Visual Studio Code

VS Code is considered the most popular free editor for programmers and has beaten out competitors like Atom. The application is offered by Microsoft free of charge for all platforms (Linux, Mac and of course Windows), but should not be confused with Microsoft’s proprietary IDE (development environment) Visual Studio, despite the similarity in name.

While VS Code is proprietary as well, an open-source edition (Code – OSS) is published and developed on Github. Microsoft states:

Visual Studio Code is a distribution of the Code – OSS repository with Microsoft-specific customizations released under a traditional Microsoft product license.

Microsoft Github repository

This edition allows the publication of a fork named VSCodium.

VS Code does not allow you to create “projects” as in full-blown IDEs – the editor always works file/folder-based. Nevertheless, the program can be used like an IDE. First, you open a folder or clone a repository – thanks to the Git integration – via the explorer icon in the left, vertical menu. Then you can add more folders to your project which is not a project, but a Workspace according to VS Code terminology. When you exit the program, VS Code remembers which files were open and restores this workspace exactly the same way the next time you start the program.

The great strength of VS Code is the large number of extensions that are made available via a marketplace. This allows VS Code to become a serious programming tool for all conceivable programming languages. Via the extensions icon already existing extensions may be configured and new ones installed.

Licensing and backdoor

Microsoft would not be Microsoft, however, if the company did not include something that open source supporters call a backdoor. Even the (proprietary, as we learned above) packages that Microsoft builds for Debian and Ubuntu collect telemetry data without asking first. At least users can prevent this by disabling all or part of this behavior in the Settings.

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How to configure VS Code

The settings of VS Code (and its plugins as well) may be found in the menue at File > Preferences > Settings or briefly by pressing STRG + comma key. To change the telemetry settings as described above, press CTRL + Comma, then search for “Telemetry” and – if there are several hits – make sure to select the telemetry entry valid for the entire application.

Installation

The easiest installation is actually offered by Microsoft itself with the mentioned backdoor: simply download the latest deb package from Microsoft and then install it:

sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/code_*.debCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

Microsoft’s package source is also set up at the same time, so that future updates of VS Code – the program is updated quite frequently – will be imported by the package management. To set up the package source manually, follow the detailed instructions on the page Visual Studio Code on Linux If you don’t trust Microsoft’ s pre-built packages, you can build the package yourself from Microsoft’s open source code, or more simply: use the packages already built under the name Vscodium from Paul Carroty ‘s repository:

wget -qO - https://gitlab.com/paulcarroty/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/raw/master/pub.gpg | gpg --dearmor | sudo dd of=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg
echo 'deb [ signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg ] https://download.vscodium.com/debs vscodium main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscodium.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install codiumCode language: PHP (php)

Alternatives

The hype surrounding AI is the main reason why VS Code faces new competition. Cursor is a fork of VS Code with a built-in AI agent. Zed was created by the developers of Atom, but is written in Rust and is therefore lighter than VS Code. Both editors have tiered pricing structures based on AI usage. Zed is open-source, Cursor is not.