and enjoyment in using the software they produce.
> Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. For individual use, most of them are <$100/year.
After a particularly bad tooling week (js supply chain problems, plugin problems and more than the usual amount of DB changes) Our dev team made the unanimous call to move require all developers to use Jetbrains IDEs instead of the mix of VSCode, Emacs and whatever else... Our codebase is Python, Go and Javascript, and data is stored in Postgres, so we use Goland, PyCharm, WebStorm and Datagrip regularly. We also started using the awesome Micro editor when we need something that can be installed on a remote because it's key bindings are identical to JetBrains...
A few thoughts:
1. We all picked up 2-3 hours per week of time we were spending pounding plugins on Emacs and VSCode into shape. There was a lot more fiddling going on than we thought.
2. The debugger in JetBrains IDEs is top notch. Debuggers are underrated, and bad debuggers make using print and over-logging seem like the best option.
3. When we want to do something new, (containers, notebooks, etc...) it is almost always supported, and there are not 100 incomplete plugins to sort out (both Emacs and VSCode have this issue).
4. We're doing things the same way, which sometimes really pays off. For example, instead of a mix of PostMan, python scripts, restclient, and bashified curl for making api requests, we just use the client in the IDE... which means we can share them.
5. Datagrip and the database tools in the IDEs are incredibly useful.
Ok, so the payoff: By the end of the second week, we were over the learning curve, and the payoff came in the third week: a total of 16 hours of developer time not spent on twiddling with Emacs, vim, Sublime and VSCode. That time savings paid for the subscription for the year.
> I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way.
I'm not sure if you mean this literally, but I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. I mentioned this the other day here [1], but for whatever reason, I've been completely unable to get Intellij to properly allow me to work on a remote codebase for my job. Despite my company giving me access to the Ultimate edition, the 2021 version of Intellij just flat out refused to connect when I tried to use the ssh plugin, and the 2022 edition's beta of a new ssh feature worked for about a week before somehow getting into a state where it would reconnect every 5 seconds or so and scroll me to the top of whatever file I was trying to edit. I'm sure there are ways to get it to work, but given that VS Code just worked the first time I set it up and never really got in my way, I have no motivation to spend more than a few minutes trying to get Intellij working before just giving up and going back to VS Code.
I think if you see behavior that seems so obviously "wrong" to you, it's worth giving people the benefit of the doubt and actually trying to see _why_ people do things that way before just dismissing them as irrational. I wouldn't be surprised if you've actually talked to people who might have experiences like this that could explain the discrepancy, but if you start the conversation so dismissively, most people aren't going to bother trying to share their experiences with you.
> Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. For individual use, most of them are <$100/year.
They just aren't, I would not switch to Jetbrains from VSCode even if it was free. It's not a question of pricing and Jetbrains themselves started to realise it since they are building some VSC clone (forgot the name right now)
You're really missing an important factor of software development which is making things accessible to all walks of life. I simply prefer open source because it doesn't exclude specific classes of people because of money. Imagine a future where only rich people and those from wealthy families get access to the good development tools to help them get richer, while poor developers and those not from a wealthy family struggle to even get access to basic tooling, or have to exchange their personal information and rights in exchange.
Fortunately, many people in software are not simply money worshipers and envision a future where money isn't the priority in building a better world.
> I was increasingly getting upset about their extension marketplace, where there is an increased number of extensions starting to sell pro versions of the extensions we used for free.
I'm not familiar with any particularly egregious examples, but I don't find "developer wants to sell software" all that outrageous.
I'm already paying for sublime text and a few other developer tools and I wouldn't mind paying for a tool that helps me pay my bills.
Also I like that some of these products have a free version that makes it accessible to people coming from a poor economic background. Everyone deserves an equal opportunity in my opinion.
Now my problem about big tech corps is that they are huge bullies.
I want my freedom back. Freedom of not being locked in an ecosystem. Freedom to choose my tools. Freedom of not being tracked. Freedom of everyone to be in the market without being copied, acquired or overshadowed by huge companies that buy/clone/replace any product or tool with their "free of charge" poison. Freedom to stay away of "growth and engagement" bs products.
Think of the following. How viable is to live without GMAIL nowdays? Do we want vscode to become the GMAIL of code?
Luckily, contrary to what the Microsoft hoard will tell you, there are countless respectful alternatives that were around before and will be around long after Microsoft turns it into some kind of pay to win thing with achievements.
As someone who has been using vim for 5 years and neovim for 2 years, what sort of learning material (books, videos) would you recommend to learn about vim internals and subsequently neovim internals?
