Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE
theia-ide.orgI think many people are missing the point that this doesn't appear to be a finished product ready for developers to use. It looks like Eclipse's goal is to make a foundation that others can customize for their purposes, building off of what VSCode has already done.
That's not to say this is a good idea or not, but I think all the comments asking "Why would anyone switch to this from VSCode" are missing the point.
> I think many people are missing the point that this doesn't appear to be a finished product ready for developers to use.
It's absolutely a finished product, GitPod is the commercially available (and white-label-able) version, people are productively using this today, including using VSCode addons and writing their own.
> "Why would anyone switch to this from VSCode"
Imagine preparing a Docker image of everything reasonably needed in your dev environment, and then giving your developers one click access to be totally set up with company-standard configuration. The IDE goes from wild-west everyone working their own way, to something that can be supported, where new devs can be brought up to speed in days instead of weeks, something with real consistency.
You ever see one VIM or Emacs user try to use someone else’s setup? I’d be shocked if there were any productivity gains... this seems like something that managers want to say but is disconnected from reality.
I actually have - because I've built an environment for a bunch of Emacs / Lisp developers, that uses a container + Emacs + VNC, so that they literally connect up to identical, pre-configured sessions - like the spiritual predecessor of the cloud IDE.
What this replaced was madness. We could never train anyone up before. We couldn't sit with each other and debug stuff. Agreeing on how things will work is key on a team that expects to do things like pairs programming, even if it means everyone sacrifices a bit of muscle memory.
I made the mistake of recommending standardization of development tooling at one point. Not one of my finer moments.
At one point in my vimrc I decided that P and p needed to be swapped...
You can do that already in vscode easily with the container remote add-on.
If MS could pull their cart out of the dirt with VSCode, why not Eclipse?
I laughed really hard, thanks.
And why would they not just consolidate their efforts into improving VS code. I don't get it, VS Code is an awesome platform, no need to reinvent the wheel we just need more high quality extensions to improve it support for different technologies.
Yeah when I see a project like this, I think of all the wasted time that all these talented teams could save by combining forces.
At the end of the day, after who knows how much effort, this thing looks IDENTICAL to VS Code. So what was the point of all the work, apart from Not-Invented-Here? VS Code is MIT licensed. So what exactly is the concern about one company running it? Anyone can fork it and do whatever they want.
Theia runs inside a web browser. VS Code doesn't.
The question is, did they approach the VS code team and ask them if they where opposed to this feature. Assuming it does not break anything I cannot see why they would be. I get it, it's open source they can do as they please it just seems to me like the logical first step would be to say hey can we combine efforts. Maybe they did, I don't know, that is the approach I personally would take, improve an already awesome open source offering with my efforts as opposed to creating a one off. I would prefer to feed a larger ecosystem and make the pie bigger.
Microsoft already got VS Code running in the browser. It's called Visual Studio Online, and it's closed source.
They are working with the VS Code team and Theia uses Monaco and other OSS components shared with VS Code.
I'd really loved this a few years ago; but now VS Code's "Remote" extension helps most of my issues. It's just brilliant that I can do e.g. embedded dev on a physical Linux box while running the IDE on Windows.
Same here! I remember I found it such a pain that the embedded toolchains were mostly exclusively for Windows. I dabbled around with cloud9 IDE for a bit, but it wouldn't fit my workflow.
Nowadays the WSL basically made Windows my all-in-one development environment. My stack is WSL, docker and Jetbrains IDEs (but the latter is just a matter of personal taste). I haven't touched my Linux desktop in over a year.
Personally, for my workflow, I no longer see a benefit in running a cloud IDE. But maybe that for junior or aspiring devs a cloud IDE will make it much more easy to get started.
WSL doesn't have access to USB device (well, you can make it work more or less, but it's a pain). So the remote extension is great in this case.
That is the point that I was trying to make: I used to work on Linux and spinning up a virtual machine to run the Windows tools (USB was also a pain with that).
But now, thanks to WSL I have turned that around. I now run Windows so I can run the windows-only debuggers natively, and still have all the unix tools available through the WSL CLI.
Admittedly I do not do much embedded development anymore, but I'm pretty sure I could launch Windows ICD tools from the WSL CLI.
Do you run the Linux versions of your Jetbrains IDEs using WSL or the native Windows versions? I was setting exactly this up just this past weekend after 10 years of running Linux exclusively and I'm not sure which way to go.
The only thing remaining to have a complete developer experience on Windows would be to convince Apple to allow building of iOS apps on other operating systems.
