For the past few years, my editor of choice has been Visual Studio Code. It’s not perfect and definitely not lightweight, but it strikes a sweet spot between features, extensions, and performance.
Running the proprietary Microsoft build on FreeBSD isn’t really an option but thankfully, the open-source build works just fine. So why write this post at all if VS Code already works?
Because there’s one thing that’s been holding me back from fully daily-driving FreeBSD:
ARM64, or nothing
I need an ARM64 machine. Period.
After spending time on Apple’s M1/M2 Macs (coming from a large x86_64 desktop), going back to x86_64 feels like a regression, both in performance and battery life. Unfortunately, there’s currently no FreeBSD-supported (or even Linux, as far as I can tell) ARM64 laptop that truly rivals Apple Silicon. I really hope Framework or someone else changes that in the coming years.
The productivity killer for me: remote dev
On both Debian (my favorite Linux distro) and macOS, VS Code is a great experience. But most of the projects I work on live elsewhere: embedded Linux systems, OpenWRT devices, and more recently, FreeBSD boxes.
That usually means NFS mounts, SSHFS, or similar setups. And honestly? They’re awful.
My current go-to stack is SvelteKit with a Go backend, and my day job involves a lot of OpenWRT work. As projects grow, editing code over NFS or SSHFS becomes painful especially with many LSPs running. In some cases, it took 5–10 minutes just to open a file. NFS was slightly more tolerable, but after running into countless weird permission issues, I gave up on it entirely.
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