VSCodium: Microsoft-free Visual Studio Code binaries

Visual Studio Code is an awesome text editor. It is in fact my favorite one. I use it for writing blog posts, I use it for looking at code (although I prefer JetBrains IDEs for actual coding) and I use it whenever I need a text editor.

What I really like is the plugin system. There are plugins for almost everything and you also get recommended addons for the file you currently look at (probably based on the filetype). You can also customize the look using themes (I use the Nord theme).

However the standard VSCode has branding, licensing and telemetry by Microsoft. By default it watches what you do and sends information about that to the Redmond company. Also the license of the binaries provided by Microsoft is a not-FLOSS license, so Microsoft would be able to hide suspicious things inside without telling anyone. The source code itself is licensed using the MIT license though, so you can compile it yourself and you have an FLOSS text editor.

But because compiling things yourself can be complicated, annoying and time consuming, there’s VSCodium.

The VSCodium project takes Microsoft’s source code, disables the telemetry mechanism, replaces the branding and builds FLOSS binaries of Visual Studio Code for Linux, Mac and Windows.

If you use VSCode, I can really recommend to take a look and use VSCodium binaries instead, just to be on the FLOSS side. 😉

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