vscode-remote-oss

No? The non-free binary is the client not the server. There are free implementations of the client for Code OSS. The server installed on the remote machine is part of vscode itself called the REH (remote extension host). It’s the core of the editor running in headless mode on the server. Here is an example open source implementation of the non-free binary client (it’s a 4 files that call various editor APIs) https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-oss This is REH entry (the binary installed on the remote machine) https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/main/src/vs/server/...

There is an open source reimplementation (or two?) I thought I used this one: https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-oss and everything just worked, though the directions on that page look complicated, so it might be the wrong project. It was in the store that ships with the open source build and was definitely open source.

That’s the extension which launches the server. The server itself, which is what runs on the remote machine, is part of the vscode repo itself. You can see this open source extension for an example of what the extension does as well as an explanation of what it does https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-oss Mainly just sets up the UI/connect commands in vscode UI and launched REH (the vscode server) on the remote machine. The actual server is just a different binary you build from the same repo. Non-Microsoft OSS builds of vscode work with SSH fine.

I guess that's https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-oss

I’ve started using Remote OSS [0] with some custom scripts to install and run the remote code host. Works great on remote servers and even with devcontainers on remote hosts. You can use a script like the one here to handle automatically installing and setting up the tunnel [1]. I’m working on a PR that adds a way to automatically run custom scripts to set up the tunnels as well [2]. [0] https://open-vsx.org/extension/xaberus/remote-oss [1] https://github.com/CGamesPlay/dotfiles/blob/master/files/.lo... [2] https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-oss/pull/9

> there is now an open source remote mode extension URL please? Open VSX lists several but it's hard to evaluate if they're complete & stable from just the READMEs. For example, https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-oss has existed for a long time, but one would need to spend a few hours to know if it works well enough.

There's also remote-oss [1], which is fairly low-level (you have to install it on), but doesn't require you to pass your traffic through the GitHub proxy that Microsoft's service requires (I believe) and is also truly open source (which means, for example, that it can also be used with Codium [2], not just the Microsoft's VS Code distribution). [1]: https://github.com/xaberus/vscode-remote-oss [2]: https://vscodium.com/

The extension API proposals and RPC protocol are open sourced and the server code is just an electron-less version of the regular VSCode extension host (hence, remote extension host, REH). This is all part of the VSCode OSS release. What the proprietary extensions provide is integration. For example, the SSH variant automatically installs and launches an REH instance on the remote host and sets up port forwarding. If you are willing to start the instance and to forward ports yourself, you can use the tiny extension I wrote [1,2] (See the README how to enable the necessary extension proposals.). It allows you to connect to a local port you configure in the config. It is based on an example extension (vscode-test-resolver) in the OSS release that is used to test this functionality [3]. Microsoft is not really hiding any of this, so I am a