Open Source 'Eclipse Theia IDE' Exits Beta to Challenge Visual Studio Code -- Visual Studio Magazine
Open Source 'Eclipse Theia IDE' Exits Beta to Challenge Visual Studio Code -- Visual Studio Magazine
Some seven years in the making, the Eclipse Foundation's Theia IDE project is now generally available, emerging from beta to challenge Microsoft's similar Visual Studio Code editor, with which it shares much tech.
Looks just like VS Code and I think it's still built on electron so take that as you will.
This could actually be a pretty big deal
- The Eclipse foundation has been making alternatives to VS Code's "killer apps" (Docker, Python, Go, C++, SSH, Live share, etc). AKA the closed source ones exclusive to VS Code offical that make all forks of VS Code a huge downgrade. The Eclipse foundation is also running the extension store that powers VS Codium.
- "why not just use VS Codium?" (With the killer extensions made by Eclipse)
- VS Codium is great, but because of manpower limits, they always have to be "downstream" of VS Code. They can't rewrite any of the core systems.
- As someone who contributes to VS Code, and loves VS Codium, many issues I have with VS Code have been open on github for +7 years, with hundreds of comments and thumbs-ups. We can't even sort the file explorer view by last-edited and folders-first (but we can do folders-first alphabetical). Thats been open since 2017.
- Theia looks like it could finally be the hard fork I've been waiting for. A hackable editor, trying to be open source, where all my extensions work, and the community can actually make a PR, get it merged, and extensions are not excessively sandboxed.
- Will it be that? Only time will tell, but the Eclipse foundation has a pretty good record. They're definitely prepared for long term support.
I feel like VS Code is in a very weird place right now.
To just be productive, you need a ton of plugins and often enough these don't really solve all the problems you might have. For example, there's no "java dev" package, instead you have to install a meta-package plus a bunch of other random crap, half of which don't really work out of the box. Or, if you want to use the advanced features, you have to live with weird constraints and bugs. The UI isn't really designed to incorporate more advanced plugins and the plugins themselves often don't work as expected. For example, for some reason, if you connect to a remote host, the java LSP needs the java home dir to be in the same path on both machines, which is just weird.
For a text editor it's way too bloated, but for an IDE it's way to barebones. The days of the nimble and fast advanced editor are gone,
I use lazyvim and this is my experience in neovim as well. I don't think it's a weird place, it just puts the onus on the end-user to tailor their experience.
Great sum up, yes, the major issue with VS Code is the licensing issues that Microsoft caused there.
As a Codium user trying to choose more open tools, I really appreciate your write up, here.
Thank you.
I'll check it out.
Why would they copy VSCode including the aspect people hate most.
Had they made it in a native gui I might actually consider it. Otherwise, why wouldn't I just choose vscode.
Ease of plugin development is a major boon
I wonder where JetBrains Fleet is at, too.
I am happy there is more competition against VS Code. But I already have my forever-editor (Neovim).
I believe fleet is still in preview. I'm not a power user so I can't tell you how it compares to VS Code.
Fleet is pretty good, it's almost like a combination of the existing jetbrains products (but some features are missing). However, it's not open source so I probably won't be using it.
Eclipse
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
Will probably need to check this out.
Coming soon, everything is corrupt, I have to delete the .metadata dir regularly, but it's faster.
It seems to be built on the same components as VScode and VScodium. Honestly, I don't see the point... yeah, sure, they want their editor to work on the web, but couldn't they have don't that with a GUI lib that compiles to WASM?
It feels like it's only for open source purists aka a minority.
I feel like browser support is such a niche. I don't understand why many IDEs dedicate so many resources to make it work on the browser. There are already many options to code on the web if you need it.
Chromebooks maybe?
I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.
I know when I was reaserching this as an option for secure development there was a pretty much just this group and jupyter notebooks.
It's a lot easier to run web apps on the desktop than the opposite and there are a lot more people with experience developing with HTML/CSS/JS.
Yeah I agree, it seems to be built on the same components as VScode and VScodium. Honestly, I don't see the point... yeah, sure, they want their editor to work on the web, but couldn't they have don't that with a GUI lib that compiles to WASM?
Yeah I agree, it feels like it's only for open source purists aka a minority.
You have to follow the attribution and share-alike parts of the license. Otherwise you'll have the same consequences as an AI company would scraping it (still zero).
Give zed.dev a try. I’ve been using it over vscode more and more. Lots faster too
Their client is only on MacOS though.
Although no official release is available yet, Linux is buildable from source…
But how's the java support? If it's better than vs code then it might be worth something.
I'll wait and see if they manage to get embedded system debugging to work properly. What I've seen in the past has been a pain in the you-know-what in that regard, showing clearly that their main focus was PCs.
I'm a die hard Microsoft hater. I haven't had windows installed on a pc in years. With that being said I use visual studio code because it's kind of the only text editor that does code completion in the capacity that it does. I can take a class name, type a "." after it and a scroll view opens up shows every accessible member of that class along with comments and information about all the variables. The amount of time this saves is so huge I don't even know how you would quantify it. Nothing else has code completion that even comes close to being that good.
Do non visual studio code users just have to memorize every single function, parameter and return type in their code base? Yeah you can always read the documentation, sure you can always dig through the source code to figure it out every time you forget what data type a parameter is but that takes valuable time.
If they ever put visual studio code behind a paywall or stop making it for Linux, I'm going to be forced to either switch to windows (which I never will under any circumstances) or make a custom made ripoff clone of that entire intellisense code completion system and hack it into whichever open source text editor I deem is the next best thing.
Vim does code completion just fine if you set up your language server correctly.
I'll give it a try
Huh? Every IDE has had this feature for decades. Eclipse, all of JetBrains products, even NetBeans. This is like the most basic feature provided by IDEs.
Also with the development of first party language servers it’s relatively easy for new IDEs to integrate.
Any editor that support LSP has the same (or better) auto complete. All IDEs also have the same (or better) auto complete, don't even need LSP.
Well I'm glad I made that comment because now I know there's ways to do this that aren't Microsoft related. Looks like I have some text editor experimentation to do.
Code completion isn't that special. Do you have experience with other IDE's?
Nothing else has code completion that even comes close to being that good.
Well, except Visual Studio (for C++), Qt Creator, and every Java IDE in existence.
I only use windows because I have to open PDFs that only open in Adobe Reader from my government.
I don't really need another text editor, sorry.
That's not really it's intended purpose
VS code is trash so not much of a challenge there
Why do you think it's trash?
"Microsoft bad"
Wouldn't call it trash but personally after trying it a couple times it seemed like it took as long to config as neovim while also not being nearly as hackable (probably is more extensible though being a GUI). For that amount of time I'd rather use something with larger benefits like an IDE
VSCodium is cool though. All the goodness of VSC,sans the "trash".