TIL about Codium, installable binary packages of the true open-source version of VS-Code without AI nonsense, no telemetry, spying on your code for AI training and no AI functionality clogging your storage ...
This I immediately recommended to our contributors at OpenPrinting:
Most probably many of you are using VSCode from Microsoft as editor/IDE (at least I see it in many videos or screen sharing on video meetings).
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Inspired by this I have also replaced emacs by VS Code recently. I do not use the special emacs functionality which makes it a text-based desktop environment, I also got muscle memory confusion as all my other apps (Thunderbird, Firefox, ...) use standard Ctrl+C/V keybindings (middle-click pasting at least works on both), and I wanted to have something more modern.
I did not find anything similar from any other author, so ended up using VS Code.
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Principally it is open-source under MIT but the binary packages from Microsoft add closed-source code for AI (Copilot), spying the users code for training and also to integrate Copilot in the app.
But now I have discovered a solution: VS Codium, Like Chrome -> Chromium we have here Code -> Codium.
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This is a project which clones the GitHub repository of the source of VS Code and packages it with a hell lot of different package managers. All common distros and even Windows and Mac are covered.
The source for the packaging work you find here:
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
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On my Ubuntu I have installed the Snap. It just works the same way as the original VS Code, but due to AI nonsense removed it takes only 340 instead of 460 MB of storage.
So after that I just uninstalled VS Code and now I can code without AI taking my resources and abusing my work.
And as we do not want to vibe-code at OpenPrinting, this is probably the best solution.
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And here is a video which raised my attention about Codium:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLPdpiTytBA
It is short, like a lightning talk, only 3:40 min.
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I did not use any themes and extensions with VS Code. So I did not have anything to transfer. Also, I wrote the post right after switching and so I did not get in-depth with it.
VScodium is 100% compatible with VScode : GitHub (and GitLab) sync and all the extensions are available. I just don’t known if you need to configure from scratch VScodium or if you can directly use the VScode’s preferences.