As someone who has been cursing Apple’s abominably obnoxious attitude in this regard for the last few days, this would be music to my ears.
I think it’s never going to happen. It’s the complete antithesis of everything that Apple stands for as a company.
Beside that reason (true) a mayor roadblock would be that the iOS simulator (the simulated debug device running alongside Xcode on the development host) is a simulator, not an emulator: it runs iOS libraries re-compiled for x64 using the macOS kernel (and the macOS Foundation and Cocoa libraries) support. Porting that on another host OS is probably borderline impossible. Doing something borderline impossible that will increase your support requests just to make people stop using machines you sell is not a good business proposition, I suppose.
There are tons of Android emulators running under Windows. So it doesn't seem borderline impossible.
The easiest thing would probably be to virtualize the OS X kernel.
Sure, but do you see Apple ever doing that?
Apple already did clones once, it is never to happen again.
That extension is proprietary.
Sure. I'd by happy to pay for it if it wasn't free.
We use this in Hackerrank for workflows for frontend/backend candidates. Theia is a great web IDE, specially with it's LSP based autocomplete, and VSCode compatibility.
You can try out this demo I put up: http://hr.gs/theia-demo
When in the test, click on the top right: "Use the online Web-IDE" option to see it. It'll be open for 20 minute sessions for the next day. If you see an "cannot provision" error, it may be the rate limiter, so try post a couple minutes.
I've recently used it in HackerRank. It's a good idea but turning off autocomplete didn't work for me and was super annoying.
Could you share a demo link where you are not forced to signup?
It's something I quickly put together to showcase what's possible with Theia, given we're actively using them. I'm not sure how to enable what you asked.
Youtube also has a few theia videos which could give you a similar idea on the experience.
Contributors and adopters: <every large company but Microsoft>
Whilst it's healthy to have competition, I'm not sure a rip-off of VS Code is in the spirit of open source. Did they try to work with the team at Microsoft to improve VS Code before forking it?
"Hey Microsoft, we're trying to improve VS Code by moving it over to a not-for-profit corporation not under your control and completly removing the Visual Studio brand. What do you think?"
"We call that maneuver the 'Edge'."
It's pretty fair considering Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish was the MS modus operandi for decades and may yet be.
I agree. Just wanted to point out why Microsoft wouldn't be on board.
My day job is TypeScript all day long, so like all but one quintillionth of one percent of TypeScript developers, I use VS Code all day long, too.
I'm extremely happy with its development, too; I think the team behind it has done as good a job as I have personally ever seen of both a.) delivering consistent improvements that excite the daily users, and b.) running an open source project.
Still, I absolutely think we are all better off with a vendor-nonspecific, open-source focused competitor.
I mean, once upon a time Microsoft Internet Explorer was the best browser for the Mac, too. There's probably enough awesome in the VS Code project to keep it from being corrupted by Microsoft's corporate priorities — and competition will help keep it that way, in addition to providing a possible alternative if that doesn't happen.
I'm the local TS evangelist. Exactly no one I've seen who's tried WebStorm has switched back to VSCode. They consume all of the same LSP APIs that VSCode does from the LS, but they have all their IDE goodies as well.
Nice to meet you! I am the first person you've met who has tried WebStorm but then switched back to VSCode!
I bought it and gave it a whirl, but I went back.
Mainly because VS Code is much faster, and has a more normal UI (native open/save dialogs, way way better file browser, etc).
Also because the development velocity seems much faster. Every single VS Code major update has goodies in it that I personally want (plus blah blah whatever that I don't) and they come out once a month almost!
But I am curious (especially since I do still have the WebStorm license) what are some of the "IDE goodies" that give WebStorm the advantage in your view?
Hmm, what I liked about sublime was that it was fast and let me do text really fast too.. other than that it got out of the way.
Everything I need is on Ctrl+p or Ctrl+shift+p.
vscode is like sublime to me, just seems the language completion got useful.
The phrasing chosen by the Eclipse foundation for the Theia 1.0 announcement was a bit unfortunate:
- It's not Theia versus VS Code
- Theia is not an "open-source alternative to VS Code"
- Theia is not a "rip-off of VS Code"
While confrontational narratives are appealing, it's more subtle than that: Theia is based on VS Code to address a different kind of need.
Much like TypeScript doesn't try to replace JavaScript, but builds on JS to address the need for type safety, Theia doesn't try to replace VS Code, but builds on VS Code to address the need for a framework to build IDEs for desktop (e.g. Arduino Pro, Arm mbed...) and for the cloud (e.g. Gitpod, Google Cloud Shell...).
Does building an IDE based on Theia provide significant benefit over simply releasing a plugin for vscode?
