Technology Tales

Command line installation and upgrading of VSCode and VSCodium on Windows, macOS and Linux

25^th October 2025

Downloading and installing software packages from a website is all very well until you need to update them. Then, a single command streamlines the process significantly. Given that VSCode and VSCodium are updated regularly, this becomes all the more pertinent and explains why I chose them for this piece.

Windows

Now that Windows 10 is more or less behind us, we can focus on Windows 11. That comes with the winget command by default, which is handy because it allows command line installation of anything that is in the Windows store, which includes VSCode and VSCodium. The commands can be as simple as these:

winget install VisualStudioCode
winget install VSCodium.VSCodium

The above is shorthand for this, though:

winget install --id VisualStudioCode
winget install --id VSCodium.VSCodium

If you want exact matches, the above then becomes:

winget install -e --id VisualStudioCode
winget install -e --id VSCodium.VSCodium

For upgrades, this is what is needed:

winget upgrade Microsoft.VisualStudioCode
winget upgrade VSCodium.VSCodium

Even better, you can do an upgrade everything at once operation:

winget upgrade --all

The last part certainly is better than the round trip to a website and back to going through an installation GUI. There is a lot less mouse clicking for one thing.

macOS

On macOS, you need to have Homebrew installed to make things more streamlined. To complete that, you need to run the following command (which may need you to enter your system password to get things to happen):

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Then, you can execute one or both of these in the Terminal app, perhaps having to authorise everything with your password when requested to do so:

brew install --cask visual-studio-code
brew install --cask vscodium

The reason for the -cask switch is that these are apps that you want to go into the correct locations on macOS as well as having their icons appear in Launchpad. Omitting it is fine for command line utilities, but not for these.

To update and upgrade everything that you have installed via Homebrew, just issue the following in a terminal session:

brew update && brew upgrade

Debian, Ubuntu & Linux Mint

Like any other Debian or Ubuntu derivative, Linux Mint has its own in-built package management system via apt. Other Linux distributions have their own way of doing things (Fedora and Arch come to mind here), yet the essential idea is similar in many cases. Because there are a number of steps, I have split out VSCode from VSCodium for added clarity. Because of the way that things are set up, one or both apps can be updated using the usual apt commands without individual attention.

VSCode

The first step is to download the repository key using the following command:

wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc \
| gpg --dearmor > packages.microsoft.gpg
sudo install -D -o root -g root -m 644 packages.microsoft.gpg /etc/apt/keyrings/packages.microsoft.gpg

Then, you can add the repository like this:

echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/packages.microsoft.gpg] \
https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/code stable main" \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list

With that in place, the last thing that you need to do is issue the command for doing the installation from the repository:

sudo apt update; sudo apt install code

Above, I have put two commands together: one to update the repository and another to do the installation.

VSCodium

Since the VSCodium process is similar, here are the three commands together: one for downloading the repository key, another that adds the new repository and one more to perform the repository updates and subsequent installation:

curl -fSsL https://gitlab.com/paulcarroty/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/raw/master/pub.gpg \
| sudo gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg >/dev/null

echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg] \
https://download.vscodium.com/debs vscodium main" \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscodium.sources

sudo apt update; sudo apt install codium

After the three steps have completed successfully, VSCodium is installed and available to use on your system, and is accessible through the menus too.

Resolving a clash between Homebrew and Python

22^nd November 2022

For reasons that I cannot recall now, I installed the Hugo static website generator on my Linux system and web servers using Homebrew. The only reason that I suggest is that it might have been a way to get the latest version at the time because Linux Mint only does major changes like that every two years, keeping it in line with long-term support editions of Ubuntu.

When Homebrew was installed, it changed the lookup path for command line executables by adding the following line to my .bashrc file:

eval "$(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

This executed the following lines:

export HOMEBREW_PREFIX="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew";
export HOMEBREW_CELLAR="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar";
export HOMEBREW_REPOSITORY="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Homebrew";
export PATH="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin:/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/sbin${PATH+:$PATH}";
export MANPATH="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/share/man${MANPATH+:$MANPATH}:";
export INFOPATH="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/share/info:${INFOPATH:-}";

While the result suits Homebrew, it changed the setup of Python and its packages on my system. Eventually, this had undesirable consequences, like messing up how Spyder started, so I wanted to change this. There are other things that I have automated using Python and these were not working either.

One way that I have seen suggested is to execute the following command, but I cannot vouch for this:

brew unlink python

What I did was to comment out the offending line in .bashrc and replace it with the following:

export PATH="$PATH:/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin:/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/sbin"

export HOMEBREW_PREFIX="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew";
export HOMEBREW_CELLAR="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar";
export HOMEBREW_REPOSITORY="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Homebrew";

export MANPATH="/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/share/man${MANPATH+:$MANPATH}:";
export INFOPATH="${INFOPATH:-}/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/share/info";

The first command adds Homebrew paths to the end of the PATH variable rather than the beginning, which was the previous arrangement. This ensures system folders are searched for executable files before Homebrew folders. It also means Python packages load from my user area instead of the Homebrew location, which happened under Homebrew's default configuration. When working with Python packages, remember not to install one version at the system level and another in your user area, as this creates conflicts.

So far, the result of the Homebrew changes is not unsatisfactory, and I will watch for any rough edges that need addressing. If something comes up, then I will set things up in another way.