I would love to contribute but I'm mostly a webdev, but I'd love to take a year or so to learn and hopefully contribute throughout the rest of my life. It's just so hard to start or learn.
The material doesn't even have to be directly related to vim, I'd like to learn more about how and why text editors work and some of the common concerns when building one.
I can partially understand the desire to switch if there are (free) plugins available on VS Codium that is not on VS Code. However leaving VS Code because of not trusting Microsoft's off switch for telemetry for the IDE and the plugins they provide is an unintentionally uninformed decision IMO.
Of all actors, one should probably trust the privacy protections and off switch of a BigCo, like Microsoft, since they tend to know what would get them in trouble. On the other hand, you may not be able to rely on the open source plugin developers to do things right and protect your privacy, however, it usually can be a problem that can be fixed [1]. Do you read the source code of all of your plugins? Open source developers may have good intentions, but they may not be following telemetry guidelines or best practices.
I originally read it as a different editor entirely than VS Code.
The slight startup delay for VS Code vs. for example Notepad++ is quite annoying. I wish there was software as cool as VS Code, but with ultra low startup time.
The reasons to switch don't make sense. Microsoft provides builds for virtually every major platform and has extensive remote development options. Why is there a requirement to be building it from source?
What is collected via telemetry is published, can be inspected with tools Microsoft provides or third party tools, and can be disabled.
Why are some extensions providing paid versions while keeping the free versions around a bad thing?
> There is nothing wrong with an organization following an open-core princip[le].
In itself, maybe, but MS is crippling the ability to use the open core. Plus, there _is_ something wrong with using the state to prevent people from copying information amongst themselves.
> Microsoft still has to pay for the developers who contribute to VS Code and other bills associated with VS Code and running the extension store.
If that's the justification, then it's BS. Microsoft has enough money to pay for this stuff many time over. Plus, the indirect financial benefit of people working in an MS app or environment is high enough.
Their main argument is “no telemetry” (or sometimes “no cemetery tracking”…), but VS Code has a setting to disable telemetry [0], and I would trust that it’s really disabled if you set it so (why would they lie about something quite trivial to check with Wireshark or such?)
> I’m sure there is a small performance gain because you don’t have telemetry running in the background sending data to Microsoft.
Have you profiled it? Have you compared VSCodium and VSCode with telemetry off?
I agree but also - a controversial opinion - I am pretty sure Microsoft collects the kind of telemetry to learn about user behavior and improve the IDE, and not to collect private information for some kind of other gain. I am sure that whoever develops Codium will eventually get into a dead-end at some point because they won't have any telemetry connected to the product usage. Other piece is that Codium might inherently actually thrive because of some product decisions based on the telemetry Microsoft has so so it's not a fair fight.
Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft employee and this is my opinion only but I say this because I know what it's like to work on apps used by tens of millions of people and I can tell you that you're dead in the water when you have no idea how people use your product. And no, at this scale, controlled user testing is not sufficient. I've worked on countless Microsoft products over the years from Office through Skype to Teams. I've also been personally adding some telemetry into these but ALWAYS to be data driven when making product decisions such as "which button should we display here", "did we improve latency/stability/discoverability/.." and "which new feature will be actually useful".
Now.. I don't know VS Code 100% but I did see some internal talks, have access to some telemetry (didn't browse it much) and I can say that the team is full of good intentions. They just deal with difficult UX problems. I've also worked at Google and I think it's much different when your product/business is using/selling data about customers as compared to creating tools for developers. You are after a very different type of data in essence and I think the actual privacy is not contended here.
I am sure people will spin this the usual way "big company big bad" and "you never know what they will try to collect next" but in that case, I can only suggest you get a job in one of these companies and see how you will develop anything without real data to back your decisions and assumptions about the real world.
VS Codium has tried, and not succeeded, to disable all telemetry[0][1]. This is with direct access to and patches to source code and all the knobs set to off.
If the direction of upstream is diametrically opposed to downstream, it is nearly impossible to prevent these issues.
> f [sic] you want to get the full open-source MIT-licensed VS Code with no cemetery [sic] tracking
I prevent telemetry tracking by blocking all network access to VSC using Little Snitch. Get it set up initially with plugins then cut it off. I don’t use VSC in ways that require network access thereafter.
[+] [-] pizza234|3 years ago|reply
This is actually great news. Some extensions, especially language ones, are very poor, and paying for them (if someone makes a commercial version) is the only way to guarantee a good development experience. Ruby is an example, and switching to IntelliJ is not smooth for people used to VSC.
