Well it's a helluva lot faster to make for one. For two, just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now. Reducing the barrier of entry has obvious advantages.

These new editors are trying to differentiate themselves via their AI features. Working on the core editor may waste resources that could have been better spent improving the AI features.

Making an IDE sounds like an insane amount of effort.

FWIW, the Fuchsia team was working on an editor that had a Flutter UI when run in Fuchsia:

https://xi-editor.io/frontends.html

How would you say Zed is innovating? Never heard of it, just taking a peek now.

> I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something extremely complex that only a handful players managed to get right using gui stacks made with only mobile in mind that are desperately trying to catch up to desktop now

> AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is gatekeeping functionality used by Copilot from extensions so they can't be used by these agents. reply

I always wonder how this works legally. VSCode needs to comply with the LGPL (it's based on Chromium/Blink which is LGPL) ; they should provide the entire sources that allow us to rebuild our own "official" VSCode binary

Could you give an example of what they're gatekeeping for Copilot exclusively? I'm kinda confused because Copilot in VS Code isn't exactly a powerhouse of unique features in my experience, it still feels well behind Roo/Kilo Code in most ways I can think of, although much closer to the competition than it was a year ago.

Has (kinda) not been true for half a year

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/05/19/openSourceAIE...

> AI UI

2026: every day ...

I was going to ask why all these companies choose to fork the entire IDE rather than just writing an extension like every other sane developer, and this response is the most believable reason why.

But Microsoft made VSCode lol, I think being able to gatekeep things like that shouldn’t allow a billion dollar company just reuse all of your code instead of making their own IDE

You just described Eclipse RCP.

The issue with Eclipse and that approach is the complexity of mixing plugins to do everything, which kills the UX.

When VSCode started, the differentiator from Atom and Eclipse was that the extension points were intentionally limited to optimize the user experience. But with the introduction of Copilot that wasn’t enough, hence the amount of forks.

I think that the Zed approach of having a common protocol to talk with agents (like a LSP but for agents) is much better. The only thing that holds me from switching to Zed is that so far my experience using it hasn’t been that good (it still has many rough edges)

there are now 15 competing standards

There's also Eclipse Che. They wrote a web based IDE from scratch and made it compatible with VS Code extensions but also provided extra APIs.

There's only one electron. It looks like separate ones because it's traveling backwards and forwards in time.

Microsoft has very specific constraints on what extensions can and can't do, it's not a free for all. They're actively defending their mote by allowing Copilot to do things in a way that extensions couldn't. That's why all the serious contenders make a fork, it's simply not possible to have the same integration otherwise.