Sure, you don't develop something on the side for an existing IDE which treats your content as remote and potentially insecure, prohibiting access to DOM and other useful APIs like embedding editors. If you are building an end product for particular developers you want to be in the control of final developer experience, you don't want to deal with limitations of iframes because your content is not remote, you want to change styles, access DOM and have good integration with editors. Consider new Arduino IDE, they have to provide similar UX as old IDE for smooth transition. It requires disabling many features by default and complete restyling and rebranding. There is no way to do it with VS Code apis.
> Did they try to work with the team at Microsoft to improve VS Code before forking it?
As an open source project maintainer, I don't think it's necessary or easy to do that. Project teams and maintainers have different goals and sometimes it's much easier to fork and evolve without stepping on each other's toes. I'd even say that's the strength of open sourcing software under the right license.
Note this is Not a fork, it's a from scratch implementation that is compatible with the extensions of VSCode, not a vscode fork.
If by "from scratch" you mean, taking Microsofts MIT licenced Monaco editor and adding some stuff around it, then yes it's not a fork.
Yeah, I'm sure they just happened to make a one-to-one exact recreation of the VS Code UI as well, huh?
In the FOSS world, forking is traditionally considered a hostile action. GitHub normalized the name of the action "fork", but it's not the same thing. GitHub forks are part of the plumbing of their Pull Request metaphor and are not true forks. As long as you're submitting upstream and pulling down, you haven't "forked" the tree.
"fork is hostile" is a myth perpetuated by little Napoleons who want to to control how users use their software.
It really depends on the situation. There are both friendly and hostile forks.
That's exactly the spirit of Free and Open Source.
VS Code is welcome to backport anything they like
Exactly. “Fork it and compete” is as FOSS as you can get. Any time I complain about how some FOSS works, I’m constantly told that it’s open source and if I don’t like it I should fork it and fix it. That’s just how open source works.
> VS Code is welcome to backport anything they like
They can't, as Theia contributors haven't necessarily signed the Microsoft CLA.
One could argue if VScode is an open source project or not. But when copying an open source project, it's not called rip-off, it's called fork. The intentions of forks are to improve the software, try out new ideas, etc, and the original software can merge new features developed in the fork. Forks can however be "hostile" when the intentions are to rip-off the original creator by stealing users/sponsors and making the fork proprietary, which is a strategy used by some cough software businesses.
> One could argue if VScode is an open source project or not
I mean... not really, no?! It's MIT licensed and fits any definition of OSS I've ever seen.
AFAIK, the only non-OSS part is the installer.
While it is also available under the MIT license, MS reserves the right to re-license it however they see fit. If you want to contribute, you'll have to sign their CLA to give Microsoft that right.
One problem is that you are required to sign away your rights in order to contribute, so that in the future you might not have the rights to use your own work.
Then there are proprietary extensions, like the "remote" extension (1) that competes with Theia's open source solution.
Also see open source vs FOSS (2)
I've well aware of the OSS/FOSS definitions - it was exactly those that made me question your argument thst VS Code isn't open source. It plainly is, and indeed is Free As In Beer.
I don't see the problem with proprietary extensions - any open plugin mechanism will have at least some proprietary extensions (by the primary maintainer, or by third parties), including Theia's if it gains enough traction.
Creating a derivative work isn't termed a "rip off" in open source its an expected use case. You don't have to work with someone before making your own work derivative of theirs. If it comes to pass that your work directly competes with theirs for developers or users you just have to convince potential users and developers that they ought to use yours instead same as any other competing entity in a free market.
For example I'm pretty sure Ford doesn't consult with Toyota before they introduce a new model.
But Ford doesn't build their cars from Toyota parts and software and then just slap their logo on it and call it a day. So I'm not so sure that's a great analogy.
You don't need to buy open source parts nor receive permission to use them.
> I'm not sure a rip-off of VS Code is in the spirit of open source
If our working definition of rip-off is work alike that replicates the interface without sharing code, then I would say that open source has an incredibly long history of building through ripping off. Linux is a rip-off of MINIX is a rip-ff of Unix, GNU is a rip-off of Unix, various graphical interfaces over the years have been copies of commercial offerings. Copying VSC is absolutely in the spirit of Open Source.
Is there an advantage VS Code? Any reason why a programmer should switch to Theia if using vscode before?
I found on these 3 differences vs vscode on the website, but for a Desktop programmer I see in these differences no reason to change.
"The most significant differences are: Theia's architecture is more modular and allows for way more customizations, Theia is designed from the ground to run on Desktop and Cloud, and Theia is developed under a vendor-neutral Open-Source Foundation."
