the VS in VS Code stands for Vibed and Shitty

[dirtwizard666@cyberpunk.lol]

@davidgerard IT security kept sending very urgent emergency emails that some very serious security problem in vs code had to be patched by doing yet another manual update, week after week in this last year and I've finally just downloaded another text editor and purged it from all machines. Madness. Total self-sabotage by microslop.

[zzt@mas.to]

@davidgerard who in the fuck asked for weekly releases. can any currently depressed vs code users tell me this

[401matthall@mastodon.xyz]

@davidgerard

Ooof, I'm gonna step into the line-of-fire here... I still use it and _in general_ I like it.

I cannot `vim` I have tried and the cognitive overhead is _too_ high. I can `nano` but I like the fuzzy-search options I get with vscode.

You can hate me, I get it but I've only got so much bandwidth to learn a new thing and do enough work to not get fired when everyone else is spitting out twenty-five hundred lines a day via LLMs.

[401matthall@mastodon.xyz]

@davidgerard

So... Having said all that... What else is there that meets _my_ needs and isn't just your favorite editor?

[mikalai@privacysafe.social]

@davidgerard
Folks. Keep copies of previous versions, in case new one becomes too ... bad.
Download. Don't autoupdate. Or, have some snapshotting of your environment with tools.

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@401matthall cat|cc and get it right the first time

it's entirely unclear to me why you respond to "x editor is vibe coded" with "well what should I use *huh*??", it seems a bizarrely nonsequitur response

[zzt@mas.to]

@davidgerard @401matthall maslow’s hierarchy of needs but every level is TECO, the programmable editor that even its fans don’t like

I’m certain you can do 25,000 lines of code daily or whatever in TECO but neither you nor the code will survive

TECO was the original implementation language for emacs and all future implementations except one considered it damage that must be routed around

TECO: nobody’s favorite editor ️

[zzt@mas.to]

@davidgerard @401matthall TECO is such a good language that most of the common control structures are single unprintable characters, like $ (the escape key, yes you insert escape to terminate commands, if you use dollar sign instead it breaks) and ^R (control-R). oh you can’t figure out how to insert these characters into text files? well guess what editor lets you do that

TECO: it lets you do anything! you’ll fucking hate it!

[aaron@chirp.zadzmo.org]

@zzt This description of TECO makes me really glad I never learned vi beyond the most basic, common-to-all implementation features.

I know how to quit, save, move the cursor, and switch between edit and command, and... that's about it.

HP-UX 8? Redhat Enterprise 9? NetBSD 1.4.3 through 11? Alpine 3.22? Solaris 8 or 10? AIX 5L? Debian Buster? Irix 6.4? I type "vi $file", and it's all the same.

I have achieved immunity to change by pure obsolescence alone.
@davidgerard @401matthall

[zzt@mas.to]

@davidgerard @401matthall TECO! how does it look? I swear to fuck it looks like

EBhello.c$$P$$SHello$0TT$$-5DIGoodbye$0TT$$EX$$

(example stolen from Wikipedia because I’m taking far too much of a dump to log into my TOPS-20 account where the horrors live)

and again $ is where you mash the escape key if editing live or insert escape into your script otherwise. this shit opens a file named hello.c and replaces Hello with Goodbye??? supposedly????

you’re gonna fucking hate TECO, as requested

[zzt@mas.to]

@davidgerard @401matthall P$$S Hello$, I scream at my computer, taking myself extremely seriously as a programmer

piss hello indeed, it replies back

[zzt@mas.to]

@aaron @davidgerard @401matthall the most telling thing about TECO is that when the emacs community needed a set of modal editing commands they went to great expense to write an ecosystem of vim emulators and supporting code in lisp rather than ever touch TECO again

the only TECO in elisp implementation I know of is a joke implementation from like 6 years ago

[zzt@mas.to]

@davidgerard @401matthall I love TECO, it’s so bad, I say, pulling on my TECO glove

feel free to use the rest of this thread to post about editors that meet _his_ needs (TECO is Turing complete, of course it’s Turing complete, it’s much more painful if it’s Turing complete) but are absolutely not your favorite. just the most dreadful, so bad it’s good shit that’s ever edited text (or punched paper tape, TECO doesn’t care)

[citrusui@mastodon.social]

@davidgerard weekly releases 🫩 (as a system admin i dislike more software having more updates)

[david_chisnall@infosec.exchange]

@davidgerard

The absolute security disaster that is the remote mode of VS Code (which shipped before Copilot was available even internally) we makes me wonder if this might be a project that LLM slop can’t make any worse.

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@david_chisnall @davidgerard no, it's definitely worse now. I switched to it from Sublime Text (after many years of paying for the latter) because VSCode had an actually sensible extension model, especially for language servers and debuggers, and ST never did. unfortunately it's reached a point where I'll have to switch to something else—for which I currently have no alternative because I rely on the "Live Share" extension nobody else has bothered implementing (in a better way or otherwise)

[arclight@oldbytes.space]

@davidgerard I saw the change in release schedule from monthly to weekly and I cannot believe anyone can do substantial quality code review on a code of that size in a week.

I do not believe they know what they are shipping nor do I believe they see this as a problem.

Aside from critical bug fixes, why should I need to update my editor more than quarterly or annually? It's just gratuitous risk and churn.

[david_chisnall@infosec.exchange]

@whitequark @davidgerard

I was never a fan of the VS Code extension model because it had absolutely no security model at all. This made it trivial for malware to infest the extension-store ecosystem. It was to text editors what ActiveX was to web browsers.