Which proprietary software do you prefer over their open-source alternatives, and why?

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Visual studio code. There's nothing else that's anywhere near as good that doesn't cost money. Those annoying terminal text editors just don't do it for me. I need code autocomplete and do not understand how there exist people who have the patience to get by without it. I do not have the time to be switching tabs 20 times a second because I can't remember function parameter overloads. That intellisense autocomplete is just too good.
- You could just use vs codium as a fully open source option.
  
  Yes, but installing plugins is a pita
- VSCode is open source though? Although I guess maybe not the plugins?
  
  It's similar to chrome. Chrome is not open source, its base project chromium is. The VSCode distributable has closed source stuff on top which is mostly telemetry. There's a purely open source build of VSCode called vscodium.
  
  I use the proprietary version for the remote tools and settings sync.
  I can work from home on my windows PC with no loss of productivity compared to my Linux workstation.
  And the ability to open any GitHub repo in the browser based Code just by pressing . is a game changer.
- VSCodium exists. Not sure whether it has intellisense by default but might be worth a try. It is open source and without all the Microsoft telemetry
- What are you talking about? Neovim LSP autocompletion is way faster and smoother than VSCode's, and one of the reasons I personally have trouble working in the latter nowadays.
  
  He thinks that the ‘annoying’ command line editors can’t do autocomplete…
  Obviously not well informed lol.
  
  Exactly
- both GNU emacs and vim can have autocompletion powered by the same language servers that vscode uses. They support the same features (jump to definition, rename symbol under cursor etc etc) as well.
  
  If you go with vim you might also want to consider using neovim specifically
  
  I suspect the op doesn't realize that you need to setup plugins in order to achieve this functionality. But yes, the functionality on VS Code that provides auto complete is from Language Servers and Neovim and other editors do support the Language Server Protocol via plugins.
- Fair enough. I get that it takes to much time to setup. But it definetly is possible to get autocompletion and syntax higlighting etc. In a terminal based editor like vim.
  I don't mind spending a copule of hours setting up my development environment, since I spend so much time coding anyway. So its a trade off. But if VS code works for you, theb definetly stick with that. I used VS code alot myself but tried exploring other tools and switched to vim. But it nerver hurts to try other things out.

655 comments