>Theia is developed under a vendor-neutral Open-Source Foundation.
Eclipse Foundation, IBM. When I was still doing Java the only good thing that ever came out of Eclipse was proberly SWT. And I remember every single Eclipse product they were competing with Sun's default option, and failed to gain much traction.
So while Theia is Vendor-neutral and open source, I think Microsoft is a much better bet on this one.
I don't find this a fair thing to say.
Eclipse was/is de facto the standard IDE for Java and JavaEE development, not to mention it was/is widely used as an IDE for C development. You can still find prebuilt packages [0] that quickly get you off ground. I've built commercial products with Eclipse RAP [1] that are still used today. Eclipselink [2] for persistence is also a great tool. Eclipse EMF [4] for modeling - and I've used that A LOT when building databases and model structures for businesses.
I have since then moved to other languages and tools, but much of today's software was made possible by the Eclipse team. And I thank them for all their great work.
0 - https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/
1 - https://www.eclipse.org/rap/
3 - https://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/
4 - https://eclipsesource.com/technology/modeling/#emf
(edit: added EMF)
>Eclipse was/is de facto the standard IDE for Java and JavaEE development
Was it really de facto? Didn't it lost to Netbeans? I remember there was some rivalry between Netbeans and Eclipse ( along with many other things ) and in the end many sided with Sun ( Netbeans ).
But that was a really long time ago so my memory may be a little fuzzy.
Netbeans mostly evaporated along with Sun. In my experience, the only advantage of Netbeans over Eclipse in its heyday was in development of AWT/Swing GUI apps (for which IntelliJ and JBuilder were better options anyway).
"Theia is designed from the ground to run on Desktop and Cloud"
Which means it's an Electron app - which means between this and Chrome, it sucks down tons of ram and processing power.
Really hoping Nova from panic.com is as good as it looks / native MacOS app.
This Electron-bashing is getting rather old - it's possible to write crappy code on any platform.
Yes, some Electron apps are resource hogs, but many are not. VS Code is a perfect example of how Electron can enable development of a performant, cross-platform IDE.
> This Electron-bashing is getting rather old - it's possible to write crappy code on any platform.
It's possible to write crappy code on any platform, but some platforms (like Electron) make writing apps that don't suck impossible.
> Yes, some Electron apps are resource hogs, but many are not. VS Code is a perfect example of how Electron can enable development of a performant, cross-platform IDE.
All Electron apps are resource hogs, including VS Code. Just because Slack made it a standard to ignore the fact that not everybody has loads of RAM and that there are other apps running on the system, doesn't mean everybody's standards of performance and UX should race to the bottom.
I strongly disagree, and I have to question if you've actually used VS Code.
I use VS Code every day, and relative to it's capabilities, I think memory usage is good. It also starts almost instantaneously, and is very snappy when using.
I am not bashing on Electron, but I have seen slowdowns and memory hogging on VS in large projects (Typescript). I end up restarting it every 3-4 hours to get it back a baseline speed.
You’re not at all alone, working across several teams of devs and infra engineers people are always whinging about electron apps that eat up resources, kill their batteries and slow down over time, slack and VSCode are prime examples.
I tried it, saw rendering glitches like the ones you see when you scroll a webpage using Firefox or Chromium on X, looked at the RAM usage, saw that its UI is its own thing that doesn't integrate with the rest of the system[1] and concluded that it's not for me.
[1]: Well, this last point isn't all that exceptional on Linux, but it adds up and I suspect that for people using macOS this is a downgrade.
Not that I doubt you, but I think your experience is atypical. I've never seen rendering glitches on Windows, Linux or MacOS (I use all 3,although mostly Windows & MacOS), and I've been using it since forever. A totally scientific straw poll of colleagues finds the same.
> VS Code is a perfect example of how Electron can enable development of a performant, cross-platform IDE.
VS Code is unable to scroll text without dropping frames on my MBP 2013. Meanwhile even Xcode is (graphically) smooth as butter.
I have no problems with Electron, it enables many good products. I for my part however moved from VSCode to (Neo)Vim because VSCode made my maxed out 2017 Macbook Pro scream (the fan) and super slow (pytest taking significantly longer in the integrated terminal). I couldn't be more happier for this move. Thanks to VSCode!
What would you expect from a cloud editor?
FYI, Visual Studio Code is an Electron app. And it's very performant.
It's performant because it's sucking your resources dry with a massive memory footprint, which is possible thanks to virtual memory. Doesn't mean it's ideal.
