VSCodium is a build of Microsoft’s VSCode without the proprietary and non free binaries. I have been using VSCodium for some time on Fedora linux for some time but I recently got my self a M1Macbook and wanted to install VSCodium on it but apparently there is no official package for it yet. Since VSCodium is free software we can compile it our self!

First make sure that you have brew installed (brew.sh). With Brew we need to install a few packages/dependencies that are needed to compile VSCodium.

The dependencies are: node 14 yarn jq git

brew install node@14 yarn jq git

Clone the VSCodium and move into the directory

git clone https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/
cd vscodium

Now we need to link node version 14 in brew so brew will use version 14.

brew link --overwrite node@14

Last step is to change the bash script build_macos.sh and change ‘VSCODE_ARCH=x86’ to ‘VSCODE_ARCH=arm64’

vim build/build_macos.sh

Now we can compile VSCodium using the bash script

./build/build_macos.sh

If everything goes well you should see something like this

The compiled application should be located in ‘vscodium/VSCode-darwin-arm64/’. You can move the application to your Applications folder and start the application. If you start your activity manager you can see under CPU it will day ‘Apple’. This means that that VSCode is running natively on Apple Silicon (darwin arm64).