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<h1 id="running-vscode-in-chromium-on-openbsd">Running VSCode in Chromium on OpenBSD</h1>
<p>2023-06-05</p>
<p>VSCode and its many variations are not available on OpenBSD. This doesn&#8217;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 <em>hacky</em> workaround to solve this problem.</p>
<h2 id="vscode-in-the-browser">VSCode in the Browser</h2>
<p>I tried my best to build something like <code>code-server</code> locally and run that directly in my browser - but I failed miserably. Instead, I fell back on <a href="https://vscode.dev">vscode.dev</a> which is essentially a remote version of <code>code-server</code>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> The following assumes you have already installed <code>chromium</code></p>
</blockquote>
<p>First we need to disable <a href="https://man.openbsd.org/unveil.2">unveil</a> for Chromium. This will allow us to access our system files through <a href="https://vscode.dev">vscode.dev</a> using the &#8220;Open folder&#8230;&#8221; or &#8220;Open file&#8230;&#8221; commands without issue:</p>
<pre><code>chrome --disable-unveil
</code></pre>
<p>Everything should work pretty solid right out the box now - except it doesn&#8217;t. Syntax highlighting does not work without enabling WASM&#47;WebAssembly. Your experience might be different, but I had to include the following when launching Chromium from the terminal:</p>
<pre><code>ENABLE_WASM=1 chrome --enable-wasm
</code></pre>
<p>Success! We can avoid typing out these complex commands everytime we want to launch our editor by setting up an <code>alias</code> (in my case via <code>.zshrc</code>):</p>
<pre><code>alias vscode="ENABLE_WASM=1 chrome --enable-wasm --disable-unveil"
</code></pre>
<p>That&#8217;s it! Now I can just pop open VSCode on OpenBSD by simply running <code>vscode</code> in my terminal. Hopefully this can help others slowly transition over to OpenBSD - which you should do because it is amazing!</p>
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