I realise that this might sound privileged/gate-keeping but if you're a developer in 2020 I'd expect you to at least have 8GB of RAM. I'd say it's the minimum you should have for a decent computing experience nowadays. I have 16GB and usually idle around 50% usage with just a general task load. Especially with Windows 10. Not that it's a good thing but it seems to be the way things are going.
1/8th of your memory for your IDE doesn't sound too bad?
I've seen native tools use more.
Your browser using just as much, if not more than VS code does so try again. Nowadays an IDE using 1 gig of ram isn't that horrible when it saves you tons of development time with it's tooling.
Why does the browser also using a lot of RAM mean VS Code should? Aren’t those different applications with different purposes? E.g., is it equally valid to compare VS Code to Excel or Photoshop?
The main problem with this argument is just a few years ago, before Atom and VS Code, most people were using editors like Sublime Text that use an order of magnitude less resources and are still significantly faster than the Electron editors. Regardless of whether VS Code is a better editor, or a better architecture, it's still an interesting question whether the dramatic increase in resources was necessary.
This is interesting to me. Do you care _why_ the apps you use are performant, if they already are? Is it noticeably impacting the performance of other apps you're actively using?
The implication of “sucking your resources dry with a massive memory footprint” in the comment your replying to, is that in order to make VS Code fast, it slows down your system in other ways. I don’t know how valid that is, but it’s certainly not “caring why”, it's about the other performance consequences that aren’t VS Code itself running slowly.
There is a .vscode folder in the repository, suggesting they might not be eating their own dog food yet but are actually using VS Code to develop Theia.
Or, possibly, that Theia is based on VSCode and uses the same config files. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet (though I am interested!) but it looks like a fork of VSCode visually: That certainly looks like Monaco editor and somewhat similar to VSCode as a whole, down to apparently being compatible with its extensions.
You're 100% correct, Theia supports configuration via a .vscode/ directory, because that seems to be a "standard" way to configure your IDE. (Before you jump, yes it also supports EditorConfig).
Also, Theia indeed uses the Monaco editor, and various other open-source components also found in VS Code. The developers of Theia and VS Code actually collaborate on these.
And finally, Theia fully supports VS Code extensions. There is even an effort to make this IDE extension format an open standard: https://open-vsx.org
Thanks for showing me OpenVSX, I am now really invested in checking out Theia! Going to be a real game changer for me if I can self-host this, will try it out in Docker ASAP.
You're welcome! And yes, both Theia and OpenVSX can be self-hosted. Please report issues if something is unclear or doesn't seem to work.
I've used Eclipse on and off and always found it to be a bit clunky. Unhelpful error messages coming from the fifty layers of abstraction you did not know about before.
Back in the days, I always preferred netbeans - it was just more of a product, less of an exercise in object-oriented abstractionism.
Today, I am a happy user of vim (and vscode, if I need to) - I left behind the heaps of design patterns, thankfully. What this feels like to me is a trying to jump on a train, that's long gone.
I don't understand your comment. What does the IDE Eclipse have to do with Eclipse Theia?
People don't understand that one project can have more than one product.
The same confusion exists between Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.
Also, Eclipse Theia could be the name of the last version of the Eclipse Java IDE since they named every major release of their IDE until recently.
Maybe they should have gone with Theia by Eclipse, or just drop the Eclipse in the name altogether.
I've come to appreciate web IDEs a lot. It's nice to develop in an environment where every computer with a web browser can be used as your workstation. It restores the exact context that you left behind in your last session. And, since it's usually hosted in big cloud providers, you have absurdly fast internet connection. It's cozy.
However, I'm still evaluating managed solutions, since I'm not so motivated anymore to self-host critical parts of my infra. AWS Cloud 9 is great, but it doesn't integrate the editor with version control and Go support is lacking there (the debugger is really clunky). I've tried GitPod (VSCode based) recently and found it very stable and useful. Maybe I'll go with that.
An alternative setup for a web IDE for vim or emacs users would be, in my opinion, an in-browser terminal hosted somewhere that gives you secure authentication and access to your server. A big plus is to implement it in such a way that the machine will turn on automatically when you access your site-terminal, and auto shutdown if it remains idle for a period of time. This makes it very cheap to host on big cloud providers, which usually charge a lot for 24/7 machines. This feature is built-in on both Cloud9 and GitPod.
>An alternative setup for a web IDE for vim or emacs users would be, in my opinion, an in-browser terminal hosted somewhere that gives you secure authentication and access to your server. A big plus is to implement it in such a way that the machine will turn on automatically when you access your site-terminal, and auto shutdown if it remains idle for a period of time.
