VSCodium/vscodium

binary releases of VS Code without MS branding/telemetry/licensing

This is not a fork. This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft’s vscode repository into freely-licensed binaries with a community-driven default configuration.

Table of Contents

• Download/Install
  • Install with Brew
  • Install with Chocolatey
  • Install with Scoop
  • Install with Package Manager
  • Install on Arch Linux
  • Flatpak Option
• Why Does This Exist
• More Info
• Supported OS

Download/Install

:tada: :tada: Download latest release here :tada: :tada:

More info / helpful tips are here.

Install with Brew (Mac)

If you are on a Mac and have Homebrew installed:

brew cask install vscodium

Note for Mac OS X Mojave users: if you see “App can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software” when opening VSCodium the first time, you can right-click the application and choose Open. This should only be required the first time opening on Mojave.

Install with Chocolatey (Windows)

If you use Windows and have Chocolatey installed (thanks to @Thilas):

choco install vscodium

Install with Scoop (Windows)

If you use Windows and have Scoop installed:

scoop bucket add extras
scoop install vscodium

Install with Package Manager (Linux)

You can always install using the downloads (deb, rpm, tar) on the releases page, but you can also install using your favorite package manager and get automatic updates. @paulcarroty has set up a repository with instructions here. Any issues installing VSCodium using your package manager should be directed to that repository’s issue tracker.

Install on Arch Linux

VSCodium is available in AUR as package vscodium-bin, maintained by @plague-doctor.

Flatpak Option (Linux)

VSCodium is not available as a Flatpak app, but @amtlib-dot-dll has done significant work to package up the open source build of Visual Studio Code without telemetry, very similarly to VSCodium. That package is available here and the build repo is here.

Why Does This Exist

This repository contains build files to generate free release binaries of Microsoft’s VSCode. When we speak of “free software”, we’re talking about freedom, not price.

Microsoft’s downloads of Visual Studio Code are licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contain telemetry/tracking. According to this comment from a Visual Studio Code maintainer:

When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.

When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license

This repo exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. The build scripts in this repo clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.

If you want to build from source yourself, head over to Microsoft’s vscode repo and follow their instructions. This repo exists to make it easier to get the latest version of MIT-licensed VSCode.

Microsoft’s build process (which we are running to build the binaries) does download additional files. This was brought up in Microsoft/vscode#49159 and Microsoft/vscode#45978. These are the packages downloaded during build:

• Extensions from the Microsoft Marketplace:
  • ms-vscode.node-debug2
  • ms-vscode.node-debug
• From Electron releases (using gulp-atom-electron)
  • electron
  • ffmpeg

More Info

Documentation

For more information on getting all the telemetry disabled and tips for migrating from Visual Studio Code to VSCodium, have a look at this Docs page.

Extension Licensing

Please note that some Visual Studio Code extensions have licenses that restrict their use to the official Visual Studio Code builds and therefore do not work with VSCodium. See this note on the Docs page for what’s been found so far and possible workarounds.

How are the VSCodium binaries built?

If you would like to see the commands we run to build vscode into VSCodium binaries, have a look at the .travis.yml file (for Linux and OS X builds) and the win32-build.yml file (for Windows builds). These build files call all the other scripts in the repo. If you find something that doesn’t make sense, feel free to ask about it on Gitter.

The builds are run every day, but exit early if there isn’t a new release from Microsoft. To examine the build logs, go here for Linux / OS X and here for Windows

Supported OS

• OS X (zip, dmg)
• Linux x64 (deb, rpm, AppImage, tar.gz)
• Linux x86 (deb, rpm, tar.gz) (up to v1.35.1)
• Linux arm64 (deb, tar.gz)
• Linux armhf (deb, tar.gz)
• Windows x64
• Windows x86

Donate

If you would like to support the development of VSCodium, feel free to send BTC to 3PgjE95yzBDTrSPxPiqoxSgZFuKPPAix1N.

License

MIT