VSCodium for Engineers — The Complete Guide: A Modern, Fully Open Code Editor for Free
VSCodium is a build of the open-source code of Visual Studio Code — the same editor and almost the same extensions, but without telemetry and under the MIT licence. It suits engineers who write scripts, firmware and technical documents and want one tool for all of them.
VSCodium
VSCodium project
The VS Code editor as a fully open build — Python, MATLAB, C, Markdown and more, without telemetry.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Extensions for every language — Python, Julia, C/C++, MATLAB, LaTeX, Markdown and Typst.
- Debugger — breakpoints, variables and a built-in terminal.
- Built-in Git — colour-coded changes and one-click commits.
- Notebooks — open Jupyter notebooks directly in the editor.
- PlatformIO — firmware development for Arduino and ESP32 boards.
How it differs from VS Code
The code is the same; the difference is the build and the licence. VSCodium uses the open Open VSX extension registry, so a few Microsoft extensions are not available. For most engineering work there are good open alternatives.
Related tools
For quick editing of input and data files on Windows — Notepad++. For version control — Git. For a MATLAB-style scientific environment — Spyder.
Notepad++
Don Ho
A light text and code editor for Windows — input files for analysis programs, data files and scripts.
Get it from the vendor
Git
Git project
Version control for code, scripts and input files — who changed what and when, and return to any version.
Get it from the vendor
Spyder
Spyder project
A MATLAB-style scientific Python environment — editor, variable explorer, console and plots in one window.
Get it from the vendor
Python
Python Software Foundation
The language behind most modern engineering computation, and its full ecosystem.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
For anyone who writes code regularly, VSCodium is a modern, complete editor — completely free and fully transparent.