Yep. And Google Colab is a Trojan horse. Give away free GPUs for a few years to choke out any competition, guaranteed they start charging for them once they’ve done that.
> This package just installs code-server on Google Colab, whatever that is.
I laughed way too hard at this, because I have thoughts like this bounce around my head nearly every time I read about a Google product. It reminds me of Microsoft circa ~2006, when they were doing all kinds of wacky and ill-defined projects that turned into pure bloatware.
> code-server, that takes VSCode and modifies it to run in a browser
Not only that, but it's also only the open-source parts of VSCode. Notably, you don't get access to the same extensions marketplace. Code-server does link to many open-source extensions, but certain things (e.g. Intellisense) aren't available.
That's interesting, but do the Google Colab Terms of Service allow this? The article goes into how, but not if you're allowed to. Until you're certain it is allowed, I would suggest not using it. You don't want to be locked out of your (at best) colab or (at worst) Google account because you wanted a fancy IDE.
I think in general you can run arbitrary code on Colab. That's the entire point. Your CPU and RAM usage are monitored and rate limited; you have to pay $$$ for more powerful specs and at that point if you're paying them I doubt they care what you're doing with what you paid for.
Gave it a try. Font's rendered incorrectly and were unusable which is an obvious deal breaker when you're trying to Code in a seriffed fallback. It was really slow which is my entire experience of all Jupyter/Collab notebook style approaches to coding. I really don't see what anyone else sees in this. If you want to collaborate with people just learn some tried and tested tools that are open and work.
The future is truly horrifying. I do not want to run my text editor in my browser. Soon our text editors will be hosted by Google or something, and we will edit files with them online. Ugh. Imagine requiring Internet connection and a browser just to edit a file on your computer! I know I am exaggerating a bit, but jeez, this direction sucks.
I have a robot who's firmware can be updated via bluetooth from a web application running in Chrome -- so I get your point. Oddly enough, arbitrary access to files are still off limits.
I used theia-ide of openshift.io. It's good as well but sometimes the browser tab was freeze and I had to reload. A bit annoy. An other choice is Google Cloudshell.
Certainly the base editor did, but was it crossed over the (vague and subjectively defined) line between an advanced text editor to a full IDE by the point MS forked/integrated it for VS Code? My history is hazy here.
I have just started playing with repl.it and am enjoying it. repl.it is using a similar IDE to the VSCode fork from the OP.
I am trying to build a small web app using repl.it as my dev environment and deploy on google app engine. The stack is flask/mysql/html5/bootstrap.
I have a workflow where I can commit to a dev branch inside repl.it, push to github and them merge to master. If merge is no-conflict, it uses github actions to deploy to google app engine.
There are trade offs, but I am really enjoying the ability to just start coding by opening a browser and having my full dev environment in a tab. Really fun!
I'm curious. I know it's great for one-offs, but is anyone actually using VSCode as their main tool when so many native IDEs and text editors are available?
I would love to know what's your use case. Maybe I'm missing something big.
I use it for every project. I mainly code node.js and sometimes Python.
Speed has never been an issue for me; VSCode boots up in under a second and easily chews through thousands of lines of code (albeit without tokenization).
The new SSH connection mode has been a lifesaver for me - you can now sync VSCode with a server you have SSH access to, meaning you can browse/open/save files remotely, and open as many terminals as you want on the target server. This makes it super easy to e.g. test code on different hardware or view logs or edit config files and such.
I'm using it as my main editor for a Django codebase. It's not my favorite IDE, it's a bit slow too but it's the best I could find for what I do. Also I haven't found any good native IDE that can handle Python, Django, HTML, CSS and JS as well as VSCode. There are IDEs that can do Python (and Django) and others for HTML, CSS and JS but I don't want to be constantly switching between the two. If you know a good IDE that can replace VSCode for my use case please let me know.
I've tried JetBrains for Android dev and it's the best IDE I've used so far but it suffers from the same slowness issues as VSCode and has longer startup times. I should give it a try for Python/web dev, it may be a good replacement for VSCode for long sessions (I'll still be using VSCode for shorter ones because it starts quickly).
Couple of years ago Salesforce switched from Eclipse plug-ins for development and went all in on VSCode. They have a set of plug-ins that log in to Salesforce and send configurations and code back and forth. They're even going to use "VSCode in the browser" to edit code in place in your organization.
Absolutely... directory tree view and integrated terminal are the two big killer features for me... everything else is just extra awesomeness. Support for JS projects is pretty much best in class (Though jetbrains/webstorm is decent too).
Support for other languages like go, rust, C# (.Net Core) are pretty decent. The extensions/marketplace is incredible in terms of the breadth and depth of support for almost anything you can think of. I even have an enviornment setup with a settings file defaulting to CP437, where I use SSH remote extension in code to configure a remote telnet BBS.
Beyond all of this, it's relatively quick to load and run, though there are faster editors, I haven't seen a (much) faster IDE really.
The remote ssh extension is probably the third killer feature for me. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of those three things alone. I don't use some of the other features nearly as much as I rely on the console a lot, and the integrated terminal just makes it in the box as an experience.
https://github.com/cdr/code-server
This package just installs code-server on Google Colab, whatever that is.
Hosted VSCode instances that Microsoft has on Azure and in beta on GitHub are a different thing and are not open source.