[+] [-] devwastaken|3 years ago|reply
The reason we do open source and free software is to make life easier for everyone, including your job. It standardizes practices and prevents mudball codebases comprised of black box libraries and tools.
Not to mention that selling of extensions is like selling of game mods. There's tons of stolen code.
[+] [-] coldtea|3 years ago|reply
So, "I'm a professional developer, but I don't like other programmers getting paid for their extensions (that I do, nonetheless, find valuable, and want to use)"?
[+] [-] chexum|3 years ago|reply
You're still missing "Most directly, the thing you do is theft."
I think the past 46 years have proved, that free software works, no matter how many Bills want (or will) get rich off the industry. If there were no hobbyists either literally stealing software, or indirectly "stealing" it, because it's free, there would be no industry to profit from.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rnd420_69|3 years ago|reply
But the gaming community being physically or mentally at an age of 14 prevented that with quite an outreach.
Would've thought someone with enough braincells to learn programming would look at this differently, but there you have it.
[+] [-] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. For individual use, most of them are <$100/year.
In years past I saw this same struggle with IntelliJ vs Eclipse or even vim/emacs. The amount of time I saw people spend on tuning, fixing, tinkering, debugging and otherwise modifying their .vim or .emacs files or their various incompatible Eclipse plugins (eg famously there were 2 big big plugins for Eclipse at one point and neither of them completely worked). At least with vim/emacs it works over an SSH connection but Eclipse?
Why are so many resistant so other people earning a living particularly when the payoff (ie time-saved) is so easily quantifiable? And why do people who generally earn so much value their time so little?
[+] [-] blip54321|3 years ago|reply
Most people don't think of it in terms of freedom, but freedom it is. With proprietary software:
- You don't know when it will disappear or be discontinued. Even your paid-for existing version stops working when the activation servers go down.
- You might be forced into an "upgrade" which breaks something you rely on
- That's not to mention issues like being able to fix bugs yourself, extend it, or understand it. I don't do this often directly, but something like being able to understand a file format my data is in or similar is common
I don't mind paying for things, but things need to be a lot better on other axes before this one becomes the most important.
My experience is that:
- Things I did decades ago are sometimes useful. Nearly 100% of the time, if this was in a proprietary system, it's gone or unusable. My LaTeX files still work.
- Companies switch between growth mode and cash cow mode. When this happens, the cost to me is almost always higher than the initial benefit over free.
- Which is better on other axes goes back-and-forth. An investment I make into a tool now doesn't mean it will be the leading tool in five years.
- Those sorts of long-term considerations are almost always more important than short-term technical stuff.
[+] [-] the_duke|3 years ago|reply
That's just not true.
I have access to the full Jetbrains suite for free, yet I still opt to use Neovim or VS Code/Codium for most languages.
Jetbrains IDEs are great in many ways, but are objectively worse on several metrics:
* slow startup times
* slow initial operations until the JIT is warmed up
* even once warm, you always eventually do something that lags or blocks the UI, maybe barely enough to consciously notice, maybe for several seconds; and it really affects user experience if you care about latency - it drives me crazy each time
* plugins: VS Code has a wide range of great plugins, many more than the Jetbrains ecosystem and especially when it comes to more niche languages or functionality, Vim/emacs but also VS Code are much more extensible in general
* keyboard warriors: the Vim plugin is fine, and you can configure the Jetbrains IDEs to do almost anything with the keyboard, but you need way more arcane knowledge in the form of memorized context-specific bindings, and you always eventually forget something and need to switch back to the mouse. Vim and emacs are just much better there. VS Code is actually also better, because the interactions are significantly more customizable.
* Wayland / tiling WM / input lag: Jetbrains products really suck on tiling window managers like i3 / sway because they use native windows for dialogs. They also don't support Wayland natively, so they run through X server emulation which hurts input lag and brings plenty of bugs like weird dialog behaviour. In general the input lag is quite bad on Linux, it seems to be much better optimized on Mac OS
There are plenty of valid reasons why you wouldn't want to use their IDEs, even if they provide more integration and superior refactoring.
[+] [-] roblabla|3 years ago|reply
Yeah, no. Don't get me wrong, Jetbrains IDEs are great. But they're not as easy to extend, its proprietary nature makes it hard to debug when writing extensions.
