Visual Studio Code VIM Extension

Microsoft came out with an open source text editor called Visual Studio Code. The cool thing about this application was that it was cross-platform so I could move seamlessly between MacOS, Ubuntu, and Windows 10 and always be using the same editor, extensions, and environment. I will save the conversation about Electron, the framework that this application uses for another time.

I started using the VSCodeVim extension to have Vim style keybindings (essential for my productivity), but found quite a few annoyances with the plugin. The extension was written in TypeScript (which I didn’t know at the time) but I decided to start contributing some bug fixes for issues that annoyed ME and figured I would learn typescript along the way.

https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim

Next thing I know I was one of the core maintainers of the extension and was contributing very often. I learned an enormous amount about open-source development, managing a community, and working with typescript. Currently, the extension has over 300,000 installs (2019 update: 7.9 million…), and using telemetry we can see that there are over 8,000 active users every day. This is pretty exciting and is cool to be shipping code to that many users.

At the time of writing this, I have 172 commits to the extensions repository (2019 update: 370+). The group of developers working on this is interesting, it is mostly the main developer, a few Microsoft employees from the visual studio code team, and myself, although the plugin has had many many contributors in the past. It is cool to see Microsoft invested in helping develop plugins to further the adoption of their open source software.

I continue to contribute to the extension weekly, and somehow managed to really really like typescript in the end…