Codeium free alternative to GitHub Copilot that you can try. Here it supports over 20 programming languages, and it comes as a browser extension as well as an extension for popular code edits out there such as VS Code and JetBrains. It lets you quickly generate code by typing the required code in plain text as a comment. It can generate statements, functions, as well as complete logic for loops and condition statements.
All the popular programming languages such as Python, C#, and JavaScript, etc., are fully supported. Here is the complete list of those languages.
- C
- C++
- C#
- TSX
- Vue
- YAML
- pbtxt
- PHP
- Ruby
- Rust
- Shell
- SQL
- HTML
- Java
- Coffee Script
- CSS
- CUDA
- Go
- HCL
- JavaScript
- JSON
- Less
- Objective-C
- Protobuf
- Python
- Sass
- SCSS
- Starlark
- Typescript
Every time you use it, it records your usage and on the main dashboard on the website, you can see your activity. It gives you a basic analytics section where you can see your most used programming language. If you are a programmer or software developer, then it can be your new coding companion. For now, it is supporting these code editors.
- Visual Studio Code
- JetBrains
- Vim
- Neovim
- IntelliJ
- PyCharm
- WebStorm
- GoLand
- PhpStorm
- CLion
- Android Studio
Also, apart from the code editors and IDEs, it supports various online programming platforms. For that it gives you a Chrome and Firefox addon. And the addon works on these platforms.
- Chrome
- Jupyter Notebook
- Google Colab
- Deepnote
All you have to do is create a free account on its main website and then start using it anywhere. Good news is that the makers of Codeium have stated on the main website that it will always be free. You can use it any number of times and anywhere you want without any limits.
Using Codeium in place of GitHub Copilot:
On the main website, downloads are available, and you can download the extension for your favorite IDE. Since, it works with browsers as well, so for this post, I will be using its Chrome extension.
After installing the Chrome extension, you need to sign up for a free account. After creating an account, sign into the extension and then start using it.
Let’s try using it in Google Colab. So, create a new notebook and then start writing some Python code. Enter a comment in any cell of the notebook and it will show you the code suggestion. Basically, it will generate the code based on the comments that you have added.
Similarly, you can also use it to generate entire function. In another cell, enter some comment and explain what methods you want to generate. Define what the method should do in the comments and press enter. It will suggest you the code for the entire function now. Press tab and the code will now be added to the current cell. You can see this in the screenshot below.
In this way, you can use this simple and powerful code companion tool to generate code anywhere you want. For now, there are no limits as it comes as a free version as well. Here I have used it in browser, but you can use it in the same way in code editor and IDEs. Just write a comment explaining what code you want, and it will take care of the rest.
Closing thoughts:
Codeium can really turn out to be a decent alternative to GitHub Copilot. These days there are many popular code generation tools out there but most of them want you to pay for them. I am glad to see Codeium’s philosophy to help the programmers and developers so they can come with great software and scripts. Personally, I think it is a very nice tool for solo programmers, open-source contributors, and freelance programmer.