I use neovim primarily, but I've got licenses for a bunch of other editors (Nova, Sublime, used to have IntelliJ). I do sincerely try them, but I keep going back to open source, extensible editors like vim, emacs, vscode... because I invariably need to tweak something in the editor, and doing so in the proprietary editors can be so damn painful.
Now, you do make a solid point though. I guess I probably should donate to neovim. Guess I'll go do that!
[+] [-] tharne|3 years ago|reply
We're not resistant to paying, we're resistant to rent-seeking. I would, and have, happily buy a piece of software I use regularly.
What I will not do is a pay a monthly fee in perpetuity for a piece of software that I cannot truly own, where features I need can be removed on a whim and where I am prohibited from adding features I want. I also find the massive amount of tracking and general disregard for privacy appalling, but that's a missive for another day.
The subscription model that's become predominant is a nightmare and is increasingly user-hostile. Why is it so surprising that a lot of folks don't like it?
So in summary, I will gladly pay for software when:
1. I can pay up front an actually own it
2. I can see the source code and modify it
3. It does not track or otherwise monitor me
None of these things are a big ask.
[+] [-] prmoustache|3 years ago|reply
What I find truly bizarre is why you bring this up in this discussion. The mentionned link is about a developper who switch from one proprietary to an open source software, both being free as in free beer.
The rest of your post is about being a fanboy of Jetbrains. Sure you may like it and are free to do so but I don't see what is difficult to understand that other people may have different preferences.
> The amount of time I saw people spend on tuning, fixing, tinkering, debugging and otherwise modifying their .vim or .emacs files
Are you making things up?
I only tinker with my neovim init file whem I want to add a plugin, which is adding one vim-plug line and command and don't take much more time than adding a plugin for another IDE.
Most people have their preferred settings that they migrate from one machine to another. I used an example vim init file from someone else and only did a handful of changes that took me probably less than 10-15 minutes over as many years.
[+] [-] wiseowise|3 years ago|reply
- Worse performance
- Worse plugin ecosystem
- No LSP support
Also, their stance on supporting other ecosystems. While I completely understand their standpoint as a business, I prefer VSCode team's approach to this.
https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/po...
https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/official-support-for-visual...
> Why are so many resistant so other people earning a living particularly when the payoff (ie time-saved) is so easily quantifiable?
Is it, though?
[+] [-] moonchrome|3 years ago|reply
- it's slower - even some basic things like terminal rendering feels better/faster in vscode
- ecosystem is developing independently and so fast that IDE support can't keep up
- everyone else is using CLI centric workflows so it's maintained and tested
[+] [-] ekidd|3 years ago|reply
The first time I paid for a fancy IDE, it ran on an Apple IIgs in the late 80s. It was the first of many. Unfortunately, commerical IDEs and editors go out of business constantly. The rare survivors, like BBEdit, tend to be limited to a single OS.
Around 1997, I figured out what I want out of an editor:
- Supports every language and text file format I'll need.
- Runs on every desktop OS.
- Customizable, and scriptable using an industry-standard language.
- Will still be around in 20 years.
Emacs met these requirements, and I used it for over 20 years. A few years ago, I switched to VS Code.
I don't buy commercial editors because they don't provide the key features I want. And I don't trust them to stick around.
[+] [-] rpdillon|3 years ago|reply
* Freedom - my workflow is centered around modifying tools to suit my use case. OSI open source makes this easier sometimes.
* Ubiquity - I detest spending time updating license keys, figuring out if that key works with the version I downloaded, finding out that new-feature isn't available in the version I paid for, or wrangling with how many computers my license will allow me to run the tool on. If the trappings and enforcement of monetization weren't present, I'd spend a lot more money on software tools.
Aside: I worked on a team managing build infra at one point, and just getting license servers and license files set up so that CI could leverage proprietary tools was a major, sustained effort. I know personal tooling is more lightweight, but the same dynamics are present.
So my investment in tuning Emacs feels to me like an actual investment: I've gotten really good at tuning Emacs for various uses, and the time I spent on that has made me a more effective engineer in some ways. I bring Emacs to every job I work and even if I end up using JetBrains for e.g. Android dev, I still have Emacs in my pocket for text editing, Magit, org mode, dired, and shells/terms. I don't feel the same way about time spent managing licenses for proprietary tooling, or even learning this particular company's git tooling; I just keep using Magit. Maybe others don't feel as strongly that their preferred tooling be "everywhere", but I really value it.
[+] [-] pphysch|3 years ago|reply
How long have you worked in software, or any industry? "Pay for this thing that will make your job easier" is the Big Lie of software. ~Half of the time it becomes "makes your job harder" (often imperceptibly without hindsight!) because the product is primarily designed to lock-in paying enterprise customers and only secondarily to provide them with a productivity-boosting service.
