Running VSCode in Chromium on OpenBSD

2023-06-05

VSCode and its many variations are not available on OpenBSD. This doesn’t cause issue with many OpenBSD users, but those making the jump from Linux might miss access to such a popular editor. Lucky for us, there is a hacky workaround to solve this problem.

VSCode in the Browser

I tried my best to build something like code-server locally and run that directly in my browser - but I failed miserably. Instead, I fell back on vscode.dev which is essentially a remote version of code-server.

Getting things to work seamlessly proved a little more challenging. I found the best performance was running everything through Chromium with special parameters enabled on launch.

Note: The following assumes you have already installed chromium

First we need to disable unveil for Chromium. This will allow us to access our system files through vscode.dev using the “Open folder…” or “Open file…” commands without issue:

chrome --disable-unveil

Everything should work pretty solid right out the box now - except it doesn’t. Syntax highlighting does not work without enabling WASM/WebAssembly. Your experience might be different, but I had to include the following when launching Chromium from the terminal:

ENABLE_WASM=1 chrome --enable-wasm

Success! We can avoid typing out these complex commands everytime we want to launch our editor by setting up an alias (in my case via .zshrc):

alias vscode="ENABLE_WASM=1 chrome --enable-wasm --disable-unveil"

That’s it! Now I can just pop open VSCode on OpenBSD by simply running vscode in my terminal. Hopefully this can help others slowly transition over to OpenBSD - which you should do because it is amazing!