You basically just described cloud console in GCP. It's pretty slick.
I wouldn't use it as an all-day IDE, but it's more-or-less what you just described.
Good to know! I've been willing to try using GCP more for my projects. Now I have yet another reason :)
> I've tried GitPod (VSCode based) recently and found it very stable and useful. Maybe I'll go with that.
Then you've tried Theia, it seems: https://www.gitpod.io/docs/ide/
Cool! It works really well. Drop-in replacement of VSCode for me.
See also: https://coder.com/
Indeed, and they have this tool https://github.com/cdr/code-server which is pretty much like vscode in a web browser launched through a potential remote server. Is Theia any better?
Is it just me or did anyone else feel this was a VS Code on the web?
The UI reminded me more of VS Code than Eclipse (from when I last used it).
Yes, it's actively encouraged by the Theia community to align the DX to VS Code: https://youtu.be/NLkQzx6rrnU?t=1040
What is Theia better for than Visual Studio code or Atom or any other of this new trend of build-a-bear IDEs? I like Eclipse and the Eclipse foundation (hey, they rocked the whole IDE game back then, and make a decent one nowadays too), but I cannot understand where this particular project sits.
In the browser. That's where it sits. VSCode does not.
Nothing prevents you from chucking https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ on a random page tho. Is the value add the fact that there's a server component behind it?
This was discussed a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607, although the submission was a corporate press release.
A bit from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466001
A thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687858
I would like to use gitpod but it doesn't let you configure the editor to your preferences. Instead, it's project-based which I think is way less useful: https://www.gitpod.io/docs/config-editor/
When I saw that it was actually called Eclipsed Theia, the first things that come to my mind was some sort of java applet running eclipse in the browser. It is actually better than what it sounds... Hopefully the can grow up on their own outside of the eclipse foundation.
I want to try switching to Theia from code-server, since it seems to offer a more polished web experience.
Unfortunately, I heavily rely on the VscodeVim extension, which doesn't work in Theia because it hasn't implemented some commands like "editorScroll" yet.
I wonder which truly free and open-source IDE is a good choice if you want to be able to run it locally and develop in several languages - C, C++, Go, PHP, Python, Jython, Ruby, Haskell, C#, Java, Kotlin, R, ...
VSCode finally runs on *BSD!
Is there anyone working on advancing CitCs in the open source space? Having some work flow like that would really improve my productivity and the safety of my code/deployment scripts.
this thing looks so similar to (and dare I say, a blantant rip off of) visual studio code that to me there is no reason to use this over visual studio code. plus, may i state, that the second i saw eclipse i vomited in my mouth a little. i've had such bad experiences in the past with the entire eclipse family of editors that i just cringe when i even hear the word eclipse, which is disheartening when lunar cycles are aligned.
What is the business model here? No sign of seed funding or anything like that; technical leadership team
I think it looks like an open source project...
So it is also Electron based IDE just like VSC? What is the point in making VCS copy then?
They selling it
the only advantage this might give teams is remote workspaces. I don't think any developer would set it as the default IDE on dev machine
Theia developers: The Eclipse brand in the IDE/code editor world is toxic to many developers; You may want to disassociate Theia from Eclipse if you’re hoping for wide usage or pulling devs away from VS Code.
Eclipse is known for being clunky, but at least it is _known_.
It is also trusted. When I wrote my first Android app, it was the only practical way to write and test. Not sure if that has since changed (am no longer doing apps), but my guess is that a lot of people have Eclipse on their system.
There is a saying that even negative publicity is still publicity.
The most important thing that Theia needs to convince would-be contributors, is that they will still be around tomorrow. Eclipse has been around forever, and most devs assume it will stay around. That has a value that should not be underestimated.
> Eclipse has been around forever, and is going nowhere.
That's true of everything, right up until the day it's gone. I heard the same thing about Borland. And Perl, Fortran, 1-2-3, Netware, Lycos, Blackberry, ... The history of computers is littered with brands which were once impossibly dominant, and now just a footnote.
In my research field, about 80% of the software is Fortran. Actively developed Fortran. I wouldn't really compare it with 1-2-3/other DOS-apps or blackberry which are basically the software equivalent of consumables.
Is your research publicly available?
Fortran is no longer dominant.
Neither is it a "footnote", especially in its strongest domain, numerical computation.
That obviously depends on the field.
While I understand your point about “Eclipse”, as a long time open source web developer, macOS user who has had to work at times with Microsoft servers, I did not think the best of “Visual Studio”
Now I spend much of my day in Visual Studio Code.
