18 months ago I was all-in on VSCode. lol

Once upon a time, the main tools I used for work were Vim and tmux. And until recently, once every few months I'd get this compulsive urge to try to recapture those glory days. That urge has stopped lately though. Visual Studio Code has reached a tipping point where the Vim support and terminal emulator are a better package than anything I can hack together with lua plugins and tmux config.

Maining VSCode Terminal

Hasn't aged well! Have you seen the VSCode website lately?

Yikes!

So now I'm all-out. It's glory days or bust!

Real happy with my init.lua for Neovim. Doing Vim config in Lua is such a dream come true. For everyday work, my core needs are simple enough.

1. LSP diagnostics (to highlight my mistakes)
2. Git integration (to highlight my changes)
3. Format on save

Those use cases are so mainstream that you're spoiled for choice regarding how to set them up. I landed on lspsaga, gitsigns and conform.

It's such an incredible relief to be back working in proper Vim instead of some IDE's bootleg reimplementation. You really learn to appreciate how finely crafted Vim's core text editing functionality is by spending a few years seeing talented people trying and failing to reproduce it in competing software time and time again. Zed's implementation was decent, but even that had quirks I never quite got used to.

Zellij is fantastic too. It's like a fully configured tmux right out of the box. And while keybinding conflicts between Vim and tmux used to be a big pain in the ass, with Zellij I've managed to move all its keybindings onto the ⌘ key where there's no conflicts at all. Its vanilla out-of-the box UX is what I've been trying (and failing) to coerce VSCode or Zed to be all these years too.

Wasn't such a difficult switch to make in the end. This community-built tooling has become really fucking slick over the last few years. And with all the commercial tooling focusing so intensely on AI it seems reasonable to expect that balance to continue to shift in the coming years. I mean if you're a product manager on VSCode and all your KPIs are about AI, why even prioritise fixing code editing bugs if a degraded coding experience could arguably drive AI adoption?

Nice being rid of tools that are funded with blood money and all. Did you know Microsoft recently fired a group of No Azure For Apartheid protestors? Or that Zed recently took money from Shaun Maguire & co? Increasingly I find myself wanting as few points of contact with this type of depravity as humanly possible in my everyday life.

I had actually underestimated how good this integrity boost would feel. Seems I had become quite numb to the dissonance of sharing in the mundane everyday spoils of a genocidal war I was otherwise willing to boycott a beloved event for. Cool as hell to discover that the high road is increasingly the best one too these days, at least when it comes to devtools.

Everyone was up in arms in August about GitHub's new status as a department of Microsoft instead of a subsidiary of Microsoft. Understandable, I guess. Moving it into their CoreAI department makes their vision for the world's leading open source collaboration platform very clear, and it's at odds with what a lot of that community actually wants.

For me the uproar about it fell a little bit flat though. Since July I've been getting about an email per week inviting me to vote on a new community decision at Codeberg, and all this newfound agency has made that kind of impotent anger harder to identify with. So instead of feeling swept up by the collective dismay about the direction Microsoft is steering GitHub, all I could think about was the raw potential in it.

Here's an example. For a while now I've been following a debate in the Codeberg community about licensing. Codeberg only provides free hosting for projects with free licenses, and there's a lack of clarity about exactly which licenses count as "free enough". Opinions vary about how broad the criteria should be and the discussions have been interesting to read along with.

I'd been reading all this with the same old-fashioned mentality of powerlessness that you get used to as a user of an undemocratic platform operated on a for-profit basis under the dictatorship of a company. Then last week I suddenly got one of these poll notification emails inviting me to cast my vote on the decision and I was slightly taken aback by it. This had been the whole point of joining the Codeberg e.V. but somehow each time that decision pays off it's a surprise all over again.

So it seems like it's taking a little while to acclimatise and raise my expectations up to a new level of agency and dignity. But at the same time, seeing all that despair about Microsoft's utterly predictable consolidation of control over GitHub made me understand how much of a mindset shift I've already undergone.

Joining the Codeberg e.V. is becoming one of my favourite little decisions of 2025. With the profit-driven side of the industry disappearing up its own arsehole to deliver an AI revolution few of us seem to actually want, I think it's a unique opportunity for a community-led non-profit like Codeberg to gain ground. And it's really exciting to imagine the potential second-order effects on the industry in general if more of us get a taste of what this kind of democratic model can deliver.