Microsoft claims Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is open source, yet it restricts the use of its Marketplace extensions in non-Microsoft products like VSCodium (telemetry/tracking free open source fork), Cursor, Windsurf, Trae, and other VS Code-based IDEs, enforcing what some see as monopolistic control. This guide provides a workaround to enable the VS Code Marketplace in VSCodium and Trae (more to be added soon), allowing you to freely use extensions. Note that using the VS Code Marketplace with non-Microsoft products may violate its terms of use, which state that extensions are intended for use only with Microsoft Visual Studio products. Proceed at your discretion after reviewing the terms.
To configure VSCodium to use the VS Code Marketplace instead of the default OpenVSX Registry, you can either set environment variables or create a custom product.json file.