The difference is, Visual Studio is a world-class IDE produced by a company that sucks, while Eclipse sucks as an IDE.
> produced by a company that sucks
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Most prominent companies have just a criticism section. That particular company has a dedicated page. [0]
I worked professionally with VS doing Windows app development in C++ and I found it super powerful, especially for handling our 20 years old gigantic codebase. I don't get the hate, and I spend most of my days in Emacs nowadays (doing more research-y coding). Yes, it's huge, but it's huge because it is full of powerful tools for developers.
I think hate for giant IDEs & their corresponding resource consumption will generally come from devs who don't need all the features, or who have the usage of the features forced on them by their org when they may not be needed or there are more lightweight alternatives outside the IDE.
It's kind of an even-more-resource-intensive Microsoft Excel - almost no one needs all the features, but they all need a different subset.
I don’t hate Visual Studio or Eclipse IDE’s
It is just that I have always done a different style of coding for over 20 years. More focused on text editors (BBEdit, Sublime, VSCode, vi, etc) and supporting command line tools.
I have seen the power that my IDE colleagues have for their use cases.
But honestly, I think many of us text editor focused developers where very skeptical of Visual Studio Code due to its VS branding. For myself, I don’t see Eclipse’s brand any better or worse than Visual Studios.
I was under the impression that VS is amazing and the best-of-the-best IDE as long as you're entirely working within the MS ecosystem and your employer is paying for all of it. I never heard anyone hating VS itself, just MS or perhaps M$.
Visual Studio is awesome because it's a native app (which means it's fast) and it has ReSharper (which means it's smart).
But the Eclipse Foundation is a pretty good place to develop vendor-neutral open-source software, kind of like the Linux Foundation. There are many great open-source projects under the Eclipse Foundation umbrella, and anyone is free to use them; contribute to them; build businesses on them; etc.
Yes but when someone mentions Eclipse all I can think of is that huge, slow, bloated, ugly IDE I was happy to flee from many years ago.
IntelliJ is prettier, but just as bloated. Buch of that bloat is just features. I've used both for years and thought both were good with different strengths/weaknesses.
The last time I checked (long ago, when no IntelliJ frorks like PyCharm etc existed) Idea' code autocompletion was a way more smart than that of Eclipse. Also the screen space is less bloated with IntelliJ.
How is the screen-space less bloated? I thought pretty much all IDEs are the same: navigation tree panel, code panel, and optional extra side/bottom panel for log/test/debug/docs/etc. Also they're all super configurable.
That's fine. They want people who appreciate Eclipse during these early stages, and young people who haven't used Eclipse before don't have preconceived notions.
Yep, in my university everyone used Eclipse. Shrug.
Genuinely curious here, how can an IDE be toxic? I haven't heard any such thing before.
If the IDE broadly reduces the efficiency of developers, and causes developers to waste time contorting their workflow to the IDEs poorly conceived approach to doing things - especially in relation to other IDEs... I'd say that's toxic for the Eclipse brand.
Any brand is toxic when the market deems your product overwhelmingly in a negative light.
Not saying that is or isn't the case wrt Eclipse.
> how can an IDE be toxic
If people associate the IDE with negative emotions, which a lot of people have for eclipse, I'd say it's fair to call it toxic.
Slow, memory hogging, and not that useful.
I don't find the latest Intellij any faster. I currently have the latest of both installed.
No soap, both are built in Java.
I have to admit, my first impression wasn't positive.
I thought this was an another attempt, after Eclipse Orion, to get that bloated beast into the modern world.
Will second this. Saw the name Eclipse and shortcut-ed to will stick with VS code.
Replying to my own post but I also did this with VS Code. Brand has a lot to do with first impression. When someone I knew told me to try out VS Code my first impression was I have spent too many years in Visual Studio already why would I want to go to what is obviously the lite version. It was only after seeing it, and seeing the support it had in the community did it overcome that initial bias. I hold that same bias towards Eclipse and my initial reaction was great web enabled Eclipse, no thanks.
Out of curiosity, what sold you on VS code over VS?
I use Sublime to edit smaller code bases, and web technologies because it gets out of my way, and obfuscates nothing from me. I use VS if I need to work with larger codebases in compiled languages with static typing, complex build processes, or multiple dependencies.
I tried it about a year after it first launched, but only for a couple days. VS code strikes me as a hybrid between the two, but from what little I've tried of it, my experience has been that it's less snappy than Sublime, while attempting to obfuscate the things the way VS proper does, which I find distracting when working with js/Python/html. When it came to the large CPP code-base I was toying with, its felt slower to work in than VS, and I couldn't find any compelling reasons (killer features) to learn its conventions.
