I think the biggest risk for those companies (see GitPod who had multiple blog posts about it) is that the good parts of VSC really are closed source or not MIT-licensed so you can't use things like share or extensions and many others.

I think cloud vendors like gitlab and others should actually work on rewriting or maintaining a different fork or write an entirely different web editor altogether.

VSC is not a piece of competitor-friendly software and most importantly it does not support mobile browsers so imho all these companies are locking themselves in the past as the need for mobile and tablet editing (even if limited) is going to keep rising and they are not offering it.

VSCodium, aka VSCode without the Microsoft proprietary bits, uses https://open-vsx.org/ as the extension registry. The hard problem is convincing devs to cross-publish

I have published some extensions with about 300k users in total. So far, I've only had two people ask me to publish on open-vsx. I did make one attempt, but something broke in the signup procedure, and it took 3 weeks for someone from support to come back to me with a fix, so I had moved on.

If more people were asking for it, I would try again, but the time spent per user to set up a pipeline for each extension just doesn't make sense at the moment. I'd rather spend those nights adding features for the existing mainline users. Cynical perhaps, but there's no reward for making extensions, so there's a limited amount of time I can spend on it.

I have a few extensions, notably an update to subtle-brackets, which I cross-published. It's relatively painless - Eclipse running Open VSX is clunky, but no more clunky and UX-weird than the marketplace (which holy shit, talk about terrible UX). The issue is that VSCodium has holes, and not all extensions will run correctly.

I'd like to see a hard fork for VSCodium, where the community could make UX/DX upgrades that VSCode's Microsoft-employed gatekeepers have summarily shut down time and time again (see: issues on the find/replace dialogs)

VSC does have reasonable support for tablet editing, there was a big push to make it fully compatible with Safari on the iPad when Codespaces was first in beta. You’re right about mobile though, it’s a nightmare.

Do people do that much code editing on their phone, though?

People don't really optimize for 0.001% of use cases.

deadlines are for real...

They have one, it's called GitHub Codespaces. (Remember, nobody wants to sell software any more, only services).

Microsoft's strategy is to build a moat around VS Code/GitHub. Compared to GitLab, they have:

* Brand recognition of VS Code

* VS Code extension gallery that only VS Code can connect to

* Buttons in the Desktop version of VS Code to connect to GitHub Codespaces, Azure etc

* MS-written closed source extensions- Pylance, parts of OmniSharp, Remote SSH, Remote Containers, Remote WSL, Live Share, GitHub Copilot, IntelliCode, Python WASM In the Browser, GitHub Codespaces integration.

* Control over the VS Code API. They can add just the functionality their extensions need and nothing more.

* They own the LSP specs. They can add just the functionality that VS Code implements and nothing more.

* Control over the VS Code "proposed" API. If you want to use these APIs in your extension, you have to be whitelisted by Microsoft (or ask users to install a non-VS Code version of VS Code). Gitlab can offer a Web IDE, they can't offer integration with desktop VS Code to provide those nice features like desktop-level keyboard shortcuts, Git Clone, compare with working tree, etc as that would use the "proposed" APIs.

Right, I just realised the GitLab Web IDE is running fully in the browser, so there is no Terminal. Maybe they are considering a later version which is more like Codespaces, letting you develop and run your code, keeping the browser as the user interface.

> Known issues

> The Web Terminal and Live Preview are not available in the Web IDE Beta.

> These features may become available at a later date.

Hi, GitLab PM for the Web IDE and Remote Development here! You're right, the Web IDE itself is running fully in the browser, but if you try to open a new Terminal panel you'll see that it can be configured to connect to a remote host. The setup (for now) requires a bit of manual config on your end but we're working on making that easier in the future!

This blog post gives a little more high level overview of the current functionality and where we're headed: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/12/15/get-ready-for-new-g...

For a deeper dive you can check out our Remote Development [direction page](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/create/editor/remote_deve...) and [documentation](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/remote_development/)

This. We need to remember this if we’re to use VS Code and any of their LSPs.