It is rational for people working in the industry to be skeptical of such claims.
[+] [-] hotpotamus|3 years ago|reply
So I see the appeal of free software (as in liberty and as in beer) - I recently switched a work machine over to pure Debian and it's a breath of fresh air. No proprietary container based installs, no advertising/telemetry built in, and I can choose a desktop environment that I like with some idea that it won't randomly move GUI elements around and change things for the sake of change because some product manager or UX engineer or other needs to make said change to justify their over-inflated salary. LXDE still looked like the LXDE I remember and the same goes for Cinnamon and MATE.
[+] [-] ttctciyf|3 years ago|reply
What I find truly bizarre is how many virtual monopoly owning companies, rather than concentrate on maximising the financial gains available from their enviable dominance of a market segment, instead focus on miserablising user experience and instrusively degrading their paying customers' sense of ownership and enjoyment in using the software they produce.
[+] [-] indymike|3 years ago|reply
After a particularly bad tooling week (js supply chain problems, plugin problems and more than the usual amount of DB changes) Our dev team made the unanimous call to move require all developers to use Jetbrains IDEs instead of the mix of VSCode, Emacs and whatever else... Our codebase is Python, Go and Javascript, and data is stored in Postgres, so we use Goland, PyCharm, WebStorm and Datagrip regularly. We also started using the awesome Micro editor when we need something that can be installed on a remote because it's key bindings are identical to JetBrains...
A few thoughts:
1. We all picked up 2-3 hours per week of time we were spending pounding plugins on Emacs and VSCode into shape. There was a lot more fiddling going on than we thought.
2. The debugger in JetBrains IDEs is top notch. Debuggers are underrated, and bad debuggers make using print and over-logging seem like the best option.
3. When we want to do something new, (containers, notebooks, etc...) it is almost always supported, and there are not 100 incomplete plugins to sort out (both Emacs and VSCode have this issue).
4. We're doing things the same way, which sometimes really pays off. For example, instead of a mix of PostMan, python scripts, restclient, and bashified curl for making api requests, we just use the client in the IDE... which means we can share them.
5. Datagrip and the database tools in the IDEs are incredibly useful.
Ok, so the payoff: By the end of the second week, we were over the learning curve, and the payoff came in the third week: a total of 16 hours of developer time not spent on twiddling with Emacs, vim, Sublime and VSCode. That time savings paid for the subscription for the year.
[+] [-] saghm|3 years ago|reply
I'm not sure if you mean this literally, but I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. I mentioned this the other day here [1], but for whatever reason, I've been completely unable to get Intellij to properly allow me to work on a remote codebase for my job. Despite my company giving me access to the Ultimate edition, the 2021 version of Intellij just flat out refused to connect when I tried to use the ssh plugin, and the 2022 edition's beta of a new ssh feature worked for about a week before somehow getting into a state where it would reconnect every 5 seconds or so and scroll me to the top of whatever file I was trying to edit. I'm sure there are ways to get it to work, but given that VS Code just worked the first time I set it up and never really got in my way, I have no motivation to spend more than a few minutes trying to get Intellij working before just giving up and going back to VS Code.
I think if you see behavior that seems so obviously "wrong" to you, it's worth giving people the benefit of the doubt and actually trying to see _why_ people do things that way before just dismissing them as irrational. I wouldn't be surprised if you've actually talked to people who might have experiences like this that could explain the discrepancy, but if you start the conversation so dismissively, most people aren't going to bother trying to share their experiences with you.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31669461
[+] [-] lelanthran|3 years ago|reply
What's bizarre about that? The only Bizarre Attitude I see here is yours: that there exists a best option and why aren't more people taking it?
There's no such thing as a "Best Option".
[+] [-] realusername|3 years ago|reply
They just aren't, I would not switch to Jetbrains from VSCode even if it was free. It's not a question of pricing and Jetbrains themselves started to realise it since they are building some VSC clone (forgot the name right now)
[+] [-] encryptluks2|3 years ago|reply
Fortunately, many people in software are not simply money worshipers and envision a future where money isn't the priority in building a better world.
[+] [-] wooque|3 years ago|reply
I like freedom, but I like getting things done more.
[+] [-] madeofpalk|3 years ago|reply
I'm not familiar with any particularly egregious examples, but I don't find "developer wants to sell software" all that outrageous.