I know quite a few people using code for web development, but they haven't really told me why ("it's just better").
I get the impression I'm missing out on something wonderful here, and I don't want to be an anachronism. But I just don't know why I'd want to switch unless I needed a heavier IDE on my Linux box.
Two things, integrated and well put together debugger for node and chrome debugging in the IDE would be the first feature for me that stuck out. I am a debugger or REPL forward developer, I like to digest code in small chunks. VS Code has some fairly slick debugging features. Second it's a text editor that acts like and IDE or it's an IDE that acts like an editor, I cannot really decide which it is and I think that is the sweet spot. It also has a huge base of quality plugins for a host of languages.
I am not sold on strong typing for the web and SPA's there is just so much tear down rebuild and remodel that I don't know if the gains are there. Given that I take that view I tend to shun a full and robust IDE in favor of a text editor with language support. VS Code is something a little bit more than that, and I it hits a sweet spot for me. When I have to support our legacy Java apps I jump back to Intellj Idea but it's not my favorite and goes a little too far towards the IDE side.
When I do embedded C, I tend to prefer a full blown IDE as it's just too easy to get lost in the weeds of a large C code base. Which is usually CLion.
Yes, same here.
I second the vote about “Eclipse” being toxic.
That is just my personal opinion, and I recognize that tastes differ, but due to years of (bad) experience across multiple domains for a plethora of reasons, I won’t allow and will actively root out any whiff of Eclipse near my codebase.
Yes, others have different options and IDE selection is only slightly less polarizing than politics or religion but... that’s the branding quagmire right there.
What are you talking about. Just because a bunch of hipsters dislike Eclipse doesn't mean everyone does. Eclipse rocks.
I turn 40 soon and am about as far away from a hipster as you can get, but I have only negative associations with eclipse.
I agree. You pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Maybe they are not so much trying to convince end users about the project, but other companies who might be willing to incorporate this into their products and contribute back to the project.
For that kind of use case having an organization like Eclipse Foundation, Apache Foundation or Linux Foundation on the background adds credibility.
Which is amusing, since the latest standard Java desktop IDE is now no more or less clunky than IntelliJ's offering IMHO.
IME what adds to the bloat is all the poorly-written and/or neglected plugins users seem to want to install.
Agree. When I read Eclipse, I thought "icky" and scrolled down to see if maybe JetBrains will turn it into something usable. Since they're not in the list, I'll pass on this.
I'd rather rent a Windows Server so that I can remote desktop into IntelliJ than suffer through another IDE.
The productivity boost that you can get from using a great tool that you are intimately familiar with is just way too much to sacrifice in exchange for what boils down to less setup work for getting a new laptop ready for duty.
You needn't even remote in IntelliJ runs on windows mac and linux.
Agree, but then what's the point of using a Cloud IDE instead?
Looks like a complete rip-off of VS Code. They couldn't even bother to use a different color scheme or icons?
It is a IDE toolkit. You're supposed to use it to build your own as can be seen in the "Arduino IDE Pro".
They've used monaco[1] which is the editor part of VS Code for their project but Theia apparently is easier to work on a cloud and customize.
VS Code is open source; you're SUPPOSED to rip it off. I'm not sure what your expectations are.
Eclipse is also open source and has been ripped off and repackaged into dozens if not hundreds of specialized IDE's. That's what open source is about.
They are even advertising their VSCode extension support.
Looks good to me, Cloud9 was rather limited and I missed my VSCode extensions.
Edit: they have their own extension registry, which makes the whole enterprise seem a bit sub-optimal.
I don't know if it's actually using VS Code as a base, but since VS Code is under a MIT license, I don't think you can say anyone would be able to rip-off VS Code. If they don't include the license from VS Code, you could say they break the licensing, but it'll be hard to argue that a copy/fork of a project with permissive license would be a rip-off.
I don't mean to say that they are doing anything illegal or unethical. It just looks cheap to post a screenshot that looks like pixel-perfect copy of VS Code. Don't these people have a vision?
Sorry, maybe my understanding of "rip-off" is wrong (not native English speaker), I always seen it as a synonym to "theft" but that might be wrong.
I think what they want to focus on is not the editor itself but rather everything around it and where it's run. In typical startups, you try to focus on your core product, so reusing the editor from another project makes sense, as they don't mind the details about the editor itself.
Maybe their vision was to build a more modular and cloud development friendly IDE while keeping it as close to the most widely used editor/IDE today for user friendly-ness.