VS Code deactivates IntelliCode in favor of the paid Copilot

This made me laugh a bit as I remembered people saying “Oh we have Nadella now, things have changed”. Have they? Have they really?

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.

This piece of news follows that of Copilot being added in an "update" to LG TVs with no option to disable or opt out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268844

I felt the same way about vim. I never had the patience to get started and configure everything to get the full benefits.

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 think some of the big features of VSCode are the extensions and, equivalently, the nice debug support. I just started using VSCode about a week ago thanks to moving to a project that uses scons as its primary supported build tool, and I've learned to hate scons and love VSCode over that time. The completely manual tasks/launch/etc stuff is kind of weird at first, but then becomes amazing and far more convenient, after you get used to it. And the 'debugger' (kind of weird to frame it that way as its extension based, like everything) is amazing - extremely fast, great visualizations, and so on.

How would vim compare?

I think many people don't know or underestimate Zed. Native, fast, with extensions, with Vim mode support.

> 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

How about switching from VS Code to VS Codium? Same experience without the microsoft telemetry. I suppose Copilot won't be included due to licensing constraints.

  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.

For me Helix gets enough right out of the box I find myself reaching for it far more than I ever did with vi or Emacs. They're working on plugin support but I've not felt the need to investigate it at all.

I suggest the opposite and not starting with all the plugins and instead try to learn the vim way of doing things. Being too locked in to the old ways could prevent discovering all the great things vim can do.

The examples you mention already exist.

- navigation: plenty of native navigation in neovim, does lazy add anything specific?

- language integration: lsp, requires config sure but git clone isn't much work.

- integrated terminal: just run `:term`

Learning to think in vim means unlearning a lot of old habits. Today I only use fzf.vim, nvim-lspconfig and a theme, not even a plugin manager (I will migrate to the native one that's in nightly when it reaches stable though). Pretty much vanilla Neovim. I'm considering trying nvim-dap to get better debugger support but so far I'm fine with :termdebug for the languages it supports (c/go/rust just works).

When I find something I want vim to do I start with a keybinding, then a function, and maybe if it's complex add a plugin. Adding half of the available plugins just because creates an unnecessary attack vector you now have to keep an eye on.

> It has captured a staggering percentage of software development

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 believe their legacy IDE was a fork of Eclipse.

Intellicode being (officially) deprecated will impact VSCodium, yes. I too am more concerned about copilot being further “needed” or required in my VSCode fork. It’s already the biggest pain in the butt I’ve ever had to deal with in the context of VSCodium. I am not excited for the future.

I didn’t think it was even possible to install proprietary microsoft extensions in VSCodium, how is that related to the version of the editor and how would it affect VSCodium?

even then using vscodium does not free you from the grasps. vscode by design is designed to fracture - see https://ghuntley.com/fracture

Same boat. I hope they don't downstream nonsense like this.

Unfortunately, people often resist change and prefer to stick with what they know. Maybe a small percentage of people will look for alternatives but it'd be a drop in the ocean.

Given the number of vs code competitors, I think "extinguish" maybe on the other side this time.

They can try but they no longer have the power to do that.

if they waited another year or so they could have killed off jetbrains

patience is a virtue

It's actually in the third paragrapth of the article:

> The classic IntelliSense with language server for the used language is still free – but without AI support.

No, IntelliCode is an extension:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualSt...

IntelliCode was first released in 2018, well before the current AI landscape. The issue here is taking a free, functioning capability and arbitrarily disabling it in favour of a paid product. Microsoft is currently "updating" its internal adoption goals for the AI features it keeps shoving down consumers throats, but I'm sure that pumping the numbers by removing features is surely just coincidental and not desperate at all.

> Great there are other true open-source tools to be used zed, nvim

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.

> One of my New Year's resolutions is to learn Neovim properly.

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.

Try Zed. Open-source (GPL+Apache), reliable, fast, not bloated at all, decently configurable, amazing remote-host support, Vim mode, AI stuff totally optional, extensions/lang-servers available for many languages, and... well overall I find it very neat and polished!

(I'm not associated with Zed, just a happy user looking to share the goodness.)

If you really only care about syntax highlighting then nearly any code editor will do. Even nano supports it, it’s just disabled by default.

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.

LazyVim is about as easy as it gets in the Vim space for a fully-fledged (but customizable) editor.

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

Hit x against a couple and you're off to the races.

[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.

I've been having a very good time with Zed. Great vim motion support, and fast to the point where using VSCode feels like driving a semi truck by comparison.

https://zed.dev

For TUI, Helix has a lovely out-of-the-box experience. What little config there is (two TOML files) is relatively easy to grasp. The main barrier you'll face is setting up your LSPs, which need to be installed manually. (Luckily, there's `uvx -q` for Python LSPs.)

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.

I’ve been using Zed [1] for some time now. They are also pretty AI focused so it may only be a matter of time, but so far I’ve been able to disable all of the AI interactions.

[1] https://zed.dev/

I'm a Kate zealot, if you're on Linux it's great with some LSP servers. The plugins/extensions are nice. There are also macOS and Windows builds.

For the terminal, micro is nice if you're used to GUI editors.

What do you mean by "extensive install requirements"...

Anyway Zed is a good option.

VSCodium has been my go-to. VS Code was great for a bit but (even long before this) it was already suffering from the cancer that is "being a microsoft product" and it was being bloated to death like everything else they ship, but VSCodium seems to keep enough distance to be immune. Will it stay that way? Who's to say. I hope so though.

IntelliCode was first released in 2018, well before the current AI landscape where running each model costs a neighborhood's worth of power. Indeed, it runs using a small local model that costs essentially nothing in comparison to the rest of the machine running it.

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 believe this comment is nuts. How the hell are you justifying the removal of a free and common IDE functionality for something that it's rate limited based on usage? In any other context, this would have been called enshittification...

It is hard because they keep buying all the popular products

    > Don't miss anything from there either

Not even EF Core? C# pattern matching and switch expressions? Linq? I find these very hard not to miss when working in other langs. C# is a fantastic programming language nowadays.

Are you asking why is it bad that MS disables a plugin you're using to shove down your throat a paying alternative?