Open VSX vs VS Code Marketplace — where should you publish your extension first?
The author shares their experience of publishing a personal theme extension on both Open VSX and the VS Code Marketplace. Surprisingly, the Open VSX platform garnered significantly more downloads compared to the VS Code Marketplace. This led the author to conclude that Open VSX has a more engaged audience for developer tools and themes.
- ▪The author's extension received over 5,200 downloads on Open VSX compared to just 56 on the VS Code Marketplace within the same period.
- ▪Open VSX is an open-source extension registry used by editors that cannot access the official Microsoft Marketplace.
- ▪The author suggests that developers targeting themes or productivity tools should consider publishing on Open VSX first due to its more engaged audience.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/sidikiconde/-open-vsx-vs-vs-code-marketplace-where-should-you-publish-your-extension-first-2eep |
| Publication time | Sun, 17 May 2026 23:23:38 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-17T23:33:21.140Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-17T23:33:21.140Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | tNkh137mGqK5 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3936517) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } dekidev Posted on May 17 Open VSX vs VS Code Marketplace — where should you publish your extension first? #devjournal #opensource #tooling #vscode I built Dusk Office for myself. No seriously — I was the only user. Ever. It was just my personal theme that I used every single day while working on my projects. I liked how it looked, it felt premium, and it made my long coding sessions easier on the eyes.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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