Besides VSCodium (which isn’t really a fork, it’s just building from the source code of VSCode without the Microsoft stuff), there aren’t any VSCode forks/derivatives that aren’t AI-assisted editors (see Cursor, Windsurf, those are the main two, right?).
That feels a bit weird to me, as many other pieces of software have lots of forks and derivatives (browsers, operating systems, email clients, emulators, PDF viewers, Fediverse clients, etc.). I guess people who would bother to create a fork and doesn’t want to put AI in everything just uses a different editor.
There’s nothing wrong with VSCodium, it’s awesome. My only gripe with it is that the rpm package takes ages to update compared to everything else I use, which is weird. Other than that issue, it runs fine, and I like the flexibility that plugins give me. I just find it odd that there aren’t any other VSCode derivatives/forks.
What would you want a VSCode fork to do that can’t be easily done with extensions? (which Codium can run)
It’s more about not reinventing the wheel. A fork needs to have a reason to exist, because it takes significant effort to maintain and develop, and there is significant opportunity cost when that level of development activity is committed to that purpose. If there’s no reason to have a fork, then it’s more efficient to keep all the development energy and momentum focused in one place. And for Codium, that place is the extension repository.
If Microsoft starts actively making the core software worse, restricting or stopping updates to the open source code, tying telemetry into features in ways difficult to remove, or otherwise sabotaging the functionality or features of the non-Microsoft parts of the code, there may eventually be a need for more, harder forks taking things in potentially different directions to get around Microsoft’s interference. But since that hasn’t happened, the non-Microsoft build process remains quite trivial and VSCode remains a perfectly cromulent editor when building it without the Microsoft crap, there’s really no need for any other forks. Codium does everything it would be reasonably expected to do.