Because market size for code editors is very small compared to email, games, document viewers and social networks.
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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I've tried to set up Void, which is essentially FOSS Cursor, if that's what you're looking for.
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.
Microsoft is a notorious waste of time. They place no value on people over profit and they screw over everything. Most people likely just use emacs and vim for independent stuff, or whatever company junk elsewhere.
I write scientific articles with inline R code in Latex (using knitr), so I need syntax highlighting that jumps between two different languages within the document as well as spell checking and advanced (non AI) grammar tools for the text documents. Also I want something that looks kinda minimalistic and neat as a wiring interface - there is more writing than coding involved.
I'm sure there's some wizard somewhere who can do everything I need in Emacs, but I'm not terribly sophisticated. I just want something that works. Sadly, as much as I try to avoid anything Microsoft, VS Codium is the only thing I've found that fits my needs in a good way.
Not a fork, but also not ai infested is pulsar. It's the reincarnated atom, with lots of active development.
I still prefer it over vscode anything, the git plugin is far superior to vscode.
On other editors, I like VSCodium the best. Something like Neovim or Helix is a bit too hardcore for me, and I like having a folder tree to navigate between different files. Sublime Text isn't open-source and, in my experience, VSCodium is more customisable with plugins and such. Lite XL is one I tried recently and seems interesting with a bunch of plugins as well, but doesn't include a GUI for the settings page (there's a plugin for that though, but strange that it's not built-in...). I still like Lite XL, it's got support for a bunch of languages. The main drawback for me is that there doesn't seem to be a git branch tree or any way to run code within the code editor.
For git, there is the git diff and blame plugins, but there's no plugin for a git tree...
There is also Trae created by bytedance
Looking at their main page, it seems incredibly AI-related…it explicitly states that it will “build software solutions for you”
The ones that come to mind are not forks but whole new projects aiming to improve way more of the fundamental issues in VSCode, like Zed (https://zed.dev/)
Why would there need to be? What would a fork do?