[+] [-] buf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ultim8k|3 years ago|reply
Also I like that some of these products have a free version that makes it accessible to people coming from a poor economic background. Everyone deserves an equal opportunity in my opinion.
Now my problem about big tech corps is that they are huge bullies. I want my freedom back. Freedom of not being locked in an ecosystem. Freedom to choose my tools. Freedom of not being tracked. Freedom of everyone to be in the market without being copied, acquired or overshadowed by huge companies that buy/clone/replace any product or tool with their "free of charge" poison. Freedom to stay away of "growth and engagement" bs products.
Think of the following. How viable is to live without GMAIL nowdays? Do we want vscode to become the GMAIL of code?
[+] [-] Asraelite|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fartcannon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cageface|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azemetre|3 years ago|reply
I would love to contribute but I'm mostly a webdev, but I'd love to take a year or so to learn and hopefully contribute throughout the rest of my life. It's just so hard to start or learn.
The material doesn't even have to be directly related to vim, I'd like to learn more about how and why text editors work and some of the common concerns when building one.
[+] [-] CoastalCoder|3 years ago|reply
Wouldn't an editor ecosystem based on Codium be as open-source as Emacs' and Vim's?
Are you referring to some difference in their specific licenses?
[+] [-] 8589934591|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karsteski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] no_circuit|3 years ago|reply
Of all actors, one should probably trust the privacy protections and off switch of a BigCo, like Microsoft, since they tend to know what would get them in trouble. On the other hand, you may not be able to rely on the open source plugin developers to do things right and protect your privacy, however, it usually can be a problem that can be fixed [1]. Do you read the source code of all of your plugins? Open source developers may have good intentions, but they may not be following telemetry guidelines or best practices.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31371979
[+] [-] sharken|3 years ago|reply
The slight startup delay for VS Code vs. for example Notepad++ is quite annoying. I wish there was software as cool as VS Code, but with ultra low startup time.
[+] [-] sottero|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmitc|3 years ago|reply
What is collected via telemetry is published, can be inspected with tools Microsoft provides or third party tools, and can be disabled.
Why are some extensions providing paid versions while keeping the free versions around a bad thing?
[+] [-] gigatexal|3 years ago|reply
“Telemetry? What telemetry?” ;)
[+] [-] gcoguiec|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#how....
[+] [-] einpoklum|3 years ago|reply
In itself, maybe, but MS is crippling the ability to use the open core. Plus, there _is_ something wrong with using the state to prevent people from copying information amongst themselves.
> Microsoft still has to pay for the developers who contribute to VS Code and other bills associated with VS Code and running the extension store.
If that's the justification, then it's BS. Microsoft has enough money to pay for this stuff many time over. Plus, the indirect financial benefit of people working in an MS app or environment is high enough.
[+] [-] Kwpolska|3 years ago|reply
> I’m sure there is a small performance gain because you don’t have telemetry running in the background sending data to Microsoft.
Have you profiled it? Have you compared VSCodium and VSCode with telemetry off?
[0]: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry
[+] [-] premun|3 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft employee and this is my opinion only but I say this because I know what it's like to work on apps used by tens of millions of people and I can tell you that you're dead in the water when you have no idea how people use your product. And no, at this scale, controlled user testing is not sufficient. I've worked on countless Microsoft products over the years from Office through Skype to Teams. I've also been personally adding some telemetry into these but ALWAYS to be data driven when making product decisions such as "which button should we display here", "did we improve latency/stability/discoverability/.." and "which new feature will be actually useful".
Now.. I don't know VS Code 100% but I did see some internal talks, have access to some telemetry (didn't browse it much) and I can say that the team is full of good intentions. They just deal with difficult UX problems. I've also worked at Google and I think it's much different when your product/business is using/selling data about customers as compared to creating tools for developers. You are after a very different type of data in essence and I think the actual privacy is not contended here.
I am sure people will spin this the usual way "big company big bad" and "you never know what they will try to collect next" but in that case, I can only suggest you get a job in one of these companies and see how you will develop anything without real data to back your decisions and assumptions about the real world.
[+] [-] btdmaster|3 years ago|reply
If the direction of upstream is diametrically opposed to downstream, it is nearly impossible to prevent these issues.
[0] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/623
[1] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/631
[+] [-] madeofpalk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hedora|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eatbitseveryday|3 years ago|reply
I prevent telemetry tracking by blocking all network access to VSC using Little Snitch. Get it set up initially with plugins then cut it off. I don’t use VSC in ways that require network access thereafter.