cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64784462

We will open source the GitHub Copilot Chat extension. It’s the next step towards making VS Code an open source AI editor.

If I open a text file that needs root privileges to modify, I get this error:

Failed to save 'this_file': Insufficient permissions. Select 'Retry as Sudo' to retry as superuser.

That's fine, that's expected.

But when I click on "Retry as Sudo", I get this error:

Failed to save 'this_file': Unable to find pkexec or kdesudo.

This happens though pkexec is installed on my machine, at /usr/bin/pkexec; and I granted VSCodium access to it through Flatseal. How do I fix this?

I made this because I started using Codium but wanted to use an extension that didn't have an OpenVSX equivalent and found out MS removed the VSIX download buttons on the marketplace site.

This should also work for Code-OSS and the MS VS Code. You can also just use it to only download the VSIX files so you can keep them locally for future use or take them to another computer that does not have internet connection for whatever reason to install there.

It will also check for dependencies and download them if you don't already have them installed.

At the moment it only downloads the latest versions of an extension.

Sharing because I imagine I'm not the only one with this issue.

found this in an extension description today:

Why not use the Dev Containers from VS Code? Because Microsoft Devcontainer is a proprietary extension incompatible with VS Codium.

Why it is not on VS Code Marketplace? Because Microsoft is a VS Code gatekeeper and won't allow anyone to publish an extension if it uses Proposed API. Except Microsoft and its "partners", of course.

Meanwhile, these API are the only way to implement an extension like Open Remote SSH or Devcontainers.

Microsoft promises to allow everyone to use these API and publish extensions based on them in the future, once these API are "stable". But it's been many years since Microsoft first published an extension backed by a proposed API. It has also published many other extensions supported by the same API. However, the API is "unstable" and doesn't seem to be going to stabilise anytime soon.

If this issue gets 20 upvotes, the bot says it'll get added to the backlog to get fixed. Just posting it here to help it get some traction. We have ~40 days before it's simply closed.

Last month I posted this issue to the VSCode github about a bug where new instances of VSCode launched from a windows terminal fail to inherit the environment if VSCode is already running. I have to use Windows where I work and I often need different environments when working on different projects so I'd really like this issue to get fixed.